Can the Police do no wrong?

A Police car crashed in an area of few recorded accidents. What was he thinking?

Are the Police serious about road safety or are they contributing to the problem?

Last week, a photograph of the above incident appeared on social media, which the Otago Daily Times picked up. The following excuse was given:

A police spokesman said the officer attempted a U-turn on State Highway 1 on Sunday afternoon after talking with a speeding motorist he had pulled over.

During the manoeuvre, the patrol car became stuck after hitting loose gravel on the side of the road.

OK, let's test that explanation.

Here is where the accident happened:

The Police officer pulled over a speeding driver near the end of the northbound passing lane near Pullar Road:

A Police officer pulled over a motorist completing a passing manoeuvre near the end of a passing lane? So, the driver was "talked to", yet no word about a ticket being issued? Something doesn't stack up here.

Anyway, he did a u-turn past that intersection and ended up in a ditch. How come?

Let's start with the turning circle of a Skoda Superb:

Here is how a turning circle is measured:

So, the 11.7m turning circle is measured from the outside front wheel of the turn. Here is the width of the road from the outside lines:

Here is an approximate measure of the seal width:

Instead of pulling over to Pullar Road and then making a right turn, the police officer decided to perform a u-turn between where a northbound passing lane ended and the southbound passing lane started:

That is an extraordinarily stupid place to perform a u-turn. If he lost traction on the hard shoulder while performing a u-turn, how fast was he driving?

What was he doing there in the first place?

Let's remember that the police officer was initially driving north and then turned south towards Dunedin. The vehicle isn't white. It's blue and a highway patrol vehicle. So, it would be safe to assume that the police officer was patrolling.

 The 'motorway' north of Dunedin is not a conventional continuous dual carriageway in a traditional sense. Rather, it is a series of single carriageways between a series of passing lanes. Queues of vehicles often form behind slower vehicles, followed by sporadic bursts of speed to overtake those slower vehicles. So, near the end of passing lanes, not all vehicles in a queue get the chance to overtake.

Taking this into account, was safety or speed-related crashes an issue in the area where he was patrolling? According to the NZTA's Crash Analysis System (CAS), there hasn't been a serious crash in the area since 2015:

  Based on this, would it be quick to assume that the police officer was on a "revenue gathering exercise"?

Only days prior, I saw the same highway patrol vehicle on State Highway 85 over 114km away, near Wedderburn:

The precise location is here, near Bullock Dray Road:

Located right in the middle of a straight, here are the sight distances for the patrol vehicle:

The road was flat, straight, in excellent condition, the weather was fine, and there was little traffic. With good sight distances in an area with few suitable areas to overtake either side, it was a great place to overtake slow vehicles.

I wondered why the patrol vehicle was there. So, I looked up CAS:

There hadn't been a serious crash within a 10km diameter of the police officer since 2015. I could see no other reason for the highway patrol vehicle to be sitting there other than "revenue gathering."

If road safety isn't the issue, then it isn't a good look, is it?

Window dressing

If you watched the TV show Highway Cops, the show was good public relations for the Police. Not funded by NZ on Air, South Island highway patrols featured prominently, focusing on the scenery and the most entertaining examples of poor driving. The diversity of drivers using scenic roads would have been a target-rich environment.

Often, the issue isn't speeding drivers but poor driving. There are distracted drivers fiddling with devices or enjoying the scenery, slow drivers, and drivers who lack confidence.

There are few passing lanes on inland state highways. There are, however, many passing lanes on State Highway 1 and sections of State Highway 8 between Alexandra and Milton. But, for instance, there are no passing lanes along this entire scenic route:

As a result, there are often queues in remote locations involving traffic unwilling to overtake slower vehicles and slower vehicles unwilling to let other vehicles past:

As a result, there are many crashes involving overtaking manoeuvres. Take, for instance, this stretch of highway between Wanaka and Cromwell, where many crashes are on straight stretches of road on a major tourism route:

Taking this into account, one would expect that police would pull over slow vehicles, wouldn't you? Well, obviously, not:

Because the patrol vehicle didn't pull over the slow vehicle, behind me there were a series of vehicles overtaking each other, only to abandon further passing manoeuvres when they saw the patrol vehicle.

I followed the highway patrol car to Cromwell. A Greenstone TV film crew pulled up behind them. They were filming the final season of Highway Cops.

The police officer was more focussed on looking good for television than doing his job. How bad could this look?

Can the Police be the nuisance?

Sometimes, police can create the nuisance. A senior constable in his fifties behind the wheel of a patrol vehicle for thirty years can develop nasty attitudes. In their rush to fill their quota, they have been known to create situations where they can fine people:

In that article, the Police maintained their line that the owner of the dashcam was in the wrong. But it was a close call, where the patrol vehicle didn't slow on a raised pedestrian crossing at a give way and seemed to be in a hurry to return to the police station less than 100m away, blaming another driver who was already on the intersection.

New Zealand does not have a specific "entrapment" law. Courts can, however, exclude evidence obtained through police conduct that is considered overly persuasive or inducing, essentially acting as a form of entrapment, by using their discretion to exclude unfairly obtained evidence.

In other words, the Police can charge or fine anyone but someone has to pursue an expensive and time-consuming process before a judge dismisses such evidence.

I found myself in a situation where the Police not only failed to deal with a slow driver but also tried to entrap me to cover their offending. It occurred on this section of State Highway 1 south of Kaikoura:

Again, look at the last time there was a fatal or serious crash on that section of road. Despite that, the speed limit was inexplicably lowered to 80km/h.

At the bottom of that map - and before State Highway 1 follows the coast - the road descends a steep and windy section. There are no passing lanes but several pull off areas. As soon as the road reaches the coast, there is this section to pull over:

Throughout this whole section of road, the slow vehicle didn't pull over, nor did the patrol vehicle take any action. It was an 80km/h section and we were driving between 40-60km/h.

Why didn't the patrol vehicle pull over the slow vehicle?

For a start, the police officer wasn't paying attention. He was swerving, braking, and I could see his left hand fiddling with something on his dashboard while I could see the glow from a smartphone in his wing mirrors and reflected on his windscreen. Was anyone holding the steering wheel or looking at the road ahead?

Strangely, when the slow vehicle didn't pull over at the point in the map above, the patrol vehicle slowed down and appeared to pull over. I interpreted this as a gesture to let me overtake the patrol vehicle. Instead, just as I started an overtaking manoeuvre, the patrol vehicle swerved and then sped up, almost side swiping my vehicle. I got a brief glimpse of the police officer, who looked at me shocked, as he held his smartphone in his right hand.

Something didn't seem right, so I briefly filmed it:

Shortly after I stopped filming, the patrol vehicle pulled over, and I overtook it. I saw the patrol officer fiddling again with his smartphone as I passed. He briefly looked up at me. He could see that I saw him. He looked as guilty as a puppy next to a pile of poo.

Next thing, I was being tailgated by the patrol vehicle. The patrol vehicle then activated his lights and siren. After I pulled over, this happened:

Did I hear that right? Was the police officer in control of his car or was he relying on the car to control it for him?

The make and model of vehicle that the police officer was driving was a Holden Equinox. Here is the vehicle, made in Mexico by Chevrolet. The system he was referring to was the "Adaptive Cruise Control." Here is an explanation of how the left hand drive version works:

This might explain how I saw the police officer operating the police computer with one hand and his smartphone with the other. In other words, neither of his hands were on the steering wheel and he was relying on a computer to keep him in the lane. The police officer also maintained that the computer controlled the following distances, meaning that he didn't need to pay attention to the road either.

  Let's not overlook that the Police are law enforcement. They need to collect information and present it in a credible way. With all this technology in a highway patrol vehicle - including speed radar, GPS, and breath alcohol testing equipment - one would think that Police would be supplied with equipment that could record incidents, such as dashcams or body cameras, wouldn't you? But they aren't, meaning that they can issue fines based entirely on their word. This raises a more important issue: Are the Police Association afraid that footage could also be used against their members?

Priceless

Weeks later, this photo appeared in social media:

Gee, I wonder what excuse was given? Was there an opportunity to blame someone else?

I was issued with a $150 fine for trying to overtake a distracted police officer. I could have spent thousands traveling across the country to fight it. The IPCA would have given the police officer plenty of opportunity to invent an excuse. Instead, I have amassed priceless footage.

Can you see the problem?

One needs to see the wood from the trees. It is one thing to single out individual instances of poor policing and another thing to stigmatise all police with the same brush.

But it is a case of "if a tree falls over and no one is around, does it make a sound?"

With the prevalence of dashcams, more Police are filmed doing stupid stuff:

A Police spokesman justified that driving, claiming "red mist" (extreme anger) was to blame. But the real question remains: If it wasn't caught on dashcam and circulated widely, would anything have been done?

In the absence of dashcam footage, the media are expected to believe the Police's version of events. Take, for instance, when two Warkworth cops collided on a motorway while doing a u-turn. Announcing that the Serious Crash Unit were investigating, the story faded into obscurity. Was the report released? Did the media even ask?

There are two issues here:

1. Are police actually trying to improve road safety or are they revenue gathering and filling quotas; and

2. Are the public properly protected from dodgy police?

Police make mistakes. But, if they make mistakes, they need to own up to them. If they go down the route where they try to cover them up, there needs to not only be systems in place to prevent and punish them for doing that but protect the public from the consequences.

Currently, the Police are a law unto themselves. Despite technology available to record evidence, such as dashcams and bodycams, they aren't readily used. Even where bodycams are used by other organisations, they are often turned off to suit their officers.

If officers turn off video recording devices, the evidence should be inadmissible and the officer sacked and prosecuted. Simple.

Finally, there needs to be proper entrapment laws and a truly independent police conduct authority that properly scrutinises police conduct, not just feed them with information so that they can form an excuse. At the moment, the IPCA doesn't have resources and relies heavily on their relationship with Police. That's just not good enough.