Spet0789 wrote:DrFfybes wrote:GoSeigen wrote:Don't give the police any information whatsoever**, whether an alibi, pictures or anything else, just ask them to give you evidence that their charge is correct. They are the idiots wasting your time in this situation. Don't let them persuade you that somehow you have an obligation. You are entirely innocent in the whole affair and being given a headache by someone else's mistake or misdeeds.
Hope it goes away quickly and quietly.
GS
(**)They will take advantage of even the tiniest thing you say. They once came to my house at 11pm; all I did was answer in the affirmative that we had a foreign child staying with us (how could it hurt to answer such a simple question??), next thing I'm told he's been accused of something and being threatened with an immediate full search of my house for evidence in the middle of the night if I didn't cooperate further with their enquiries. Nightmare and expensive -- would have been better to shut up and tell them to come back at a sensible time to ask questions.
I would strongly disagree with this suggestion.
Firstly, the tone - GS is immediately assuming the police are idiots and treating them as so. This is NOT a good idea. People don't like being treated like idiots so best not to provoke them, especially not if they are in a position of authority.
What we know is someone has reported an incident to the police quoting your vehicle Reg. That is all we know. The Police have followed their standard procedure in tracing the registered keeper and informing them of the situation. There is also the Offence of failing to stop after an accident, and you might have been unaware of hitting someone depending upon the vehicle/trailer/caravan and circumstances.
The ball is now firmly in your court to respond, in this case to inform them that there has been an error. This could be either by mistake in recording the reg no, a cloned vehicle, or someone maliciously reporting your vehicle for some other reason.
Paul
I agree with this. The Police are acting entirely reasonably given the vehicle registration they have been given. I would simply reply briefly and courteously stating that you (and your car) were [whereever] on the day in question and offer to provide them with any assistance you can in clearing the matter up.
This is poor advice IMO. The police are idiots, if that is not obvious from the past few years in the UK then perhaps people have been living in some foreign nirvana. The police are not your neighbour, they are an arm of the state with IMO excessive powers these days (and the rights of ordinary people seriously eroded). The less we have to do with them the better. In all my recent interactions with UK plod my attempts to "cooperate" or illicit help from them have backfired and caused me grief for no good reason at all. They are systemically incompetent, corrupt, abusive and prejudiced due to years of manipulation to achieve political aims, to the extent that they cause huge amounts of stress to completely innocent people in the name of clamping down on so-called trouble-makers. I'm a great believer in assuming good faith but when an organisation has shown repeatedly that they don't assume good faith and further, they themselves repeatedly act corruptly then the assumption rightly falls away.
GS
[In another incident, I myself called the police to report an accident in the hope that they would record the evidence that corroborated my innocence in the incident. Instead they place me under criminal investigation, which was eventually dropped but not before causing stress and expense. So much for police "acting entirely reasonably" -- there really is no way to accurately judge this without gaining further knowledge about what they are up to. The very fact that they've approached entirely the wrong person without first doing a decent investigation is prima facie unreasonable in itself.]