PARDON me if I look askance at the departure by police in East Lancashire of telling motorists in advance where they will be mounting mobile speed camera traps the following week.

I accept that the list of locations and the days when they will be in operation may well lead to drivers reducing their speed at these spots on those days. Nor, do I see much likelihood of the alternative of others taking advantage of the information to race along the roads in question on the days they know the camera cops won't be there.

But given the glut of fixed cameras in Lancashire at designated accident black spots and that Britain's roads are already the safest roads by far in the whole of Europe, as an EU study confirmed only last week, and that speed is a factor in only a third what few fatal accidents there are, what is the point of deploying officers with mobile cameras elsewhere on safer roads when they might be better employed catching more serious criminals than 35mph racers?

However, we are told the disclosure of the mobile camera locations will prove that slowing down vehicles and not generating cash from fines is the police's main priority. Given the low numbers of road deaths -- just 60 per million people against the average of 104 across Europe -- and the low incidence of speeding in the cause of them, would that not be better proven by ditching the mobiles? Some hopes -- when Lancashire police gets a nice rake-off from the fines-money millions?

But what of the other expectation that the police hope will ensue from this new openness -- that it will dispel claims that they are 'sneaky' when running mobile speed camera traps?

You really have got to laugh -- when just two days before the publication of their first we're-not-sneaky list Lancashire Police were exposed in the tabloids of mounting a speed camera, half hidden by a blanket, in the back of a white Hertz rental van parked on a grass verge on a road with a 50mph limit.

By way of explanation, the councils-and-police Lancashire Partnership for Road Safety, said it was only targeting drivers doing over 80mph. Well, even if the end may justify the means, the means were still sneaky, were they not?

And how does this sort of action square with statement by the Partnership's Linda Sanderson as the we're-not-sneaky list was issued that "Our Partnership has done its utmost to ensure that the signing and conspicuousness of our enforcement sites is maintained at the highest level"?

Who are they kidding?