Near Miss of the Day 256: Cyclist records close pass – then runs into police red tape

BehindTheBikesheds wrote:

It isn't a generalisations as it applies to ALL forces, hence why we have the same shit time and time again reported and spoken of on many different forums by thosands of people every year ... when they can be bothered to report because they know that plod are a bunch of lazy, lying, fact twisting, agenda driven cretins who don't give a fuck bar the odd one or two decent coppers!

From ignoring, not prosecuting hit and run to deliberately attempting to pervert the course of justice when trying to intimidate me to not bother with pressing for them to do something over dangerous driving which ended up with an Inspector flicking me off by not turning up to my appt with him when I complained about his sargeant. He even tried to get me to turn up to his unmanned station at 10pm ffs! I ended up filing a complaint via IPCC and the chief Insp gave me all the flannel which was just yet more pony.

It's endemic and contrary to a constable's sworn oath, but you know, generalisations right!

Yes, generalisations, or - alternatively - cycle.london and you are right and the police in all forces are pathological liars, as stated. One of those is grounded in reality.

fukawitribe wrote:

BehindTheBikesheds wrote:

It isn't a generalisations as it applies to ALL forces, hence why we have the same shit time and time again reported and spoken of on many different forums by thosands of people every year ... when they can be bothered to report because they know that plod are a bunch of lazy, lying, fact twisting, agenda driven cretins who don't give a fuck bar the odd one or two decent coppers!

From ignoring, not prosecuting hit and run to deliberately attempting to pervert the course of justice when trying to intimidate me to not bother with pressing for them to do something over dangerous driving which ended up with an Inspector flicking me off by not turning up to my appt with him when I complained about his sargeant. He even tried to get me to turn up to his unmanned station at 10pm ffs! I ended up filing a complaint via IPCC and the chief Insp gave me all the flannel which was just yet more pony.

It's endemic and contrary to a constable's sworn oath, but you know, generalisations right!

Yes, generalisations, or - alternatively - cycle.london and you are right and the police in all forces are pathological liars, as stated. One of those is grounded in reality.

cycle london is right.  The very nature of policing requires constant lying.  They couldn't do their jobs otherwise - and even if they managed it, their 'clear up' rates would be a fraction of the quite lamentable figures that they are.  

I don't believe that every copper lies all the time.  But I believe that well over 90% of cases that plod submit to the CPS, contain blatant lies.  The vast majority of arrests carried out by the police are based on falsehoods.  

The CPS - indeed, the entire 'justice' system in England & Wales - is built around getting results, and those results mean taking people to prison, or fining them.   As such, the CPS turns a blind eye to most of the dishonesty in cases, unless it's so egregious that they can't prosecute without risk to themselves, should it come to light.

Let me ask you this: remember the recent cases where rape cases collapsed beacause the defence had not been provided with text messages and other evidence?   Do you think that the CPS didn't know about that?   Also: do you think that this kind of erm ..'mistake' is rare?

cycle.london wrote:

The police are hampered by the fact that they are pathological liars who don't have the brains to keep track of their own lies.

[snip]

Maybe if plod stopped being such lazy, dishonest twats, they'd get more sympathy from the public when one of theirs takes a kicking.

Sounds like you have a problem with your local force, go take it up with them.. perhaps they're fed up with the inane and sweeping over-generalisations sent their way, who knows. You seem to know all about how "the public" feel though, so perhaps you're right.

CXR94Di2 wrote:

The white line, I would of been riding 3ft to the right of it.  The position of the rider invited drivers to maintain speed and not slow down

Totally agree, that line is not marking a cycle lane, it is marking the edge of the carriageway

"How could the car be too close m'lud, the cyclist wasn't on the road" would be the easiest defence

EK Spinner wrote:

CXR94Di2 wrote:

The white line, I would of been riding 3ft to the right of it.  The position of the rider invited drivers to maintain speed and not slow down

 

Totally agree, that line is not marking a cycle lane, it is marking the edge of the carriageway

"How could the car be too close m'lud, the cyclist wasn't on the road" would be the easiest defence

Your road positioning does not invite anything. But in my experience it is less bad to be further out into the lane... until some idiot close passes you because they incorrectly think that you should be further over.

While the white line does demarcate the edge of the carriageway, it obviously doesn't mean you can drive into things or people that are partially or wholly the other side of that white line.
 

ChrisB200SX wrote:

EK Spinner wrote:

CXR94Di2 wrote:

The white line, I would of been riding 3ft to the right of it.  The position of the rider invited drivers to maintain speed and not slow down

 

Totally agree, that line is not marking a cycle lane, it is marking the edge of the carriageway

"How could the car be too close m'lud, the cyclist wasn't on the road" would be the easiest defence

Your road positioning does not invite anything. But in my experience it is less bad to be further out into the lane... until some idiot close passes you because they incorrectly think that you should be further over.

While the white line does demarcate the edge of the carriageway, it obviously doesn't mean you can drive into things or people that are partially or wholly the other side of that white line.
 

 

Can't disagree, obviously no invites were isssued, but by cycling just off the carriagway then eejits with tunnel vision don't see that any action is required on thier part.

CXR94Di2 wrote:

The white line, I would of been riding 3ft to the right of it.  The position of the rider invited drivers to maintain speed and not slow down

That was going to be my first comment. On a road like that I would always ride to the right of the white line. To the left is clearly not a cycle lane, and such verges are usually full of crap, glass and drain covers so a hazard in their own right. As you say, the tighter you keep to the verge, the more drivers will try to slip by too close. Riding to right of the verge then gives you an 'escape lane' in case of close passes. The mini driver didn't seem to be much worse than the other vehicles.

On the subject of Avon and Somerset police, since they introduced the web-upload tool for dashcam type footage I have had nothing but good responses from them. Although they ask all these questions about time-stamps, 2 minutes either side of the incident etc, in practice they would only need this if it did go to court. In all videos I have submitted there was no timestamp but it is still possible to obtain the time and date data from the file digitally, plus there is Strava evidence to back this up. So as long as the devices you are using have the correct time and date on them, they seem happy with the footage.

Also, to upload a 4 minute HD video file would take ages. Ages for them to download too no doubt. Most of my videos submitted contain about 30 seconds or so of footage - the minium needed to see the incident - and this has been fine. As I say, if the case did go further that is when you may need the additional footage, so I always keep a copy of the full video.

They presumably applied the 7-day limit as otherwise they would probably have been inundated with old footage that people have kept hold of! I certainly have some crackers I could have sent them!

They have always responded to my submissions within a couple of days, over weekends too, and they always let you know what the intended next course of action will be. This comes from the person reviewing the footage. Most times this results in a warning letter but a couple of times has moved to prosecution.

From what I read, this service provided by Avon and Somerset Police compares very favourably with other police forces around the UK. It is just a shame that there seems to be a postcode lottery in terms of the level of service offered though. Wasn't there supposed to be a national scheme/service that was due to be rolled out?

Plasterer's Radio wrote:

So if a murder is committed on film without a timestamp or more than 7 days ago, it's not worthy of investigation.

Is the cyclist reporting to us from beyond the grave then?

Drinfinity wrote:

In my corner of the IT universe anything which is part of the legal record has to be time and user stamped, all history archived, and critical changes digitally signed, and the whole system rigorously validated. I probably get more up tight about standards of evidence than most.

On the other hand, the same industry has an almost religious devotion to a paper record. Email trail? Hearsay. Print out the email, sign and date? Compliant, thank you very much.

The problem is the user is the one who time stamps the footage, so the time stamp is worthless.  I can set any time/date on my camera. The only way to get a vaugely reliable stamp would be to use a camera with gps that applied the location and time to the footage as it was taken.

All we have with a video is a recording of a 'crime' and the sumbmitters word that the video was theirs and happened at that time/location.

This also applies to CCTV recordings, they have to find some way to prove the video is where/when its supposed to be.

Drinfinity wrote:

It’s not good enough if you have no independent witness and an undated video. The defence could just say ‘I was somewhere else, your video is wrong’ and there is nothing to back up the case. 

The force has described clearly the standard of evidence required, and have a portal to load it. There is cheap equipment easily available to collect the evidence. Why would you expect them to pursue a case which will never stand up?

 

if you submit evidence which would stand up, and clearly shows a crime, and then they don’t follow up, that’s a reasonable complaint.

they don't all need to end up in a court case. In many cases it might only merit a word with the driver, but that could be enough and would always be better than nothing.

All digital evidence depends on someone who's prepared to affirm that it's an accurate representation of reality. I used to work in IT in a famous department store and was required to give precisely that type of affirmation about the contents of the sales database in a case of fraud.

Drinfinity wrote:

Why do you consider the requirements awkward?

They will have little hope of a conviction based on the video alone if it isn’t recent, if there is no timestamp to show how recent it is, and if there is not film either side of the event for context.

If you aren’t prepared to give statements or go to court, then why would you expect them to expend finite resources on a case that is unlikely to get a conviction?

 

if you don’t have a clear reg number, why would the evidence be good enough beyond reasonable doubt? 

 

Plenty of cases uses in all sorts of crime fail because the evidence is flimsy. Given it is easy to get a camera that timestamps, and records plenty of footage, it seems reasonable to me to help the police by providing evidence that stands up. If you offer something that has the same provenance as a dodgy YouTube clip, it’s unlikely to stand up in court on its own.

Conversely, why isn't the witness statement of "this video was taken at this location, at this time, on this day" good enough?! Because they want to add artificial barriers so that they maximise the number of videos they can easily dismiss and not action.

ChrisB200SX wrote:

Drinfinity wrote:

Why do you consider the requirements awkward?

They will have little hope of a conviction based on the video alone if it isn’t recent, if there is no timestamp to show how recent it is, and if there is not film either side of the event for context.

If you aren’t prepared to give statements or go to court, then why would you expect them to expend finite resources on a case that is unlikely to get a conviction?

 

if you don’t have a clear reg number, why would the evidence be good enough beyond reasonable doubt? 

 

Plenty of cases uses in all sorts of crime fail because the evidence is flimsy. Given it is easy to get a camera that timestamps, and records plenty of footage, it seems reasonable to me to help the police by providing evidence that stands up. If you offer something that has the same provenance as a dodgy YouTube clip, it’s unlikely to stand up in court on its own.

Conversely, why isn't the witness statement of "this video was taken at this location, at this time, on this day" good enough?! Because they want to add artificial barriers so that they maximise the number of videos they can easily dismiss and not action.

Even if you do accept that as an unreasonable level of evidence it hardly justifies the claim of unreasonable red tape. I feel like a better title would be “Near Miss of the Day 256: Cyclist records close pass – then runs in to own laziness”. If it had been a frustration at not having a time stamped video I could understand (although not all video is visibly time stamped. Some has hidden stamps from system time). This came across more as thinking that you should just be able to upload a few seconds of the incident and be done with it.

Drinfinity wrote:

Why do you consider the requirements awkward?

Since some forces have less restrictive requirements, and others have a policy of not doing anything about near misses no matter how good the evidence, obviously there are other factors involved.

Drinfinity wrote:

Why do you consider the requirements awkward?

They will have little hope of a conviction based on the video alone if it isn’t recent, if there is no timestamp to show how recent it is, and if there is not film either side of the event for context.

 

Just to be clear, if I film for 3 hours and a car hits me, smashing my body and the camera into tiny pieces forcing it to stop recording, it isn't admissable?

Or if there's a close pass 50 yards from my home, do i ride around a bit longer?

Nope, not awkward at all!