Counter-Terror Police Hunt Vigilante Group Cutting Down and Blowing Up Speed Cameras

London is not the only city where vigilantes are destroying traffic cameras, as Italian counter-terror police have been deployed to catch the people behind the destruction of cameras in the north of the country.

A team of counter-terrorism and anti-mafia police officers are working to track down the people destroying speed cameras in several Italian areas, with cameras sawn down, shot out, and even exploded. The elite police squad finally got their first hit this week, reports Il Giornale, which reports security cameras at the scene of one strike against the traffic cameras caught a man in the act, allowing him to be identified and later arrested.

Calling themselves ‘Fleximan’, a play on words on the Italian name for a popular brand of battery-powered angle-grinder, this particular individual was caught after two months but police understand there were more perpetrators on the loose, all using the same name.

Remarkably, in some Italian areas, the Fleximan appears to be winning. AFP reported this week that while some mayors decry the vigilantes as dangerous menaces, in others there is tacit support for their actions from local governors. The wires service states Marco Schiesaro, mayor of Cadoneghe in Veneto said after cameras were vandalised in his town that he was “already unconvinced” they were a good idea and simply decided not to replace them.

A report in The Times of London notes one Fleximan has been leaving notes, taunting police. On Monday, one left on a downed camera read “The Fleximan is coming.”

Italian newspaper Libero writes of the Fleximan in terms of a battle between ordinary working Italians trying to earn a living and keep some of their own money and city bureaucrats trying to price the little people out of driving — a narrative that will be familiar to London camera vandals, which has become a massive issue for mayor Sadiq Khan over the past year. Libero wrote:

Why does the motorist have to pay all this bill? How much does it cost today to have a car and use it to go to work? … The taxes on the car, insurance, petrol… Fleximan is the desperate hero, the daily small hero; he is the citizen who is not listened to… Dear mayors, how much do you think you will earn with our use of cars? Do you still have the right and freedom to enter cities or will entering them be like joining a very expensive club?

As previously reported, the London Fleximan equivalent — the ‘Blade Runners’ — may be somewhat ahead of his Italian cousin in kill count, with hundreds of Mayor Khan’s green-policy enforcing ‘ULEZ’ cameras destroyed. The fate for the cameras in London has been broadly the same: stolen, cut down, cables severed, and in at least one case, shockingly, blown up.

When the new anti-car ULEZ policy came into force, one area of London had been so effectively taken on by the ‘blade runners’ that 90 per cent of cameras in the neighbourhood had been taken offline. Khan’s London resorted to deploying mobile truck-based cameras and a police crackdown on discussing the matter.

There are further indications the meme is spreading, too. Just last month one of Berlin, Germany’s expensive $100,000 speed cameras was blown up. Despite being the second attack on the same camera in weeks, police said they weren’t going to give up their investigation.