Actually dash cams make you much safer. I used to see lots of scary things happening around me on my drive to work each day so I bought a dash cam. Now that I have one I have only seen one scary situation. So they must somehow make other people drive more safely.
The one scary situation I did see happened yesterday. We went for a drive down to Shoal Bay and decided to stop for breakfast at one of the cafes in the area. We parked the troopy and strolled down the road, and stopped to check out a menu on a table in the open air area at one of them. Because the area is right beside the footpath and separated by a low brick wall, my wife just leant over and picked up the menu. About 10 seconds later a car driven by a woman in her late 60's (at a guess) reversed straight into the wall a few meters away from where we stood. Had we not stopped, she would have cleaned us up for sure. She appears to have been trying to reverse park and had one of her wheels against the kerb. When the car didn't go backwards any further she just put the foot down harder on the accelerator until the car jumped the kerb and hit the wall with enough force to knock over a section of it, and a table adjacent to it. A woman seated at the table was very lucky not to have been injured when she was flung back off her chair and onto the ground. Then the driver just looked around smiling and trying to drive out off the heap of rubble still unaware of what she had done. Someone opened her door and removed the keys from the ignition luckily or she would have driven off straight into the path of oncomong traffic... Bugger, no dash cam to capture it though.