In praise of the dashcam citizens policing our roads

Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory, as most readers will know, was the panopticon. He imagined a prison where the cells were arranged in a rotunda so a guard in the middle could watch every prisoner without having to clop round from cell to cell. What was so clever about the idea, and why it fired Michel Foucault’s imagination, was not that it saved shoe-leather. It was that, because the prisoners didn’t know whether they were being watched or not at any given time, they would be forced to assume that they were and behave accordingly. 

Now, a free phone app called dashcamUK promises to turn the southbound A24 into a digital realisation of Bentham’s dream. This app’s USP isn’t just that it uses the smartphone camera as a dashcam, keeping thirty seconds of footage in working memory at any time – but that if you see another driver doing something wrong, such as shooting a red light, texting at the wheel or changing lane without indicating, with a single quick tap of the screen it’ll save the footage; all ready for you to submit it to the police.