Safe Speed Forums

Anyone care to bet what the police reaction would be if any normal members of the motoring public did this?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... _id=493400

Its potentially a violation of the officer's licence too, carrying more than 8 passengers.

This sort of thing can be very dangerous though - and I DON'T mean from the overloading or seatbelt point of view! Plod (and all the emergency services) will NEED to bend (or even break) the rules from time to time in order to get the job done. I wonder how many of the public would write in and complain if they'd been on their way to thwart a major terrorist strike? It wouldn't take much more public whinging about H&S, RTA, European Working Time Directive rules (and so on) being broken to completely paralyse our emergency services - closed followed by the armed forces!

Leave 'em be, I say!

As an aside, I'm impressed that the VW wasn't sat much lower on its rear springs than it was with all those bodies behind the rear axle!

Yep. And the rest of us?



Leave us be, I say!

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Not so the forces, we're already hampered on many fronts by rules and regulations that seem to fly in the face of common sense, but they must be obeyed, because they are the rules, and we must be above reproach.

The police are even more public-facing, by a massive degree, and as such it is even more important that they be seen to be above reproach.

It is worthy of note that they were not off to thwart a terrorist attack, but to attend the massive fire. Police officers...at a fire...

Kinda brings back memories of the Keystone Cops - all hanging on to a vehicle as they stood on the running board!!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Typical trash from the Daily Mail.

No doubt the editor Hugh Jarse (or whatever his name is) would have run screaming headlines: "Officers refuse to help because of red tape restrictions!" if they had declined to all get in the car to rush off to the fire.

So, according to the Daily Mail it is wrong for PCSOs to NOT jump into water to rescue a child who is drowning.

Yet it is wrong for police officers TO overfill a car in a desperate attempt to get to a major incident.

Oh, I get it! The Daily Mail is staffed with a bunch of sensation seeking, two-faced wastes of space who believe they CAN have it both ways!

What a bunch of clowns!

And yes police officers DO attend major fires. Always have done.

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www.thatsnews.org.uk / www.thatsnews.blogspot.com / http://thatsmotoring.blogspot.com/

You can see the difference though surely.

One is to save life, the other is to assist in administering an incident scene. One is a lack of moral fibre, excused by convenient H&S legislation, the other is breaking the law they are sworn to uphold.

What goes around comes around.


Whats good for the goose, live by the sword, reap what you sow, etc etc etc etc etc, all means the same thing, police get served by a photographer- kinda cool.

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

Edit: ^^^^^ According to the comments on that video, this was done by the mechanics servicing the car, not by police officers. Always reset your trip counter and note the mileage when dropping off any vaguely fun car for a service people!

I'm not too bothered about this, so long as the driver took a little extra caution to compensate. Hell the weight of the 6 extra officers is probably nothing compared to the weight of all the fancy equipment that's slung in the back of the police Volvo T5 estates.

And really who hasn't done something similar in their youth, sure we are all older and know better now, but in reality I suspect very few incidents arise from one-off situations that result in a trip like this.

Now if this was standard procedure, then the matter would be totally different.

As it is, I just find the pictures amusing, and a reminder that the police force is, ultimately, staffed with human beings (as well as gatsos)

Aye, and I canunderstand that feeling. relations between "them" and "us" seem to be at an all-time low. The thing is we can leave it to go around and come around but then it will go around (again) and come around (again) each time getting a bit nastier. We need to break the cycle and one way I can think of where we MIGHT go some way to achieving it is to cut them some slack - then maybe they'll do that for us?

OK utopian dream amybe but what's the alternative? Hell, I know that they do some unjust things and we should show no mercy but in cases like this, I agree with Thatsnews, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't!

Although I agree in principle that we need to treat each other sensibly, the police are a public body with an image problem. They must take the lead in "cutting the slack" not the public. More flexibility from them would have to be the first step.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

The difference though is that the former is not illegal. If the vehicle was overloaded, then the latter is, as the police would be only too quick to point out to anybody else. Six extra people at an average of 150 lb. each is an extra 900 lb., on top of the 1200 lb. payload of the "legitimate" eight, plus whatever equipment was being carried. Does anyone happen to know the curb weight and GVWR of this make and model of vehicle? Even if the GVWR was not exceeded, can you see a traffic cop accepting people being crammed in like that?



I don't have a problem with the basic premise. My beef is that the police would not accept this from any regular members of the public -- Even in a one-off emergency situation.

I think the VW Transporter has a pretty good carrying capacity and I wouldn't be surprised if it was OK weight-wise. I'd guess at a kerb weight of around 1800kg and a GVW not far off 3000kg. That said, the max. rear axle weight might have been exceeded!

I thought it was more the contravention of seat belt wearing regs that people were on about though (although, come to think about it, does "Plod" have an exemption from them)?

Isn't everybody excluded from seatbelt laws 'in an emergency'? Certainly remember reading that for the new restrictions on children.

Ian

Even if the actual GVWR and rear axle limits are O.K., we hear enough stories these days of police stopping people for having just a couple of people in the cargo area of a vehicle, something we did in my day as kids quite regularly. The overloading in the back of this police vehicle is clearly far worse than that.



Yes. Those who enforce the law against everybody else are exempt from complying with it themselves while on official duties. Stalin would have been proud.



No. The revised child-seat law which came into effect September 2006 under EU orders has an exemption which allows an extra child to be carried without the designated booster seat in an emergency (however that is defined), but there is no general emergency exemption.

I can remember getting a stuffing off one of my teachers at school many years ago for taking nine (yes 9!) lads down to the games field in my...

...Reliant estate!

Come to think of it, the steering DID feel a bit light!

One of my friends was once done for 'unsafe load' with half a dozen of us in the pick up bit of his Land Rover.

He asked the policeman why he was being done when he'd actually been in the back of a different Land Rover with the SAME policeman (off duty) on a hunt a couple of months before. Didn't get him anywhere.

Just goes to show though that many of these things are not about safety, they're about money and control.