Lies, Damn' lies and Lancashire Constabulary statistics

There's no sign that LC are perturbed by my baiting as yet- the policy of ignoring pretty much every moving traffic offence persists. They don't seem to be worried about any form of regulation. PJ07 NFP is often seen around Garstang, and is here 20 yards from the police station- almost a year since I first reported it. He's going for 3 1/2 years without insurance, MOT or VED and is clearly not worried that LC will suddenly wake up.

are you not worried about some form of petty retaliation from the [Lancashire] police?

I have considered this for about 4 years, since I was hit by a vehicle coming down the wrong side of the Sainsbury's access road and became alarmed at the police willingness to find any excuse for driving offences: in that case it was 'only a momentary loss of concentration'. I bought the headcam and it has been downhill since then- they have, at least, supplied me with plenty of ammo. I know they would really stuff me for any driving offence which they would generally ignore. 

My guess is that the Commissioner will argue that police forces can hand out information if they choose to, but can equally claim exemption from disclosure if they don't choose to. This power to ignore things or enforce them at will is a way for the police to deploy patronage and let people off who pay the unofficial private fine, and to stuff people they don't like: such as those who annoy them by reporting offences with immaculate evidence.

 I will read up about it when the Commissioner's reply arrives (there's a huge backlog of appeals to the Information Tribunal because the IC has learned from the police that you can get away with not doing things the law dictates by simply saying you're busy. So the IC applied to the IT for all appeals to be paused because they didn't have time to respond by the IT deadline.

I have not been able to find any reference to having to display signage

It's still there on OpSnap Lancs! You still have to accept this, and when I'm filming people hurtling through a red traffic light, my transport is legs. The fact that most forces don't deploy this dodge indicates that it has no legal foundation:

I confirm that I understand that dashcam footage falls under the Category of CCTV and as the footage is taken in the public domain, the Domestic Purposes Exemption under the Data Protection Act/UKGDPR does not apply and therefore all users are Data Controllers in their own right. As such you should be informing the public that they are being filmed and should have some form of notification on your mode of transport as you have responsibilities under the Data Protection Act /UKGDPR

 I have only just noticed the "1 minute before and after" clause- around 2019, Lancashire used to demand either 2 minutes or 5 minutes (I've forgotten) before and after at a time when you were limited to a 60 MB file! They don't have that 'rule' (read 'dodge, to discourage submissions) here any more

hopes that drivers might see a cyclists side of the interaction

Sadly, this hope is almost always forlorn- especially with readers of the hyper-junk press. I had it in my mind, from something on here I think, that Sussex was using the same GDPR stuff as Lancashire, but I thought I ought to check. I could only get part way through the process before having to give in my details, so I don't know much about Sussex police except that they're going with the one minute before and after rubbish, which they claim is essential for video to be accepted in court. This is obviously just a Trump type made-up 'fact'- this one is 14 seconds long and would be excellent evidence in court. It obviously didn't get there because this is Lancashire, and RLJs are legal here!

Great stuff! May be useful...

Gloucestershire have recently changed to OPsnap from their old system

This is more important than it seems! We now know that Sussex copied Lancashire with the GDPR dodge that you have to accept, or your submission will be rejected:

I confirm that I understand that dashcam footage falls under the Category of CCTV and as the footage is taken in the public domain, the Domestic Purposes Exemption under the Data Protection Act/UKGDPR does not apply and therefore all users are Data Controllers in their own right. As such you should be informing the public that they are being filmed and should have some form of notification on your mode of transport as you have responsibilities under the Data Protection Act /UKGDPR

I have just looked at OpSnap Gloucs and they don't seem to have adopted that dodge, but have the 2 minutes before and after dodge. Have you come across the GDPR dodge with Gloucestershire?

Where is a cyclist meant to display such a notice to say they are recording?!?!?  Would a GOPRO sticker on your helmet suffice? Crazy.

Clearly you have no experience of Lancashire Constabulary! You're supposed to display 'notification that you're recording' on your legs if you're walking or standing! In fact, these are just police dodges so they can claim that people who report offences were lying when agreeing to the statement forced on them by Lancashire Constabulary that they were displaying 'notifications'. I have still never seen such a notification on a vehicle or cycle around here. I repeat yet again: what would be the consequence if this was a truthful interpretation of GDPR which is touted by LC? Lawyers claiming that they couldn't see the notification as they zoomed past at 50mph, so therefore the video was inadmissible?! It's very difficult to conceive of much which is stupider than this

So if there's a car accident, and I have dash cam footage showing it happening, and the police ask for any available evidence to be presented, they can't have it because I didn't have a sticker on my car saying I'm recording video? 

Not quite. You can send it to them, but they will only accept the report if you agree that your bike, car or legs did display such a notification. They can then later invalidate your report unless you can prove you were actually displaying the notification- I have not yet seen any such notification and I insert in my reports a statement that I wasn't! 

Since I was hit by someone driving down the wrong side of the road when waiting to leave the Sainsbury's access road in December 2018, I have accumulated a collection of LC dodges, downright lies and extreme stupidities. They have little or no insight or conscience. I even have, from a couple of years ago, a letter from LC suggesting that I make a FoI request if I wanted to know about what happened in a case. This latest reply even contradicts what they say in Opsnap Lancs documentation and FAQs.

An utterly stupid dodge since vehicle registration is not PII

Although it makes this a bulky post, I will reiterate what I have written before, now including the Lancashire Constabulary Internal Review, soon to be on its way to the Information Commissioner- an organisation itself so paralysed by backlogs that it has had to apply to the Information Tribunal for extra time to deal with many, many appeals. Anyway, that's another story. The FOIA is knackered at the moment! However, you have to keep going or the b******s always win!

FoI request to LC, resulting from this offence, and the later letter to me from LC claiming they would be 'taking action'. Soon after, they ceased to respond to any reports on OpSnap Lancs

https://upride.cc/incident/4148vz_travellerschoicecoach_closepass/

FoI request to LC: This FoI request is for the information held about the action actually taken over this offence against the driver of what was then registered as 4148 VZ, using the information above to identify the offence

Naturally, Lancashire Constabulary refused to even admit that they held any information about what action Lancashire Constabulary had taken against the driver who committed this offence.

The Internal Review confirms this: 

Lancashire Constabulary can neither confirm nor deny that it holds any information
relevant to this request as the duty in Section1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information
Act 2000 does not apply, by virtue of the following exemption:
 Section 40(5) Personal Information

Your Internal Review has now been considered and I can confirm that the information you are seeking cannot be provided at this time. Having reviewed the exemptions applied I agree that the use of s.40 has been applied correctly. I deem that “information held about the action actually taken over this offence against the driver” is classed as third party information and as such is not accessible to yourself via the FOI process. If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint, you may apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision

Anna Cawley 11044
Information Compliance & Data Protection Advisor
Lancashire Constabulary Data Protection Office

You may think this is not relevant to you, but if one bent force gets away with it, it will become the routine response from all the rest of them, from the Ultra-Bent Met emanating outwards. It will end up at the Information Tribunal, because the Commissioner sees it as his role to aid public bodies in evading the intent of the FOIA.

This post is copied from this topic

I'm still waiting to hear back from Sussex Police - I've done an FOI on this

It won't do you any good! Sussex is one of the forces following the Lancashire Constabulary dodgy OpSnap model, which involves no prosecutions, lying about what they've done and refusing to disclose anything about anything. Cutting a long story short: see the most recent item on here, which is about this offence(link is external). I now have the Information Commissioner's Decision Notice dated 3.5.23, Ref: IC-225713-W2Y2. Oddly, this is not available on the Information Commissioner website(link is external), despite them being published up to the decision date of 10th May. Maybe they hold back when they think it's going to the Information Tribunal, which it is.

If you want to find out what the police actually did, when they claim to have taken action, this DN is important, because there will be numerous cases where they did nothing at all or, at best, sent out the joke warning letter for the offender to hang on a nail in the toilet.

This is the top of the DN, verbatim:

1. The complainant has requested information about an incident he reported, from Lancashire Constabulary. Lancashire Constabulary would neither confirm nor deny (“NCND") holding the requested information, citing section 40(5) (Personal information) of FOIA.
2. The Commissioner’s decision is that Lancashire Constabulary was entitled to rely on section 40(5) of FOIA. No steps are required.

What it means is: when the police tell you they're 'taking action', and you try to find out what the action was, they refuse to tell you, claiming that they can't even confirm that they have any idea what the police did! It's even possible, given the institutionalised ineptitude at Lancashire Constabulary that they really don't know!

So this is the Decision Notice from the Information Commissioner which supports police forces refusing to tell you what action they took after they claimed to you that they had taken action over a traffic offence report. It's worth reading, because they'll all be using such dodges if it's supported at the Information Tribunal. If it is, when the Met. or another force tells people that the offender received a warning letter, or a course etc. they have committed an offence