Holes in the Road

The BBC contacted the SRA on this very subject in November 2013, having realized that former Royal Marine Matt Seiber was photographing damage to road furniture and posting the images on his website (http://gunfire-graffiti.co.uk). We couldn’t deny all knowledge of the phenomenon: we’ve photographed some ourselves, and were involved in one court case on the subject in the 1990s.

Modern road signs are painted on 11-gauge aluminium; these are the ones that attract bullets. In Corsica in 1988, we saw holes that appeared to have been made by SG shot—which in France is available legally only to the police. In some parts of some US States, road signs seem to be regarded as a public provision for passing shooters, rather than as a service to travellers.

We prepared evidence for a case in which Mr B was prosecuted by Northumbria’s finest in 1999. He had a shotgun that he used on a private clay pigeon shoot in the field behind his home, and a road sign 585 feet from his rural abode had holes in it.  A man parked near the road sign claimed to have been shot at by the defendant from his home. The road sign and thus the would-be victim of this supposed incident would have been in the fall-out zone for number six shot fired from the cottage, if the gun were fired at a high enough angle in their direction.

Charter gun club member and sign-writer Ken Potts furnished us with off-cuts of the aluminium he used for road signs. We found that number six shot went through it at three feet, making a single large hole but not at 21 feet, where it made multiple dents. By the time we visited the crime scene the road sign casualty had been replaced, but, working from poor quality police photographs, we assessed the damage as having been caused by a shotgun fired at the road sign at a range of no more than about seven feet.

There was a lot of clay pigeon debris and plastic wadding to be seen in the field behind the cottage, suggesting that clays were fired on from the cottage garden, at a 90-degree angle away from the road. No evidence of shots fired in the direction of the road from the cottage was discernible in the field. The jury had to decide if Mr B had turned through 110 degrees from his clay shoot to drop shot onto the road and the victim, as claimed, or not.

The charges relating to damaging the road sign were dropped in reaction to our report. What we don’t know is whether that was because our evidence was of close action against the road sign while the victim claimed the gunman was two hundred yards away, or whether it was because the evidence, in the form of the wounded road sign, had gone missing.

Had the road sign been in place, we could have formed some opinion about the age of the damage. Bullet holes in inanimate objects remain to be seen until repaired or otherwise for as long as the object exists. The Prefecture opposite Notre Dame in Paris still bears the bullet scars of the 1944 battle by elements of the police and population to rid their city of German occupation in anticipation of the French 2^nd Armoured’s arrival. War damage can also be seen around London, such as to the Obelisk pedestal on the Embankment, scarred by a bomb dropped from a Zeppelin. Visitors to Colchester, Essex,  can see bullet damage caused during the civil war in the 1640s.

The difference between buildings and road signs is that stone weathers. When aluminium is first damaged, the scratch, dent or tear looks bright silver. This weathers to a dull lead colour over time. After that, the bullet holes remain looking awesomely like bullet holes forever.

The damage seen on rural road signs may be fresh, but may be as old as the sign. We didn’t do any life tests to determine how long the damage takes to weather, so we can only say that fresh damage looks fresh, while aged damage has oxidized. The damage looks much the same whether caused a year ago or fifty.

Matt Seiber describes some of the damage he has recorded as being made by pistols. They’ve been restricted to cops and robbers since 1998, which limits the suspect list somewhat, if the damage is comparatively recent. Our observations in Corsica were that the holes were caused by road users, in the sense that the bullet wounds couldn’t be attributed to stray ammunition overshooting from a field or wood, because of the short ranges involved. The same was the case with Mr B. He’d have had to leave his property and stand on the grass verge next to the road to do the damage seen in police photographs.

We’d extend that thought to road signs generally. They face oncoming traffic and are thus edge on, as it were, to adjoining fields and are quite often shielded from the field by a hedge or other trees and vegetation. Where roads have been widened post-war, they tend to be thickly planted, particularly in cuttings. Buckinghamshire’s roads are planted with a wide variety of trees for spectacular autumn colour effects and it would be quite difficult to struggle through that lot from the field to square up to a road sign and try making holes in it.

It’s more likely, therefore, to be someone who is on the road in the first place and who probably has no business in the fields. It’s more likely to be Bonnie and Clyde testing their guns between heists than firearm or shot gun certificate holders, who got their certificates only by having somewhere safe and legal to use the guns.

It’s an offence to fire a gun on or near a public highway if doing so causes any inconvenience or interruption to another road user: unless you’re a policeman shooting Guy Savage’s tyres out. Making holes in a road sign, whether you use a firearm or a battery-operated electric drill is criminal damage. The last time we thought about this was back in 1997, when we commented darkly that it was surely no coincidence that armour-piercing ammunition was prohibited on the same day as speed cameras were legalized.

We wondered, in passing, if speed cameras had received any attention from snipers in the UK. A quick internet trawl turned up one unoccupied police camera van riddled with bullets from an automatic rifle—in the United States—and numerous reports of vandalized speed cameras. UK ones seem to suffer burn damage, although the cause is often not obvious, leaving room for the suspicion that at least some cameras commit suicide. 

A 2011 report in thenewspaper.com claimed that 44 Belgian speed cameras were vandalized in 2010, and in the five years prior to the date of the report, 49 cameras had caught fire, 19 were shot and 47 spray painted. While fire could be caused by an electrical fault within the camera, getting painted or shot couldn’t. The report also claimed that cameras had been attacked with builders’ foam (which expands to fill the space available to it), and blamed Jeremy Clarkson for the concept. Also in 2011, a bomb disposal expert was injured in the Netherlands when an improvised explosive device attached to a speed camera went off.

So much for Belgium being boring. Other reports from the same source mention camera attacks in eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia and Australia. Fire seems to be the commonest cause of damage, but in Saudi Arabia, camera vans have had to be fitted with steel grills over the windows to protect the crew from rocks thrown by passers-by. In the US, a man was hauled before the courts for attacking a camera using a catapult and marbles.

The general absence of reports of bullet holes appearing in speed cameras in the UK suggests that whomsoever made the bullet holes in road signs either has nothing against speed cameras, or that wounded road signs were shot a long time ago before cameras first appeared in 1997, or both, or even neither.

Guns Review magazine (1960-97) worried in the early 1960s about the lower classes having access to guns that they didn’t have anywhere (legal) to use. In the 19th century, after guns became more reliable and before road signs were invented, the usual victim of casual criminal damage was the weather-cock. Also in the 19th century, the Royal Mail made security guards on mail coaches buy their own powder and shot, because so much was being consumed as the coaches trundled through the countryside. They probably didn’t have road signs to shoot at then, but plenty of edible wildlife might have been suspected of planning an attack on the coach. Not to mention the occasional highwayman.

Police comments suggest that bullet holes in road signs are not particularly common, nor do they get reported often. On a scale of things, with over 20 million firearms in the UK and barely 10 per cent of them registered, the limited amount of criminal damage caused is not much to get worked up about. At least, not until road signs have lawyers.