Police instructions are that officers who carry out speed checks should not hide, as the purpose is prevention and not fines, Police Spokesperson Christos Andreou told CNA on Thursday. Asked to comment on complaints about incidents of police officers conducting speed checks without being visible, Andreou said that "the instructions are clear; they should not be hidden and the reason is clear: our aim is not to hand out fines, but to prevent." The Police Spokesperson noted that drivers must be stopped and reported when they are spotted, while the driver must be informed on the spot of the offence he has committed. He said, however, that the guidelines are that if any member of the police is in danger or if stopping a vehicle is likely to affect or cause a traffic accident or collision, the officers take the registration numbers of the vehicle and a complaint is made. He clarified, however, that this is only done in exceptional cases. Policing can be done at any time in any location, at any time of the day, but some basic conditions must be met for the safety of both police officers and drivers, Jason Senekkis, research associate for road safety at CERIDES, European University, told CNA. He mentioned that abroad checks are carried out from air, with helicopters and drones taking photos and either a police report is made based on the photos and videos, or drivers are stopped at roadblocks set up by the police at points following the check points. "A more correct practice, which unfortunately is not applied by Cyprus police, is to check (the speed) and then stop the vehicle safely at a distance beyond the check, so that there is no element of surprise", noted Senekkis. Senekkis added that he has been told by police officers that the radars in Cyprus which are not all of the latest technology, are limited in the distance they can cover, as a result of which, the police officer does not always have time to stop the driver in time. He suggested that speed control could be done from bridges or from points at the left or right of the highway and that the driver be stopped at a road block further down. However, he noted that it is important for the police to be able to spot someone going way over the speed limit without the officers being noticed. "Driving at 150-160 km/h, seeing police car lights flashing in the distance and slowing down and then continuing (at high speed) is not effective," he said, adding that it is not enough to say that speeding is reduced at a local level due to warnings about the presence of speed cameras. According to an applied psychology study, published in Science Direct in 2013, which, among others, examined how speeding behaviour varies depending on the visibility of the traffic police, researchers concluded that in order to limit the deviant behaviour in traffic, the traffic police should make efforts to stay as visible as possible and not remain hidden in the attempt to detect the over speeders. The researchers suggested that police patrols would probably be more effective than hidden radars, especially outside inhabited areas and proposed as a possible solution to use visible police cars that continuously move and regulate the traffic flow. On the other hand, a European Commission report suggests that speed enforcement is most effective when it is unpredictable and difficult to avoid, when there is a mix of highly visible and less visible activities, and when it is continued over a longer period of time. Furthermore, it notes that it is advisable to focus speed enforcement on roads, situations, and times where speeding is considered to affect the road safety level most. In a televised intervention on Wednesday regarding the possibility of criminalizing the warning for speed control cameras, the Minister of Transport, Communications and Works, Alexis Vafeades, stated that "we do not set ambushes, we monitor the road. We shouldn't take things to extremes."

Source: Cyprus News Agency