Police to target some known speedsters.

[peterw]

Reckless drivers who use legal loopholes to avoid conviction are being targeted in a new police initiative. BBC News this morning says it’ll happen in South Yorkshire, but once again Liberty has chipped in to defend those who should have been convicted but were acquitted because of legal loopholes. I think it’s about time Liberty lost their freedom!

[Agent Orange]

Why, what are those lovely's at liberty saying about this?

[cgksheff]

The main emphasis of the initiative is to get the police and their lawyers to do their job properly in the first place:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5340846.stm

[Cyclone]

Meredydd Hughes, the chief constable of South Yorkshire Police, said officers were becoming increasingly frustrated with lawyers who used legal small print to help win acquittals for clients.

 

So what the police are actually saying is that they haven't been doing their job properly and will now try to do so in the future.

Well done to them.

 

I think my colleagues in the roads policing groups will share my anger when people are unjustly acquitted and I'm sure they'll be looking for those drivers.

 

Thats a very dangerous statement for a police officer to make. If they have been aquitted in a court, there is no such thing as an 'unjust aquittal'. Unless he doesn't think that courts should follow the laws of this land...

 

Liberty spokesman James Welch told BBC News: "If [Mr Hughes] is suggesting that police officers are going to target people they consider have been unjustly acquitted - meaning they are going to stop them on a number of occasions when they don't have a good reason - then that should be wrong in principle and probably is almost certainly illegal as well.

 

Seems like a perfectly reasonable statement from liberty.

The police should not be targetting people on the basis that they disagree with previous judgements, and as he said, doing so would probably be illegal.

[donuticus]

I have to say I love the look on a policmans face when someone has ust made him look a right lemon. If you can find a way around something then good luck to you.

[DaFoot]

I wonder how many of these loopholes are the likes of the 'illegal' speed signs cant be enforced.

[stackmonkey]

I think the thread title is misleading; it's not just speeding drivers, it's reckless drivers, drunk drivers, dangerous drivers etc, who will be targetted, none or all of whom may have been speeding.

 

It's getting the police and CPS to do the job properly.

 

if the police target these acquitted people as suggested, it could be counted as harrassment.

[Greybeard]

Their seems to be an acknowledgement by the CPS that their lawyers have been less than rigorous in prosecuting drivers where death and serious injury arise from carelessness.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,,1869067,00.html

 

What I've never understood is the difference between 'careless' and 'dangerous' in the handling of what amounts to a lethal weapon. It's surely semantic nonsense to suggest that a driver who kills someone whilst driving 'carelessly' is any less guilty of criminal negligence than someone driving 'dangerously'.

[stackmonkey]

Careless could be you or me simply not paying enough attention and having a bump as a consequence; dangerous is more a person knowing that they're driving badly/recklessly and putting people's lives at some kind of conscious( risk.