Malibuflyer wrote:
Many legislations have a limit for driving under influence under which you can only be fined if “driving abilities have been impaired” without measurable definition of what “impaired” really means.
Do you mean if there is some alcohol in your bloodstream but not enough to make you automatically guilty of an offence, you can still be done for driving with impaired abilities? I have never heard of that.
Once upon the time in the UK it came down to a policeman’s judgement as to whether you were too drunk to drive. It was realised that this gave policemen far too much scope for little power trips against citizens they deemed to have shown them insufficient respect (contempt of cop), and that policemen were no better placed to make such judgements than the average person anyway. Thus we now have a simple measurement of alcohol level in the bloodstream, and value above which you may not be whilst driving – with strict liability.
The positive is you don’t have to fear a policeman being out to get you. The negative is that the blood alcohol level, whilst being a reasonable indicator, is not actually a measure of your fitness to drive.
Graham wrote:
Once upon the time in the UK it came down to a policeman’s judgement as to whether you were too drunk to drive. It was realised that this gave policemen far too much scope for little power trips against citizens they deemed to have shown them insufficient respect
My oral history lessons said the issue was that the UK police would invariably find that an upper class driver was “tired and emotional and advised to go home” versus intoxicated although the paternalistic power trip against others version rings true as well.
Insulting somebody is perfectly legal in the US, and protected as such.
Silvaire wrote:
My oral history lessons said the issue was that the UK police would invariably find that an upper class driver was “tired and emotional and advised to go home” versus intoxicated although the paternalistic power trip against others version rings true as well.
Perhaps once upon a time, when the average policeman might have had some deference towards the upper classes. These days, if they had the power described, being upper class would be the first trigger for a power trip. Inverse snobbery is enormous in the UK these days.
Insulting someone is legal here too. It’s when the words become threatening that the law gets involved, which I believe is the same in the US. Contempt of cop however, as I understand it, is going on a power trip when someone hasn’t done anything wrong but isn’t showing what the officer might consider sufficient respect….. nothing to do with the law, and I believe it’s a term of US origin.
My oral history lesson in relation to the UK drunk driving enforcement reflects a “once upon a time” roughly 70 years ago 
but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true at that time.
The police in England do record Crime : non Crimes where the “victim” just has to have seen something that they’ve taken offense to. These show up on background checks.
There are members of the police who absolutely do love to exercise power when they don’t necessarily have it. We saw earlier in the lockdowns where people were told they couldn’t sit in their garden and had to be indoors.
The video going round of the police rounding up a woman who was walking claiming that she wasn’t exercising because they had spotted her in town earlier in the day (she claimed to have been going food shopping to tesco). I’ve had to drive about to check on some property and around here traffic is certainly down on what it was but it is definitely not as quiet as the march lockdown.
Well, guys, if you want to really get noticed by “enforcement”, this is how to do it 
The good news is that the UK has vaxxed 2.6M people so far. This is pretty amazing. Nobody can understand it. I reckon the army must be running it and they have terminated sidestepped all the yellow jacketed NHS managers Traditionally, at times of crisis, the UK govt has called in the SAS, with excellent results, but there aren’t enough of them.
alioth wrote:
I’d like to see a source for this.
I’ve got that tidbit from one of the official information briefings of the Swiss Task force when asked if people who have had Covid should vaccinate themselfs.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Many examples: Insults, improper behavior, even minor bodily injury (if I give you a clap on the shoulder) is often not black or white. Many legislations have a limit for driving under influence under which you can only be fined if “driving abilities have been impaired” without measurable definition of what “impaired” really means.
Yes, but these are all questions of degrees. There is little doubt that the law may have been broken, because legislation has been enacted to make this type of conduct illegal. It may well be right for the police to ask the Courts to test whether the criteria are met.
My concern in the example we were discussing and generally some of the enforcement of COVID rules as opposed to legislation, is they are rules, they arent legislation. There isnt a law that makes the conduct of the people concerned illegal, and it should be very clear to the police the difference between rules (for which even the word is misleading, they are better described as earnest recommendations or some such) and legislation even if it isnt to most of the public, some of the politicians and the press either because they dont know, or it suits them to suggest otherwise. This is not a luxury the police can afford themselves, they must upload the law, not the way in which politicians might emplore us to conduct ourselves.
Peter wrote:
This is pretty amazing. Nobody can understand it. I reckon the army must be running it and they have terminated sidestepped all the yellow jacketed NHS managers Traditionally, at times of crisis, the UK govt has called in the SAS, with excellent results, but there aren’t enough of them.
I could agree more, clearly the army must be running the show.
I recently had to go to the nearest city centre hospital, recently newly built, with a person with suspected fractures. Reception was as far away from the car park as it could be, the x-ray facilities were as far away from reception as they could be, and the orthopedic department, once omitted, was on the top floor. You couldnt make it up. I suppose the managers have very little idea what a hospital actually does, but doubtless their offices were either in the middle of their empire on the ground floor, or in the top floor penthouse. I suppose they might well argue that if you can make it to the far reaches of the hospital with broken limbs then you might justify treatment.
As it tunred out the person was discharged with mild pain killers. Three days later after many complaints they were omitted with a fractured ankle an disintergrated shoulder, requiring several hours on the table, surgeons working at each end and some new titanium work, very stron pain killers and anti coagulants.
To be fair, and so as not to give the wrong impression, our NHS in the UK can be either very good, or very bad, and it is sometimes difficult to know from all the anecdotal reports where their average performance actually lies, albeit my limited experience has sadly been substantially towards the very bad, especially with respect to cases that have been of serious concern, which is a worry.
Peter wrote:
The good news is that the UK has vaxxed 2.6M people so far.
Where are you getting an up-to-date number? Everything I see seems to have a significant lag, e.g. dated 1 week ago.
