Police number plate camera scheme broke law in Royston (UK) | Hacker News Reader

Police number plate camera scheme broke law in Royston (UK)

bbc.co.uk

38 pointsDanBC11 comments

I seem to recall a story where a town put some traffic cameras on its roads, and a guy printed the mayor's license plate on a piece of cardboard and stuck it on the back of his car and proceeded to speed through the camera a few times.

Sounds pretty effective to me!

The thing that annoys me most is that the locals referred to this palisade of cameras as a "ring of steel". Surely it's a ring of glass?

That's what annoys you the most? I'm way more annoyed that they are planning to continue to deploy the darn things.

"palisade" seems like precisely the mot juste

Probably this in reference to the steel towers and girders upon which the cameras are mounted.

"Ring of steel" was the term used for the road blocks, barbed wire and railings around central Belfast in the 1970s, when bombings there were common [1]. In this case it was literally steel barriers encircling the city centre. It was not a continuous ring of steel, as buildings formed parts of the barriers.

It's also the term used for the covert ring of CCTV cameras and checkpoints erected in the City of London [2] in 1993 in response to bishopsgate bombing. It shares the property of encircling the centre of a city for security purposes, but is not literally a ring of steel. At one point people would have recognised this as a reference to Belfast's situation.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/belfast-security-measur...

[2] http://henriwilliams.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/entering-panopti... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/londons-ring-of-steel-to-e...

"Ring of Steel" is the slang used for the security around City of London, coming from earlier Troubles in Belfast.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_(London))

Strangely enough I just considered moving to Royston as it's slap bang between Cambridge and London.

This has changed my mind instantly.

Royston seems to take the worst of both places and the good bits of neither.

(I grew up just South of Cambridge and went to school not far from Royston; and I now live in London. For a while I commuted between the two by motorbike, passing Royston every day.)

Indeed I have discovered that. Decided on Ely instead.

We only serve local people!!

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