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Daily Mail, Tuesday December 27 th 2005
By Ben Taylor, Crime Correspondent
Police were accused of having ‘carte blanche' to speed last night after it was revealed that only one in 50 officers caught by a roadside camera is ever prosecuted.
Of the 45,741 officers who triggered a speed trap, just 934 – 2 per cent – were given a £60 penalty ticket, taken to court or are facing an ongoing prosecution.
Motoring organisations claimed the figures are evidence of a ‘two-tier' system in which thousands of police are routinely let off without having a valid excuse.
Police chiefs point out that officers are exempt from speeding if they can prove they were on important business for their forces. But the new figures did not state whether the speeding vehicles were using their sirens at the time, and there were wide differences in prosecution rates between constabularies.
Out of Bedfordshire's 2500 officers who triggered cameras, 46 faced action.
This was nearly three times the conviction rate of the Metropolitan Police – where 25,486 camera flashes ended in just 16 prosecutions.
Police in Greater Manchester, Kent and Hampshire were treated more severely than their colleagues in the capital.
The data for England and Wales, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also shows huge differences in the number of speeding cases between forces.
For example, Essex admitted to 5,269 in just six months, while neighbouring Suffolk reported just 40 in a year. Kevin Delaney, of the RAC Foundation, said: ‘The exemption rules are pretty widely misunderstood by rank-and-file officers as giving them a carte blanche exemption from the speed limit when driving a police vehicle. That is clearly wrong and suggests that something is wrong with police driver training. It is difficult to explain the difference between the Met and Greater Manchester Police, which are both large urban forces with presumably broadly similar numbers of cameras. It seems the Met is working from a presumption that every cop who triggers a speed camera must have a good reason to do so. That presumption is the wrong way around.'
Earlier this year, the Met launched a crackdown on speeding officers. It circulated a list of excuses which are no longer acceptable. They include being late for a court case, office meeting, shift change or lunch appointment.
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