Near Miss of the Day 604: Driver makes two close passes in succession into oncoming traffic

I have to agree with you that there is an inconsitency with the standards applied between forces and quite possibly between individual officers.

It is the same in every walk of life and every situation, some people will do the absolute minimum that their job requires while others will do everything they can to make sure the correct result is reached.

I concur.

Last year (to about May) I received e-mails - usually from the same person - to update me with the disposal. I had the opportunity to query at least two of them, both with favourable results; both times were to point out that they had initially looked at the wrong thing.

These days, it seems to be a letter (surely a waste of money when they have my e-mail and phone number) - when they respond at all.

However, there is one individual at TVP who, instead of writing, actually calls me to let me know the disposal and seems genuinely interested in my opinion.

But according to that data more than half the submissions Norfolk/Suffolk result in fixed penalty notices, 2 years ago I might have felt that was about right, that doesnt feel right at all at the moment.

Plus youd think with that kind of prosecution rate people would be driving with much more care on the roads, and that couldnt be any further from the reality if you tried.

Says lancs police don't accept footage - wtjs was right all along !!

Says lancs police don't accept footage - wtjs was right all along !!

I was, and am, right all along, but it's nothing to do with this duff article- which is what you'd expect from a rag called 'What Car' with careless journalists on loan from the hyper-junk press. You can, of course, get video footage into Lancashire Constabulary- it's just that they ignore it and any other evidence with the combined aims of protecting their Supreme status in the Champion Crappy Constabulary competition, avoiding work and stuffing cyclists. The notion that you can't submit arose from LC refusing to join the 'portal' for video set up by some company. This used to be a major disadvantage, but they have now increased their limit to 60 MB per file and I have increased my CPU firepower for compression, so it's not a limiting feature now- if they want to return to the Good Old Days they'll have to limit it to about 10 MB per file.

HoarseMann wrote:

I've done a bit more digging around this FPN malarkey; it does appear to be a difference in the interpretation of the guidance between forces (and even among officers). Interesting article in WhatCar? about it...

I think you're right about it being local interpretation. Here in my area (covered by South Wales Police) they used to make a point of notifying you after a OpSnap/GoSafe submission that they wouldn't or couldn't provide any sort of update on the case, unless I was called to court. I can't remember exactly but it was some nonesense about witnesses and GDPR.

Recently however they have changed to provide a more detailed response, stating whether they intend to take further action or not...

"The digital recording submitted by you has been reviewed and we are satisfied that one of the following actions is necessary to proceed with this matter:

Warning
Conditional offer of a diversionary course
Conditional offer of fixed penalty
Proceed to court (if you are required to attend court you will be notified nearer to the time, by our witness care team)"

You can see in the above extract from the reponse email to one of my recent submissions that they have included the option of an FPN. I still won't ever know which option they took, unless it goes to court with me as a witness/victim, but at least I know that as a minimum the driver received a warning letter. The driver will now realise that their future actions 'may' result in Police action, so they might adjust their driving accordingly. We can but hope...

A move in the right direction, due in no small part to your submissions to the force I'm sure. As far as I'm concerned any action on the list will improve driver behaviour in the long run which is what we are after. Out of interest have you posted the videos on this site? It would be interesting to see what sort of incidents the police decide to proceed with in some way or other and also to compare different forces. As far as I can tell this is the only site which is acting as a repository for this comparison to be made.

This also varies between forces. In the two incidents I've had dealt with by Thames Valley, they had no problem telling me the exact course of action taken.

In the more serious one, I had a fairly lengthy chat with the officer about the possible options and he was very good at listening to me and coming to a compromise. Although he did remind me that ultimately it's the police who decide what action to take!

Hopefully there won't be another incident that I feel the need to submit, but if there is, I may push Thames Valley to take the FPN route and see what they say.

You would have no option 'to see what they say' in Lancashire, because there would be no response whatsoever. You could then email, but they wouldn't reply to that either. There are essentially 2 outcomes to an online incident report here, but you aren't told anything about them: report ejected straight to bin and no action; or, if they're bored, they might have a laugh at how close the vehicle came to the Road Rat and then no action- see VW Transporter PJ13 FNP below. However, sometimes they make a mistake and bin the Grade A evidence of crossing traffic lights 2 seconds after they turn red. They then ignore the complaint for over 5 months, but eventually the policy is going to find them out.

Nope, can't be it. Failure to identify is an automatic 6 points for the registered keeper.

What if the registered keeper doesn't know?  What if the registered keeper identifies, and that person denies it?  Still have to prove who was actually driving.

The 6 points for failure to identify from the registered owner is a good start, however they should also confiscate the car as the person responsible for it doesn't know what is happening with it so best take it away from them for public safety until they can be more careful. 

SaintClarence27 wrote:

What if the registered keeper doesn't know?  What if the registered keeper identifies, and that person denies it?  Still have to prove who was actually driving.

No. For failure to identify, the prosecution only has to show that you didn't identify the driver - they don't have to prove who was driving (it's not relevant to the offence).  However, if you weren't given enough information to identify (date/time/location) or you can show you took reasonable steps to do so, then you have a defence and it's for the prosecution to argue against that. 

The latter is most common if it's a shared family car, for instance, and multiple people could have been driving at the time - but they'd not know that until they actually sent the NIP & s172 in the first place. There's no reason in advance to believe that someone's going to have a 'reasonable steps' defence - and if they do, you just drop the charge if you're not confident at that time, right?

I just think, in this case, it's just an admin thing and they kept some standard 'NFA' paragraph from a template letter.

I think, actually, the whole mag's court bit is a red herring and may just a standard paragraph they normally put on if they're truly taking NFA under their 'solvability matrix'.

Perhaps they didn't think it definitely crosses the 'dangerous' threshold, and there have been no priors against this vehicle/driver.

In a remarkable coincidence I was in a magistrates court last week giving evidence for a close pass. The driver was found not guilty, said it wasn't him driving and the prosecutor couldn't prove otherwise from my camera footage. I guess that's TVP's thinking here. The guy in court did get 6 points and a fine for no insurance though, so not all bad.

How did the fine for no insurance stick if he 'wasn't driving'?

Sriracha wrote:

How did the fine for no insurance stick if he 'wasn't driving'?

It's an offence (for the registered keeper) to keep a vehicle on the public highway without valid insurance.

Seems like there's a gap there somewhere then. If you fail to identify the driver, that's 6 points. If you identify yourself, you can't then claim in court that it wasn't you. If you identify someone else, and they deny it or it wasn't them, then either it's a failure to identify, perverting the course of justice, or you've got the 'reasonable diligence' defence; presumably CPS would account for the defence and not charge to start with?

So to get to court with a CD/DD charge (rather than failure to identify, or worse), I assume someone must have responded to a NIP to admit they were driving? Seems a bit odd then that they can get around a conviction just by then denying it in the court... 

I didn't believe him, for what it's worth. He said he was sent two NIP forms, one for no insurance and one for careless driving. Apparently his wife helped with the forms because he can't read very well and told him to put his details on both. This was all said under oath and couldn't be disproved by the video (I didn't see who was driving so couldn't identify him that way) so they had to take his word for it. It does seem to be a bit of a loophole.

Well the careless driving would have been 3 points or so. Driving without insurance is between 6-9 and / or a ban. So 6 points for failure to disclose and just a fine allows him to stay on the road. I'm guessing the no insurance bit was the decider on saying he was driving or can't remember.

He pleaded guilty to no insurance

morgyporg wrote:

He pleaded guilty to no insurance

But only to 'keeping with no insurance' and not to 'driving with no insurance' presumably.

I don't know, it wasn't specified at sentencing. Does it make a difference to the penalty?

morgyporg wrote:

I don't know, it wasn't specified at sentencing. Does it make a difference to the penalty?

Absolutely.

Penalties for keeping a vehicle without insurance include £100 FPN, clamped/impounded/destroyed vehicle, or court fine of up to £1000.

Driving without insurance is £300 FPN + 6 points, or if it goes to court, an unlimited fine and disqualification (plus potential seizure & destruction of vehicle).

Of course wtjs has loads of examples 

Audi Q3, appropriate reg W28 SSS, Wednesday 30.6.21 08:57. There will be no response whatsoever to this online incident report, so this makes TVP look like a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Judge Dredd. I am nominating Lancashire Constabulary as the laziest, most useless and most cyclist-hostile police force in England.

I meant of crossing the double white lines. That is the only offence easily chargeable by the TVP with no reasonable doubt. However you have helpfully posted an example elsewhere.  

I meant crossing the double white lines

Pfff! Lancashire wouldn't care if it was triple unbroken white lines, they still would be 'too busy' to respond