Motoring offences clampdown: are we all fine now?

By Helen Wells, Lecturer in Criminology




 
Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin has announced that fines for a variety of motoring offences will rise from £60 to £90. Offences covered by the increase included speeding, driving through a red light and using a hand held mobile device. Interestingly, the offence of careless driving (for which a new fixed penalty is proposed) was couched in terms of behaviours that we can probably all recognise: cutting up other drivers, eating a sandwich or lighting a cigarette at the wheel, driving at an inappropriate speed and needlessly hogging the middle lane on a motorway. What is not so immediately recognisable is the legal definition of any of these behaviours, which all require some degree of interpretation. No doubt, however, the choice of these irritating activities is deliberate and is likely to appeal to motorists who often criticise the behaviour of other motorists whilst defending their own activities which they view as comparatively more minor or insignificant.

Current reporting of the announcement in the media has, perhaps surprisingly, focussed on the enforcement of the offence of using a mobile phone while driving – not on speeding. Even the Daily Mail opted to use the word ‘safety’ in its headline (and did not put it in its usual sceptical “scare-quotes”) and seemed to support the need for more enforcement to ensure that these new penalties and offences have the desired effect. Seemingly, there is more of a consensus from motorists that mobile phone use is a genuine and legitimate focus for police attention, although at first glance the offence does show several similarities with speed limit violations. How might we explain this differential reaction then?

Research into the criminal histories of motoring offenders has focussed on ‘serious’ traffic offenders (drink drivers, dangerous drivers, disqualified drivers) so we are unable to comment on whether or not mobile phone users are ‘real’ criminals in off road contexts (as ANPR research tells us those without insurance, tax or MOT tend to also be) or whether they are more likely to be otherwise law-abiding individuals, but my money would be on the latter. Both the offences of speeding and mobile phone use are ones that can be, and are, committed by the ‘ordinary’ driver. They are the sort of behaviour that a ‘law-abiding’ driver might drift into, and out of, without too much malign intent. Of course, the level of intent and the level of harm are not correlated and even the smallest lapses in attention can lead to some catastrophic results, but persuading the public of this is not easy. No wonder, perhaps, when recent central government guidance on road safety advocates a ‘twin track’ approach to offending that reflects the fact that some drivers have ‘lapses’ (and need education) while OTHERS ‘cause significant harm’ (and should be punished). So how come the 400+ comments offered to the Daily Mail site on this story (at the time of writing at 2pm on the day the story came out) are broadly supportive of the crackdown on mobile phone use when they are so noticeably less so when it comes to stories about speeding and speed cameras?

Well, the research basis for the two offences does not provide many answers to this question. The legitimacy of enforcing against both types of offences is supported by a growing research base that links the behaviour to an increase risk of a crash occurring. For some reason, this seems to be believed more in one case than the other. Whilst suggestions that speeding is responsible for 1/3 of road crashes continue to be challenged, the findings that mobile phone use reduces the drivers’ attention by in excess of 70% seem to be more readily believed, and were even quoted supportively in public responses to the story on both The Guardian and the Daily Mail websites.

Perhaps, then, it is explained by the prevalence of the offence. Whilst research suggests that almost all drivers speed at some point, perhaps we are not all as inclined to pick up our mobile phone whilst driving. Perhaps this is simply because our phone may not be to hand in the way that the accelerator is to foot, or perhaps we are all more receptive to new road safety messages than old ones. Perhaps exceeding the speed limit has been positively reinforced by years, even decades, of ‘getting away with it’, and mobile phone use while driving has yet to become such a habit.

Perhaps, in the end, it is all down to drivers simply wanting to get where they want to go. The peculiar thing about speeding is that, if another driver is doing it, and gets away with it (by which I mean does not cause a crash) then we may consider that they have assisted our passage to our destination by not holding us up. It is slow drivers that more often come in for criticism, in my research experience – something perhaps alluded to in the DfT announcement about a crackdown on inappropriate speed. Another driver using their mobile phone, however, produces no benefit to anyone else in terms of keeping traffic moving, and (I’m talking from my own experience of observing phone-using drivers here) is more likely to be left at a junction with us sitting impatiently behind, veering across onto our side of the road or hampering our progress in some other way. As such, we may support enforcement attempts that problematize what they are doing at the expense of our freedom of movement.

Unlike speed limit infringements, detecting people using their mobile phones at the wheel is going to require humans. It will not be a case of automated enforcement clicking driver after driver and generating fine after fine at relatively low cost. Perhaps, given a context of declining traffic officer numbers phone-using drivers just don’t foresee a clampdown in this area as posing them much of a problem.


POSTSCRIPT: FORTHCOMING PhD STUDENTSHIP OPPORTUNITY: Do the issues raised in this blog interest you? Are you looking for the opportunity to conduct research in this area? Well read on. The DfTs announcement, as reported, failed to make any reference to educational alternatives to fixed penalties although the 2011 Strategic Framework for Road Safety suggested that education programmes would feature heavily in future activity and early research shows that they have some success in changing attitudes. In an era when any proposals to target driving offences are met with calls of ‘revenue raising’, alternatives that do not contribute to central or local funds have been popular with drivers and enforcers alike. Offering the driver an opportunity to learn from their mistake and to modify their behaviour may be viewed as a fairer alternative to the fixed level fine and, crucially in the case of Speed Awareness Courses offers the driver the chance to avoid the really unpopular aspect of the penalty – the endorsement points. Just such an alternative specifically aimed at changing attitudes to mobile phone use amongst those caught offending in this way operates in Staffordshire and preliminary research into its effectiveness suggests cause for optimism. A PhD studentship, funded jointly by Keele University and Staffordshire Police, and looking into the longer term effects of such a course will begin shortly, so if the issues in this posting are of interest to you, watch this space for information on an exciting opportunity in this area!

PhD Grant Success for Keele Sociology graduate!

We are delighted to announce that Rachel Cason (nee Wiggett) has just been awarded a prestious ESRC Studentship for her PhD. This is a real achievement for her (and for Keele) as the Open Competition awards are extremely difficult to come by and Rachel is one of only 77 students nationally to receive one in the whole of the Social Sciences in the UK.

She is just completing her Masters in Research in Sociology, taught by many members of the School of Sociology and Criminology, and prior to that she achieved a First Class degree in Sociology and French from Keele. She also won the Neil and Gina Smith Student of the Year award (the second Sociology student to do so in 2 years!) for her all round commitment to Keele University. Rachel will be supervised by Professor Pnina Werbner and Dr Dana Rosenfeld, both from the School of Sociology and Criminology. If you would like to find out more about studying at Keele, you can find information about our Undergraduate degrees, Masters' degrees or Doctoral opportunities by clicking on the links above, or you can find out about Sociology staff supervision expertise by looking up individual research interests by clicking on staff names.

Here's what Rachel herself has to say about her background and how this led to her interest in her PhD project:

I came to Keele University having lived "full-time" in England for only three years. In fact, I was close to being listed as a foreign student (which would have been of great financial inconvenience!) unless I had completed my three years residency. I was born in Niamey, Niger Republic, West Africa to missionary parents. My father worked at a leprosy project, local market, mission treasury, and as mission director. My mother homeschooled me and my sister alongside several other missionary children, and later worked as mission pastorial director - providing support and acculturation advice to new missionaries.

We lived on an African compound away from the mission compound, and my parents dressed and, in many ways, adopted the cultural habits of their neighbors. When I was 11 years old we moved to the capital, where I was enrolled in the private mission school there. It was this melange of cultures and countries that developed in me a over-whelming curiousity in how societies "worked".

Keele University was not threatened by my questions, nor did it let me get away with stereotypying or cliched "answers". Now, in my fifth year here, I have been granted the amazing opportunity to study more about people who, like me, are constantly re-defining and re-living their identities in ways that cross occupational, national, gender, race, and local boundaries. I am a Third Culture Kid but this ESRC grant will allow me to theorise this personal experience in way that is meaningful across the sociological and anthropological disciplines. I feel very blessed and challenged by this unique opportunity.

The PhD proposal: Third Culture Kids

Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are people who have spent “a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture” (Pollock and van Recken 2001). They are the children of expatriates employed by international organisations as, inter alia, development experts, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, international NGO and humanitarian aid workers, or UN representatives. The ‘third culture’ they possess is the temporary, nomadic multicultural space they inhabited as children, within an expatriate community and international school. It is distinct from their parents’ homeland culture (the first culture) and from that of the country in which they spend their formative years but of which they are not native members (the second culture). The “third culture” they claim for themselves does not unite their first and second cultures but comprises a space for their unstable integration (Knorr 2005), although how and when this is achieved remains an open question, despite some preliminary research on this group.

TCKs are situated ambiguously in current transnational and identity theory, falling outside conventional sociological and anthropological paradigms. They thus provide an opportunity to expand the relevant literatures’ current theorisation of the deterritorialisation of identity (Debrix 1998; 14, 18) the relation of identity to place (Appadurai 1990 and 1996) and the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2008). The formative experiences of those who have matured outside of their country of origin are likely to shape how they negotiate their identity, roots and social relations across the life course, nationally and transnationally. For some TCKs, the only ‘home’ to which they can return is that of an expatriate itinerant. Much remains to be understood about identity formation and development as our traditional reference points of national borders begin to dissipate and citizenship becomes increasingly flexible (Ong 1999). The life histories, social relations, and identities of TCKs can thus allow for a critical expansion of current theories of diaspora and transnationalism, and of ideas surrounding double-rootedness, identity and ways of belonging in navigating cultural worlds (Werbner 2002; Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004). The project will explore the McLachlan’s (McLachlan 2005) argument that the adaptability, perseverance and multilingualism typically developed in TCKs contribute to a cosmopolitan sensibility and therefore demonstrate TCK's growing significance to a global society.