Urgent advice needed - I have been a bit bad....

[tartyhighheels]

ok so we have had parking crackdown at our school which involved 8 (yes 8) police, comm support officers and traffic wardens standing about and moving everyone on

On the first day i reverse into space and forget tow bar is on and knock car behind number plate - no damage but cue. gross over reaction by pc and cso - take all my details check everything try and tell me they can do me for driving without due care and attention - bear in mind no damage and owner of car really cool about it... this goes on and on and ends up in them not being able to do anything at all as all legal - i was ascerbic to say the least because this charade took about 45 mins and all my children were there etc.

Next morning though am folk hero with mummies.... my victory however is short-lived

because, the next day after school pick up

cars parked and mummy in front of me putting her dc in car and securing him in car seat, i pull in behind her and wait for her to leave the space. wpc runs (yes actually sprints accross the road) and tells me to move on immediately. I say i am waiting for space, she says move on right now or i will give you a ticket for double parking! i say again i am just waiting and she gets her magic book out so i drive off (past the children we are trying to protect twice unnecessarily - in my mind putting them at more risk than just staying put) - i go off and then turn to the very space i was waiting for - wpc points at my car as i do something and writes in magic notebook - pick up children and then drive off and as i do wpc in question gives me a sarky smile and wave (even the 8 year old dd remarked how sarky) so i go to give her the finger and shit out at the last minute and think better of it...

Next day - i am charged with section 5 public order offence!!!!!!!!!! she says i gave her the 'wanker sign' (not my style) - actually i didn't but i said nothing rather than make it any worse.

so... am i going to get a criminal record? could she have given me a fixed penalty thus avoiding criminal record? do you think i was harrassed? and actually as i said i didn't really do the thing i was accused of but rather was going to give her the finger (thank god i didnt eh?)

Amazingly due to the grave seriousness of this crime it has been brought to magistrates court with a month!!!!!!!!!!!!!! amazing

i am terrified but completely outraged - i know i pissed them off by not commiting and offence the day before but this is so so over the top.

any advice anyone????? crapping myself..

oh tarty i hope they do the same for you. it really is ridiculous that so much time and money is invested in these petty things.

good luck. when do you go to court?

i am going to call on mon to see if mine was thrown out too at the same time as hers - it should have been but if not it will be 6 - 8 weeks until i go to court. I really wish i could have gone yesterday and got it out of the way but i just didn't have any childcare.

Still worried about it and I will update as soon as i know... but a bit more angry about all this now as clearly there never was a case to answer - just making an example and chucking their weight around.

without wanting to embark on a personal attack, I'm keen to understand the logic behind the behaviour of the parents of this school. The folk behave at my son's school makes me despair at times.

Given a scenario where the police rightly or wrongly have been told to do something, and the situation is escalating daily, why continue to bring your car close to the school on the second and third days?

Is there no point when someone says, "maybe I'll leave it at home today", or "perhaps I'll park 5 mins walk up the road and walk the rest"?

The police officers concerned must have been going spare by the third day, nobody gets the message, the cars continue to pile in. Someone on foot regardless of whether they are wearing a police uniform or not can find the behaviour of people in cars intimidating quite easily. Don't doubt that the end result was over the top and not the best use of police powers, but did it not occur to parents collectively that if they continued to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in the face of a police presence they were going to kick back?

The parking issues are a bit of a red herring here in terms of the offence of the s5 itself.

I'm a defence lawyer and would DEF be advising you to plead not guilty. The offence, on what you say, appears to be the making of the wanker sign. Which you deny anyway. TBH even if you did, or display the middle finger, it would still be not guilty. There is a case that says that police officers should be able to take this sort of abuse. They would hear and see a LOT worse and the law says that they should, as police officers, have a thick enough skin and be professional enough not to be upset by it and that is the crux of this offence - whether offence would have been caused to the person.

I can't remember the name of the case off hand sadly as I've been out of the game for 10 months on maternity leave. Its a well known case however and is probably why the other mother's case was dropped. Yours should be too if the CPS know their law.

Good luck.

out of interest how has the school responded to all this? Doesn't reflect well that things got to the stage where the local residents had to call in the police (ignoring the s5 thing which sounds like things just got of hand). Are there any moves to try and cut the number of vehicles coming to and from the school?

HeadlessLadyH - i am confident that it has already been thrown out if the other case is anything to go by. Tragically, there is no more to the case than i have reported. I have already pleaded not guilty.

dhlurker -The school are under the impression that the two offences that the police reported back to them were for parking!!! no-one at the school knows they are for public order offences. And no nothing has been done to reduce traffic, we use an informal one way system to make things easier. I have not been at the school long so i have no idea why there was such a heavy handed approach to this but there is a man on the corner who comes and takes pictures of people and hurls abuse even if you park legally outside his house. He also brings his car out and parks accross 2 spaces, that sort of thing - he is a bit of a nob but i don't know the history.

I have no choice but to take my car and i do not tend to park 5 mins away and walk becuase my baby goes to sleep on the way and i will not disturb him. It is a public road and i have done nothing illegal - not ever, and lets face it this isn't a parking issue and i havent pushed the boundaries sufficiently to break the law - not by any stretch of the imagination so this should not be happening to me. I do not give a rats ass if the police were pissed off that they couldn't nail anyone - i am sorry the residents have an issue with people parking but i does not mean i should get a criminal record for something i have not done just because some stroppy wpc is having a bad day (remember it was her who booked us both!- coincidence, i think not)

Some policemen and women are horrible little jobsworths who get off on the power. When this is thrown out you should make a complaint about the WPC.

Actually the other woman is writing to complain already and I will do too.

She read my rights to me the next day in the loudest voice she could for max effect - actually two other people used the word jobsworth to her after she did it. She is a bully on a power trip and i am not backing down.

no of course you shouldn't get a criminal record. The issue perhaps though is that with school run traffic the collective behaviour of all the parents, of which each taken on its own might be completely reasonable, together can become anti-social / dangerous.

You yourself admit double parking (waiting for a space). On your own maybe harmless; as part of a school community of hundreds this can mean dozens of vehicles double parked at any one time as people rotate through spaces. One parent stopping where they shouldn't "just to drop off" can seem reasonable, but repeat 40 times in an hour and it doesn't seem very reasonable.

A situation can develop whereby (in a primary school) the behaviour of parents of younger kids starts to make life more difficult for older children at the school who are trying to travel independently. Every parent driving to the school has their own reason why they "must" drive and "must" park as close to the gates as possible.

I don't doubt that your man on the corner has lost the plot. However I'd suspect that when local residents have been asked what they want the police to prioritise, school run traffic violations have been very high up the list. What are you (the school community) going to do about it?

dhlurker - the wpc didn't charge her for double parking, she lied and made up a charge of threatening or offensive behaviour.

i think i have been very clear about the fact the i didnt even know waiting for a space was double parking (i reckon most peopleon here would think that double parking involved actually parking)- even in a court of law i don't think this would stick otherwise i am sure she would have given me a ticket if she could.

there aren't that many cars coming to school considering how big the school is - it has buses but none that come near me and a lot of people walk because it is in the middle of a big estate and a lot of children come locally and walk. The ones that come in cars are from a long way out becuase it is a catholic school it has an intake from a huge area.

To be honest, I am not doing a thing about it except to drive and park considerately.

the saddest thing about what the police have done in all of this is that all he mummies at the school just have even less respect than they did before - a lot of these people had suffered burglaries etc and had no help and as the police presence was so fullsome they questioned that - rightly so. They do pay their wages and they wanted to know why, in the scheme of things why this took priority. I wasn't even one of those that questioned this but i did take issue with being threatened with a fake charge the day before and then the policeman 'letting me off' by using his 'discretion' - it was alll a load of bollocks and doesn't really help public relations does it?

seems odd that if there is no problem the police became involved.

Regardless of whether there was a problem with parking, th police can't go around making up charges!

seems odd that they didn't manage to issue any tickets for parking either? like i said, i have not been there long so not sure of the history

and absolutely right they cannot make up charges because apart from the effect on me personally they now look like complete arses

The police at the moment seem to have a policy of doing local crime surveys and then bring in a lot of officers to target those crimes identified in the survey (quick win, locals happy, police seen to be doing something). The above sounds a lot like the outcome of one of these surveys. Its a shame if the parents of the school walk away (or drive away) with the view that its all down to the police being unreasonable, there is no problem etc etc. At every school my kids have attended there has at some point been a problem with school run cars.

but this wasn't about parking

"parking crackdown at our school"?

The charge wasn't about parking though.

yes we know that. The police clearly handled their "crackdown" badly. But that doesn't mean that the parents shouldn't give some thought to how things got to a stage where they were having confrontations with the police.

the confrontations with others were based around the sheer numbers of police and their over zealousness even with those parking legally, also about some people not having their burglaries etc attended - all fair comment

It sounded to me like your incident arose from your double parking outside the school (waiting for a space) ignoring a police presence, despite having had a run in with the same group of officers the day before. Multiply that by a few other people doing the same and you have a confrontation.

This is obviously still very personalised for you, with the stress of the threat of court action. You have my every sympathy for that and I'm no fan of police abuse of the public order or criminal justice acts (whoever would have thought....).

Maybe now isn't the right time, but perhaps when the anger fades a bit then it is worth talking to the PTA or chair of governors and finding out what they are doing to stop the same situation arising again? Are they meeting with the local residents association (sounds like they should be)? Would life be better for everyone concerned if they just di what the dutch do and banned parking within 200m of schools?

Still I feel this isn't about the parking, you feel free to keep banging on about it of course - if i had commited an offence believe me she would have given me a ticket - what i did would not stand up in court as double parking so i know this is not about parking it is about police abusing their position in the community, making things up and further alienating the very people they are meant to serve. I did nothing wrong and parking near my children's school, legally and thoughtfully is not wrong - so no, i cannot imagine making any sort of enquiry to the pta etc al. what others do is their business, it is not for me to dictate how close people park to the school.

To be quite frank i couldn't be less interested in finding a parking solution for my school - the Dutch also have a free for children public transport system which is incredibly wide ranging and therefore this policy is workable. Very very few people drive their children to school in Holland compared to the UK - it is not a comparable argument. I have lived and taught in holland so i do feel qualified to comment on this

I genuinely couldn't give a fuck about parking at my school, anti-social enough for you? I am certainly not going to start some sort of crusade to sort parking out to keep the police from getting too heavy with people....I have never seen anyone do anything really serious re.parking but like i said i have only been there a few months. My concern is with Police abusing their powers, wasting my tax money on stuff like this which has proved not only fruitless but even counter-productive in the community the are meant to be working for. Remember, not only the police time this has taken to police and charge, and then take to the cps and then have a prosecutor in court etc etc. only to have it thrown out. If i go with a lawyer they will also be paying my £500 costs for that too when mine is thrown out as well... Everyone at our school has been left with a bad taste, it is not because they are thoughtless people who park near the school it is because they saw something that was wrong happening and many of them have experienced a lack of police presence when they needed it - for really serious things. This was not about child safety (as it should be i assume) this was about being seen to be doing something. A token effort.

a quick read of the legislation suggests that the reason you didn't get a ticket was that the police were being nice and moving people on rather than slapping tickets on windscreens. Another reason might be that the main restriction on double parking is civil rather than criminal:

under the RTA:

You MUST NOT leave your vehicle or trailer in a dangerous position or where it causes any unnecessary obstruction of the road.
[Laws RTA 1988, sect 22 & CUR reg 103]

but under Civil Parking Enforcement:

(ticket may be issued for....) Vehicle parked more than 50 centimetres from the edge of the carriageway and not within a designated parking place.

Many people would take the view that enforcing laws like this near schools is a very sensible use of taxpayers money.