A software engineer has successfully escaped prosecution. Cops not happy
Police are trying to get Gatso pictures of a Sussex rider removed from the internet after he used them to have the speeding case against him dismissed.
Peter Barker, 51, a software engineer, received a notice of intended prosecution stating he’d been photographed by the camera while riding at 38mph in a 30mph limit earlier this year on a BMW F650GS.
He obtained the two photographs, worked out how far his bike had travelled in the half a second gap between them and calculated his speed. It was 30mph, significantly less than 38mph.
UK law states if there’s more than a 10% discrepancy between the speed as recorded by a Gatso camera’s radar and the speed calculated from the two photos, then the reading is void. Despite police attempts to prosecute Mr Barker for riding at the lower speed he’d calculated, the case was dismissed.
The whole story was published on American motoring site www.thenewspaper.com, along with the Gatso pictures of Mr Barker. Now thenewspaper.com claims Sussex Police are attempting to get the photos removed from the site, saying using them violates their copyright. They’ve put up a copy of a letter from Sussex police’s solicitor asking Mr Barker to remove the photos which ends: “If they are not removed, further action may be contemplated.”
The website said: “Sussex Police did not send any copyright notice to us, and nor did their solicitor respond to requests for clarification and comment. The agency became particularly upset with Mr Barker in May after he threatened legal action against the Sussex speed camera partnership for insisting that he had been speeding even after his court acquittal. The agency had no choice but to issue a swift apology.”
The site added: “Mr Barker also believes that the local council and police do not want motorists to know that a time-distance calculation can be performed on the images to check the vehicle’s speed against the radar reading. A difference of more than 10% between the two figures renders the machine’s speed estimate unreliable under UK guidelines.”
A spokesman for Sussex safer roads partnership said: “We do not comment on individual cases and a single case with its own unique set of circumstances does not set a precedent. The partnership and Sussex police have no issue at this stage with the pictures currently being used.”
