Quiggley

“Don't worry, I'm not getting angry or even agitated.”

Thank goodness. I don’t want to upset people. But I know how difficult it is to find that balance in entertaining vigorous debate without causing offence.

Now back to your earlier posts…..

“Ludwig, I think you take some comments to the extreme and out of context.”

You can rest assured that I do my best to interpret them as I read them. I could say the same about you and mjpb, and as for Steve…well!!

This business of accurately presenting what you mean and accurately perceiving what others are trying to say appears to be a chronic problem with written debates. I see it all the time on this forum.

So I guess we just have to concentrate on asking the right questions in order to clarify each other’s views.

I fully appreciate your experience in this field, and I’m glad you are here on this forum. And I just want to be appreciated as being a lay person with respect to this subject, who is passionately concerned about road safety, who has come up against the ugly side of the police a few times and who strongly wishes to see a high standard of policing and of law abidance.

I think that many more ‘ordinary’ people should become embroiled in these issues, and I find it quite unfortunate that there are only four of us involved in this discussion. [I speak about this current discussion with a number of people, all but one of whom agree with my position. I wish they’d all jump in and contribute! (:<)]

I don’t think our discussion is starting to go around in circles, but there does seem to be a bit of repetition needed, in order to clarify stuff. I don’t know….maybe that means it is becoming circular!? Anyway, I’m gonna hang in here for a while yet.

BUT I might be offline for a day or three, coz I’m going bush, as all good botanists/ecologists/geomorphologists have got to do regularly….or else they’ll go completely bonkers!

OK, I’m back from the real world, right out in the feral backblocks of lower Cape York Peninsula, and back into the parallel (cyber)universe again.

Now, where was I? Oh yes….

Quiggley (27 Oct)

Your request for a point form list of my concerns is good.

1. Many laws on the books that are just bloody well ignored. If they are worth having, then how come they are not enforced? We need to bring law enforcement in line with the law. This has two components; improving the policing regime and redefining laws that are deemed not fit to be policed as they are currently written.

2. Respect for the rule of law. What sorts of a society do we have if this respect is not upheld? Of course perfection is not possible, but we should be striving for the highest standard that we can get.

3. Fairness for all. Fuzzy laws in combination with extremely broad police discretionary powers leave the situation wide open for subjective and highly unfair treatment. It would be lovely if we could rely on our police to use their discretionary powers wisely, but we just can’t. So three things have to happen; the laws need to tightly defined and policed, police discretionary powers need to be reigned right in, and the police need to be held accountable for their decisions in a much more rigorous manner.

4. Elimination of blatant hypocrisy. For example, the ‘every k over is a killer’ message, while several ks over is acceptable!! And, the recommendations from the police, RACQ, Dept of Transport, etc regarding driving behaviour, while no effort in the policing regime is made to get people to take up this driving behaviour. The complete lack of policing of tailgating and almost complete lack of policing of road-hoggery by slow drivers are a couple of examples.

5. Awareness that our roads are dangerous places, and that a high proportion of drivers drive in an unsafe manner when they think they can get away with it. Driver-training must be greatly improved. So does driver-accountability, which means a strong law-enforcement regime.

Quiggley, in further response to your post of 27 Oct;

“Basically I don't really see a problem with the way laws are enforced at the moment (traffic laws that is).”

Wow! I can just see so many ways of improving it, and I don’t just mean by police, I mean within the law itself, driver-training, empowering the community to act against dangerous driving, etc.

Look at what is happening in NT. Speed limits are being introduced throughout the Territory, as are red light cameras, a demerit point system and increased fines to bring them in line with the rest of the country. No longer will the Territory be a virtual lawless backwater as far as driving goes.

Why on earth can’t the rest of the country take a couple of very simple giant leaps forward as well, such as putting most police in unmarked cars, so that any reasonably new car on the road could potentially be a cop in the eyes of law-breakers. The blue line is so damn thin….and yet the cops make themselves stand out like dogs balls… and in so doing, make it patently obvious when they are not around.

Why can’t driver-training be greatly improved? How on earth can we accept people getting their licences with such a flimsy understanding of the hazards? This is the craziest aspect of all.

Why can’t the responsibility for speedometer accuracy be placed fairly and squarely with the driver?

Why can’t the law be upheld at face value? What is with this crazy attitude of accepting a law and then policing it at some quite different value?

In short, there are a hundred easy steps that we could take to improve the law and its enforcement regime.

“Police are drawn from the community…..”

I appreciate your sentiments in this long paragraph. But surely it is all the more reason why we have to be very careful with discretionary powers, and keep them to a minimum…..and in order to do that, keep the law and the policing thereof tightly defined and aligned respectively.

Speedcamerjustice

How did your rally go?

Steve, we’ve got fairly and squarely on each other’s goat, which really is unfortunate. What do you say we set the bad vibes aside and have another go at neutral logical debate?

(from 27 Oct) “The fact is that there IS no absolute right or wrong here.”

But there IS. The absolute right or wrong is defined by the law, with things such as speed limits, which have a crystal clear interpretation, with hard and fast cut-off points.

“We don't HAVE a method of determining exactly how fast we're going.”

We don’t have to have a precise method. But we do need to make it as good as possible, and to emphasise the need to err on the side of caution when we don’t know what the error factor is in our speed-measuring device.

“Yes it would be great if we could apply fair judgement to every single person, but the fact is that everyone deals with different people (different cops/magistrates/whatever), that every situation is actually different.”

Great! We agree with the principle of fair judgement for all. So given this, shouldn’t be striving to make it as fair as possible wherever possible, and certainly NOT just living with a high degree of unfairness in situations where it could easily be improved?

“If you believe in a uniform response to a non-uniform input as a means of IMPROVING this situation then you are sorely mistaken. Because, in fact, that produces quite the opposite effect to the equality you so dearly crave.”

I’m struggling to understand just what you mean by a uniform response to non-uniform input. Different situations need different responses, and as far as possible this should be written into the relevant laws.

I espouse a uniform interpretation and enforcement of any given law. Within that uniformity there could easily be a sliding scale of penalties depending on the severity of the infringement, as there is to some extent with speeding and other road rules.

Footnote: I’m doing my damnedest to interpret things as they are intended, as always.

Ludwig,

1. Many laws on the books that are just bloody well ignored...

It is simply impossible to Police every law, all the time and to the same extent. This is one reason why there is targeted campaigns. As for getting rid of 'old' outdated laws, there is a process which is done to do this, but as you can imagine it wouldn't feature too highly as most of the time they don't affect anyone and basically it is just cleaning up the books so to speak. As for bring law enforcement into line with the law you forget it is not the Police who make or interpret the law, we just enforce it. Our enforcement of the law is as a result of the courts interpretation of the law - which not always agrees with the intention of the law makers at the time they wrote it.

2. Respect for the rule of law.

Yep, but how is this to be achieved further? Don't you think that if some good ideas had been thought up to do it all better that it wouldn't have been done already? You seem to forget that 'good' people do generally respect and adhere to the law and the 'bad' people don't give a darn about adhering to it, so why in the world would they respect it.

3. Fairness for all.

As I've said before and I'm not being rude, but you really do live in a fanciful world. Lets just say all Police were instructed to show zero tolerance for every offence they saw. The public would be scared to say/do anything, Police would suffer even more resentment, the courts would be flooded with cases, need I go on? Then the clincher; One day I pull over a friend and let them off. How would anyone know that I did and how would you stop it? Your expectations are unrealistic.

Police are already the most accountable people on the face of this earth, how would you proposed to make us more accountable whilst still maintaining the very little morale that currently exists?

4. Elimination of blatant hypocrisy.

Politicians are a unique breed all of their own. Deep down I'm sure most of them want to do the best thing, but how can they if they don't get re-elected to follow through with their ideas? At the same time we only get what we pay for, we really don't pay our Politicians very much for what they are 'suppose' to do. As the old saying goes, pay peanuts get monkeys.

You cover a lot of ground in this one short paragraph. It is not the function of the Police to get/educate people to do more driving courses or show more manners on the road etc. That is a function of the RTA and alike. Also there are numerous examples of various 'independent' bodies like the NRMA, RACQ etc speaking out about government campaigns/enforcement being inappropriate, so they are doing a pretty good job as is.

The last point you make about lack of Policing in certain areas, tailgating etc, how do you know that it's not Policed? Because you saw it happen once or twice and nothing happened? Were there any Police around when you did? Do you know for a fact that they weren't going to or doing something more important at the time if they did see it and didn't take action? There are so many what ifs here. Maybe they had a bad day and didn't feel like it or maybe they were just plain old slack. Again another argument for consistency.

5. Awareness that our roads are dangerous places,

I agree they are dangerous places, but they are not dangerous per say. Just like guns don't kill people, people using guns kill people. I think that most people drive very safely when they see the Police around, both good and bad, then when the Police aren't around the bad ones go back to their bad ways and the good keep on doing the right thing.