Outgoing Chief Constable Julie Spence indulges in a valedictory stab at speeding motorists. Unfortunately, she is being muddle headed about it.
Mrs Spence, 55, says that while anti-social behaviour is usually defined as rowdy youths or vandalism, “for too many it is the antics of drivers who refuse to accept that speed limit signs apply to them.”
“Driving without care or consideration for other road users is probably among the worst kind of anti-social behaviour in its truest sense, because serious offenders can, and do, kill,” she says.
Breaking a speed limit is, indeed, breaking the law. It is not necessarily antisocial. Driving at a speed that is too fast for the conditions most certainly is.
A posted speed restriction is not the same thing as a safe speed as I’ve mentioned here before. Also, breaking a speed limit is not the same thing as driving without due care and attention. A careful driver may be perfectly safe while applying due consideration for the prevailing hazards yet still in breach of the posted limit. The posted limit is merely an arbitrary figure set by the local authority, it not the same thing as a safe speed and a driver who is obeying the limit is not necessarily driving safely. You would think that someone who has risen to the rank of Chief Constable would appreciate the difference.
You would also think that someone who has risen to this rank might just question why there is such a high level of non-compliance. If a speed limit bears no relationship to the prevailing hazards – 40mph on an open country road, for example – then people will treat that limit with contempt. The answer, therefore, is to reassess the limit, perhaps to the national limit of 60mph.
Ultimately, though, Ms Spence’s whinge is a piece of shroud waving about police spending cuts. Ho hum…
I’m afraid you’re guilty of trying to apply sense and logic to the situation and the system is not designed around such rules.
Incidentally I suspect that taking note of high levels of non-compliance whilst on the way up to chief constable would be counter-productive as a career move, far better to be politically correct, gender aware and equality focussed than actually attempt to apply common sense to a situation.
Yeah, I know…
Agreed, of course. My first comment was lengthier but got chewed up by the system.
Outgoing at 55, isn’t life sweet when one is suckling at the taxpayer’s teat?
They are all jumping on the band waggon – “Chief constable Mick Giannasi has warned ministers there will be a rise in fatal road accidents” (says the Grauniad).
I suspect these senior police officers (and the attendant ‘road safety’ fascists) actually do believe this.
Certainly, if there is not a significant rise in KSI’s when cameras are withdrawn it will show the polices over the last 10-15 years have been based on fuck all and drivers punished for no particular reason.
A few years ago a friend of mine went on an advanced driving course – the sort where you follow the bad guys at a distance but at speed. He regularly exceeded the speed limit on country roads by a, well, country mile.
On one occasion he topped a steep hill at speed and found himself behind a line of cars going downhill at the posted limit of 40 mph. They were all driving nose to tail, with barely 10m between cars.
He had a grandstand view of the next mile of road and saw nothing coming the other way. He floored it and got past all of them before he reached the bend at the bottom of the hill. He made it around the bend on the correct side of the road, even though it would have been safe to have been on the wrong side of the road.
He heard the other drivers sounding their horns and his instructor later said that many were angrily gesticulating at him. The irony that they were driving with less care and attention than him was clearly lost on them.
As for the CC, well it just goes to show how many senior officers have fallen under the New Labour spell. Court the middle classes for their votes, bribe the underclass with benefits, let the latter off criminal offences by giving them unenforced community sentences, devise Stalinist targets to assure the voters that crime is being dealt with by introducing new crimes that decent folk will accept cautions for rather than go to court and you have a recipe for unfettered crime, disorder and a middle class that increasingly sees the police as the enemy instead of their natural ally.
It seems that Giannasi is living up to the legasy left to him by Brainstorm. Or maybe he is fearful of receiving his P45 some time soon.
Still, note that camers are simply being switched off rather than taken down.
Mention was made on BBC news last night about local residents funding the cameras themselves.
Next step privatisation just like with parking offences.
You heard it here first (and second and third).
A country road I regularly drive down used to be unrestricted, so limit of 50mph. According to the law it was perfectly ‘safe’ to drive down that road at 50, and you wouldn’t get stopped by the police for doing so. Then it was downgraded to a 30mph zone. So now doing 35 mph is ‘unsafe’ and you’d get points and a fine if caught.
The road hasn’t changed. So which is it? Safe at 50 or only safe at 30?
Thats what bugs me about speed limits – there is no reference to any absolute concept of safety, just a fixed number, whatever the road conditions, time of day, or quality of driving. A road could be lethal in certain conditions at 35, and perfectly safe in others at 50.