“You know what you’ve done wrong, don’t you?” he smirked.
I muttered something about one of my hubcaps coming loose but my crime, as it transpired, was far worse. I had just driven in a bus lane and for that the penalty was a £30 on-the-spot fine.
I protested that I had to enter the bus lane (which, incidentally, was bus-free at the time) to execute a left turn. Aha, said the policeman, but you committed an offence and there is a policy of zero tolerance on bus lanes.
Zero tolerance sounds like such a good idea when applied to hooligans or muggers but in connection with bus lanes it seems, well, intolerant.
In the end, he let me off with a warning, but the confrontation puzzled me. It suggested one of two things: there is such a surfeit of police on our streets that they have to go scouting for work, or, middle-aged mothers have been identified as a special menace to society and should be apprehended at every opportunity.
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What other explanation can there be? The second theory suggests a many-pronged assault involving council traffic operations and the police on those lawless members of the public who will persist in ferrying their children around.
In Glasgow, parents who stop near their children’s schools will be liable for £60 fines, following the introduction of “road exclusion zones”. Traffic wardens, as if their days were not full enough, are to make random checks at schools.
That means the harassed working mother or father, who is concerned enough about their offspring’s welfare to see them to the school gate but doesn’t have time to take a leisurely stroll or wait for a bus, will now become a fresh source of income for Glasgow city council.
How soon before Scottish police hide in the shrubbery, as they did in London last week, to catch motorists making unauthorised turns, or slap fines on drivers for having the wrong screws in their numberplates, as they did in West Yorkshire this week? While so much manpower is diverted to this easy bait, the thugs who drive in unlicensed, uninsured or stolen cars, often without ever having taken a driving test, will continue to tear through residential streets mowing down toddlers on pedestrian crossings.
I am not advocating a laissez faire attitude towards all motoring offences, far from it. Michael Howard’s bid to win votes by scrapping speed cameras and raising urban speed limits amounts to a road hog’s charter, which is insupportable.
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But there is law-breaking, as in doing 60mph in a 30mph built-up area, or driving under the influence of several units of alcohol and several grams of cocaine, or taking a pickaxe to somebody else’s car window. And then there is nipping into a bus lane, forgetting which bit of Princes Street is closed to cars, or missing a parking-meter deadline by a minute. When upstanding citizens, increasingly sickened
by rising street crime, demanded a greater police presence they
did not expect to become the focus of it themselves.
Police forces come under pressure from politicians, locally and nationally, to clear the roads, to ease congestion (which always means cars), to meet targets. And they respond. They have a crackdown. They allow near empty buses to cruise in near empty bus lanes next to single-file jams of nose-to-tail traffic.
They issue edicts to their officers who then rush around in expensive, fuel-guzzling Range Rovers and round up bemused women in saloons who have never knowingly been on the wrong side of the law.
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It’s quite remarkable, in fact, how the police respond when the target is a soft one.
But why, if they can respond so zealously to this kind of pressure, can they not respond to the other kind, which requires them to deal with recidivist hoodlums, neds, antisocial juveniles or whatever the correct term is? There has been no let-up in the pressure for more frontline police, for more bobbies on the beat, from the public, from politicians and from the police federation, which represents policemen up to chief inspector level.
Jack McConnell recently reiterated his pledge to cut back on form-filling and release police from non-essential duties so they could be more usefully occupied in the community. He promised to ensure that every pound of public money goes towards detecting and solving crime — “not to unnecessary bureaucracy to run the service”.
It is part of a long-standing initiative to encourage the chief constables, who alone are responsible for deploying policemen, to free up coppers for crime-busting, and address public unease that out of a force of 15,487 officers in Scotland, there is a maximum of only 140 on the streets at any one time.
But where is the evidence that police chiefs are responding? In Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders Police have “launched” another 12 officers to tackle antisocial behaviour on the Broomhouse and North Sighthill estates and in Leith, after local residents asked for more police. Twelve have already been dropped into north Edinburgh and Craigmillar and a further 12 will be “operational” next year. So, out of a Scottish force of nearly 16,000 an extra 36 will be consigned to the capital’s street crime problem. I suspect there are many more than that on bus lane duty.
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Admittedly, there are well-meaning pilot projects popping up all over the place. Edinburgh council is going to expand its youth action teams, launch neighbourhood response teams, community safety concierges, environmental wardens, housing investigation teams, and an intensive family support service (none of which are drawn from the police).
Clearly, the politicians have grown sensitive to public clamour for more visible law enforcement. But I wonder if these teams and concierges and wardens would be necessary at all if regular patrols were established within our cities and towns.
Since moving house nearly six months ago I have not once seen a policeman or woman on my street. Come to think of it, the only officer I laid eyes on at my previous address in a five-year period was the one I summoned following a fracas with a gas man (but that’s another story).
Police on the street would deter burglars and vandals and joyriders. They would probably curb speeding. They might even restore public confidence in the force.
The perception at the moment is of resources being squandered as motorists are pursued for minor transgressions while violent criminals and habitual troublemakers get off scot-free. The perception is that there are never any policemen when shopkeepers are being terrorised by gangs of loitering youths, but they materialise the instant a car is spotted with a faulty brake light.
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It is a public relations disaster and it has turned Scotland into a country where even the middle classes despair of the police.