Patrick Crozier’s Transport Blog has a valuable service at the top right of the blog, in the form of links to transport related articles. (Most of the media do not seem to have a special category for “transport” stories, the way they do for “education” or “arts”.) Patrick adds very little in the way of accompanying commentary to these links, but others can comment, and on this story, several people did. I missed this when it first came out, but it seems to me worth making a fuss of, even if belatedly:
A pensioner who warned motorists of a police speed trap was convicted of wilfully obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty, banned from driving and ordered to pay £364 costs yesterday.
Stuart Harding, 71, was attempting to slow motorists down as they approached a Sunday morning car boot sale where many people were crossing the road.
Noticing that police were parked nearby with an officer using a hand-held laser speed camera, he decided that a warning stating “Speed Trap – 300 yards ahead” would be the most effective way of getting drivers to reduce their speed. But as soon as the officers noticed his placard he was cautioned for committing an offence.
And there seems little doubt that it was this sign that was the “offence”.
Robert Manley, prosecuting, said: “In displaying this sign the defendant was giving motorists advanced warning of a road safety camera being operated by the police 300 yards further along the road.”
The supposed idea of speed cameras is to dissuade people from breaking the speed limit. Mr Harding was also dissuading people from breaking the speed limit. Yet this is something that a prosecutor considers it proper to denounce Mr Harding for doing. And what is more, the court agreed.
I suppose you could just about argue that if we were all allowed to put up signs about speed cameras, we would all be at it, and we would all accordingly only have to obey the speed limit where there was a warning sign, instead of all the time as we should.
But I prefer Andy Wood’s explanation, which he links back to in his comment on this story. The income from speed cameras goes to local police forces, and they use cameras, and place their cameras in the first place, to raise revenue rather than to dissuade dangerous driving, the problem with dissuasion being that if it succeeds they get no money out of it.
So, watch out. If someone is committing an offence for which he is liable to be fined, do not, whatever you do, try to dissuade him. You will be “wilfully obstructing” the police in their attempts to fleece us of our money whenever they can.
I suppose the next question is: would it be wrong to encourage people to commit such offences? Would the police have any objections to that? Presumably not.
More seriously, this illustrates the general principle nowadays, that the state would rather tax and torment and generally mess with law-abiding, and even, as in this case, actively law-upholding citizens, rather than go after real criminals. Criminals are just too much bother to deal with. Moral: be a criminal. Seriously. The government is always jabbering away about how this or that measure might “send the wrong message” – usually what they say is that if they do not forbit some harmless and utterly unaggressive thing they might be interpreted as encouraging it. Well, what kind of message does prosecuting Mr Harding send?
I think the magistrates got it right – clear instance of unfair competition. Plaintiff had invested several ?illions in setting up the infrastructure to provide this service. Along comes some Joe, a road-safety market trader, and pinches the customers, WITHOUT PAYING ANY TAX. What was he thinking of?
I reckon that motorists who get caught speeding should take a leaf out of the habitual criminals book and flatly deny everything.
It wasn’t me.
I wasn’t in the car.
I don’t know who took the car at that time, people steal cars everyday.
That is some other car with a duplicate plate.
Go to court. Deny everything. Get a fine. Don’t pay. Try for legal aid for a retrial. Get summoned for non payment. etc .
And the fact that the police can SEE who the driver was is irrelevant? Add to which the joy of going from 3 points on your licence up to a possible 6 points, if the case ends up before a magistrate, just makes it not worth it – pay the fine, take the points and hope that Parliament brings in the new law that will supposedly see a graded system of points deductions instead of the current ‘4 strikes and you walk to work’ .
Incidentally would having software on a PDA like this be considered an offence, given the “advantage” one would have over the police?
If the police SEE you throwing bricks in the street they still have to prove that it was you.
Hence ‘It wasn’t me!’.
Do you think that ‘I saw a picture of a car driver and he looks to me like Julian Taylor, your honour’ is a good basis for prosecution?
They arrange these matters far better in France, where it is only good manners to flash one’s head-lights to warn oncoming traffic when one has just passed a police speed trap.
I always thought that wonderful sales orgnaisation, – the Autombile Association, was formed solely for the purpose of warning the public of ‘speed traps’.
The AA patrolman giving a decourous salute , if all was clear. the absence of a salute being the warning that ‘the fuzz’ was up to their usual dirty tricks.
But then life in general was so much more civilised then…
I heard a similar story here in the US on NPR. A man was fined by police for blinking his lights at oncoming cars to warn of a speed trap. He challenged the fine and ended up taking his case to a high court (can’t remember if it went to supreme court or not). In the end, the court found in his favor saying that the fine was a violation of his 1st ammendment right to free speech.
Ernest Young is right. In the early days of motoring, c. 1905, there was a judgement in the courts that alerting motorists to police speed traps was legal. How then has this elderly gent infringed the law?
They still do that here. Or they’ll tap the brake a couple of times if you’re behind them.
Here in my town in the US, speed trap locations are announced on the local radio stations – and they still catch plenty of people. Radar detectors are legal too.
La Marquise – Which part of the world do you live in that you don’t know that flashing lights to alert fellow motorists to traffic cops is universal? They do it in Malaysia, they do it in Mexico, they do it throughout the US and Canada … and in Britain. I’ve never been in a country where I haven’t, at some point, seen motorists coming in the other direction flashing their headlights.
Have you never been speeding happily along with everyone else and sudden realised that all the cars in front of you were slamming on their brakes?
I haven’t lived in the UK for about 10 years when it was not normal practise to do this. I suppose that as there are more speed traps now and the police seem almost exclusively interested in this sort of crime, the motorists’ attitude to the police has changed. In the past, in the UK, flashing headlights meant that there was something wrong with your car or your driving (so as to annoy the head-light flasher), so when I did move to France and was there, as it were, flashed at, I would think “well, what have I done?” or “ohmygod – I’ve forgot to dip my headlights, er no I haven’t” until a native interpreted the signal for me. I remember being rather shocked: it was representative of the French attitude towards the law as something with which you never willingly co-operate.
Ugh. I hate speed traps, and red light cameras too, though fortunately I have not been nailed by either. The problem isn’t just the points and fines alone; as a 20-year old driver, I could also end up stuck with hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars in additional insurance costs (I don’t believe insurance companies treat speed trap or red light camera tickets differently from others), and insurance is required by law in California.
My experience is that speed traps are positioned more for revenue raising than stopping speeding in dangerous areas. One speed trap that is commonly set up on my commuting route is on a straight stretch of road in which the speed limit suddenly decreases from 50 to 40 mph.
I’m not sure whether speedtraps should exist within a libertarian society. Some may consider the following statement crazy, but speeding only potentially harms. One could drive at 100mph on the M1 yet not actually harm any other road user. If a government in a libertarian society is only concerned with protecting rights to person and property, then I’m not sure whether they have an obligation to maintain a network of speed cameras.
Thank goodness our courts in the U.S. decided that under the First Amendment, we have the freedom to warn people of danger ahead — and WE get to decide what constitutes “danger”.
Any magistrate who decides that by doing this one is “obstructing the police” should be pelted with rotten vegetables every time he ventures out in public.
Some of the speeding ticket revenue could be set aside for his dry-cleaning bills.
This issue actually first came up almost a hundred years ago in two cases decided by the English Courts in the first decade of the 20th century.
In the first case (Bastable v. Little 1906), the court held that it is not an offence to warn drivers of police traps if the drivers are not speeding at the time at which they are warned.
In the second case (Betts v.Stevens 1910) the court held that is an offence if the drivers who are being warned, are speeding at the time at which they warned.
The practical effect of Betts v. Stevens was of course to emasculate Bastable v. Little since it is almost inevitable that at least some of those who are warned, will be speeding at the time of the warning.
Cydonia
Some places here in the states place radar setups with big digital readouts on them at a particular spot where speeding seems to be a problem. Drivers come along, suddenly see this big display at the side of the road showing that they are going 43 miles an hour in, say, a 30 mph zone — and they also realize that rather than this unattended display, there could have been a police officer with a radar gun at that site and they could have received a speeding ticket. It is very effective. People slow down. (No, they don’t seem to think that this means it is safe to speed because it is an unattended device; after all, there still could be a cop parked just around the next bend in the road for just that reason.) After a day or two, the display can be moved to another location. This has the desired effect of reducing speeds in areas where safety is important without penalizing citizens — and it also allows more effective use of police officers in protecting citizens from criminals rather than spending a day writing tickets (and then another day lost to court appearances). It does not fill the municipal treasury with traffic fines. The use of such devices, in my opinion, as opposed to automated cameras at intersections, says something about a town’s attitude toward public safety and whether they view citizens as citizens or as sheep to be sheared.
Verity – you’re wrong about the meaning of flashing of the headlamps:
Some time ago my Father and I were driving in a built-up area when a car coming the other way flashed us. There were no speed traps and we did not know the driver or the car. We had our lights on proeprly and when we got to our destination (the local chippy) we checked the car to see if anything was amiss (flat tyres etc) but all seemed to be in order. Since the local chippy had closed 5 minutes earlier it was clear that the meaning of the flashing was “the fish and chip shop’s shut”.
🙂