TL;DR
A two-week trial of AI-powered roadside cameras at two West Midlands sites in March recorded almost 19,000 potential offences, mostly people not wearing seatbelts, Sky News reported on Monday 12 October. Mayor Richard Parker called the results “frankly shocking”. The trial was designed only to measure the problem, so none of the drivers will face enforcement.
What the cameras found
The cameras sat outside Ladywood fire station in Birmingham and Fallings Park fire station in Wolverhampton. At Ladywood they flagged 11,045 potential seatbelt offences and 1,163 possible cases of mobile phone use. Fallings Park added 6,030 seatbelt cases and 757 phone cases.
Some images went well beyond a missing belt. One showed an unbelted front-seat passenger with a young child sitting on their lap, dozens more showed children without suitable restraints, and one driver was pictured gripping a phone with both hands instead of the wheel.
The trial was paid for by the regional combined authority, the WMCA, working with the police and fire service. It cites 2025 road safety data tying 133 deaths on UK roads to unworn seatbelts and 32 to phone use.
What comes next
Parker said the scale of risk-taking was far higher than expected and promised to use “every resource available, including new technology like this” to make streets safer. Simon Foster, the West Midlands PCC, who also chairs its road safety partnership, said the results were under review to establish how AI might be “deployed for future police enforcement”.
For comparison, Sky says roughly 2,000 West Midlands drivers receive a fine and points each year for phone use while driving. The trial found 1,920 possible phone offences across two sites in a fortnight.
Looking forward
We have previously covered AI roadside cameras in Sussex and Suffolk. The West Midlands figures give the region its own evidence for a similar move, and Foster’s comments point that way. In our view, the harder questions come with enforcement: how images are checked by humans before any penalty, how long they are kept, and how the system handles passengers and children captured in vehicles. Councils and forces considering similar trials should settle those rules before the cameras go live, not after.