THERE is a \u201creal need for legislation\u201d to protect officers from being prosecuted for dangerous driving, the Police Federation of England and Wales conference has heard.<\/p>\n
Steve Taylor, an Essex Police Federation representative, voiced his opinion to the conference floor in Bournemouth \u2013 stating: \u201cOur officers are at greatest risk in the beginning moments, the opening minutes and hours, of an incident.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThe National Police Chief lead on stage at conference seemed to make the distinction between an officer on a response run and an officer on a pursuit run, but the law makes no such distinction and the potential consequences that officer faces if found at fault in any of those two situations is the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if the law doesn\u2019t\u2019 differentiate between the two I don\u2019t understand why police Chiefs are comfortable differentiating between the two.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he feared that \u201cin the worst cases officers are being duped and cajoled into giving an account without the protections afforded to any other suspect in any other line of criminal investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve added: \u201cOfficers don\u2019t identify that they are criminally liable and therefore are doing their best, and wanting to do their best for the job, and be open and transparent, and all these are laudable objectives and we should be supporting them as much as possible, but not at the expense of officers\u2019, ultimately, liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does Steve think that officers should take the risk of driving pursuit?<\/p>\n
\u201cYes. I\u2019m a pursuit driver myself – what I\u2019m asking for is almost a cultural change within the organisation. So when officers are asked to provide an initial account at the roadside within sight of the accident they can say \u201cI need to process and I need to seek some advice\u201d and I think that\u2019s desperately important.”<\/p>\n
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THERE is a \u201creal need for legislation\u201d to protect officers from being prosecuted for dangerous driving, the Police Federation of England and Wales conference has heard. Steve Taylor, an Essex\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2833,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830\/revisions\/2833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}