View Single Post
Old 01-05-18, 07:25 AM   #16
Red Herring
Member
Mega Poster
 
Red Herring's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Posts: 2,708
Default Re: The Crash Detectives - a sobering story

This driver was poodling along the motorway at an average speed below 60. That's a fact from the investigation. It's not unreasonable to assume he would have been overtaken by numerous other vehicles, none of which appear to have been taken as a slight on his masculinity

The bike was averaging over 70mph, another fact from the investigation. At some point the bike has passed the car and immediately both of their speeds increase dramatically. That's another shown fact. I'm not trying to excuse or justify what then went on, just try to understand why it happened so that I can learn from it, fundamentally because I'm a selfish bugger and I wouldn't want to find myself in that situation.

The facts then show that both the bike and the car continued along the motorway close together for some distance at high speed. That didn't happen by accident, it happened as a direct result of a conscious decision by both parties involved, either of whom could have stopped it from happening in an instant.

Everything I have said so far is a fact, from here on we can start exploring theories about how people felt or what they were trying to do, but they will be just that, educated guesses.

My educated guess is that both persons involved lost their cool and did stupid things. After thirty years as a copper I'd like to think I know enough about human nature to understand how easily that happens, I've even been guilty of it myself. We don't know if the car driver became so incensed that he deliberately knocked the rider off (his history tends to suggest he wasn't a particularly level headed chap) if he misjudged the distance when trying to pass close to the bike, or they both swerved towards each other at the same time, but either way it all went tragically wrong for both of them.

No length of sentence will bring the biker back, or right the wrong done that day. We live in an age of social media where the news is regarded as entertainment rather than informative facts. Everything you read and hear has an agenda behind it (and no, I'm not a complete conspiracy freak) because they ether want to engage with you, or give you a particular message. As a population we are very good at reading what we want to see and then jumping on whichever part of a story happens to support the particular bandwagon that happens to be passing at the time. I have absolutely no doubt that everything I have just said would have come out in the court case, but the judge was very careful in his summing up, and the media in what they reported, because they knew that any inference that the biker had a part to play in events would have been turned against them, in much the same was as andy650 did with my original post.

The only good that can come from this entire sad affair is that folks could learn from it, unfortunately that kind of message isn't what people want to hear.
Red Herring is offline   Reply With Quote