"Community Speed Watch" - complete fantasy, again, from Dorset Police and PCC, and some related comments about tax

There have been some recent comments published by Dorset Police / PCC about Community Speed Watch (CSW) that demonstrate that the long history of misinformation / delusion about their activities including "road safety work" is continuing in full flow.

A number of quite bold and direct statements about CSW impact have been made, but as I suspected, when asked to provide some kind of analysis / data to back them up by FOI, there is nothing. See the FOI question and answer here: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/please_evidence_statements_made

Another of their good old tricks is also apparent, a simplistic interpretation of cherry-picked numbers to provide a false conclusion: "Casualties in Dorset continue to decrease (please see Record 2 document)". Note how they have picked a randomly high year to start this data from, 2015. If we look in the wider context, from 2010, there is something a bit strange. Beyond the random variation, there is a slight upward trend 2010 to 2017, (and I don't remember them telling us they were doing a bad job at the time). Then there is a sudden shift to a lower but more constant period 2018 onwards (with potentially a covid dip in 2020).

So what happened in 2018? Was there a sudden massive increase in CSW operations? I don't think so. But there was a change in injury reporting systems!

Of course this is only one of vast number of possible explanations, but to provide the data they did, and the interpretation of it that they chose, it should now be obvious, is a nonsense of astonishing magnitude, and quite probably deliberate. A "continuing decrease" it is not, it is 2 periods of flat / slight increase with a shift in 2018.

Are Dorset Police not aware that there is an increasing proportion of cars on the road now that will not crash even if you try? (autonomous emergency braking). It seems much more likely that even if there was a genuine reduction, it would be more likely to be due to things like this, than a few people randomly irritating drivers with a speed gun, or pretty much anything else our virtually non-existent police do.

Note also how they choose to ignore the obvious dangers of CSW. I almost collided with a "volunteer" once on my bicycle, when he gleefully leapt into the middle of a cycle lane with his speed gun looking in the other direction. That could easily have resulted in someone falling into the road in front of a moving vehicle and a serious injury or death. And this after a motorcyclist was killed in Dorset when the witness said he was riding sensibly and just panicked when he saw a speed van and lost control, on a perfectly good dual carriageway with a ludicrous recently reduced speed limit of 50. I would have thought that Dorset Police would have learned to take negative / unintended consequences seriously.

It therefore feels as though it would be impossible for any benefit of CSW (which could only be a small fraction of virtually nothing) to outweigh the dangers and risks (which PCC David Sidwick has admitted he is aware of) and to continue doing it based only on false information (presumably to prop up the perception of good about the obsession of the police about "speeding") is totally unacceptable but sadly typical for Dorset Police and other forces.

I have commented on plenty more false / misleading information from Dorset Police / PCC over the years , this demonstrates that far from scrutinising the Police and making them accountable to the public, PCC David Sidwick (a politician), and his predecessor Martyn Underhill (even worse, an ex-policeman) are only providing another layer of gloss and protection around them. Sadly any positive news coming from Dorset Police about Dorset Police needs to be treated with suspicion. My family does not share the optimism of David Sidwick about reducing crime with my own daughter suffering an attempted mugging recently in the middle of the day just outside Bournemouth train station, she is aware of multiple other attacks on friends recently, we have never experienced anything like that before.

To any politicians who may be reading, this is the tip of the iceberg of broken Britain, this disease runs right through Policing, councils, health, transport, energy, environment, education, finance, water, you name it, it's broken. Lack of money is not the problem. You could throw all the money in the world at Dorset Police and it would not change the incompetence, waste, corruption, protection, and therefore entirely inadequate performance misrepresented to the public as excellent by people like PCC David Sidwick.

Even before Labour started, even just on basic PAYE and VAT, many normal people lost about a 1/3 of their income before they received it and another 20% when they spent it, that is about a 1/2 to the government. Considering the vast number of other taxes the government were actually already taking the vast majority of earnings. This was already disproportionate and totally excessive and a significant downward force on the economy. The money in the country is finite, not infinite. How blind do you have to be to not see that trying to take more money won't magically mean there will be more of it, something else will give, jobs, new business, growth, exports, and almost certainly, less movement of money reducing tax opportunities! This is lazy, greedy, oppressive, inflationary, demotivating and counterproductive. It's a miracle we have any economy at all.

So to ramp up taxes even more to fix public services without any mention of actually fixing the problem, the public services themselves, is mind-bogglingly stupid and damaging and only likely to make matters a great deal worse.

And while our councils seem to be going bust and pushing up costs, we have 3,106 officials receiving more than £100,000, with 829 receiving over £150,000 in 2022-23, apparently on a mission to do everything possible to make life harder for the few who actually make the country work. There does however seem to be endless piles of money to fiddle with the roads resulting in disruption and usually, lower efficiency therefore greater cost to business and inappropriately lower speed limits, and as we can see from Dorset's KSI figures, contrary to what we are told, no actual reduction in casualty.