Safe Speed Forums

Police Witness.com penalise drivers for profit
More road safety so long as there's a few bob in it. With great fanfare the Daily Mail
ran a great spread about a new pious initiative to empower people to spy on others; all in the name of road safety and saving lives you understand.

The idea, by an outfit called http://www.PoliceWitness.com, calls on every Tom Dick & Harry to spy on other people, including covertly, in case they may commit a driving offence on camera, and then report them, to the firm, with video evidence for whatever heinous crime may have been perceived.

As we have exposed on another Ex Police officer jumping on the profitable Road Safety Bandwagon, the MD of this is no less than retired Assistant Chief Constable Alan Featherstone.
All very impressive. No doubt designed to bring respectability and credibility, as only ex ACPO Ltd members know how to do so well, for any profitable adventure. Err but what is his road safety and driving expertise to be dabbling in this life & death matter and also one which includes the distressful prosecution of perfectly safe drivers? According to the company profile, his history seems to have been police management. Is he a police advanced driver? Was he in traffic? Accident investigation? What exactly was his police specialty other than management?

Their Chief Exec. Matthew Stockdale
is pure management through and through whilst their Gen.Manager Kerry Lewis
is a career business woman whose major aim was to run her own company. In neither of these is there any association with road driving expertise or road safety.

In reply to my concern that these people would mostly be filming ordinary people not doing anything wrong and that there clearly would be an intrusion of privacy which they could legitimately stop happening, Matt let out, on BBC Radio WM, that 'most of the time they wouldn't know they were being filmed.' That is covert filming then?

From the hostile anti driver post we get, the last thing we need is hundreds of illogical, anti driver, Lycra anoraks running around with cameras stuck to their hats. Is PoliceWitness.com going to vet these people before it accepts their input?

But why do we need an inexpert company to handle this when we should take evidence like this direct to the police? Err perhaps it may be to do with the fact that one of the things this company supplies is a 'proper' camera to do it with at £149 a pop!

So now we are going to challenge all police chiefs to denounce this profitable spying; a microcosm of all that is wrong about the Road Safety Industry.

WHOIS information for policewitness.com :

[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.advantage-interactive.com]
[Querying whois.advantage-interactive.com]
[whois.advantage-interactive.com]
domain: POLICEWITNESS.COM
owner-c: AI-826604
admin-c: AI-826604
tech-c: AI-300624
bill-c: AI-300624
nserver: ns1.lcn.com 195.82.107.156
nserver: ns0.lcn.com 94.126.40.3
created: 2011-01-12 06:35:05
expires: 2013-01-12 06:35:05
changed: 2011-10-14 09:30:20

contact-handle: AI-826604
contact: Private User
organisation: Domain Privacy Protector Ltd
address: Office 404, 4th Floor
address: Albany House, 324/326 Regent Street
address: London
address: w1b 3hh
address: GB
phone: +44.1438342490
email: 35547e6141896087a6de6efcd08faaaa@domain ... tector.com

contact-handle: AI-300624
contact: Hostmaster
address: Units H, J, K
address: Gateway 1000
address: Whittle Way
address: Stevenage
address: England
address: SG1 2FP
address: GB
phone: +44.1438342490
fax: +44.1438300137
email: support@lcn.com

Seems to be encouraging the "Stasi" mentality as seen in the former East Germany, where everyone spied on everyone else

Hypothetically if everyone obtained a (cheaper) cam-kit and then filmed every council official and MP, and showed them their errors, if might help them to perceive just how pointless this all is, perhaps then they would re-consider this 'evidence'.

Yes, yellow box infringements, bus lane enforcement and no waiting restrictions (as opposed to no parking).

I despair of this country, I really do.

Who are these people? (Rhetorical question.)

http://www.policewitness.com/media/brea ... rent-news/

There is a story about parents being able to limit the top speed of their car if the teenager is driving it, technology pioneered by Ford. Police Witness says:

"Only 2 out of 10 for achieving. Sadly, using a blunt instrument will rarely achieve a successful operation. People do not have to wait to buy a new car in order to have a solution to the problems which Ford seeks to address. That solution can be far more refined and massively more effective for a fraction of the cost.

Installing a camera and ‘black box’ technology in your car will not only allow you to identify precisely how your teenage child is driving, it can also allow you to monitor it on a live basis if you wish, and to see precisely where, when and by whom it is being driven.

It's what the Americans call a ‘no-brainer’." "

So they advocate spying on your children? Monitoring your car on a live basis?

My brother was suitably contrite and after a while was allowed to borrow the car again. I, on the other hand, am to this day not allowed to drive the car. Make of that what you will.

I am against any of these type of devices. In an ideal world, kids would look after their mum and dad's cars out of respect for their parents and fear of the consequences if as much as a scratch was attributable to misuse. I remember my brother knocked a reflector out of the back of my dad's car due to an invisible post jumping out and attacking the car while he was trying to park. The damage to the car was minimal. The trust took much longer to repair. My brother was suitably contrite and after a while was allowed to borrow the car again. I, on the other hand, am to this day not allowed to drive the car. Make of that what you will

Most people I know crashed a car in their youth. Those who did not survive would not have been helped by a black box or a limiter as they were drunk or under the influence of other substances. They would still have probably ended up getting into trouble. Those who were sober learnt the valuable lesson that crashing cars is an expensive business best avoided and that girls don't pay much attention to you when you are back waiting for the bus. Sadly, today, we seem to want to wrap our kids in cotton wool, monitor them and curtail their freedom, all in the name of safety. Sounds to me like some of us are as bad as the government.