Parking Crackdown – Area Commander Update
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| James Sutherland (Police, Chief Inspector, South Cambridgeshire) |
In February we launched a web-site where you could register complaints about parking in your village. As promised we have taken the information that you gave us and have run our first two crackdown days.
During these days we ring-fenced our PCSOs and deployed them only to the places where you told us parking was a problem. Before deploying our PCSOs I took a careful review of the information and it was clear to me that a lot of the parking being complained about wasn’t necessarily illegal. This is due to some confusion about the difference between a Highway Code Rule and the rules established by the Road Traffic Act. Without getting too technical, there are some rules in the highway code which are ‘should not’ and some that are ‘must not’. Only the latter can be legally enforced. Click on Read More for further information.However we recognise that this anti-social parking that breaches the highway code was of concern to a lot of you so rather than take no action, I drafted a letter highlighting the rules of the Highway Code that was placed under windscreen wipers of any car we found breaching one of the rules. We also developed some new ways of utilising the technology at our disposal to target our PCSOs and cut out some of the admin and paperwork normally associated with an operation like this- all at no extra expense to the public.
Over the course of the two days we issued a combined ticket/letter total of 200 which I hope you agree is some impressive work. We are going to be repeating these crackdown days at unannounced intervals throughout the year, striking a balance between dealing with parking concerns and the other very important work that our PCSOs have to do.
So, please continue to use the web-site to report concerns- we are essentially starting with a clean sheet- so if parking is a problem in your road you need to tell us about it. You can find the link here:
http://tinyurl.com/SouthCambs-Parking
I hope that you all have a safe weekend and that the weather stays nice for us!
Best wishes
Chief Inspector James Sutherland
Area Commander- South Cambs.