Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology is increasingly being installed at your local service station. For good reason too, after many late night fill and runs have left service stations needing a way to protect themselves against petrol theft.
But servos have done a deal to assist police with access to that same ANPR technology (Auror and DriveOffAlert) to catch unregistered vehicles, and suspended or disqualified drivers. How’s that for customer service.
Police will run the number plate through the Police LEAP system and if the owner of number plate is a person with a suspended or disqualified licence, they will allege an offence has been committed by that person.
Our firm has had a recent case where a client has been charged with driving disqualified on over 50 occasions…all at service stations. It is lazy policing which comes as no surprise, usually with no complaint or reason that a person has come to police attention.
With lazy policing also comes mistakes. Police will seek CCTV footage in an attempt to identify the offender and this is where problems arise. The footage is often unclear, with people wearing baseball caps or covered clothing making it difficult to reasonably identify the driver.
Rather than doing a proper investigation, police just charge the owner of the car and say the person in the footage was him or her.
To that end, we have also had a case where a brother of a suspended driver was driving the car of their suspended sibling, and the sibling then got charged. In that case our client sought costs against police for wasting his time and money on having to defend a charge that should not have been brought in the first place.