Near Miss of the Day 825: Police refuse to prosecute because cyclist swore after driver pulled out on him

FWIW, this is the traffic regulation relating to Give Way lines:

"no vehicle shall proceed past such one of those lines as is nearer the major road into that road in a manner or at a time likely to endanger the driver of or any passenger in a vehicle on the major road or to cause the driver of such a vehicle to change its speed or course in order to avoid an accident."

So if the cyclist has to brake or swerve to avoid an accident, then the driver is guilty?

I can understand the police taking the position that the swearing makes a prosecution more difficult. If there are limited resources then it's probably reasonable not to prosecute, I hope they've at least sent the driver a letter though.

having looked at the video I can only file this as rude, rather than dangerous. The sort of thing that often happens to me when i am driving, which I have to remind myself when I'm cycling.

It's not ant cyclist, it's often just impatient, or poor driving. 

The fact the cyclist passes behind the emerging car suggest that was plenty of time to react, and no real prospect of riding into the side of the car.

Did the driver fail to give way? yes

Do we see drivers edging out into traffic many times every day? yes

thereofre was this worse than 'typical' driving. I.e. noticeably worse than the average driver? no

I wouldn't even submit.

For people whose job it is to deal with angry, irrational people, police really are weirdly sensitive to bad language.

Watching again.  What I think are "facts" - doesn't seem to be a particularly high speed by the cyclist here.  Cyclist and white car appear to have good mutual visibility.  At the start the cyclist is fairly far to the left (seems to be a head cam), the dark car overtakes them but appears to be slowing (brake lights?) even at that point seeing the queue ahead.

Speculation: it wasn't SMIDSY as much as the driver saw the black car pass the cyclist quickly and thought they had time to nose out behind them.  They then failed to make further observation and spot the cyclist hadn't slowed and / or mentally calculated  "it's a cyclist - I've got time".

I don't think that positioning would have made much difference.  I do think if you were paying close attention (which isn't always the case, let's be honest) you could have suspected what might happen and slowed slightly further before.  It looks like this chap kept on trucking, thinking to filter down the side of the queue.  However it was a late move by the car - about a second and a half before he was on it?  I have experienced several of "failures to stop" from side roads and know that you've got respond quickly.

I hope I'd have chalked this up to experience.  This could be interpreted as someone with trigger control issues although I do appreciate this might have been the nth time in a short ride he'd experienced poor driving.  If someone does something stupid in front of me I tend to keep my Klingon battle greetings to myself (I love videos where crap driving is greeted with a confident "oh, saucy!" or "Hello sailor!") although I've certainly had words with drivers behind / alongside me.  Removing the sound wouldn't have helped his cause that much - although his choice of words would be a gift to a lawyer - since a) he twice rides up alongside and clearly stops to remonstrate (once filtering past another car to do so) and b) EDIT you can see him bang on the car.

Have finally watched the video.

#justacyclistinnit

(and that's *at best*, and assuming that the driver had even seen Mr Sweary)

I pass this on for interest, not to start an argument: I showed this to a visiting lawyer friend last night, she said that if she were defending she would put to the court that the cyclist's extreme reaction (her words) demonstrated that he was in an aggressive frame of mind already and looking for trouble and that he could have braked earlier, basically that the cyclist had deliberately turned a minor error into a major incident.

I'm not saying that this is the case, just it's interesting to know the way a legal professional would see it; possibly this influenced the police decision when weighing up the reasonable chance of conviction odds.

Just like to thank road.cc for asking the police for a comment. I look forward to reading the response.

Completely nonsensical policing; choosing to not prosecute a driving offender because a cyclist committed a separate offence afterwards is a laughable conflation; both circumstances should be dealt with on their individual merits.

There are a lot of reasons cyclists shouldn't swear at motorists (for one, it's highly unlikely to do any good; for another, it doesn't help our public image, which, rightly or wrongly, isn't a good one), but let's be very clear: it is completely and utterly irrelevant here.

Criminal/public safety law is not about private disputes between two individuals. It is about protecting society from behavior that threatens the public welfare. Yes, there is often an individual victim who was immediately harmed or threatened with harm, but that is just a detail; conceptually and legally speaking, the real victim is society as a whole, which is threatened with continuing future harm if the offender is not dealt with effectively. Indeed, that is why cases are prosecuted by the state, as the representive of the whole society, rather than by individual victims representing themselves. The (putatively) bad behavior of the individual victim after the fact doesn't change the threat that the offender represents to the society, and so it should have absolutely nothing to do with the way the offender is handled by the state as the representative of the society.

Let's say that again for those in back not paying attention: The (putatively) bad behavior of the individual victim after the fact doesn't change the threat that the offender represents to the society, and so it should have absolutely nothing to do with the way the offender is handled by the state as the representative of the society.

If a cyclist were to bring a civil case and the state were to invoke some sort of clean hands or morality doctrine to deny him relief based on his unforgivable use of dirty words, that's another matter. But, when it comes to matters of public safety, the police are completely fucking this up.

There is a simple solution to sweary cyclists when their lives are threatened with a 2 ton lump of metal. Police should stop f@@@ng being total c''ts to cyclists by ignoring or dismissing evidence of dangerous M**F***g  behaviour and start prosecuting the w'krs so they learn to f**ng drive safely or lose their licences permanently. Then perhaps we might be more civil and turn the other cheek to be slapped with vehicle. 

Removing audio from a video is easy; most of them will have a timeline that you drag the video in to, and this will split in to a video line and an audio line.
Just click "mute" on the audio line, or right click on the video line and click mute.
Davinci  (free, and bloody excellent) also has a seperate mute button.

If you are going to mute a video, do it before you add any titles, transitions or cuts as this will ensure the *whole* video is muted

### better video editors than me exist ... just trying to be helpful ####

Not one I would have bothered submitting - you could see they were going to pull out all day long, typical cyclists don't count move, but on the grand scale of things I would have settled for a bit of a rant and moved on with my life.

Definitely one for defensive cycling live another day, however much the driver was in the wrong.

Meanwhile, I really can't face editing my video submission of my so close the rider behind thought I had been hit close pass which apparently wasn't enough evidence for the review team at Leicester (though they had sent an NIP to the driver).

I really think we need a concerted effort to get the police to come up with a credible set of criteria across the country for what meets the bar for an offence - because clearly most NMOTDs meet the theoretical test of driving offences, yet such a small proportion get through to action. I'm happy to help the police by only submitting the most serious offences (and I would not count this one as meeting the bar given the general standard of driving that we get, regardless of whether we are cycling, driving or walking) , but when that critieria is met, we should expect the police to make a reasonable effort to progress the report, and give reasonable feedback - it is important to know justice is being done and the trend towards silence is concerning.

Ages ago, I proposed we should have a national agency, civilian staffed but under the watchful eye of the police, to deal with these reports. I would think it would be self-funding.