Thanks To Police Patrol:
 

I was out on the bike yesterday going through a village in the Dales, when a Police Patrol Car travelling in the opposite direction waved at me to slow down. Confused at first because I was only doing 30? Got further up the road and there was a speed camera van! Thanks lads for that.

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Nice one, must be a biker :D

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Not my experience of Derbyshire police. Caught speeding twice in a day by them, one of which was a laser pointing at a bend to catch people driving around it into a village.

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Most speed camera vans are operated by partnerships, and they tend to have slightly different priorities and objectives to most front line police officers. It might be considered a mistake to assume there is any degree of love between the two organisations......

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Spot on,

Although where police are concerned they always deny they have targets to meet during their shift I seems obvious that they do, and depending on whether they have done well or badly that day, or are on their way back to station at end of shift and can't be ars#d to deal with paperwork you can get lucky (or not , as the case may be).

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I was talking to the officer who drives the Medway area Police mobile speed trap. He's a nice guy and he told me that he sets his gear to 37, 47 and 57 MPH so you are properly speeding if you get caught. He went on to say that you get a speed awareness course up to 43,53 or 63 and fine + points for driving over those numbers.

Seems pretty fair really. He went on to say that is only the way he does it and other areas may vary though.

Next time your area Police HQ has an open day, it's worth going along to see what your local officers do.

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it makes life easier for police if speed is set on high side as a lot of lawyers are smart at querying calibration if their client gets done too close to limit (the safety nutters keep asking for zero tolerance on speed but it wastes both police and court time as a lot get off, and only the lawyers get rich). If you get caught at 6 or 7 miles over the 30 limit it is much more clearcut, and it misses genuine people who just drifted up a bit from 30.

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For sure.

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Compare those figures to the ones we used to use a few years ago if you want to see how things have changed.... Unless they were driving like a complete tool we didn't even bother stopping them in a 30 until they were doing 40, they then generally got away with some advice until 45 (there was always the odd exception who managed to talk themselves into a nicking before that), then it was a ticket at 45 and a summons over 50. In nearly thirty years I never had anyone contest a ticket and only ever ended up in court once for just a speeder, and he was only arguing if it was over the ton or not.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is drivers rarely just got nicked for excess speed, they got nicked for bad driving that involved inappropriate speed. There is a subtle difference, and in answer to the other post, no we never had quotas. We were allowed to nick as many as we liked..... :D

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some forces do have quotas though, they admit it

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ist-fines.html