From a friend (husband ex-police, now MP)
"scary exchange between the well informed cyclist and a hapless police officer, who got it wrong from the start and didn't know the law."
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Commuting
meanwhile on twitter
(13 posts)-
Posted 12 years ago #
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Any more details?
Posted 12 years ago # -
I asked 'why scary'; she replied "that an officer was so clueless about what he was doing and about the legalities he was "trying" and failing to enforce."
so not an accident, I guess.
Twitterer: police officer was aggressive as well as clueless, though cyclist pretty arrogant as well.....
me: Fear combined with self-righteousness does that...
19 minutes ago · LikeTwitterer: indeed - on both sides in this altercation. Almost funny!
Posted 12 years ago # -
Intriguing. In these days of multimedia I almost find myself demanding video evidence on YouTube of these sorts of things!
Posted 12 years ago # -
Where's the Twitter exchange?
Posted 12 years ago # -
I don't know 'where' it is on twitter. You know I don't 'get' twitter. It was crossposted on FB.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Nice, Jump a red light, be a Twat, get away with it. Sigh!
Posted 12 years ago # -
yeah, I only watched the start of that video, but how annoying. what a pompous idiot.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Cyclists in the legal profession who dislikes red light jumpers must hate that guy with a passion that makes supernovae look damply squiblike.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Comments I've seen on this video elsewhere, from people who claim to be police (but then on the internet you can never tell) is that the policeman handled it badly from the start, and never really managed to recover the situation.
If you've not watched the video to the end, it's worth knowing that the policeman makes a lunge for the cyclist's camera, but then does not attempt to pursue him when he rides off.
The cyclist in the video is Danny Shine, who seems quite an interesting character. Here's what he had to say on the matter: http://dannyshine.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html
Posted 12 years ago # -
Does policecop with rather wooly grasp of the intricacies of the law cancel out the fact that the cameracyclist went through the red light (he didn't seem to deny it) and is enough of a legal smartarse to get away with it?
No, I don't think so.
Policemen (who are not lawyers) have a job to do. This guy was trying to do his - albeit in the rather block-headed way that police can approach things when they are used to scraping drunks off the pavement for a living.
We would be spitting with rage if it was a smartarse lawyer in a Porsche or 4x4 who "got away with it" and I don't see it's any different that he was riding a bike instead.
He should man up and take the ticket and learn his lesson and not do it again.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Thinking about this a bit more, two things occurred to me.
1/ it will reinforce the perceptions held by (too many) people that cyclists think they are above the law.
2/ publicly humiliating a policeman going about his duty by posting this on youtube will do nothing to improve police / cyclist relations.
If he was sure he had been wronged and (even though he had committed the offence) should be immune from prosecution because the policeman tried to charge him in the wrong manner, he could have taken the ticket and then used his video evidence to challenge it in court.
Bah bah bah. It's annoyed me no end.
Posted 12 years ago #
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