VENDETTA AGAINST MOTORISTS

Motorists who are fined by courts will pay a £15 surcharge to improve services for crime victims, but many violent criminals will pay nothing. Under the new Home Office rules motorists who unsuccessfully challenge a speeding ticket and other offenders who are fined in court will have to pay the charge. However, jailed criminals, including murderers and rapists, will escape the penalty. The flat-rate levy will go towards improving services for victims of crime, including domestic violence. The only situation in which someone sent to jail will have to pay the surcharge is if they are also required to pay a fine.

The measure, expected to raise £16 million a year, was introduced as part of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, and will not apply to on-the-spot fines at this stage. The Act does allow the levy to be added to fixed penalty notices but a Home Office spokesman said this would take place at a future date "when it is feasible to do so". The £16 million will include £3 million to expand the network of independent domestic violence advisers and £3 million for witness care units.

Home Office minister Baroness Scotland said, "We are hitting criminals in the pocket to make sure that crime doesn't pay and victims continue to get the services we all want them to have. Domestic violence affects one in four women and one in six men during their lifetime and, more disturbingly, on average two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner. This is totally unacceptable. I want to urge anyone suffering at the hands of someone they know to come forward and report it." (Source: This is London, Mar/07)

Outside every police station in the land, there should be a statue dedicated to the Unknown Motorist. What would the hapless cops do without us? We all know that Policeman Plod can't catch burglars (and he acts all surprised when you suggest that he might try). Urban street robbery is going through the roof - up 44% in Essex, for example, and up 50% in Devon and Cornwall (yes, now you can get mugged in Devon and Cornwall).

And drug dealing is now deemed a "victimless" crime (although your granny might disagree if they are conducting their "victimless" business outside her front door). The police can't catch criminals. So they criminalise motorists instead. And what soft targets we are! No resisting arrest. No doing a bunk over the garden wall. No pulling out sharp objects or putting up a fight or even denying our guilt.

Motorists are docile, passive creatures. The police tell us exactly how we have been bad, and what we owe them, and we meekly reach for our wallets. The only alternative is going to court and feeling like an old lag. Two million drivers are caught by those ubiquitous cameras every year, and cough up a staggering £120million in fines. It's a great racket.

The reason cameras are so popular with the boys in blue, apart from the fact that it's a safer game than confronting real criminals, is that in the majority of British police forces, they are allowed to keep a proportion of the fines under the "cash-for-cameras" scheme. As a way of raising revenue it is faultless, and as way of nabbing "criminals" without leaving the comfort of the cop shop canteen, it can't be beat.

But how smart are those police cameras? They can certainly catch the insured, licensed driver at the wheel of his registered vehicle if he creeps up to 34 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone. Yet they are useless at nabbing the stoned driver, the drunk driver and the child killer. They can't catch the driver who has no insurance, and no licence. They can't catch the wide boy driving with false plates to stay above the law.

They can't catch the mini cab driver who shouldn't be behind the wheel of a Dinky toy. The cameras can't, in other words, catch genuine bad men. All they can do is turn law-abiding motorists into criminals. The two million drivers who get done every year are the poor saps who do everything that society asks them to, apart from keeping to often absurdly low speed limits.

Greater Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd has been the only senior policeman to appreciate the damage that this relentless hounding of motorists is doing to the image and reputation of our police forces. "It should not be random enforcement," he has told his officers. "Our objective must be safer roads and better driving behaviour, not numbers of prosecutions." Michael Todd is a cop with imagination and vision.

In 2002 he switched 200 traffic officers in Manchester to fighting street crime, which immediately fell. When he was at Scotland Yard, Todd moved 300 traffic officers to the street, resulting in the arrest of almost 1,000 muggers. Todd is not soft on dangerous driving. Nobody would want him to be. Certainly not the majority of those two million drivers who get done for "speeding" every year.

But Todd understands that the average motorist is being taught to loathe and fear the police and their wretched cameras. Michael Todd is a lone voice of sanity among our cowardly, inept, money-grabbing police forces. The cameras will continue to spread. The government and Whitehall love them because they are an easy source of massive revenue for the boys and girls in blue.

It was bad enough when the average law-abiding citizen realised that the police can no longer protect us. But now we realise that they can't even tell us apart from the real bad guys. Burglars walk away unmolested, free to go about their loathsome business. Your Uncle Fred gets three points on his licence and a hefty fine for straying slightly above the speed limit. And your local police force gets its coffers stuffed with Uncle Fred's pension money.

Speed limits are often completely barmy. Thirty mph is too high in the average built-up area where there are children going to school, yet the 40mph you frequently see on fast-flowing, pedestrian-free roads is way too low, often dangerously low. It is difficult to believe that the law actually cares about genuine road safety.

ALL that plod cares about is persecuting easy targets who will timidly reach for their wallet murmuring: "It's a fair cop, officer." Why are the police treating the average motorist as a criminal? Because catching real criminals is beyond them. Figures released show that violent crime is rocketing all over the country. In the war on crime, you would think that the police would be going out of their way to win allies. Instead they are teaching us to despise them. Tony Parsons