An article comparing a police initiative encouraging citizen reporting of minor driving offences to the Soviet Union's 'Red Terror' era denunciation campaigns.
During Joseph Stalin's 'Red Terror' purges in the 1930s, a youngster named Pavel Morozov became something of a poster boy after supposedly grassing on his father for disloyalty to the regime. ' Denunciation ', as it was officially known, was all the rage, and the Soviet authorities ran regular campaigns telling children they had a patriotic duty to report their parents if they lacked commitment to the cause.
I wonder what Pavel would have made of Operation Snap, the campaign backed by West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster, encouraging people to inform on motorists who commit minor driving offences. I suspect he would have been well up for it. The commissioner's office has proudly announced that, over an 11-month period, a total of 5,919 drivers have been fined after 13,543 videos were uploaded by snitches onto a police website. Since the scheme was launched, a total of 4,524 people have taken the opportunity to report their peers, with one individual submitting a mind-boggling 539 entries. I bet he's fun at parties. I would really love to know what this gentleman - and it's bound to be a man, and probably a cagoule wearer to boot - does for a living. After all, who has got the time to film 539 errant motorists, and then upload the evidence onto a police website? My hunch is that he probably does something in the public sector. And I'll bet it involves a lot of 'working from home'.Not that I condone bad driving for one minute, and may even feel the temptation every time I get cut up or tailgated by a travelling salesman in a leased mid-range German saloon car. But even if Operation Snap does lead to an improvement in driving standards, which I very much doubt, I'm not convinced it justifies the societal damage this kind of denunciation culture will inevitably lead to. The fact that almost all of those caught were dealt with by fixed-penalty notices suggests they were hardly the crimes of the centur
Operation Snap Denunciation Police Surveillance Driving Offences
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