detective-boy said:
That is a truism about much of policing. When I was involved with the Community and Race Relations Training workshops in Lambeth most of the youths who came in for the interface sessions weren't worried particularly about being stop/searched ... they were complaining about HOW it was done and the attitude of the officers.
Unfortunately most people who complain don't differentiate between the two and just say e.g. "Speeding enforcement is bad", which means the authorities can just say "No it isn't" and ignore the actual point. More reasoned complainst like yours are, in my opinion, the only way of changing things. Over time it has worked to some extent with parking enforcement in London, lets' hope the speed camera partnerships learn ...
I don't see that they will. They're not in the slightest bit dependent on public goodwill, which seems to me the only area where pressure can be applied to encourage them to learn, or even just to listen: the IAM issued a statement about a year ago saying that the nature of speeding enforcement in the UK was seriously damaging the relationship between the motorist and the police (which does rely, to some extent, on goodwill), but, until things get MUCH worse, by which time I'd say that the motorist/police relationship would be pretty much irreparable in the short term, I don't see much imperative for change.
I'd love to be wrong, but the way I see things, we have a cold-eyed bureaucracy whose sole raison d'etre is to raise money by catching people speeding, regardless of the broader issues, and without any kind of perceived need on their part to pay any attention
to the broader issues: the only way I can see the situation changing would be for some legislative change to take place, and I haven't the first clue what kind of law you'd have to pass to, in effect, require the SCPs to stop enforcing the
letter of the law in favour of something addressing its spirit, ie. something about enforcing safe driving rather than focusing entirely on speed.
I now believe that there is a very real danger that, in the same way as the prohibitionist attitude of the anti-drugs mob in the '80s succeeded in completely discrediting the anti-drug message, the behaviour of the SCPs is likely to do the same thing to the speeding message. We know that speed kills - it's pretty obvious - just as we know that "drugs are baaad, mm'kay?", but when the message is being hammered home and backed up with the rapaciousness that it is, more and more "reasonable" people will find themselves on the wrong side of the argument, and will begin to question these hitherto accepted "truths". Meanwhile, the roads aren't getting any safer. There's far too much room for improvement on road safety, but, after 15 years of increasingly automated enforcement, very little progress on casualties: someone needs to be asking the right questions. Questions like "if 'speed kills', and we've stopped all these people speeding with our cameras, then why are so many people still dying? Could it be that we're trying to fix the wrong problem?"
But I'm not hearing those questions, except in the dark corners of anti-speed-trap bulletin boards and IAM press releases, and that doesn't seem to be nearly enough.
We seemed to succeed in doing it with drink-driving, but perhaps that was easier, since it's a pretty unilaterally bad thing to do, whereas speeding isn't necessarily always inherently bad or dangerous. But I'd have thought that there were enough people being paid enough money to manage road safety (from the police, through the civil service, to our Beloved Leaders) that
someone ought to be able to see the way through.
