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news
Met PoliceCyclist pulled over by police for not riding ‘courteously’
A London cyclist has claimed that she was pulled over by two Metropolitan Police officers who accused her of “putting my own safety before cars”.
In a series of tweets Aileen Rice-Jones, who works in public affairs, explained that she was stopped by the officers while cycling between South Wimbledon and Putney on the A218 Merton Road earlier this week.
This evening on my 5km cycle to Brownies I was pulled over on a blue light by two @metpoliceuk officers.
The reason?
I wasn't cycling very 'courteously' (his words)...
👇— Aileen (@ARiceJones) March 23, 2022
Rice-Jones says that the officers informed her that she wasn’t cycling “very courteously”, forcing motorists to “go to the other side of the road to overtake me – which they should legally do anyway.”
She also claims that the officer admitted witnessing a motorist carry out a close pass on her, but told Rice-Jones that she was at fault.
When Aileen explained to the officers that she was riding in the primary position in the middle of the lane – as “encouraged by the new Highway Code” – they allegedly accused her “of putting my own safety before cars”.
I was accused of putting my own safety before cars.
Of course I will. I have no roll cage, no air bag, no seat belt.
When you hit me, you hit me, not a bumper or a reparable metal object. A person.
— Aileen (@ARiceJones) March 23, 2022
“I also pointed out he was unlikely to have stopped a car going the same speed as me (roughly 16mph),” she said.
She later sarcastically tweeted that it was “great to see how cycling friendly the police are and how prepared they are to take action against people performing close passes”, and said that she would have placed an official complaint if she had taken note of the officer’s badge number.
> Police in Hackney catch 18 red light jumping cyclists in 90 minutes
Many Twitter users criticised the officers’ actions, with broadcaster Jeremy Vine describing the incident as “just incredible” and arguing that there was a “desperate need of intervention here” from the Met.
A former cycling instructor also tweeted: “Such ignorance [from the] police is concerning and harmful, asking you to disregard the Highway Code, and instead put cars ahead of your own safety.”
Another user claimed that the officers in question demonstrated “idiocy, car-worship and misogyny” through their handling of the incident.
The Met’s Cycling Safety Team has contacted Aileen to discuss the issue further.
In February, the Roads and Transport Policing Command was criticised after it tweeted that Safer Transport Team officers in Hackney fined 18 cyclists in the space of 90 minutes for jumping red lights.
One cyclist asked the team “one day could you please send 14 officers to sit at the lights and look for phone drivers? A fiver says you’d get 18 in 10 minutes.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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60 comments
You have got to feel (marginally) sorry for the bosses at the Met. They will only ever be percieved as good as their worst behaved member(s). Thus huge numbers of decent coppers everywhere get tarred with the same brush.
Having said that - since said Managements job should have including rooting out those bad coppers and they've been failing at that for at least 3 decades now, maybe on balance they dont deserve any sympathy.
I wondered what busy and wide highway this was. Turns out it's a 20mph limit, through a residential area, with parked cars lining the sides.
I do hope they were also ensuring all drivers adhered to the 20mph limit.
Words fail me.
I can hear the logic going through the always fabulous Met Police mind...
Look at that fucking bike, getting in the way of legitimate motoring. It's a fucking bird, out on the road, in the evening... it'll be her fault if I end up having to scrape her off the road or deal with an assault. Let's get that bitch back in the kitchen.
Though maybe it was nothing like that and they just decided she was an easy target to mess about with on a boring shift.
Absolutely disgraceful
The Met does seem to have rather strange priorities. Two Sundays ago, my riding partner and I were close passed and verbally abused three times by a bloke in a Mercedes. It was 8.50 AM, we'd never seen him before and we were riding single file on the short stretch of 30 mph dual carriageway running through the middle of Bromley. There was nothing in the lane to his right but he was close enough that I could have touched his wing mirror had I taken my hands off the bars.
He subsequently stopped his car in front of us, got as close to me as he possibly could without actually touching and shouted in my face for about a minute. When I pushed him away, he opened his boot, rummaged around and pulled out a hammer which he then attempted to hit me with.
Fortunately, he wasn't a very good hammer attacker and I hit him first. He did manage to get in a tepid blow to my leg but I was about 6 inches taller than him and have rather longer arms.
I reported it to the Met that day (Crime Ref. No. 3305279/22) but have not had anyone attempt to contact me since despite my chasing.
So, my inevitable conclusion is that taking up a perfectly legal position on the road is worth a stiff talking to to but being attacked by a bloke with a hammer doesn't even warrant a phone call. Strange old world.
Door mirror!
Is that for checking the door's appearance?
eh?
It's a road.cc thing. See also "licence" (n) qv. 😁
It's such a cc thing, and so nonsensical to raise given the content of the story itself that on this site I am only gonna use license and wing mirror.
License can be correct as long as it's a verb.
But none of that american 'gonna' please ! There are standards here !
Standards, what standards? 😁
I'm all for amusing pedants. But if they are not amusing the full back is that english language becomes correct on usage.
Though up here in Glasgae "gonnae" is totally acceptable. Quite possibly rooted back to the original tongue in the British Isles before the Norman's got their hands on it!
Ah, but the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
More a swidxer thing.
Ah, a welcome return. I assume this is in tribute to the Met's own "rather strange priorities". In hommage I'll ask what gives you licence to always correct everyones' grammar?
Everyone's!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Caught one! I could see how this trolling business could get addictive...
The pedant in me believes he is correcting their usage rather than their grammar.
That's nit-picking rather than being pedantic
The owner's manual for my car calls them 'outside rear view mirrors' - it isn't a Mercedes mind.
So sorry to hear that Huw, and glad that you were able to hold your own. Hope you get a worthwhile result from your report.
Interesting detail about the hammer in the boot. Unless he had a good reason for the hammer to be there, does that not come under laws about carrying an offensive weapon? The fact that it was his go-to object when he stopped to confront you suggests he carried it for offensive purposes.
He had a large box of tools in there together with a load of other stuff. The car was a white Mercedes E-class convertible but we're pretty certain that he was a tradesman despite the not very tradesman-like vehicle.
He doesn't need a good reason for carrying a hammer, that's only bladed and sharply pointed articles - nor does he need a reasonable excuses, that's only for dedicated weapons (e.g. swords, daggers, knuckle dusters etc). The prosecution would need to prove that he was carrying it with intent to use it as an offensive weapon.
Ofcourse all of the above is moot, the instant someone uses ANY object as a weapon (including threatening) it becomes an offensive weapon. His only defence would be to deny or to make up some bullshit about self defence.
That particular example is not covered by the "reasonable excuse" section. Possession of a knuckleduster is prohibited under s141 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, applied by The Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988. Swords are also complicated.
There are some exemptions, such as for museum or film purposes, but these aren't under the "good reason"/"lawful authority" defence of s139 CJA.
Given the met's apparent ambivalence towards the incident, it doesn't seem like he'll need to. ☹️
You misunderstand; it was a driver with a hammer, perfectly legitimately dealing out summary justice to some cyclists who hadn't showed him enough courtesy.
If it had been a cyclist with a hammer, he'd be in custody now and looking at a long stretch for assault.
Seriously, please keep pressing them for a response, and demand to be transferred to someone higher up the chain every time, and please keep us informed.
Don't be silly, if you're on a cycle there's NO way you can carry a hammer on it with you, they're ever so heavy, and cycles are ever so small and feeble and impractical.....
https://momentummag.com/quaxing/
Thanks for reminding me, I had forgotten that chap! One for the bingo card here too.
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