Meredydd Hughes on the legal offensive
ACPO send in their legal A-team
ACPO has created the team, called Road Safety Support, to help forces struggling to cope with the increasing number of drivers contesting tickets over a legal technicality.
Meredydd Hughes, Chief Constable of South Yorkshire and ACPO’s head of roads policing, is on the offensive: “We are going to demonstrate that spurious cases get a slap. This team will defend the integrity of enforcement equipment and help us win high-profile cases.”
“We are saying to drivers who think they can try it on, ‘Come and get us if you think you are hard enough’. We have won every case we have supported.”
Mr Hughes added: "I respect competent lawyers who go through the evidence on behalf of their client. My job is to make sure the prosecution case is as robust as the defence."
He also criticised campaign groups such as Safe Speed and the Association of British Drivers.
"What these groups have done is encourage people to believe that there is something inherently wrong with enforcing the law" said Mr Hughes.
Paul Smith, founder of SafeSpeed.org.uk, said: "This action by ACPO is a dirty trick - they are attempting to put access to justice beyond the pocket of ordinary drivers. They are effectively saying - 'you are guilty because we never make mistakes'. But the newspapers are full of Police mistakes, and, to make matters worse, one of the key pieces of police prosecution equipment is downright dodgy. So dodgy, that it has been christened the 'dodgyscope' by Internet users."
“The ACPO is merely upping their bluff. The biggest bluff of all is that the resources do not exist to prosecute every speeding case. If drivers stopped accepting fixed penalties the system would collapse in weeks. This is the real reason for the ever increasing 'bluff and bluster' tactics - they need to force us into paying fixed penalties because neither the courts nor the CPS can possibly cope with much of an increase in cases.”
"What is wrong, Mr Hughes is the overzealous application of a law that simply isn't up to the job. You are damaging confidence in the justice system, the Police / public relationship and road safety itself. You can't even comply with the speed limit yourself, because you recently had 6 driving licence points for speeding."
"We encourage drivers to investigate the case against them. I would go as far as to say that MOST speeding cases are DEFECTIVE on the prosecution side. If you dig deep enough a fatal defect is quite likely to emerge. If you know you were not speeding according to law, or you do not know who the driver was at the time of the alleged offence then you are likely to have a winnable case."
"The whole thing has become a petty war of technicalities with ACPO and the Police throwing ever increasing resources against an increasingly untrusting public. In this ridiculous war road safety has been forgotten. Mr Hughes may well claim that the law is on his side but however much he may bleat about the law the fact is that millions upon millions of speeding prosecutions are not saving lives on the road. It isn't 'the law' that matters most here, Mr Hughes, it's the number of roads fatalities. You should know better."
Lets have a more intense driving test which will give drivers
a license which is graded to their ability (which can be up graded).
I was hit by a under cover police van a year ago, driven by a policeman
who was not driving responsibly in wet conditions. No appoligy from the local constabulary, indeed they were not even prepaird to give me and my elderly mother a lift home or to the local garage, until I made it plain that I would take it further!.....safty NO, money (sorry) revanue YES
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