12 dangerous driving prosecutions in the past six months thanks to Operation SNAP
The Northamptonshire force say they have had 1419 pieces of dash cam footage shared with them in the first half of the year.
Northamptonshire Police say 12 dangerous driving offences have been prosecuted through Operation SNAP in the past six months.
The force say 1419 dashcam videos from the public have been sent in to the force in the first half of the year with 56% leading to action from police, ranging from warnings to prosecutions.
Operation SNAP has been used in the county by the police force since 2018, having been trialled in Wales in 2016.
SNAP allows members of the public to submit dash cam video of driving offences to the police force for them to investigate.
Matt O'Connell from the Northamptonshire forces Safer Roads Team says it allows them to have more eyes on the road:
"Every pair of eyes helps, it counts and and some of the results that we see through submissions through Operation SNAP.
"In some cases of things that otherwise we we wouldn't have been able to see and deal with and we've had some some pretty serious incidents that have been reported through there."
Matt says most drivers are safe on our roads and Operation SNAP helps them to remove those few unsafe drivers.
But he says many road users still aren't considerate enough of others, especially vulnerable cyclists and horse riders:
"Typically I would advise if you're overtaking cyclists where it's safe to do so, actually you move to the other side of the road as if you were overtaking another vehicle.
"And horse riders again, we should be leaving two metres clear space and really should be passing them under 10 miles an hour to make sure that that's safe for the for the ride around the animal."
1419 dashcam videos were submitted by the public in the last six months
Matt does say not all submissions pass their rules regarding what is and isn't a driving offence:
"So whilst we can't e-mail people per submission that they send to us, we do a monthly data file. So with the kind of the acknowledgement e-mail it gives people a unique identifier and tells them in there how they can find kind of what's happened with their submission.
"So we're able to provide some good constructive feedback to people around what they could do, whether it's an offence or not to begin with and try and work with them to get to get the best sort of output. Because it's not lost on us, that it is quite an undertaking to to take the time to download your dash cam and fill in the form and all those type of things."
With us all becoming more tech-savvy the force say Operation SNAP is likely to see growing numbers of submissions, something Matt has seen since 2018:
"We've had a steady increase of of people submitting information to us and we we will typically see peaks, where people have obviously gotten new cameras for Christmas presents or birthdays or things like that."
You can find out more on the forces website.