Devon and Cornwall Police Flag Doctored Speed Watch Image

What looks like a damning snapshot of a Speed Watch volunteer hiding behind a flag turns out to be something else entirely, and police say the giveaway is in the shadows.

Devon and Cornwall Police Road Safety Team have publicly called out an altered image circulating on social media that they believe was manipulated using AI to misrepresent a Community Speed Watch deployment on the New Portreath Road.

What Happened on the Road

On Wednesday 6th May, a team of Community Speed Watch volunteers were stationed on the New Portreath Road, providing a visible presence aimed at encouraging drivers to stick to the speed limit. According to the force, there have been five injury collisions within 1km of that spot over the most recent five years of data, two of them involving serious or life-changing injuries.

While the volunteers were carrying out their duties, a member of the public photographed them and posted the image online. Police say they had no issue with the original post.

“We do not have a problem with this; the post was not in any way offensive to those who volunteered their own time to help their local community and was not a breach of any legislation,” the force said. “We fully accept that road safety operations polarise public opinion and are open to public scrutiny and debate.”

The Altered Image

After the original photo appeared, a second image surfaced. This one showed one of the volunteers apparently hiding behind a flag, and was reposted with a claim that it provided “yet more evidence of hiding and misuse of equipment”.

Police say the second image was almost certainly produced using an AI application and bears no resemblance to what actually happened.

Their reasoning rests on the fact that both images are framed identically within a car window, with clouds in matching positions and every fold of the flag blowing in the wind appearing identical. That, the force argues, would be impossible if the two photos had genuinely been taken seconds apart.

Eight Tell-Tale Signs

Officers have laid out eight anomalies they say point to AI manipulation.

The shadow cast by the flag is noticeably different between the two images. The support foot for the flag, clearly visible in the first photo, has vanished in the second. The weights holding the flag down lack detail, and a sandbag stacked on top has disappeared.

The hair of a volunteer standing behind a man in a blue cap was not recognised as human by the AI software and remains as an obvious anomaly. The front of the man’s cap has been misread by the software as street furniture and appears as an odd box stuck on a telegraph pole.

A white plastic downpipe on the far side of a building, obscured in the first image, simply does not appear in the second because the AI had no way of knowing it existed. The registration number on a car is far less detailed in the second image, and the reflective stripe on the volunteer’s tabard has shifted closer to her cuff.

There is also the volunteer herself. In the original, she has wavy hair poking out at the sides. In the altered version, she does not. Police say the AI-generated facial features do not match the volunteer on duty, who is of very slight build, while the woman in the doctored image appears considerably taller.

A Wider Concern

The force was direct about what it sees as the broader damage caused by this kind of content.

“This kind of abuse of AI applications to create misinformation to feed a specific narrative does little to advance the cause of those who have legitimate concerns about speed enforcement,” they said. “It reduces the credibility of those who may produce genuine evidence of concerning conduct by police staff or volunteers and only serves to amplify an echo chamber of specific individuals on social media, drowning out those who may have real concerns they wish to raise.”

Police are hoping the administrator of the Facebook page where the altered image was shared will remove it, pointing out that the same administrator acted quickly when somebody previously tampered with an image of a notice of intended prosecution in an attempt to undermine the force’s integrity over speed enforcement thresholds.