Safe Speed Forums

BBC



My bold. Funny how that's what everyone here's been saying for a while. Glad to see that it's now hitting the news on a regular basis.

_________________
Prepare to be Judged

I've just seen this on TV, it's really odd.

I don't understand how people get away with this. How I would expect it to work is:
1. Driver is caught speeding on a camera.
2. They aren't prosecuted because their car is registered to the wrong address.
3. Their registration is added to a central database of "wanted" vehicles.
4. Next time they drive past an ANPR their registration is flagged up and a police motorcyclist pursues them, stops them, and they're in a lot of trouble.

Does step 3 not happen? I drive past an ANPR typically once a month, so would expect myself to have no chance of getting away with this.

i would imagine with step 3 only British plated cars would be added to the ANPR databases, French Irish and the rest are probably just thrown in the trash can

I would hope not. If the issue of a NIP doesn't result in a response, the SCP has no way to know why there wasn't a response. It might be a false address, it might be someone who thinks ignoring it will make it go away, it might have been sent to someone who tripped the camera at the start of an extended holiday/business trip, it may even have genuinely been lost in the post. To assume that failure to respond within a given period of time could only be the result of nefarious intent, and to then add the registration to the ANPR database as a result, would be a bit unfair.


Furthemore, what if more than one person has access to the vehicle? Driver A trips a camera but doesn't respond to the NIP for whatever reason. Registration is placed on ANPR. At some point in the future, driver B is using the vehicle when it gets pulled in an ANPR operation. What are the police supposed to do then? They surely can't charge driver B, because they've done nothing wrong - they didn't commit the original offence which got the registration onto ANPR, and UIVMM there's no law making it illegal to use a vehicle just because someone else might have been caught speeding in it at some point.

_________________
Chris

In all those scenarios it seems completely fair to me. Even in the extended business trip scenario, it seems fair enough to me to pull them over and check the identity of the driver and that the vehicle isn't registered to a false address. If it were me I would have no problem with them pulling me over if that is the price I have to pay for catching all the other drivers who register their vehicles to false addresses.


It is the registered keeper who needs to respond to the NIP, not the driver. If the registered keeper of a vehicle isn't responding, the only way to establish who is responsible for the vehicle is by pulling the vehicle over. If the driver at that time had nothing to do with the original offence, tough, they need to explain to the police who they are, and how they have come to have use of the vehicle, so the police can trace who should be prosecuted for the original offences (both the speeding one and the incorrect registration of the vehicle or non-response to the NIP).

So, leaving apart the fact they don't seem embarrased that only one in three burglars, rapists and murderers are identified I find it a strange thing to compare

If I ran a building firm and said that 48% of my buildings didn't fall down, whereas only 30% of my competitors remained standing would I be seen to be a top quality outfit... I think not.

Mike.

Yeah, but it's far wose. There are BILLIONS of speeding offences year year. I've probably committed 20 myself this morning. The detection rate is, and always will be, microscopic. The prosecution rate of those detected is completely insignificant by comparison.

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

Except that, while that ANPR unit is busy dealing with your innocent reason for being on their database, how many other genuinely pull-worthy vehicles have they had to let go by? I don't have a problem with the police wanting to crack down on false addresses if they don't have anything else to do, but I do have a problem with any idea that has the potential to poison the ANPR database with false positives.

If we had sufficient resources to pull every untaxed/uninsured/unroadworthy vehicle and *still* be left with units to spare, then maybe adding registrations associated with offences where the police are after a driver rather than the vehicle itself might be fair enough, but when we still have a very real and quite serious problem with untaxed/licenced scrote-mobiles cluttering up the roads, we ought to be prioritising the resources we do have on getting them off the roads before worrying about drivers who might not even have committed an offence.




This sounds worryingly close to "guilty until proven innocent". The driver has commited no offence. The vehicle is road-legal. Why should they *need* to explain *anything*? I see your point-if tracing the RK is such a big deal, then any info the driver can provide may be useful-you just make it sound as if you're OK with the idea of treating everyone with suspicion unless they're able to verify their ID and provide a sufficiently plausible and confidently-delivered explanation to satisfy the officer who's carried out the pull, which they may not be able to achieve at the roadside...

...you wouldn't happen to also be in favour of mandatory carrying of ID cards, would you?


It's bad enough that the reliance on cameras, combined with politically-motivated reductions in limits, is causing decent and essentially law-abiding people to end up on the wrong side of the law, but if the flaws and loopholes in the camera enforcement system are then also responsible for causing genuinely law-abiding people to also end up being, even temporarily, treated as suspects, then isn't it time to take a big step back, a deep breath, count to 10 and re-assess the whole sorry mess before things get even worse?

_________________
Chris

Another point here is that the registered keeper may not have any documents on them so cannot prove, there and then, that they own the vehicle. So the policeman decides to impound the vehicle which may be destroyed that day as has happened in at least 2 occassions that have been brought to our notice here.

_________________
Prepare to be Judged

Good point about the Med Hughes comment.

It seems to me that he is aiming for mediocrity but unfortunately falling short.

The false positives will surely be a tiny percentage.


No, it IS the vehicle we're after. The offence of most interest is the vehicle being incorrectly registered, not the speeding offence that caused the incorrect registration to come to light. What if a driver of an incorrectly registered vehicle mows down a pedestrian, and gets off scot free because even though a witness gets the registration number, the incorrectly registered vehicle cannot be traced? Surely this is every bit as serious as an uninsured vehicle, arguably much more serious?


The police can already lock people up until they're happy they have established the person's identity. I'm not in favour of a central ID database (which is the issue rather than the cards), but the fact is that we already have an obligation to prove our identity to the police. If this were not the case it's difficult to see how any sort of law and order could be maintained.

The driver would not be a suspect as such, merely someone whose help is being enlisted in tracking down the person responsible for the vehicle. What other way is there to track them down? If we don't make such efforts why should anyone bother to correctly register their vehicle? It's too late to do anything when an incorrectly registered vehicle is involved in a serious accident and the person responsible cannot be traced (via the RK's responsibilty to know who is driving their vehicle), the chance to resolve the problem was 6 months earlier when they drove past an ANPR system.

The registered keeper of the vehicle is not necessarily the owner of the vehicle.

I was knocked off my bike a few years ago by someone. This person, it turns out, gave the name and address of the previous keeper.
They (could have been Police, maybe an insurance person, I can't rememeber) eventually went to see the person named, who said "I've sold the van".
They than came back to me and said.... that the person who they saw looked nothing like the description I (and others) gave of the van driver and he claims not to be the owner.
And that was it. Tough shit, pay the excess on the insurance and pay for the privilege of having your bike trashed.
Now I thought it was an offence not to inform DVLA etc etc.
I'd have put the vehicle on the ANPR database to catch the git, who knows what else he's been up to. And the guy who sold it and didn't inform the DVLA got off scott-free as far as I'm aware also.

This was five years ago and it still pisses me off writing this.

Mike.

EDIT: got my dates wrong

In the 'let's pretend world' maybe.

Here in the real world three million vehicles are registered as 'in the trade' so they have to ignore those.

I believe that ANPR will only catch the marginally illegal, while inviting criminals to hide effectively behind legit registration marks (often falsely displayed).

Serious criminal can rent cars for cash and vanish.

Local car thieves will soon realise that copying a numberplate from a dealer forecourt will render them invisible.

It's another bloody disaster of unintended consequences.

And have they studied 'criminal response' to ANPR? Have they hell. It's a wish and a prayer and gobs of cash for the technology suppliers.

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