A Question About English Meter Maids.

Factual Questions
1

I was watching one of these Worst Of programs tonight and one thing it had on was a clip about English Meter Maids, who are also guys. Man! These people take an enormous amount of verbal and physical abuse, from being poked, to having guys and women get right in their faces and cuss them out, to chasing them down, ripping ticket books out of their hands or trying to grab their ticket machines to ripping up the tickets and throwing them away.

Now, I know there is a big difference between English and American cops, aside from the Americans carrying guns, like the English chasing down a speeder who blasts through 100 miles of narrow roads, runs 27 stop signs, 34 stop lights, and bangs into 6 cars. After a 3 hour chase, the cops get them. Their punishment? You know, $500 fine, suspension of license for 6 months and being required to retake their drivers test. :ROLLEYES: In the States, it’s like a year or two in jail, $5,000 fine, drivers license suspended for 5 years, and repayment of damages. Plus, upon capture, the officers are not going to be all polite a courteous towards the guy when they yank him out of the car, through the window and bounce him on the pavement.

However, if the English cops catch you yacking on a cell phone while driving, they’ll throw the book at you! I guess fleeing the cops over there is considered a lessor evil than chatting on a cell phone.

But these English meter maids don’t seem allowed to do anything to people abusing them! I don’t know how the get these meter maids to begin with, unless they pay them tremendously well.

In my city, meter maids are cops. Throw the ticket down and you will be arrested for littering, swear at the officer and get in his face and you can be arrested, touch the officer and you go to jail for assault. Chase the officer down to argue with him and you got to jail for interfering with an officer. You harass an American Meter Maid at your own risk.

Do these meter maids in England have any recourse to back them up from these mouthy SOBs who harass them over a ticket? Anyone from England care to shed some light on this?

2

Well, a fair bit to get the teeth into. I’ll have a stab at ‘meter maids’ – henceforth termed ‘traffic wardens’.

I believe they have the same redress here as they do in most countries i.e. the normal civil remedies if they’re personally abused and criminal action (via the prosecuting authority – the ‘Crown Prosecution Service’) if things get nasty. In other words, I think most countries separate parking from regular police activity although the police can and do enforce parking regulations, also.

In addition, nowadays traffic wardens come in all flavours – some work for the local authority, some work for private companies either on the street or towing away. I get very confused.

As you mention, you watched a ‘worst of’ show – that should tell you that you saw only the extremes of behaviour. Having said that, traffic wardens do tend to get abused quite regularly and it’s a thankless job. Not being cops means they only have the same rights of personal protection as does any ‘normal’ person dealing with the public but if you start whacking one around the head with a blunt instrument, the courts do take a dim view.

As for the relative sentences between people using mobile / cell phones while driving and the other business, there is usually more to it than you’re told because the idea is to sensationalise. That’s what programme makers do to sell their product to networks.

Not sure what you actually mean by ‘throwing the book’, whether the speeder was a juvenile, first time offender, had mitigating circumstances, sometimes the authorities have a mad blitz on a particular type of offence, etc – difficult to say without all the facts.

Also worth remembering that the US puts a far higher percentage of people in prison than does any comparable country so it might also be argued it’s not so much the UK having ‘weaker’ sentencing (pretty average for a first world country) but rather that the US has harsher.

3

Meter attendants carry radios with alrm links to the local police station.
Although they can talk their message they can just hit an ‘assist me’ button and the police come running.

The response time is very, I got involved in facing off a scumbag who was threatening a meter attendant who was simply going abut his job.

Police took less than 5 minutes to arrive.

The majority of town centre streets where the meter attendants work are monitored on closed circuit tv as well.

4

Using a mobile phone while driving is not a specific offence, though there are calls to make it one. Government papers releasewd recently under the 30-year rule show that when car phones were first developed in the 1960s, Ministry of Transport officials wanted to introduce legislation prohibiting their use while driving but the Prime Minister personally vetoed the proposal. So I can thank Harold Wilson for the fact that, nine mornings out of ten, I come close to getting run over on the way to the tube station by some wanker who won’t stop for the lights because he can’t change gear because he’s yapping on his phone.

Mostly, people who are caught using cell phones are prosecuted for a general offence like driving without due care and attention. Sentences range from a slap on the wrist to a lengthy prison sentence, depending on the circumstances of the offence. Bear in mind that mandatory minimum sentences are rare in England and most laws specify only the maximum penalty to which a convicted person can be sentenced. A lorry driver was recently sentenced to five years for causing death by dangerous driving after he killed somebody by trying to send a text messsage on his phone while driving.

I think London_Calling’s right about sentencing: the USA sends a greater proportion of its population to jail than any other democratic country. You’d probably find that sentences for driving (and other) offences in England are closer to the international norm.

5

I was impressed with the Traffic Wardens, whom I knew there was another name for but the TV said Meter Maids and that stuck for some reason. The examples they showed, knowing that the program concentrates on extremes, made me figure that those guys did not get paid enough, whatever they were making. I would not have held my cool like they did.

We did not start mandatory prison sentences for specific crimes until not all that long ago, leaving it up to judges to set the time. People got tired of slamming crooks into jail for 6 months or a year, then they get out, do more crime, get slammed in jail again for a few months, if not put on probation, then when getting out, go right back to crime. One guy, with a long history of criminal activity like theft, while awaiting trial, stole new cloths to wear in court and stole other things to sell to pay his bond and estimated fine!

Judges were giving heavy criminals low jail time and people wanted some solution. So, they came up with the 3 strikes law, where if you do three felonies, you go to jail for life. This law is flawed badly and there is a fight to have it modified, but Congress is not real interested in doing so.

I watched the long chase I mentioned in England and when they told what punishment the driver got, I almost fell out of my chair. It seemed like a slap on the wrist. The penalties for finding people using cell phones while driving were much harder. Over here there is a growing movement to ban cell phones being used in cars also, but the companies who sell them have major bucks invested and, of course, are fighting it.

I have to say that the English Traffic Warden business does sound confusing. On one episode, two different wardens gave a lady a ticket, which confused me, but you explained by indicating they used different companies.

Well, thanks to you all for clearing it up.

6

In California I saw an application for this job, we call it parking enforcement officer. You don’t have to be a cop to do this job, though.

Our local parking enforcement officer was sued for writing tons of false citations, letting her friends tickets go, smearing the names of other officers, accepting gifts of 2 cars from the comp she would call to come get cars on the street, etc. Even though I know its all true, they are letting her come back to work at the PD. I can just imagine how it be for her.

7

One thing that happens and drivers find really annoying is that the driver may return to their vehicle, having been warned by someone about the presence of a traffic warden, and try to explain that they were parked for only a few moments and are now moving their vehicle, by the time they arrive the warden has just begun writing out the ticket.

Trouble is that the warden does not have any room for negotiation, they have to account for every ticket that they start to write and can only cancel that ticket on a technicality such as spelling error of registration plate error but the only way they are allowed to do so is if they have then gone on to write the ticket correctly on the next page in their book.

The offending driver does not usually know this and thinks the warden is just being mean and petty.