The Wings Of A Dove

[toucana]

The dove blocked the speedcam view of the driver. (Pic - Viersen Police)

A driver in Germany may have the Holy Spirit to thank for avoiding a speeding ticket of €105 (£93).

https://news.sky.com/story/divine-intervention-dove-stops-driver-getting-speeding-fine-in-germany-11730013

Police in Viersen shared a picture of a car snapped by one of its cameras driving at 54km/ph (33mph) on a 30km/ph (18mph) road, but the driver's face is obscured by a passing dove.

As the car but not the driver could be identified, they spared the motorist a fine, saying it was "thanks to the feathered guardian angel with apparently carefully spread wings".

[doogles]

Interesting Toucana. I'm left wondering about the subsequent fate of the dove if the driver was speeding.

[charon]

Lazy, or perhaps romantic, policing. There's enough of the driver's face and clothes to make an identification, especially if he were the owner.

Not that I want him fined, etc, it's just an intellectual response :-)

[Serpent]

Lazy, or perhaps romantic, policing. There's enough of the driver's face and clothes to make an identification, especially if he were the owner.

Probably not worth their while to pursue a case that's likely to be contested in court; they wouldn't commit resources equal to or exceeding the value of the fine. Plus, they could appear foolish, and 54kph is not a dangerous speed. This is worth far more as public relations: "See, we laugh with you. (But don't speed, OK, 'cose you might kill birds.)"

[toucana]

One thing that caught my attention was the sharpness and definition of the dove caught in mid-flight with its wings in a full downstroke extension

Modern speed-camera systems use fully digital image-capture systems that are rigged in pairs with a baseline separation of anything between 75m to 20 km. The cameras work in tandem with an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system to confirm that the baseline calculation is being applied to one and the same vehicle.

https://www.jenoptik.co.uk/sites/vysionics.vmdrupal04.lablateral.com/files/specs3_vector_0.pdf

This incidentally is one reason why the driver received no penalty. The inadvertent presence of the dove effectively corrupted one of the datum points in the baseline. The police could prove it was the same vehicle in both shots from the ANPR data capture, but they couldn’t prove it was the same driver in both shots ! (Even though they might have been taken only 75m apart which takes about 5 seconds of travel at 54 km/ph).

ANPR systems in UK typically use an effective shutter speed of 1/600 for 30mph traffic rising to 1/1300 for 70mph traffic. They also rely on a pulsed infrared LED illumination source at 850nm with an IR corrected camera lens to prevent focus shift.

http://benchmarkmagazine.com/anpr-and-optimum-performance/