An organisational reform collapsed the Finnish police forces’ automated road safety systems in the first six months of 2014. South-east Finland was hit the hardest, with a 62 percent drop in the use of speed cameras and other automatic equipment. Some 14,000 fewer processes were accrued compared with the same time last year.
Police say that 60 percent of all traffic-related incident records of this type are fines, with the rest being official caveats. With one ticket being worth an average of 90 euros, this means that some 740,000 euros worth of fines were uncollected in South-eastern Finland from January to June.
On a national scale, the January—August period saw 24,500 fewer incident reports than were recorded the same time last year. With 60 percent of these being fines, the money that went uncollected is counted at 1.3 million euros.
Police to play shortfall catch-up
Police say the failures in automatic traffic surveillance from early this year were due to traffic control being pulled out of local hubs and centralised in the national control centre in Malmi, Helsinki.
Spokesperson and control centre chief Dennis Pasterstein says he believes that the deficit caused by the disturbance can still be caught up by intensifying surveillance.
”We will be advising local areas to send us more surveillance images to analyse,” Pasterstein says. “We believe that in doing so we can still get close to the processing figures we had last year.”