Bigpower

Sounds like a case of 'drive it like you stole it'

10 weeks in the slammer.

Pity he wasn't a police driver 'testing the vehicle's capabilities'. He might have got away with it. :-D

In my opinion I do not have a problem with trained rapid response Police drivers testing the capabilities of their cars. I do think they their senior officers should be aware of when these tests are being conducted.

God forbid but if a child of mine was abducted and the offending vehicle was spotted I would prey to god that the police office chasing the car would be trained, experienced and comfortable driving at high speeds and not someone who passed their driving course 2 years earlier but had never driven that car at speed.

But, 80mph in a posted 30 limit? What was being tested there, The driver's IQ?

I for one am getting p1ssed off with the anti-police vibe doing the rounds these days :evil:
I appreciate that "The authorities" make mistakes, but lets be fair here, this bloke was an arse, broke the law and got sent down. Shame burglars and robbers dont have room for them, but that is another story.
It may come as a huge suprise to some, but most officers consider as many variables as possible when engaging in a pursuit or responding to an emergency call, but yes occassionally they make mistakes.
But out of the hundreds of thousands of blue light runs, there is only a tiny percentage of accidents caused by the officers. Due to national guidelines with the changes for training of drivers. The old way was first " initial basic ticket (non blue lights, stick to the speed limits), 2 years of that you get a standard ticket (still non response, stick to the speed limit, but drive a bigger car capable of stopping other cars), if you drove really wheel after a total of 5 weeks training, you would then get a place on a response and pursuit style course. On this two week course, you trained daily driving at high speeds in marked and un-marked cars, gradually under more and more challenging conditions. (This is over and above normal advanced driving for obvious reasons)IF you excelled, you'd get put forwards for an advance course.
The ability to drive like this is reviewed bi-annually, and if you have an incident in between time, you can get re-assessed to see if you need re-training or your status reduced.
Every time you drive or train, you know lives are at risk, and your future on the line. 99.9% of drivers won't arse around.
HOWEVER, there have been steps in the recent past whereby the time scale has been steeply reduced, enabling officers to progress through training much earlier, without as much training. You can guess the results.
This has now been moved away from by most forces, reverting to "The old ways". (Thankfully)

Now I don't like coppers hiding behind bushes to get you speeding (or me for that matter) but they are a tiny minority of a group of people trying to make a difference within the communities they try and protect.

As Pablo said, imagine the scenario, a loved one is really in trouble, who you gonna call? (It aint the Ghostbusters!)
Rant over.
Rob

I wasnt going to comment,

As I have never been that proud of my road driving for various resons (I swear I try to be good - honest ).

But Whilst I understand comments like Robs and Pablo, and I fully agree that the police have a job to do and traffic police get to see the results of the "worst case scenerio" almost every day I think they fall a long way short of what we are paying them to do. I dont see myself doing 100mph on a motorway in the same bracket as a petty thief snatching someone elses property in a violent and premeditated act. But I expect in court that the financial penalty I would face including the affect the points will have would be more than that faced by the bag snatching druggie who has probably not paid a penny in tax their whole life.

There IS a direct correlation in these crimes, and a scale by which actions should be measured and all the spin in the world wont change the fact that we are basically a bunch of trapped and tagged statistics in waiting for the police and powers that be to point at and use to show they are making things "better" - never mind the fact we are almost a mobile piggy bank for them and the councils that are also fleecing us for all that we work so hard to acheive. Its almost as though they want to manipulate the way the public feels by focusing on those they can catch with "hardware" to make us agree to bio-chips or some other draconian freedom reducing way in which they will say they want to start catching "real" crimminals but which will end up being used against us normal folk eventually like it always does.

Sooner or later a stand is going to have to be made to properly highlight the way things are headed, but I guess as normal we will all just moan about it a bit and then bend over the next day as always !!!

J.

The 'anti-police' vibe is nothing new Rob but then you've served for 17 years so you know that already.......doesn't make your role any less valid, it just means that the laws that you are entrusted to uphold are unpopular. Now there's a shock.

Good points all around.......we're in danger of having a sensible discussion chaps