Archive for February 4th, 2009
Scotland: Police Halt Use of VASCAR Over Accuracy Concern
Police chiefs in Scotland, UK told not to use VASCAR to issue speeding tickets due to interference and reliability issues.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in Scotland issued a memo Tuesday recommending that VASCAR not be used to issue speeding tickets to motorists. Although the “Vehicle Average Speed Computer and Recorder” is a thirty-five-year-old technology and has been replaced in some areas by radar and laser speed guns, it is still commonly used in the UK and the US.
“Until such time that the matter has been fully investigated, a memo has been sent to officers asking them to use alternative speed detection equipment,” Strathclyde Police Chief Inspector Andy Orr told the Aberdeen Press and Journal newspaper.
VASCAR estimates speed by calculating the amount of time it takes for a vehicle to pass a given distance. The police officer operating the machine flips a switch when a vehicle passes a given point and then flips it again when the vehicle passes a second point. The machine then displays a speed on a small readout. Because the device appeared to depend more upon the skill of the operator to produce a reliable estimate, UK police authorities never required Home Office Approval or accuracy testing for the device. Instead, the VASCAR manufacturer insisted that the “quartz crystal” performed a self-test allowing the device to establish itself as an accurate instrument for measuring speed.
That did not turn out to be the case for UK officials who recently uncovered reliability problems while working to integrate the speed detector with new digital radios and automated number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. The same officials had already known about the possibility for radio frequency interference. A 2002 ACPO test registered interference any time a radio or cell phone was used within six-and-a-half feet of the VASCAR machine.
“There is a potential risk of interference to Traffic Law Enforcement Devices (TLED) such as VASCAR from Airwave Radios and GSM phones,” a Devon and Cornwall Constabulary memo dated August 19, 2008 explained. “Officers should not operate a TLED from within a vehicle in the presence of a GSM phone or Airwave radio that is switched on, unless a ‘Transmit Inhibit’ system has been enabled. Failure to do so may compromise the integrity of any relevant prosecutions.”
Now Scottish officials fear the possibility that lawyers will seize upon the unreliability of the technology to undermine past prosecutions and force refunds.
Source: Speed-trap device may be faulty, say police (Aberdeen Press and Journal (Scotland), 2/4/2009)
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
A proposal to scan the driver licenses of bar patrons and keep it on file in a state law enforcement database is a good start, says Senate President Michael Waddoups, but he wants to see the program go further.
Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, says he wants to see the database idea start with private clubs, but extend to restaurants that serve diners beer and liquor.
That would greatly expand the scope of the data collection and create a new requirement for restaurants, which are not required to have people sign up as members in order to serve beer and liquor. There are fewer than 400 clubs and taverns and nearly 1,100 restaurants licensed to serve alcohol.
Bar owners pitched the idea of doing away with Utah’s unique requirement that all patrons be members of a private club, replacing it with the use of electronically scannable driver licenses to prevent underage drinking.
Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who wants to eliminate Utah’s private club laws to make the state more tourist-friendly, is amenable to the idea.
But the governor and bar owners have expressed concern toward a bill that Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem, is crafting. He would store the information in a central database that law enforcement could access for accident investigations or in the event of a traffic stop.
“In a restaurant, if they’re serving alcohol, the person ordering the alcohol should show the ID,” said Waddoups, who was receiving a demonstration of the license scanners after the Legislature’s budget meeting Friday. “At some point, the restaurant would feed [the information] into the central database.”
That way, he said, if the restaurant patron left the restaurant and went to a bar, the bartender could know the customer may have already been drinking and might need to be watched more closely.
Tom Guinney, a partner in the Gastronomy family of restaurants which includes Café Pierpont and The New Yorker, said the mandatory scanning of restaurant patrons’ licenses to add it to a central database would be “an absolute customer relations fiasco.”
“It’s inconceivable that that kind of legislation could be passed for public restaurants, or for private clubs, for that matter,” he said.
He said the electronic scanners can be a tool for weeding out underage drinkers in private clubs, but that is not a serious problem for restaurants. And he said business owners — whether bars or restaurants — need to have discretion in who they scan, so grandparents aren’t being asked to turn over their driver licenses.
Melva Sine, president of the Utah Restaurant Association, said she had not heard of what Waddoups described to The Tribune , and said she wanted to meet with him to discuss it.
Waddoups has already objected to restaurants that he said are becoming too much like bars. He has advocated for requiring restaurants to prepare drinks and store alcohol away from where diners might see it.
Some frustrated with lead mandates
Libraries, bike shops scramble to comply with new requirements
With Congress saying “get the lead out,” local retailers and librarians are wondering if common sense gets chucked along with it.
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which goes into effect Feb. 10, is meant to protect children from lead-laden products. But when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission gave libraries two options, get rid of all your children’s books or ban anyone under 12 from entering the library, librarians across the country waited for the punch line. But it never came.
“I was speechless,” said Mary Beth Revels, director of the St. Joseph Public Library. “To know it wasn’t a joke and those were our choices.”
After discussing the situation with the library board, she deduced that they would not pack away the library’s 70,000 children’s books and they weren’t going to close the library doors to children.
“We felt that if libraries didn’t comply with this across the country, that we would be taking a stand of continuing to connect children with books,” Ms. Revels said.
The publishing industry has tested the lead content in books, Ms. Revels said, and the levels are within legal limits. But the commission won’t recognize those tests because they weren’t carried out in a “certified lab.”
“But there are no certified labs,” she said incredulously.
And though librarians can’t give an estimate of how many of their children’s books end up in the mouths of readers, Ms. Revels said they’ve never had to replace a book destroyed by an orally fixated patron.
Luckily, libraries have received a reprieve that will last one year, and the commission will consider which products should be exempt from the law.
But local motorcycle shops that sell kid bikes aren’t so lucky. They will not be allowed to sell motorcycles to children as of Feb. 10.
Motorcycles contain lead parts on the batteries and various other areas of the engine.
“It’s so stupid,” said Mike McBride, owner of McBride’s Yamaha on the Belt Highway. “You’d have to suck on an engine case for hours a day to get any lead out of it.”
He’s got about 10 motorcycles that he’ll have to pull off the showroom floor on the 10th if he doesn’t sell them first, which he said won’t happen.
With fines up to $150,000, Mr. McBride said he’s not going to risk keeping them on the floor. Instead, he’ll pay interest on them until “it gets resolved.”
“I think everybody thought (the commission) would have a flash of common sense, but that didn’t happen,” he said.
Jimmy Myers can be reached at jimmym@npgco.com.
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