Drivers in Russia have long been aware of police corruption - the BBC News covered the issue as early as 2009. According to the BBC, an "officer from southern Russia accuse[d] his superiors of forcing policemen to arrest innocent people to ensure monthly quotas are met."
The roads in Russia are often quite dangerous: treacherous snow and ice, along with highways with fast-moving traffic in two directions which are separated only by painted lines. Car crashes are frequent, according to Business Insider, "200,000 traffic accidents killed 28,000 people" in 2011.
Faced with the problem of proving their innocence, many Russian drivers installed dashboard-mounted cameras in their cars. These cameras are set to record continuously while the car is moving and they record everything that happens out the windshield of the car. According to an article in Al Jazeera, "An estimated one million people across Russia have installed cameras in their cars - to ensure that justice is served."
The high rates of traffic accidents combined with the large number of dashboard-mounted cameras has resulted in hundreds upon hundreds of videos being uploaded to video-sharing sites. Videos of horrific car crashes which often go viral.
And just this past week a meteor crashed into a small town in Russia's Chelyabinsk region. Within hours, hundreds of videos of this historic event were uploaded - many of which were from those very same dashboard-cams. The New York Times covered the event and called those videos "a distinctly Russian phenomenon."
While those cameras are, undoubtedly, aiding drivers in proving their innocence in traffic court, they have also provided the world with a look at just how dangerous it is to drive in Russia. Dashboard-mounted cameras are widely available and relatively inexpensive, but they are not as popular anywhere else as they are in Russia.