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FINED IN FIFE
CASE ONE. A British motorist is photographed driving at 156 mph, and loses his licence for one year:
Businessman Ronald Klos, whose original acquittal was overturned, has been banned for a year and fined £3,000.
Fife Constabulary said it was the highest speed recorded by their traffic cameras.
CASE TWO. A British motorist is photographed driving at 22 mph, and loses his licence for one year:
A UK court on Monday severely penalized a motorist for the crime of showing disrespect to a mobile speed camera van. The device had photographed Sean Toehill, 21, driving 22 MPH in a 40 MPH zone but police became enraged when they noticed he had given the camera a “V-sign.”
Officers were dispatched to his home two days later to present charges which the Cupar Sheriff Court in Fife, Scotland upheld on Monday. The court suspended Toehill’s right to drive for a year and imposed a £90 (US $160) fine.
paco - I’m pretty sure that the “V” sign is British for “middle-finger.”
Posted by Matt Moore on 2006 01 11 at 10:11 AM • permalinkThis is what happens when police have their hands tied behind their backs by the criminal-rights ‘industry’ and the PC spinelessness of civilian authorities.
Too much trouble to go after real perps—the paperwork, the bad press, the law suits, the shrieking accusations of brutality or racism, the lenient judges who haven’t dealt with violence since schoolyard fist fights.
Better to lint-pick the behavior of taxpayers who reflexively respect the uniform, don’t talk back, can pay their fines, and will shut up and go home when it’s over.
The source for that article claims that he lost his licence because he took both hands off the steering wheel to make the gesture. Which is somewhat more serious than “the crime of showing disrespect to a mobile speed camera van”.
#5, true, jic, but at 22 MPH, it’s not as serious as that appears, although a fairly stupid thing to do. I’ll bet that the cops noticed the “hands off” after they saw the the hand gesture, and used that as the official reason for the charges.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 11 at 10:28 AM • permalinkAnd why is a camera taking a picture of a fellow doing 22 in a 40 in the first place?
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2006 01 11 at 10:32 AM • permalinkI’ll bet that the cops noticed the “hands off” after they saw the the hand gesture, and used that as the official reason for the charges.
I happen to have a pretty low opinion of the British police, but I have no problem believing that the fact that both hands were taken off of the steering wheel was the main reason (although I doubt the gesture endeared him to them). If the police here charged and convicted every person who gives them a rude gesture, they wouldn’t have time for anything else!
You mean in all those photos of Winston Churchill during WWII flashing the “V” sign, he was really flicking people off?
If the sign is made with the rest of the fingers facing the viewer (as shown here), it is the completely inoffensive ‘V for Victory’ sign. If the back of the hand faces the viewer, it is “flicking people off”. Churchill was photographed using both signs. Whether or not that was deliberate is open to debate…
The crime of showing disrespect to a van? This is absurd—the British must be manufacturing crimes.
Is it a crime to show disrespect to another race or religion in the UK? If not now, it soon will be.
Posted by stuartfullerton on 2006 01 11 at 10:54 AM • permalinkI didn’t know there were so many nuances, thanks jic. Everything I know about offensive British hand gestures was learned from a drunk exchange student during a Tyson-fight party in 1999.
Posted by Matt Moore on 2006 01 11 at 10:58 AM • permalinkIf English police are taking photos of cars travelling at 22 mph, then they deserve to be shown “disrespect”.
What a pack of tossers.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2006 01 11 at 11:00 AM • permalinkHmmm.
Steering with your knee is illegal in the UK? It’s the first thing taught in the US.
Ahhh. You must have been driving in New Jersey.
Sooooo. What exit? Turnpike or Parkway?
Posted by memomachine on 2006 01 11 at 11:51 AM • permalinkIf the police here charged and convicted every person who gives them a rude gesture, they wouldn’t have time for anything else!
No argument, jic. But looking at the crime versus punishment, one has to wonder if the police had additional motivation to push the case a leeeeeetle big harder.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 01 11 at 11:53 AM • permalinkYou have to steer with your knees, otherwise it’s not legal to talk on the cell phone whilst eating a BigMac.
And ed, you need to go on both the Turnpike and the GSP to get to my house, so ha!
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2006 01 11 at 11:55 AM • permalinkCamera enforcement is a slow-growth industry in the U.S.—partly for Fourth Amendment concerns (search-and-seizure without probable cause) and partly because most Americans take offense at robots doing police work.
More on the issue in this excellent, long article by Matt Labash at Weekly Standard.
Posted by Rittenhouse on 2006 01 11 at 12:10 PM • permalinkGood thing those guys that blew the trains in Britain didn’t use any rude or offensive gestures, huh? They’d have been in real trouble then. (Hey, maybe that’s what happened to the guy they shot and killed who police originally claimed might have been a bomber. Maybe he made a rude gesture at them.)
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2006 01 11 at 01:29 PM • permalinkWhile everyone over here in the States worries about the Patriot Act and the coming Police State, Britain is actually turning into one. They have cameras situated not only as traffic monitors but as monitors of people in virtually all situations as they move about on foot. And beyond the snooping cameras watching people are the latest addition: microphones picking up conversation. Britons are watched wherever they go these days under a government “anti-social behavior” umbrella. It’s more like 1984 over there than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. It’s stunning to me that the land which produced the essential concepts of individual liberty and rights of protection against the imperial State is the first one to cave to socialist Big Brother paranoia.
But looking at the crime versus punishment
The year’s suspension of his licence is pretty standard for dangerous driving, and a £90 fine is nothing. I’m not arguing that this guy did anything that serious in the scheme of things, just that his punishment was not harsh by the standard of what I’ve seen given for similar offences.
Unattended nondescript vans fitted with speed cameras used to be used by Tasmanian Police to punish petrol heads.The camera lens was located under the right hand side headlight.I’ve never heard of anyone “disrespecting” these devices by use of offensive hand gestures however a spraycan of black paint was very effective in ensuring that offensive gestures,if any, went unrecorded.One can was good for preventing hundreds of potential camera insulters inflicting their hurtful message.
EKW:
Personally I’ve come to the conclusion that Britain’s current series of lurches toward oblivion are connected to it’s near proximity to the epicenter of Socialist Collectivism’s birth/influence/rot. Eastern Europe still remembers the rot firsthand whilst Old Europe clings to their beloved dustbins.
That Britain has kept it together for so long is noteworthy given the long term delusions that have been brought to bear against their culture. Shit! They even tax themselves for the privlege (BBC). That they aren’t yet France is chiefly due to the now waning efforts of oldsters who really remember the who, which, why, and where’s of which side they chose in the three great ideological wars of the last century…That and the once formidable channel that kept the various sundry Huns at bay.
Now the Chunnel as an umblical to the EU has juxtaposed Brits physically/fiscally and spiritually with the historic authoritarian dispositions of Continental elites. Those passive aggressive Napoleons busily ensconcing themselves in their great halls in Brussels…Home of the Pissing Princeling.
Any cultural kinships they had shared with the values that became America & Australia have become a thin veneer of tired anachronisms in the godless socialist dystopia the continent’s elites are busy whining and coercing their collective ways toward.
It’s a sad thing to watch a once rightfully proud nation of people - who history had invested the world with the refined ideals of prosperity through individual liberty - busily topple the pillars and rubble the foundations upon which human progress is built.
In the span of a mere half-century, a once great culture has taught itself to transmogrify its vitality and essence into the decline of self-loathing. A fashionably socialist loathing that’s seemingly blind to any of the good things that have given them the comfortable pulpit from which to deconstruct their society.
As it stands, our older brother is slouching toward a socially contracted tyranny of the sort our ancestors had [recently] died fighting.
The counterpoint of Britons having at least retained the [begrudging] will and the [diminished] ability to project a forward defence by joining us in our efforts to secure our mutual Freedom from an emergent Islamist tyranny - along with the (50 million) people of Afghanistan and Iraq - is that it’s likely a mere tollbooth on the road leftist intellectual snake oil peddlers have laid out for our futures. Apparently outrage has been browbeaten out of the majority of British people.
Their object lesson is our call to vigilance.
Does this mean I can’t moon Tony Blair’s plane any more?
Posted by localharbor on 2006 01 11 at 09:09 PM • permalinkDon’t the British go by Kilometers per hour?
Negative . . . they still use miles, not kilometres, spend pounds, not euros, weight stones, not kilograms, and mustard is yellow, not brown.
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 01 12 at 06:18 AM • permalinkWhile the government has been pushing metric hard for most things for last 30 years or so, it’s actually illegal to put up road signs in metric units. It’s also illegal to sell draught beer in measures other than 20 oz pints and 10 oz half-pints (the British have used 20 oz “Imperial” pints since the 19th century).
Until very recently, the Irish had a worst-of-both-worlds system, where speed limits were in MPH, but road distances were in kilometers. They are now all-metric (I have no idea if their beer is too).
Wonder if old Horace Rumpole stil thinks that “the English nation when it is long gone will be remembered for three things—the English breakfast, the Oxford Book of English Verse (the Quiller-Couch Edition), and the presumption of innocence.”
Stupid cameras.
Posted by MikeTheLibrarian on 2006 01 12 at 01:52 PM • permalink
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So it’s illegal to show ‘disrespect’ to a friggin’ machine in the UK?