Social Marketing of Operation Snap: An International Opportunity to Improve Road Safety

Background Sending ‘dashcam’ footage of road incidents to traffic police is becoming increasingly common in the US and internationally. However there is little research examining the role of social marketing in promoting the involvement of the public in policing the roads. Dashcams, together with helmet cams (used by cyclists, motorcyclists and horse riders), mobile phones and other digital recording devices, are potentially valuable data sources for policing road use, and in response to increased unsolicited footage sent to UK regional constabularies, a scheme called Operation Snap was set up to encourage further reporting of risky on-road behaviours. Article Focus There are two key foci, one for professionals and the other for scholars. The professional focus of this article is to assess public attitudes to Operation Snap to provide insights that might inform social marketing planning, and in particular identifying audience segments, informing strategies and designing messaging. For scholars, the findings create an agenda for possible future research examining public involvement in road safety in general, and in particular examining how Operation Snap might work in different countries. For example, scholars could use this work to investigate how different cultural attitudes towards their police forces affect the success of public involvement in similar schemes within different nations. Importance to the social marketing field There is a dearth of published work examining how social marketing can help the growth of public involvement in road safety generally, and the growth of using dashcams in reporting incidents specifically. This article seeks to help fill this gap. Methods A representative survey of public attitudes and claimed behaviours was undertaken with a sample of over 2000 UK respondents. We analysed these the results using two behavioural models: the Knowledge-Attitude-Behaviour Model, and the Social-Ecological Model. Results Negative attitudes (for example issues of privacy) were only exhibited by a minority of respondents. Given the difficulty of challenging ‘motonormative’ views, it was encouraging that the majority of respondents had positive views of Operation Snap. However awareness and understanding of the scheme was low. Recommendations for research or practice Police constabularies made some use of tactical social media marketing, but in this paper we recommend a strategic role for social marketing that could support Operation Snap, with social marketing particularly useful for raising awareness and understanding, and promoting public reporting of risky behaviours. Our recommendations for scholars include conducting specific work on the extent to which car-norms (motonormativity) might interact with public dispositions towards Operation Snap. Scholars may also wish to examine other key success factors internationally for the scheme, for example the connection between public willingness to report incidents and levels of public trust that the police will act on reports sent to them.