Target Culture

[carinaman]

Thanks Derek.

Derek Smith said:

I would agree that warnings should, perhaps, have been given out initially. Specials are too valuable a resource to be used as mere reminders.

I was thinking from a 'Hello we're your local bobbies, just a reminder to get the addresses on your licence updated' perspective. It's something Cadets or PCSOs could do. I think it ticks the police presence and public engagement boxes. Some say the public only deal with the police when they get done for speeding. Touring a new estate handing out reminder flyers and knocking on doors would allow police to public interaction without penalty or pain.

In Royal Berks., just off of the M4 corridor a new estate goes up. It was in a huge field or three. Someone did say to me 'Just you wait, once people have moved in, those places will start to get burgled.' So I guess dancing on the head of a needle, clutching at flood plain straws, I could cite a crime prevention angle to doing it. It would seem fairer than loitering around the main entrance routes into the new estates.

A 300% increase on busting people for wrong addresses on their driving licences is quite something.

I'm not sure if it's comparable with burglars eyeing up new estates looking forward to house breaking if only to get the keys of the nice cars outside on the driveways and not in the junk filled garages.

Poachers turned Game Keepers?

Derek Smith said:

Another reckoned that he was in 'temporary' accommodation and that he was looking for a house to buy and had merely rented the house he gave as an address.

So if you live in a shared house as a student in the centre of Bath where they have parking permits and therefore you leave the car a 5-10 minute walk away in a residential street and then your first job is field based with stints requiring stays in B&Bs and hotels covering a territory covering all of Southern England west of Southampton, up to Glos. and South Wales what address are you supposed to have on your driving licence?

Are students expected to update their driving licences for every address they have during their courses? What did your kids do when they were students?

I'm not getting on your case, but I encountered some petty minded, jobsworth plod that would frantically grasp for the tiniest of thing to make something stick a few years ago. Imagine Little Britain's 'No but, but yeah, but no' Vicky Pollard character in a police uniform. Imagine such an officer in a Chief Constable's uniform sending my MP a letter. It rankles after being an honest moron in my younger days and handing myself in at a police station for something they were unaware of.

In the scheme of things, there are bigger fish to fry than people with an out of date address on their driving licence. Fair enough if they'd been there 18 months or 2 years or so, or if the address isn't even their previous one, but the one before that. Perhaps some would feel happier about it if they didn't have to pay to regularly renew their ID Card photo licences or they were more affordable.

Someone in the police may have once told me that they had an old green, pre-photo ID licence as they weren't too enamoured with the idea of paying for a photo ID licence.