Quote:
Originally Posted by L3nny
It's just not worth it, a couple of people on the course I was on tried to engage in logical, reasonable, discussion and it was just ignored. All it did was keep you there longer than you needed to be. The "instructors" standard response to everything was "I'm not going to argue with you".
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Despite all my bravado and tongue in cheek comments I do understand where these courses are coming from and if it were not for the blatant financial motivation behind them I would be a whole lot less scathing....
Many years ago police officers had what was called discretion. If you were driving like the proverbial they had the option of stopping you and encouraging you to change your ways. This could be done in several ways including a quiet word, a fixed penalty ticket, or summonsing you to court, and the choice often revolved around what exactly you had been doing, how you had been doing it, and your reaction to be asked to explain it.....
Then came along auditing and officers were asked to account and justify their time. "Words of advice" believe it or not were actually one of the activities recorded and some bright spark up at Headquarters spotted an opportunity, if not to improve road safety at least to get themselves promoted up the next rung.....
Overnight officers were told that all offenders were to be reported regardless of the circumstances. The report went to a specific department where somebody would decide how to proceed, conditional fixed penalties were sent to some, others sent to court, and a few received invitations to attend a very profitable "telling off" course. Unfortunately it seemed officers didn't particularly want to play the game and the opportunities to offer these courses were few and far between (Traffic officers are notoriously lazy and the thought of actually putting pen to paper for a trivial offence, let alone having to explain it to the member of public right in front of you wasn't that popular)... so they decided to lower all the thresholds on the camera systems so instead of getting clocked at 10%+2 (the guidelines at the time) it suddenly became a fair bit less.....
Eureka! You now had a major contribution to road safety and making a very tidy profit as well thank you very much.....