By Richard Diamond/Staff Reports

Residents of Cornwall, England, fed up with the use of photo radar have taken to slicing the wires of the cameras and cutting down the poles on which they are mounted. Six cameras have been taken out since October, with the latest attack on Wednesday claiming a camera on Tregolls Road in Truro and the other on the A39 at Perranarworthal. Even some within government are supportive of the vigilante action.

"I know its wrong, especially as I'm continually being asked by residents to have speed cameras installed," Truro City Council member Dulcie Tudor wrote on her Facebook page. "But I fist bumped the air when I saw that someone had cut down the Tregolls Road speed camera.... there's not nearly enough adequate signage to let drivers know what speed they should be driving to stay within the law... It's almost as if they're trying to catch you out!"

Police in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday said they would prosecute an Audi driver who slowly passed by a photo radar. The device had been triggered by a different car in another lane, but officials are nonetheless charging the Audi driver with "insult" for flipping off the automated ticketing machine. On the same day in Reutlingen, a 27-year-old ran up to an automated speed trap on Rommelsbacher Strasse and kicked over a mobile photo radar device. On New Year's Day, the speed camera trailer that had been issuing citations on Otisheimer Strasse in Muhlacker was smashed by unknown vigilantes. Around the same time, the photo radar device on Markthallenstrasse in Radolfzell was blinded with silver spraypaint and the German word for "fraud." Also on New Year's, a pair of automated ticketing machine on Europastrasse in Konstanz had its lenses smashed and the photographic equipment taken away.

Italian media have celebrated a new hero in "Fleximan," an unidentified vigilante who has so far cut down eight speed cameras in the Rovigo region. The latest attack took place Wednesday as the pole-mounted device on the Strada Statale Romea in Rosolina was found sliced in two and left lying on the ground. Police have no idea who might be responsible.

In Melbourne, Australia, a group of five masked men smashed the front and rear windows of a speed camera van that had been issuing automated tickets on Nicholson Street on Friday. In Fere-Champenoise, France, vigilantes on New Year's Eve torched the speed camera on the RN4.