Q&A - Is It Legal for Traffic Police to Hide?

In general, for the purposes of traffic enforcement, there is no reason that the police cannot hide and then successfully prosecute a violation that they observe.

A driver on a highway has no expectation of privacy when police observe how they drive.

If the point of traffic enforcement is to prevent drivers from doing things that are dangerous on the roads, why do the traffic enforcers hide in order to catch drivers in the dangerous act? Wouldn't they be more effective at preventing the undesired behavior, that everybody is already aware is bad, just by standing prominently at the intersection looking important and vigilant in their iconic red coats, leather hats and high heeled boots? Why not? Aren't they just condoning the undesired behavior by hiding from the public view only to pounce on the offending driver after the offense was already committed? If their goal and expectation is to prevent undesired behavior, shouldn't we ticket them for every-time they don't prevent the undesired behavior, especially if it is reasonably prevented just by them standing there?

If writing tickets is supposedly a public good and a proper way to deter undesired behavior, shouldn't there be less and less tickets issued year after year? Not more as is the case with almost every single jurisdiction that issues road tickets, where the amount of the increase of tickets issued year over year is several fold higher than the increase of road users from the additional new drivers!

If accident prevention and safety is the primary concern, grave enough to infringe and limit everyone's charter rights in a special judiciary decision that such limitation is for public good; and if everyone is paying for the insurance to aid everyone in-case of an accident, why is there no regular anonymized publication of the reported accidents for which prevention has failed and our premiums have been used to cover the damages: i.e. When, what, how it happened and why?

Having an open and neutral public incident review and follow up has decreased the oil sands industry injury rates dramatically. Why regular and timely public accident reporting and analysis isn't part of the ICBC's safety agenda? If I see or hear a vehicle collision at an intersection near my house, I want to be able to logon to ICBC's website a week later and know what happened, so I could learn to not do that myself. Why do I have to rely on the following: "It was Texting, Speeding, Alcohol, pick one, or two or three at your own discretion. Speed Kills *throws right arm swiftly into the air at a 45 degree angle to the sky with a palm open towards the ground*."