to expect not to be made to leave 6 year old dd in the car on her own by the police.

[islandofsodor]

Dd had to be picked up from school early on Friday so as it was the first off the drive I took dh's car which I drive once in a blue moon.

Big mistake, his numer plate was not spaced correctly so I got pulled. It was on a dual carriageway with no hard shouler and I didn't feel I could safely stop so pulled off at the next junction which led onto a supermarket car park.

I got out of the car telling dd just to wait there a minute fully expecting to be booked for the numberplate.

The policeman started to have a go at me accusing me of failing to stop of a police office. I was terrified at this point and just kept repeating calmly, I'm sorry I was just trying to find a safe place to pull up I really was. Anyway he told me to get into the back of his car.

I indicated to dd and started to say I've got my little girl in there can I just get ....but her stopped me short and said he (his colleague who had got out and was running a reg check on his radio) can see her, you get in the back so I did. Anyway he started to take me through the process, fair enough, checking my details, was it my car, was I insured etc etc. I glanced up and dd was sobbing her little heart out crying Mummy, Mummy. They asked me her name and one of them went to talk to her but she sobbed louder so he eventually opened the car doo, lifeted her out and put her in the back of the police car with me.

I managed to calm her down whilst trying to take in the details of the booking and desperately trying to keep calm so it would just be a numberplate offense rather than failing to stop.

He started to explain about the reason it was an offense and an automatic vehicle tracking thing they have for stolen vehicles, dd was listening intently and he said "if your car was stolen with your little girl in it we wouldn't be able to find it" Couldn't he have just said stolen rather than scaring dd even more.

I was shaking by the end of it all, I know they have a job to do but it just seemed so insensitive to a little girl who thought her mummy was being taken away.

So why wasn't the number plate spacced correctly in the first place?

(personally I think everyone with a dodgy plate should be pulled over)

What happend about not having a correct plate?

Yeah, I'm interested in what was wrong with the actual plate too.

i dunno - i think any organisation needs feedback to improve, no? so flagging up how upsetting it was for the dd to be separated without explanation and how dangerous you thought it to be to be asked to stop on the dual carriageway, is not a bad idea imo.
if you make an appt to meet the person in charge of the police in cars (whoever that is locally) and explain that, while saying that youre not making trouble, you just want them to understand how frightening it was... it just might prompt a little thought for next time the pull a woman with young child alone.

Is it a personalised plate that has been printed to make it look more like a word?

DH's neighbour used to work for Radio 1, he had a plate that was RAD 101
He printed it to show RAD1O 1 and got pulled over for that and made to correct it!

I hate the police, when my dad died 2 of them were sent to tell my mum and whilst one locked my 26 year old sister in the kitchen by holding the handle and telling her to step away from the door the other one said " ive come to tell you your husband is dead and pick your children up from school"

There was no sit down im really sorry blah blah.

They then got me and my DB from school and made my mum tell us in front of them.

He said "go on tell them so we can get a move on"

Fuking Cunts i have never got over that day because of them.

Rant over.

so she was meant to leave her dd alone in a car pulled up at the side of a dual carriageway?

very safe

oh but in the eyesight of someone she'd never met?

and as she asked, what if her dd had SN?

i would be fuming!

"I agree with UnquietDad about the traffic crimes being easy pickings, the fucking roads are awash with ignorant donut-munching keystone cops harassing motorists for whatever stupid little detail they can find"

As someone's DH has said, you don't know who you are stopping and what offences may be revealed. A huge amount of drug arrests are made following random stop checks of vehicles, as well as those wanted on warrants and for other serious offences and illegal immigrants.

As well as stopping those who speed. Speeding motorists cause more deaths than any other crime.

And what if, god forbid, a child had been taken, wouldn't you be happy to be stopped knowing it was for a good reason?

Yes the officers where a bit insensitive wrt op dd. But they think suspiciously all the time, it's part of their job.

If an offence was being committed then tbh you should have stopped when you were signalled to do so by the police. Probably by failing to stop, you escalated the situation and they then treated you more harshly than they would have done. The police are trained to make a judgement call in any situation - so presumably they considered it a safe enough place for you to stop. We can't all overide the decision of the police just because we disagree with it. People would have all sorts of subjective views on whether a particular place was safe to stop or not - are the police supposed to let everyone else decide for themselves??!! I'm not saying the police force are perfect. Just that by refusing to respond to what you were signalled to do, when you were in the wrong in the first place, you've put yourself in a weak position.

Whether or not you committed an offence is not the issue. The police were unreasonable.

They could have easily checked whether the car was stolen while you were sitting in your own car; you have been asked to produce documents at the police station if needed.

You should never be put in a position whereby you have to leave your child alone!!!!

Are there any police officers around who can clarify procedures? I'm wary of making assumptions about other professionals jobs, because I'm not an expert.I assume that the police officers followed procedures correctly. If they didnt, then obviously they should accept the consequences for that. I just think it's very easy to sit and criticise about how other people do their jobs, without knowing all the details. One thing I'm sure of is that there will be very clear guidelines within the police force for how this situation should be handled.
I still think the OP was totally out of order in not responding to the police in the first place. It's ridiculous to think we can all pick and choose whether we repsond or not!

The fact that the kid got frightened here is not grounds for complaint. Kids get frightened in all sorts of circumstances involving the police and it's not up to the police to prevent that.

The OP was told to stop. She should have done it. Being middle class and having a kid in the back of her car did not give her a license to bend the rules.

Muthahubbard
"As someone's DH has said, you don't know who you are stopping and what offences may be revealed. A huge amount of drug arrests are made following random stop checks of vehicles, as well as those wanted on warrants and for other serious offences and illegal immigrants."
Innocent until proved guillty? This doesn't mean the police can treat people so insensitively and run roughshod over them for petty minor things.
islandofsodor, yanbu, they shouldn't have left your screaming child in the car.

My sil was stopped in a pretty northern town 6 or 7 times in a about a year, and asked about her car. She's black.

findtheriver, don't the guidelines say that you have to pull over where it's safe? Island has already stated she didn't feel it was a safe place to stop.

If that's the exact wording of the guidelines, then it's a bit crappy isnt it?? We might all have different definitions of where is 'safe'!! I think it's reasonable to assume that police officers who have huge experience of this are not going to try to get someone to stop where it's unsafe!

You have my full sympathy on this.

In my view your only error was to have a badly spaced number plate. It is quite reasonable to find a safe place to stop, and if you are a woman on your own I think it is even reasonable to continue to a police station before stopping since people impersonate the police.

The police didn't deal with this offence appropriately and you should put in a complaint.

Re the safe place to stop - did the dual carriageway have a hard shoulder?

"then you do not have to pull over, but you should call 999 and tell them what you are doing and confirm its a poliuce car "

ermm but wouldn't you then be in trouble for using a phone while driving???

Exactly Darthvader

I don't think you can reasonably assume anything of the police. Last month, , we got caught up in a mini marathon in a small town.The police directed our car through the street as the last stragglers jogged in. Unfortunately, someone collapsed, right in front of us. A polceman next to me told us to stay where we were. i realised that the ambulance wouldn't be able to get past us, so suggested we carefully move to the side so it could get through. he shouted "You stay right where you are!!".

Sure enough, the ambulance arrived and couldn't get through. He then shouted at us to move.He was really angry with us! He hadn't foreseen what could have happened and was even more annoyed because we'd seen it before him.
( The woman was ok btw, heat exhaution)

i assume it was a marked police car

The other thing I find interesting is that the OP made it clear that she knew the number plate was unlawful and was fully expecting that this was the issue when she got pulled. Yet she chose to take this car because it was 'first off the drive' thus avoiding a few minutes hassle of swapping the cars around....
The simple solution here is a) sort the number plate! b) until the plate is sorted, spend a few moments swapping the cars around!

I am astounded at some of the overreactions on this thread.

People usually only have dodgy number plates for one of two reasons. Either the driver is a poser with more money than sense who seems to feel the need to tell the world how important he is by means of his personalized penis extention? erm I mean number plate.

Or, the car is stolen.

So imagine this scenario:

Police driving down the road when they see a car with an illegal number plate. They signal to the driver to pull over, because as yet they don?t know whether the vehicle is just a dodgy personalized plate or whether it actually might be a stolen vehicle. Driver doesn?t stop, so police begin to suspect that it?s more likely to be a stolen vehicle, so they follow the car. As they do so they notice that there is also a young child in the back of the vehicle. Suspicion heightens. Maybe the car has been stolen with the child in it. Maybe the child has been abducted and this woman is using a stolen car to get away with the child. The fact the driver is a woman should not make the situation any less suspicious, women are often used in crime because they can appear more vulnerable and less likely to be guilty. Or maybe the car has been stolen and this is the woman?s own child in which case this might be a child protection issue (the types that steal cars aren?t generally lovely upstanding members of society).

So eventually the driver stops and gets out of the car. The police want her to get into their car because she has already tried to get away from them once. She protests that she must go back for her child but at the moment they don?t want this because they A, don?t actually know whether it is her child, and B, don?t know what kind of crime she may have committed.

So she sits in the back of the car and another police officer keeps an eye on the child. Eventually the police officer gets the child out and takes her to her mum in the back of the police car. It is only at this point the police are able to establish that she is the wife of the poser with the dodgy personalized plate.

They have to err on the side of caution. Even more so where a child is involved.

The op had a dodgy plate. She failed to stop. She had an at that point, unknown child in the back of her car.

The child is 6 years old. The op should have been able to explain to her where she was going and why. And tbh a 6 year old should not be so terrified of the police, on the whole the police are the good guys.

And all this talk about potentially bogus police is just rubbish. Especially if the police car was marked etc.

Exactly wannabe. Imagine a situation where a child had been abducted and the police, after managing to get the driver to stop, and away from the child, then allowed her to return to the child. There would be public outrage and charges of incompetence levelled at the police! I think police officers, like people in certain other professions, are frequently in a no win situation.
You really are asking for trouble driving around with a number plate that doesnt adhere to regulations, and then failing to stop when pulled over!

'A woman driving a child in the car is most unlikely to have abducted it. In any event it would have been clear to the officers once they had approached the car and spoken to the occupants that was not the case.' - how, exactly, would this have immediately been clear?? How would the officers have magically known that this wasn't a case of a mother abducting her child from the father who had custody, for instance??

"A woman driving a child in the car is most unlikely to have abducted it.". I'm sure that people who may have seen Myra Hindley with her victims may have thought the same.

Imo that's a very dangerous assumption to make, and one which I'm sure the police need to be very careful before making.

Just because it's a woman does not make her immune from crime.