IN CAB CAMERAS

well.... my opinion:

It is a bad and a good thing! good thing because if you are a professional driver and if you get involved in an accident you are protected.

Bad thing because you are human:

- do you ever talk on the phone while driving?
- do you ever meet a GF in a truck stop?
- do you have a porty-potty in your truck?
- do you ever masturbate in your truck?

I guess if you are local and completely legal, you make good money it is ok!
If you are like me and you spend home 3 days a month....... LOOK FOR A REAL TRUCKING JOB!

 

Our fleet has had them for two years now. No biggie to me. I use a Bluetooth, it only stores events that are triggered by g force or hard braking. My face looked pretty funny when I smoked a deer!

Let's face it... A lot of guys are doing stuff they shouldn't while driving. One guy was eating a bowl of cereal and blew a stop sign. I don't want people like that working with me. It's your choice.

 

I, like many people, have mixed feelings about driver facing cameras. As long as you knew for sure they only triggered on an event, I'd be ok with them. And if they were on all the time, but shut off when my eLog was off duty or sleeper, I'd be ok. But how would you know for sure? If they trust me so little as to think they need a driver facing camera, how can I trust them to be honest about when the cameras are on? Another issue is, who has access to the data? And will they give me access to it if I had a legitimate need for it? I have been wanting to get my own camera system anyway. If the company put one in, I'd for sure want my own. Then I'd at least have access to the same images as they have, in the event of a situation that they say casts me in a bad light.

 

Actually, in the retail environment it is, in essence, what you elude to. Most retail places have camera above EVERY cash register and you'd be amazed at how many cameras are in a retail store, not just in the public customer area, but also the employee only areas too. The fancy words they call it is 'loss prevention". According to 'them' most retail thief is actually carried out by employees, so retail employees are watched like a hawk! Just like at a craps table in Vegas! That is an industry standard attitude in retail.
Also, I put forth was 'food for thought'. I would never want a driver facing camera, but considering many, if not most other employees are constantly observable while working, I don't know what substantive argument against it.

 

You want a substantive argument against? Fine. Retail theft is something you do and are fully aware that it is wrong and could put you behind bars. Don't want to go to jail? It is quite simple: Don't steal.

You drive a truck, though. You are making your way through town towards a new customer, and you are unsure where exactly it is. You have the directions written on a pad of paper for easy reference, but as you reach for that pad of paper and glance at it, a car pulls out from a side street and BLAMMO! You cream them. The camera, having only recorded the few seconds leading up to the crash (when you were "distracted" looking at the directions so you would know what street you're supposed to be watching for)...one brief moment of inattention, NOT the hours and hours and hours on end that you've been the perfect driver...JUST you "allowing" yourself to be "distracted" behind the wheel. Now, YOU are the bad guy, NOT the dead person in the car that pulled out in front of you, because you MIGHT have been able to stop (or at least not clobber him hard enough to kill him) IF you had been paying attention. Now you are facing vehicular manslaughter charges because the DA is up for re-election and trucks have been causing problems in town so he wants to show that he's tough on those evil truckers. A dash mounted camera would show the guy pulling out in front of you, and by itself could exhonerate you. However, the driver facing camera shows you "distracted" at the critical moment. Now you're going to jail.

There is a BIG difference between a camera watching you in an environment where you need to actively try to break the law for it to send you to jail for your own action vs. A camera in an environment where simply making a less-than-ideal choice at the wrong moment in time could put you in jail because of the action somebody else makes.

If you're dumb enough to steal from the cash register, you deserve to go to jail. I don't want to get sent there for something stupid that somebody else does at the wrong moment. Like I said, even if you're the "perfect" driver 99.999% of the time, that still leaves plenty of opportunity for that camera to cook your goose.

 

^^^^Makes the Assumption that everyone is stupid, and accident investigators are HS drop outs^^^^

 

^^^^^Puts far too much faith in the wisdom/common sense of others^^^^^

Apparently you've never seen an aggressive, politically motivated response to a current event. Watch the news, sometime...this world is NUTS sometimes. Hell, kid shoots up a church in SC and suddenly an Arkansas Walmart won't deliver a class ring they sold weeks earlier because the school mascot is holding a Confederate flag and people in Memphis are wanting to dig up and move the remains of a Confederate General from the park where he's been resting peacefully for 100+ years. Politicians thrive on opportunities to rile people up over what SHOULD be nothing in order to show "leadership" and "action" on an issue.

If you want to play russian roulette with a driver-facing camera, have at it. Not in my truck, or any that I'm expected to drive.

 

My company has them in all our trucks, I don't pay any attention to it. With my previous employer I had my own dash cam, it prevented me from getting a ticket in FL when I let the Police Officer look at the video. The ones in our trucks do not record all the time, they are critical even triggered OR if the driver sees something (like a drunk driver that may be a potential problem, etc.) we can activate the camera ourselves.
I would not "sweat it" unless / until it becomes a problem for you.
Be Safe.

 

"Unless/until it becomes a problem for you" is too late...you're already in trouble by then.

I don't understand the willingness of so many to just bend over and grab their ankles, taking whatever the company wants to do to them. THESE CAMERAS ARE NOT FOR YOUR BENEFIT!!! The company can and will use them to throw you under the bus as soon as it is in THEIR best interest to do so. THEY aren't the ones that video will incriminate...YOU ARE! Like I said, even if you are 99.999% perfect in your driving (which you aren't, by the way), with the average driver making 200 decisions per mile (OSHA stat, not mine), that is an error every 500 miles that could potentially ruin the rest of your life...all caught on camera for an unscrupulous prosecutor to hang you with.

Remember, that "jury of your peers" won't be fellow truck drivers. It WILL be full of soccer moms and Sunday drivers who are scared to death of semis, as well as people who have been tailgated, cut off, "forced" off the road, etc. by a semi at some point in their life...and there you are representing everything they dislike about truck drivers sitting there in front of them after a serious wreck.

I'd much rather NOT roll that dice. Camera view in front is fine. Camera view of me, not going to happen.

 

What kind of driver are you? Any moron who can read a billboard ad can hire an ambulance chasing attorney to sue you. Cameras can prove you DIDN'T screw up just as easily as they can prove you did.