I HEAR that police officers are once again being allowed to hand out warnings to motorists instead of being forced to ticket or prosecute every single time; or, to be more accurate, a warning given to a motorist instead of a ticket will apparently count as one of those dreaded key performance indicators (KPIs)used to measure the worth of police these days.
Is this true? I hope so. To those of us who are in court every day the great KPI issue is a thorny one. Cross examine a beat officer on whether he or she has targets to meet and you will get a denial. Cross examine them on whether their bosses have targets to meet which they pass on down the chain and the answer is far less clear.
What is clear is that the huge surge in the prosecution of motorists in recent times is being driven by something. Not only are the public baffled then angry about it, but also many officers are privately not too happy about it either. Are police officers ordered to sit outside new housing estates to stop drivers and ticket them for not changing their addresses?
Why does the number of cases of motorists parking on zig-zags seem to have suddenly soared? Do minibuses full of armed response police still cruise Glasgow in their stand-down time seeking out motorists to hand out traffic tickets to? Who knows. But what are the chances of a police officer giving someone the benefit of the doubt when they have no discretion and are under pressure?
Isn't there also, then, a temptation to increase the gravity of actual offences that are committed to, say, charge an incident of careless driving as one of dangerous driving? Or to see every case where someone momentarily gets too close to the car in front as tailgating? Outside court, officers talk about what effect this is having on the general public's perception of the police. Respect? Will an otherwise completely law-abiding motorist who feels he or she has been unfairly treated view police evidence in court differently if they are, say, some time much later, called to sit on a jury?
Of course, there is always the answer that we can never be too safe and the police are committed to ensuring safety. Yet, while 5,000 more motorists were convicted in 2013/2014 than in the previous year, the number of road-traffic deaths actually went up. And let us not forget this war on motorists has apparently been going on for five years. One of the knock-on effects is that the Road Traffic Act and the Road Traffic Offenders Act, with their twists and turns, have become specialised subjects in courts that are not really equipped to deal with them. Will we lawyers have wasted all that time learning the minutiae of road traffic law now that warnings as well as tickets are to be counted as KPIs? Or will officers, knowing their warnings are being monitored, simply limit them to one or two a year? And otherwise it will be business as usual?
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