Dorset Road carnage: We join the No Excuse campaign (From Dorset Echo)

Dorset Road carnage: We join the No Excuse campaign

10:00am Wednesday 3rd March 2010 in

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DORSET ECHO reporter Arron Hendy joins traffic officers as they roam the roads of Dorset on the lookout for motorists breaking the law.

As part of an ongoing campaign dubbed ‘No Excuse’ aimed at reducing road deaths across the county, specialist squads are targeting law-breaking drivers.

THE latest campaign to cut road deaths is called ‘No Excuse’ but that is not stopping drivers from coming up with lots of them.

So far the scheme has seen 80 motorists a day stopped by police for driving offences that put lives at risk on Dorset’s roads.

Excuses given to police include being in too much of a rush to put on seatbelts and saying they were only going around the corner to the petrol station.

Two officers from Dorset Police are working on the project full-time and every day they go out they take four others from the operations division.

They are using two unmarked cars, an unmarked motorcycle and a marked motorcycle – though it is planned that all will soon be unmarked.

When a man in Southill was stopped on Radipole Lane for not wearing a seatbelt he told PC Graham Pinney he was in too much of a rush and the officers should have better things to do.

“I said saving lives is perhaps the best thing I could be doing,” PC Pinney said.

He added: “With seatbelts the general comment you get is ‘it’s only myself I’m going to hurt’.”

“That’s a bit of a selfish view as there’s the effect on their family. If they are killed or injured we have got to talk to the family. There’s no easy way around it when you’ve got to pass on that information.”

In Dorchester a driver passing Kings Park was lucky that PC Pinney and PC Sean Ford decided not to turn around and catch him.

On the Puddletown bypass they followed cars and used a device to track their average speed between points.

A young driver doing 83mph was stopped and given a ticket.

The officers told him they did not want to have to visit his mum to tell her he had been in a crash.

The driver said he had not heard of the No Excuse scheme but welcomed the chance of completing a driver awareness course.

He said: “It sounds like a good idea. I would rather do that than get three points.

“It’s scary when you are pulled over.

“I won’t be speeding any more for one thing.”

At the two-way lights at roadworks on the Ridgeway, PC Pinney noticed a driver who kept looking down while the lights were red and continued to do so as he pulled away.

When he was stopped the traffic queued behind as the officers discovered he had been listening to voicemails and reading text messages.

PC Sean Ford said the scheme is not about prosecutions but more about education.

One driver was told to put his seatbelt on as he passed in the opposite direction in slow traffic and a man pulling out of Lancaster Road onto Dorchester Road was told to clear the condensation from his windscreen so he could see where he was going.