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Taxi swerves into (offduty) policeman - Arrest and charge + trial (bolton)

(16 posts)
  • Started 11 years ago by ARobComp
  • Latest reply from ARobComp

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  1. ARobComp
    Member

    Clicky Linky

    Interestingly I don't see mention of
    1) another witness
    2) a headcam.

    It's an interesting one where I've seen videos of much worse incidents (this is bad nonetheless and I'm glad the man has been found guilty) which could not be taken forward because there was not enough evidence. This includes the one where the woman runs the man off his bike when he ended up in the funeral traffic que, the one where the guy punches the cyclist, and others where cars have deliberately actually hit the cyclist.
    Note that the cyclist here was never actually hit - just threatened by the taxi and he effectively fell off afterwards.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  2. Kenny
    Member

    Yeah, funny how things went much further, and one can only assume it was because it was a copper, as you say. I find that quite depressing, tbh. Are police believed to be inherently more trustworthy than us ordinary joes?

    Posted 11 years ago #

  3. le_soigneur
    Member

    @ARobComp:

    "could not be taken forward because there was not enough evidence. This includes the one where the woman runs the man off his bike when he ended up in the funeral traffic que"

    Er no, that Nottingham case was prosecuted & the two assailants convicted and sentenced. A police officer might have come out with some controversial motherhood about giving way to funerals but nothing to do with the letter of the law.

    In this Bolton case, the fact that it happened in England made the prosecution possible. I doubt if a Polis Scotland would have managed to get justice without a witness. Even headcam footage is apparently insufficient for corroboration here apparently.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  4. crowriver
    Member

    He wasn't just a copper, he was a detective constable. That's CID. Clearly, you mess with CID at your peril.

    Probably helps that the detective knew who to phone, what the likely offence might be, and so on.

    As for the Scottish situation, I don't think you'd get away with hitting a police officer here either.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  5. Greenroofer
    Member

    The officer who was knocked off got the 'model and partial plate' of the taxi. One advantage he would have had is that when he phoned a colleague to check (or looked for himself) on whatever computer the police use to look up number plates, the person doing the looking up would be more likely to spend time over it. They might even have stayed late or given up some of their lunch hour to look through all the possibilities. That's just human nature: it's what any of us would do at work for a friend or colleague rather than just another customer. Anyway, point is, just like the rest of us, the police will tend to look after their own.

    Warning to drivers: don't abuse cyclists. Any one of them might be a police officer on their way to work...

    Posted 11 years ago #

  6. Charterhall
    Member

    ". Are police believed to be inherently more trustworthy than us ordinary joes?"

    There was a time when that would have been true. But not now, after Plebgate.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  7. crowriver
    Member

    @Charterhall, the only significance of Plebgate is that the Conservative establishment no longer trusts the (Metropoltan) police. Other communities have had much worse experiences, and therefore justifiably do not trust the police. Perhaps you recall the Birmingham Six or the murder of Stephen Lawrence?

    Policing is a somewhat different beast, politically, north of the border and generally the force is more trusted, with some exceptions (mostly in Strathclyde). Still not without a few controversies though.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  8. Dave
    Member

    Video footage can be corroborated, see Carloway review:

    "Another example is where there is CCTV involved. Provided that the recovered recording is proved by two witnesses to show the scene of a crime, two witnesses each identifying a person from the recording as the assailant will suffice, even if they are both police officers viewing the recording later. The CCTV recording is not the "source of evidence". The corroborating sources are the two witnesses speaking to the recording and the two (possibly the same) witnesses identifying the person shown."

    Posted 11 years ago #

  9. le_soigneur
    Member

    Agreed, Dave - an example was the Cereal offender, where I think the footage going viral (or at least into the EdiWD/EEN) helped motivate the police to do the correct investigative work. And a definite crime that they would like to make an example of.
    The trouble is two fold
    1. For you average desk sergeant seeing you turning up with headcam footage, it would make life easier if you would go away. Telling you that you need corroboration is one way to achieve that result.
    2. Definite crimes, road rage etc are one type of headcam footage worth pursuing. Others such a close passes, cutting someone up etc can be a matter of proof as to whether they are malicious or not.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  10. Wilmington's Cow
    Member

    Just a minor point, Carloway isn't law yet (mainly because there are huge, enormous holes in it - it's all very dull but important, a friend of mine is a criminal law lecturer who was recently giving evidence to yet another consultation on the review).

    But, the position with CCTV has been as stated above for aaaaaages (I'm in a world of lawyers, my other half was a fiscal a decade ago and often prosecuted shoplifters on the basis of CCTV footage.

    The troubles le_soigneur points out are sadly real (though in many cases the person on the desk isn't a sergeant, or polis, but civilian staff - certainly was the case when I went with my footage, which would explain why he was very keen to help, that help subsiding by the time the real cops came round to take a statement, and in the end I didn't even get to give the CD of the video to anyone in the police).

    Posted 11 years ago #

  11. Dave
    Member

    A mechanism of some kind to make these things public (i.e. not just adding them to the 700,000,000 videos on youtube) might be worth thinking about.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  12. Wilmington's Cow
    Member

    Agreed.

    bikeincidentvideosedinburgh.com

    Posted 11 years ago #

  13. steveo
    Member

    What you really need is a regular spot on evening telly, part of these hopeless road policing programmes. Anything else will be ignored just as easily as youtube.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  14. Dave
    Member

    It might not really be worth it, but I was thinking that a site which centralised video footage might make the problem more conspicuous by concentrating the evidence.

    Potentially, people could submit video along with some tags and/or predefined states (such as "action taken against driver", "company informed" etc) and you could then search only for footage which had successfully been used in a prosecution and easily access the details, footage from Leith Walk, or whatever.

    With YouTube and other sides doing the heavy lifting of displaying the videos, it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to set up.

    It might indeed be a big waste of time however.

    Posted 11 years ago #

  15. Slug
    Member

    @Dave, you mean something like this:

    http://www.tolvajkergetok.hu/

    More to do with bike theft in Budapest rather than traffic violations, but it's interesting to see that although they've had limited success with prosecutions, bike theft in Budapest has apparently dropped substantially. Click on the 'English' link at the top and all the videos - some of which I found very interesting - have English subtitles.

    And now they're looking to set up in Edinburgh (although they are also trying to punt their SpyBike security thing):

    https://www.facebook.com/ediburghthiefs

    Posted 11 years ago #

  16. ARobComp
    Member

    le_soigneur - apologies for my wrong assertation that nothing happened in the nottingham case. My memory was clearly not quite right on that one!

    Posted 11 years ago #

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