UK's Top Traffic Cop Gets 42-Day Driving Ban
SafeSpeed reports that Med Hughes, the UK's "top traffic cop," has been disqualified for 42 days at Wrexham magistrates court for driving at 90mph in a 60mph zone. The now former chair of the Association of Chief Police Officers road safety committee has been the locus of particularly virulent anti-speed camera ire since he was hoisted by his own electronic petard. The court case put the Welsh cop in the Mother of All PR binds: if he wasn't banned, it would be a tacit admission that speeding isn't dangerous per se. If he was banned (as he now is), it would show Hughes to be a good old-fashioned English (Welsh?) hypocrite, heaping dishonor on his rep, the police and Hughes' camera-wielding "road safety partnerships." Sensibly enough, at least as far as we've heard, Hughes has said sweet FA about his brush with the law. Predictably enough, SafeSpeed's Paul Smith put the boot in. ""We don't believe for a single second that Mr Hughes was driving dangerously and he must now tell us the truth about the role of speed limits in road safety… The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Mr Hughes should clearly have been preaching what he practices – because clearly he knows that exceeding the speed limit isn't necessarily dangerous."
[Watch a video of Med talking about the importance of speed limits here.]
More by Robert Farago
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Beautifully laced with British English terms. Or as we Americans say, "Do as I say, not as I do" 90 in a 60 is pretty extreme, most drivers probably don't get popped for that amount usually. I'm surprised only by the lack of a cover story about how there was some pressing emergency that demanded he drive 50% above the speed limit.
British hypocrisy? Nooooo....!
I don't believe that a senior policeman caught speeding in the US would have been charged let alone gone to court. Individual hypocrisy in the UK might be better than having policeman who are above the law in the US...