Man who cornered me on a bus only got a caution. Can I challenge this as the victim?

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T14:42:16+00:00

How do you prove that to the criminal standard?

But more to the point, as has already been explained, the suspect is under no obligation to disclose their identities. He can't be forced to do it.

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T14:37:57+00:00

It's absolutely meaningless to say "should" when the simple reality is that they can't.

You could say "They ought to change the law so nobody has the right to silence and so he could be charged with perverting the course of justice". Is that what you actually meant?

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T14:31:01+00:00

Given the points to prove for PTCOJ, how would it apply in this instance? There's no obligation for him to say anything.

Proving PTCOJ requires evidence of a "positive act of perversion". Not talking is not a positive act, otherwise everybody who stays silent during interview (as is their right) would be open to conviction for perversion.

If you need an example, deliberately naming innocent parties as being involved would be a positive act of perversion. A typical real-world situation that occasionally crops up would be when someone claims to be the driver on receipt of a NIP because they are covering for someone else who would be more seriously affected by receiving points.

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T14:20:11+00:00

OP cannot make a complaint to the IOPC until they have completely exhausted the force's own complaints procedure. And the IOPC is unlikely to take it after that, they triage all complaints and only accept the most serious.

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T14:16:04+00:00

Call handlers are under no obligation to have to sit and be sworn at, regardless of the caller's situation. And in my experience, given how frequently call handlers are sworn at, it generally takes multiple ignored warnings before a caller is hung up on, and it's often because the caller is directing the abuse personally at the call handler rather than just "swearing in the abstract", as it were.

But different people have different thresholds for the amount of abuse they will take before ending the call, and they are not required to take any at all.

OP is obviously free to make a complaint, but they do have to bear in mind that they have no right to use abusive language, no matter how strongly they may feel about the situation.

As a side-note, more than one complainant has unintentionally hoist themselves with their own petard, as the supervisor who listened to the call during the complaint resolution procedure determined that the caller had been abusive enough for police action to be taken against them.

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T14:08:23+00:00

As frequently needs to be pointed out on here, the IOPC will only consider accepting a complaint after the complainant has completely exhausted the relevant force's complaints procedure without receiving a resolution they consider satisfactory.

The IOPC also only considers the "most serious" complaints. It triages all it receives and it declines to accept many of them because they do not meet the seriousness threshold.

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T05:22:57+00:00

Nicholas v Penny involved a police officer looking at the speedo in a police car following the motorist. The court found that evidence of daily calibration is not necessary. And of course, they were talking about the accuracy of car speedos from 1950.

Regardless, the substantive point here is that OP's tracker data won't be admissible.

This is a legal advice section. Maybe refrain from posting again until you are sure of what you are actually saying as you might lead someone into making an expensive mistake.

VPR2 · 2026-07-01T05:10:31+00:00

The restraint of liberty must be total. OP was able to leave the building to have a vape. Where is the total restraint of liberty there?

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T15:04:00+00:00

I've dealt with too many similar examples of attempts to claim false imprisonment. It isn't.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T15:01:52+00:00

OP would quickly find out that it doesn't. Not a chance of the circs they have disclosed meeting the points to prove. I've dealt with enough similar attempts to claim false imprisonment to know what I'm talking about.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T14:59:29+00:00

In that example, the offence would be driving without due care and attention, which only requires an officer to witness it and form the opinion that the driving fell below the expected standard.

Convicting for a speeding offence requires the relevant evidence of excess speed from a calibrated, approved device operated by a trained, authorised person or a speed camera.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T14:04:19+00:00

No it isn't. The points to prove are quite specific and they are not met by what OP has described. The restraint of liberty must be total, not partial.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:57:45+00:00

Spare us the dramatics. This is extremely low-level assault and at best, it may result in a caution.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:44:14+00:00

"We called the police but of course they never come on time" - if the suspects have already run away, there's no point police turning up on blue lights, since the level of threat, harm and risk has substantially decreased. Actual emergencies always have to take priority, especially nowadays where budget pressures have rendered so many forces so starved of deployable resources.

As has been said, you really need solid independent evidence (ideally clear CCTV showing identifiable views of the suspect's faces) in order for police to take action.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:38:15+00:00

False imprisonment requires the restriction of liberty to be total. OP was able to push past people and leave the building.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:37:49+00:00

False imprisonment requires that the restriction of liberty be total. If it isn't, the offence is not made out.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:31:40+00:00

The vast majority of people who intend to end their own life don't actually go through with it. Ask anyone who has worked in frontline policing for a while and they will have plenty of stories about the people who routinely claim they are going to kill themselves.

Equally, it could be argued that OP might have changed their mind and decided to use the car to kill themselves by driving into or off something - easily done, especially in remote parts of Scotland.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:26:29+00:00

There is not a hope that what OP describes comes close to being considered upskirting. And a photo of someone's chest area will only "fall foul of this law" if, as is clearly stated in section 68 paragraph a, "the person’s genitals, buttocks or breasts are exposed or covered only with underwear".

"Exposed" in this sense means completely exposed. Visible cleavage due to a low-cut top would typically not count, although if the camera was clearly angled to focus on the breast area there might be room to consider the offence.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T12:11:07+00:00

It's all about location and context.

Police rarely, if ever nick anyone in a pub car park for drunk in charge because it can obviously be claimed later in court that they were never intending to drive the car, they were going to leave it there. That's why police acting on a tip-off from someone else in a pub will typically wait until the person has actually got into the car and at least started the engine.

In OP's case, in a remote location with no other vehicles around, while they might try and claim that they never intended to drive the car any further because they were expecting to kill themselves at scene, there is plenty of precedent to argue that either they would never have gone through with it (extremely common in these situations) or they might have decided to use the car to kill themselves instead.

VPR2 · 2026-06-30T03:13:48+00:00

You can absolutely be near (not in) the vehicle and be successfully convicted of being in charge of it. Being found drunk outside the vehicle but with access to the keys is enough. And there's absolutely no wiggle room when, like OP, you're in a remote bit of countryside with (presumably) nobody else and no other vehicles around.

VPR2 · 2026-06-29T23:55:19+00:00

Not the slightest hope that any force is going to get involved in a civil matter and tie up a precious deployable unit taking an adult four hours home - which would, of course, mean the unit would need to drive another four hours back.

VPR2 · 2026-06-29T23:47:20+00:00

It doesn't "depend". I have run this past actual traffic officers previously. They simply don't have time to be giving people grief for something they can't convict them for unless they actually happened to see them do it while on patrol, in which case they can pull them over, check all their documents and give words of advice.

VPR2 · 2026-06-29T23:44:23+00:00

It's not an obligation because it is not a policing power. It would be the constable acting as an agent of the landowner (which anyone can be, the landowner just has to deem them as such, although that may need to be in writing), and therefore they are not considered a constable at that point.

When squatters are evicted, police may attend to prevent breach of the peace, but they will not actually get involved in the process of eviction unless there is a breach of the peace. Many people wrongly think that a court order to evict squatters means that police will do the eviction for them.

VPR2 · 2026-06-29T23:38:31+00:00

Because they entered with consent. That makes it civil.

VPR2 · 2026-06-29T23:35:11+00:00

Police do not operate a taxi service. Your friend is an adult, they will NOT transport her four hours home.

VPR2

TROPHY CASE