Suzette Davenport,
Chief Constable,
Gloucestershire Constabulary,
No 1 Waterwells,
Waterwells Drive
Quedgeley
Gloucester,
GL2 2AN.
18th December 15
Dear Ms Davenport,
Further to my correspondence of the 5th November and Fatal 4. I hope that you are already realising that ‘Speeding’, to exceed an arbitrary number on a pole, simply cannot physically cause a reaction and thus cannot be fatal.
In the meantime there is a far more serious and dangerous situation persisting of mass road safety fraud and dishonesty that really does need to be addressed urgently. In view of this, I am appealing to you and your assistants as honest, moral human beings as opposed to Chief Constable and (Sic) Chair of the NPCC.
My voluntary work in road safety commenced some fifteen years ago having retired from the police. I had noted a glaring cause of the worst type of road accident there is: The multi casualty head on overtake collision. And that this cause could easily be addressed by police patrols but was being totally ignored. My rationale was simply 'Reduce the need to overtake, thus reduce the attempts to overtake, and thus reduce overtake crashes’ Pretty self evident and valid and I suggested cheap solutions.
There were also a couple of other issues, which on the basis of the more a driver can see, the more information reaching the brain and thus a reduction in night-time accidents too.
I was absolutely shocked to find that not only were the local Road Safety Partnership disinterested but the ideas were rebuffed on the basis of Stats that are not actually kept on the subject.
If that were not bad enough, I was also subject of RSP hostility and dishonesty in local press.
The Traffic Police idea of road safety it seems is to lay blame and retribution rather than stop the accidents in the first place or to pretend that a policy stops accidents.
This started me on my long quest for genuine, altruistic not profit based road safety. I had noted that there was not one altruistic scheme or policy and which was not profit based. Why is that? In this life and death issue, with added serious dimension of the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of people, there is no room for a popularity contest. I only need to prove my case.
Let’s start with the reality that, in any other such life and death proposition, bungee jumping, free fall parachuting, rock climbing, abseiling and so on we would only defer to experts and those experts would not be expected to put profit, ideology or vested interests first. Yet in road safety, every Tom, Dick & Harry, butcher, baker and candlestick maker has massive input without any CV in the subject whatsoever. Take yourself for example. I expect that your academic qualifications are mostly about management but are you a first class police advanced driver? Have you specialised in road and traffic accidents etc? If you have then great but what if you haven’t? When the door is left wide open to all comers, like it is in road safety, that’s when the charlatans, profiteers vested interests as well as the green anti driver, so called charities with no CV fill their boots. As a copper, you must be well aware of the potential for this in an open door scenario.
This has undoubtedly happened now over a long period of free for all road safety. I have catalogued it and named names publicly and yet no-one has been able to sue me for public statements. This therefore is no longer a matter of opinion but until a court says I have got it wrong, then legally I am correct.
Just take a look at this post about the CC of North Yorks Police who took advantage of an innocent bereaved to promote their lucrative speeding policy. You may not like it but that I can publish it widely should worry you somewhat. Of course every time they refer to Fatal Four they promote a dangerous lie too. Whereas speeding can cause nothing at all, dangerous and careless driving, that do cause fatality, are excluded. How dangerously mercenary can police be about these things?
By the way, who is the DfT mandarin who is instructing your officers to wrongly complete Stats 20. See What is his driving and road safety CV?
Why are you Chief Officers allowing your officers to be dictated to by non experts so that Stats can show lies about accident causes like this? Surely it isn’t within the remit of a Whitehall civil servant to tell police to lie about such a serious matter is it? Since this is the foundation of many prosecutions and profiteering too, don’t you think that this gross interference in accident reporting is an extremely serious issue?
We now have a multi billion pound road safety industry where most of that money actually stops not one single accident. After some 300 billion driver miles a year, there is less death on our roads, from all causes, than from accidents in the home, strangulation, hanging and self harm. That money would save more lives if in the NHS, Fire & Rescue, police and A&E. So why are police chiefs so in thrall of their traffic officers?
Without drivers and motor vehicles the economy would collapse overnight. 35 million ordinary people struggling to keep an essential infrastructure running, whilst having to deal with other humans, animals and unnecessary road users and yet there is this peculiar, self righteous, police breed doing its utmost to pretend that society actually needs them and that focussing on drivers is what the public see as a priority. See the traffic Ch.Ins salivating over his 900 costly drug kits.
Don’t you and your NPCC colleagues see it as part of your role to not allow any particular branch to run away with themselves? In all the talk about police budgets why don’t police chiefs see the money that can be clawed back for the economy by dismantling the out and out corrupt industry and starting again on a totally altruistic basis? How will we ever get best road safety from profit or anti driver ideology?
We now have a Speeding Industry. When two Ltd companies are getting through some 6000 speed awareness courses a month in Wales alone, how and when does that get dismantled? The system now must have speeders to subsist. I study speed limit orders and can tell you that, contrary to ‘It’s … for a reason’ I can show you orders where no reason is given whatsoever. See this example
Once the limit is set, police point their cameras without having any idea what the limit is about. As a copper I saw it as my duty to question things before instigating prosecutions. The Traffic excuse is that drivers are deliberately speeding disobediently. Do you go out to speed deliberately? Do any of your colleagues do so? I have asked many forums how many of them do and no-one does. So if that’s the case, the whole premise of focussing on speeders is a false one.
When a site generates 1000s of speeders, yet no accidents, it’s a sure sign of a site fault and that it is actually failing. So why are the authorities allowing this to continue? If these were 1000s of crashes, would your boys and girls just keep taking photos or find out what’s going wrong?
Most speeding is actually caused by a misleading or enticing road layout, a badly set limit, or not enough reminder signs. If the object is to maintain the limit, why not correct the problem? Here then is the evidence that speeding is actually being cultivated as part of someone’s budget. It really is no good then justifying this, as you do, by saying that the money is spent on a good cause when it is an ill gotten gain in the first place.
Having then entrapped all these perfectly safe drivers, they are offered illegal dishonest courses run by 3rd parties on payment of money to waive the judicial process. I have made enquiries at the highest level and have not been able to find any statutory authority whereby police can offer this option. Apparently ACPO Ltd and The CPS were relying on comments by Lord Shawcross back in the 50s where he quite rightly observed that he would hate to live in a country where every case finished up in the courts and much later Lord North who had correctly anticipated that speed cameras would overwhelm the courts and so courses could be considered.
I doubt if Shawcross was envisaging the handing over of money after judicial process had started so that the defendant can be ‘let off’ appearing before the courts. We jail corrupt police officers who do just that don’t we? But neither lord had any authority anyway. They were merely musing.
Common law has also been cited. Again since when was it common law to coerce a plea of guilt based on money changing hands? Now that, is all I have been able to establish about these courses and they seem to have no legal foundation at all.
The courses themselves are fraudulent and dangerous. They do not tell their students that speeding causes nothing, that the camera that got them there cannot see one single accident cause and the graphic images shown to students, were not caused by speeding anyway and the limit isn't set scientifically by a driving expert and is totally arbitrary.
Do see Richard Madeley suddenly an expert for having been on a course.
So what we have is many thousands of perfectly safe drivers, allowed and induced to speed then wheeling and dealing with them for profit instead of seeing the process through to the courts. That is as corrupt as it can get. Surely you Chiefs, outside this lucrative bubble, can see that not only is the system corrupt but because of false statements and over focus on speeding, real accident causes are being ignored and that certainly does kill people.
You seem to be content with a survey of people with no qualifications in driving or road safety to determine or endorse policy. Do you really support this life and death subject being based on the skewed surveys of the unqualified? There are far too many such polls. You are qualified enough to know that this is undesirable. Ask the drivers if they would support any costly course that is illegal, fails to tell the truth and based on a ticket that was unfairly generated and see what the answer would be for example.
Currently, all over the UK, councils are falling over themselves to adopt 20 MPH Zones. Any driving expert would confirm that, in congested busy areas, we need drivers focussing more on what is going on outside their vehicle than worrying about driving points.
See I have investigated the claimed figures of child accidents in these streets and as I suspected, they are totally bogus. See the responses from the DfT and Road Research Laboratory.
So here again we have limits based on fraud. The fact is that streets with no accident record at all are being included within a blanket zone at the expense of failing to deal with and rectify streets where accidents are happening.
But none of this is about accidents or road safety at all. It’s about a left wing green anti driver agenda led by Rod King MBE and his 20s Plenty campaign. He is supported by other aggressive anti driver groups such as Sustrans, CTC, Living Streets and Brake; none of whom have any CV whatsoever in driving or road safety. In effect drivers will now be prosecuted for not being green. Is that what police are for? To prosecute an anti people people, anti progress, anti comfortable living ideology of a green minority?
By the way; if you ever wondered what happened to communism, just look in the greenery. Streets, just like railway lines and airport runways, are to carry essential infrastructure and the green movement hates infrastructure.
So far as the environment is concerned, we are all living longer because of drivers. Without drivers our whole society would collapse very rapidly with the result of most of the population, deprived of basic needs, dying soon after. Any aggressive attitude against drivers by the police is, by definition, an aggression against the whole community. Is NPCC just going to allow the likes of Rod King and minorities to dictate driver prosecution based solely on ideology? Police should protect the needs of the community and it depends totally on its drivers.
I queried Mr King’s MBE. Interfering in road safety with no CV and against the public interest how did he get it? I traced it back to the DfT and probably the very same anti driver civil servant who is telling your officers to submit false statistics.
Of course we need speed limits for guidance and indeed cameras to assist in compliance as well as a punitive function but we have allowed them too much priority over what does cause accidents. And this is because of the income stream as well as the need for less police officers that any automated system brings.
Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas. By falling for all this camera nonsense the police are shooting themselves fiscally in the foot.
I will now turn to Careless Driving by fixed penalty.
I was one of many who took part in the consultation process and ignored.
See our written evidence to the Transport Select Committee
and here you feature personally. and a profiteer’s charter.
Didn’t just one police chief realise that for the first time in FP history, it turned from the objective and absolute to the subjective? Prior to Careless driving, the offences were absolute. The car was on a yellow line. It was stationary in a box junction. It was exceeding a limit. It went through a red light. Rubbish was thrown from it. A dog pooed and no-one cleared up the mess. Surely someone of ACPO Ltd. must have realised the massive and historic sea change of this?
It was sold to the public, not on the basis of provable offences but pet hates. Tailgating, lane hogging, misuse of lanes and so on. Yet none of these are offences in their own right. They are far too subjective and infinite to define in law. When does bumper to bumper, become tailgating? At what speed does it start? Over what distance and what separation? It’s pure subjective opinion. So too is lane hogging. So, without telling the public and media the facts, this wasn’t about these pet hates at all. It was only about the 3rd most serious driving offence of careless driving to be used as a catchall at the whim of a traffic officer. But that is the point about subjective law; it must be tried at court. The officer should be made to prove his case at court. How, if driving wasn’t deemed careless prior to FP, does FP suddenly create careless driving? It doesn’t. So, in one fell swoop, common justice was removed from drivers for the 3rd most serious offence on the road. And why was this? For police convenience to hound drivers without police needing to prove their case. What kind of justice is that? What next? Attempted murder by fixed penalty?
Then of course, to add insult to injury, was added the coercive illegal option of paying a 3rd party for one of their courses. This is where I depend on your honesty and integrity to accept that by any standards, you and your fellows had been talked into yet another unjust and profit based scenario. As Chief of NPCC you alone have the power to review this matter on the basis that FP can never be used for subjective opinion because that is what courts are to determine.
We simply cannot base justice on what is convenient for police or else we are in a police state.
By the way, on the day, you demonstrated my point on Sky News by relating your impression of a driver the previous day. What you said was purely subjective opinion for which an officer should always be compelled to give in evidence and prove their point.
Is this just another example of the originators being the unfettered road traffic branch of the police? I can hardly imagine any other branch asking for such a thing.
Many moons ago, a Druid, one Richard Brunstrom, made a big name for himself with an undisguised hatred of drivers. He was the man who took the word ‘accident’ from road accidents so that there was always some-one to blame.
To this day, although by any dictionary these are accidents and indeed still are under the RTA, a whole industry has been built around the notion that there are no accidents on the road. See
See also a Traffic Chief cannot justify road closures at all.
What does all this costly accident investigation achieve? It certainly doesn’t bring back the dead nor repair the maimed. However what it does do is cost millions of pounds when a motorway or town is shut, probably killing more economically than from the original accident. So is it cost effective? Stats are never kept of knock on crashes elsewhere later in the day, on roads not suitable for diverted heavy traffic, or from drivers trying to make up time and from tiredness. Of course none of this is of interest to the Traffic Man but it should be to his chiefs. Again we are looking at budgets and the kind of money that could be available to police if not being continually thrown at the profiteers of the Road Safety Industry. To try to pretend that aggressive accident investigation is costless is dishonest so is it cost effective? Of course accidents happen on roads so a fortune can be saved by restoring the word 'accident' to the police vocabulary and assuming an accident, until there is evidence to the contrary, as soon as possible.
Uk Road Safety requires a bottom to top review based totally on altruism and no vested interests. The Highway Code, is now totally out of date. Many rules are contradictory and some are totally unworkable.
See and this and an ideal Highway Code in a 100 words.
My work is now complete. It’s all at www.driversunion.co and www.driveeastmidlands.com Please feel free to examine it as a road safety reference without vested interest.
I am writing to you as the one person who can use the work wisely and honestly with your fellow chief officers to the best end. When we mess around with road safety people die from it. See this graphic perspective.
Wishes Keith Peat
