Police driving instructor in court on speed charge

Police driving instructor in court on speeding charge

A SOUTH Yorkshire police driving instructor is to face magistrates on Monday accused of speeding while off duty.
The offence is alleged to have occurred in Leicestershire and PC Colin Yates is due to appear before Loughborough magistrates to answer the charge.
It is understood the officer has been given an alternative job in the South Yorkshire force training department until the matter is resolved.
All police officers are given training before being allowed to drive any of the force’s vehicle fleet and must pass internal assessments. Officers who use powerful traffic cars are given advanced training.
A police spokeswoman confirmed: “An officer is to appear in court in Leicestershire to answer an offence of speeding alleged to have been committed while he was off duty.
“This was correctly reported through internal procedures. The situation will be assessed following the completion of court procedures,” she added.
It is expected that magistrates on Monday will be told details of the circumstances leading to the officer’s prosecution.
A court spokeswoman said precise details of criminal charges were not made public until the day of the hearing.
Speeding offences rarely end up being heard in court. Most are dealt with through fixed penalty tickets, which attract a £60 fine and three driving licence penalty points.
If a defendant pleads not guilty the case would normally be transferred to court.
Cases deemed too serious to be dealt with through the fixed penalty system may also be heard in court. In circumstances where a driver has been found to be travelling at more than 30mph above the speed limit, there is the option to issue a driving ban.
The issue of speeding has become increasingly contentious since the introduction of widespread roadside cameras controlled by safety partnerships involving organisations other than just police.
South Yorkshire Chief Constable Med Hughes has been caught twice for speeding, by a fixed camera in Sheffield and by a mobile unit in Wales.
He remains firmly in favour of speed enforcement and has suggested that all cameras should be hidden, rather than painted bright yellow as they are under present rules.
The law surrounding speeding police officers has also been criticised recently after a Derbyshire officer was cleared by a court which heard he had driven a police car at high speed.
The statistics were recorded by the vehicle’s own monitoring equipment but the officer claimed he had been testing the vehicle to familiarise himself with it.

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