Metropolitan Police Consultation

The Metropolitan Police Authority are consulting us on the priorities to set for the Metropolitan Police.  The closing date is 25th November.  I have responded indicating what I believe might be an appropriate priority for them.
I have written before about the Roadsafe London website of the Metropolitan Police.  I have reported many instances of bad driving to them and my hope is that they have written to at least some of the miscreants I have identified.  However they have clearly rewritten their webpage in order to clarify what their priorities are:

"Please tell us about people who:

• Drive under the influence of drink or drugs
• Drive with no insurance
• Drive without a licence or whilst disqualified from driving
• Using an un-roadworthy vehicle

We are also happy to hear about:

• Drivers who race or excessively rev their cars close to homes.
• Road layouts that you think may be dangerous or could be improved.
• Criminals who deliberately cause crashes to defraud the insurance industry"

There is an old legal maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius which helpfully identifies that if you list a lot of things you want to be told about then it suggests that you may not be too interested in other things.  Equally if you list a lot of things that you are happy to hear about, it rather suggests you are not happy to hear about other things.  So where does bad driving around cyclists, use of mobile phones whilst driving, roadrage and the like fit into all this?  Possibly somewhere below the interests of the insurance industry and the peace and quiet of residential areas (not that those things do not have some importance, but they are not life and death).

I thought I had better look to the Metropolitan Police Cycle Taskforce in the hope that they were working hard to keep us cyclists safe from harm on the road.  Their priority appears to be very clearly on cycle theft (again important but not life and death) though they have set up a lorry in Trafalgar Square to show cyclists lorry blindspots (with an emphasis it seems on changing the behaviour of cyclists rather than that of lorries).  I could not see that there was a way of reporting bad driving to them.

Having hunted around a bit on the Metropolitan Police website, I thought I might make a contribution to what I thought might be prioritised more highly than at present.