Western Australia Police have withdrawn about 5,700 seatbelt fines issued by the state's AI-assisted road safety cameras, roughly 7 per cent of the infringements sent back for review. Each fine carried a $550 penalty and four demerit points. Commissioner Col Blanch confirmed the withdrawals on Wednesday.
The cameras have issued 81,412 seatbelt infringements since the Department of Transport switched them on in October 2025. More than $1 million in penalties was withdrawn in the first six months alone.
Blanch said police prosecutors dropped the cases after hearing reasonable defences from drivers and concluding there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. "We don't want to waste the courts' time on a matter we aren't going to win anyway," he said.
The defences follow a pattern. A camera photographs a seatbelt that is not where it should be, and the driver then has to establish that they did not know, and could not reasonably have known, what a passenger was doing behind them.
Lisa Taylor was fined after her 10-year-old daughter's seatbelt slipped out of position during stop-start traffic. It took more than eight months to have the fine overturned. Emily Esplan's husband was fined when a passenger's belt moved while they reached into the back seat. That fine was also withdrawn.
The system reverses the ordinary sequence. The machine makes the finding, the penalty and the demerit points are issued on that finding, and the burden then sits with the individual to disprove it, without legal representation and on their own time. About 2,000 fines had already been withdrawn by April this year, and more than 6,100 across all camera types in the program's first seven months.
Most Australian states now run cameras of this kind for mobile phone and seatbelt detection. Western Australia's are operated by the Department of Transport, with enforcement decisions resting with police.
The Road Safety Commission says the cameras are working. Detected infringements fell 76 per cent between September 2025 and August 2026. The share of motor vehicle occupant deaths involving people who were not wearing a seatbelt dropped from 20 per cent to 13.8 per cent over the same period.
Both things are true at once. The cameras have changed driver behaviour, and about one in fourteen of the seatbelt fines that anyone bothered to contest could not be sustained. What is not published is how many of the remaining 75,000 infringements were paid by people who had a defence and did not know it, or who looked at eight months of correspondence and decided $550 was cheaper.
Neither the Department of Transport nor the Road Safety Commission has said whether the review rate will change how the cameras are calibrated or how infringements are assessed before they are issued. Blanch's statement addresses what happens once a fine has already landed.
