Tony Michaels

Team Leader for Safety Camera Enforcement

I’m not entirely sure what I expected the safer roads unit to look like. I have no memory of having ever actually seeing a camera officer – just the big fluorescent vans.  I suppose I was expecting the office to either look equally fluorescent (although I don’t know why it would look like the vans) or to be a sort of drab, boxy grey shrine to health and safety.
Actually, the office looks like most offices I’ve ever been in. There are banks of desks, lots of screens, and clearly it’s been somebody’s birthday – there’s a half empty box of brownies on a central table, and a lone purple balloon floating up off the back of somebody’s chair. I can see a few police officers dotted about in full kit, but there are other people in normal work-wear, and some in what I realise are the powder-blue shirts of the camera officer’s uniform.

Tony isn’t in uniform – although he is wearing a shirt in a similar shade (perhaps in solidarity with his officers).  Around his desk other people’s monitors are filled with stills of traffic, and I see that they’re cropping them down to get a clear shot of the registration plates. By contrast, on Tony’s screen is a spreadsheet.
We sit down together and I’m given a mug of tea and a brownie.  I ask him what it is, exactly, that he as the ‘team leader for safety camera enforcement’ does.

‘Plan the duties for the officers so that they’re getting their fair share of all the different aspects of the role. Making sure deployment is what it needs to be for the ratio of each area… I oversee the vans and sites, the officers’ wellbeing and manage the impact on the rest of the department.’

He reels it off with an air of comfortable familiarity which is impressive for somebody who’s been in the role for 14 months.

‘I was a camera officer for 17 years. I’m actually a bricklayer by trade, but there’s been a lot of things since then [he’s not exaggerating].  I applied for a job in procurement in Merseyside Police. I never applied to be a camera officer… a week or so later I got a phone call asking if I would like to be a camera officer. I thought I’d do it for a few months before I started my own business in garden care… but I’ve been here ever since.’

I ask him what’s changed, and find it hard to believe when he tells me that they didn’t have uniforms and they didn’t have marked vehicles.  I can understand the necessity of a uniform, a group of anonymous people photographing your car could prove unpopular – although, as I say to Tony, it’s a pretty unpopular job anyway.

‘Public perception is what it is. They know we’re not police officers.   When you’re out and about and you’re getting abused, that’s not nice. You do get loads of abuse. I’ve had people face to face with me. It can get quite hostile. That’s another part of the planning process.  When I do the van duties for the week I’ll match the personality to the location and to the time of day.  One was injured recently, one was smashed into in the back of the van. But you can’t legislate for that.’

I ask him if he thinks it would be different if they were police officers.

‘We’ve proved it. A lot of times when the team are going out, the sergeant will ask where we’re going. And a couple of times he’s been in the back of the van with me and someone’s come knocking, and then he just opens the door and it’s “sorry officer I didn’t know you were there” and it totally diffuses the situation. It’s like when we have to call in – which we do have to, quite a bit – a police response vehicle will be there in a few minutes. It changes everything. That’s how the whole section 38 thing came in.’

I ask what section 38 is.

‘Section 38 is when someone tries to obstruct us in our duty we can prosecute them…  Camera officers have section 38 enforcement powers.’

It’s amazing to me that people come to work every day expecting to get abuse, to the point where legislation has to be brought in. I know why it is though, so I ask the question.

‘Is it a money trap? No. Because people’s lives depend on it. It’s not for profit.  It could be considered a cash trap as far as the public are concerned but what the public don’t realise is what goes on behind the scenes, and what happens to the revenue that gets generated. If you look at the figures for the past four or five years it’s been pretty flat. Because of the way we plan it, how we manage the operations, all the communication, being more proactive.’

I want to know what he means about being more ‘proactive’.

‘More proactive to what the public wants, more proactive to our historical data. Looking at my historical data I can see where the potentials are for sites. We will go out, and we will know from the KSIs [numbers of people killed or seriously injured] and the information – people ringing up or requests we get through the Chiefs office, the PCC  – can we go and look at this – and we’ll go out and look at it and see if there’s potential there.’

I had no idea that people were actually requesting speed cameras.

‘The councils always want us there… the public want it because the want to see us on the roads. I know I’ve got a certain number of vans, and a certain percentage based on KSIs, so I have to plot in to see how I’m going to reach those percentages.’

I’m getting lost with this a bit, so I ask for an example.

‘So, say if 28% of the number of people killed or seriously injured in Merseyside are in Liverpool. So 28% of my cameras, per week, will go to Liverpool… The KSIs is always going to be top of the agenda.’

I ask if everybody’s happy with that enforcement spread.

‘You’re never going to get it right. Councils and members of the public often want us to enforce in places that are unsuitable. We look to engage with the councils to provide the infrastructure for such things as hard standings and off-road parking. Even if we can cover the cost of a camera for a site, often councils don’t have the budget for the infrastructure.’

It seems as though Tony’s job means that he will permanently be stuck between a rock and a hard place. People he catches will be angry with him, believing it’s a money trap. Residents of streets who want enforcement will be angry if they don’t get it. If the number of people caught speeding goes up there will be negative press. If the number of people caught speeding drops, questions will be asked about whether his proactive approach is working. It’s hard to imagine what a good professional day for Tony could possibly look like, so I ask.

‘Sometimes there’s cake.’ He says, wryly.

My first impression was accurate:  this really is just like any other office.

People We Love

Sergeant Daniel Harris of Merseyside Police’s Mounted Section

Sometimes the challenge isn’t about struggling to the top of the hill, it’s about staying on top when you’re there.

Sergeant Daniel Harris of Merseyside Police’s Mounted Section could be forgiven for taking his eye of the road safety ball. Collisions and near misses involving horses in Merseyside are incredibly rare (surprising for a region which, in the sergeant’s words, has ‘tons of horses’). Mounted officers are in incredibly high demand, called upon for everything from crowd control to formal escort, but Sergeant Harris is far from complacent about road safety.

It’s surreal visiting the stables at Mather Avenue Police Station to meet him. Whenever they can, the mounted section welcome visitors to make an appointment and see them, and doing so feels like a real treat. Everything from the mud spattered yard to the gleaming tack room has that wonderful horse smell, and it feels like a rural haven tucked into the city’s suburbs. As I’d brought chocolates for the officers, I felt it was only right to bring the horses something too, so I take a few bags of carrots.

We sit and talk in the small office that the officers share – there are eight of them – and I ask him if the mounted section really have a role in road safety.

‘Some days it’s football, some days it’s operations, weeks of action. You’ll see us all over Merseyside. We’re dealing with enforcing road traffic legislation – careless driving, mobile phones. We’ve got saddle bags, we do OSCOS [an ‘officer seen conditional offer’ – a fine in other words]. Some people don’t really like it when they get stopped by someone on a horse… we’re just the same as any other bobby.’

I can’t image what it must be like to get given a ticket for being on your phone by an officer on horseback – it’s not something you’d be likely to forget.

I ask him about equine RTCs in Merseyside – how they get their data – how do they know what needs doing?

‘The BHS (British Horse Foundation) have got a reporting system. They give us the statistics. It shows near misses as well as actual accidents. They highlight sites as high risk. The Wirral and Formby were highlighted areas, so we said right, okay, let’s take two horses, go out in hi-vis without the police logo, just look like two normal people riding horses. We had the radio on and a police car back down the road… and basically if anyone came past us too close or too fast we just radioed through to say ‘just coming up to you now, Citron Saxo or whatever, going really fast no effort to slow down.’ They’d pull them in having identified a spot that was safe for them to stop. It’s not about persecuting people it’s about the education. It wasn’t about ticketing people for careless driving, it was just about purely, stop them, two minute educational chat: did you know that you should slow down to 15 miles an hour, did you know you should leave 2 meters like for a cyclist? And 99.5% were receptive… We’re not just saying to the public that horse riders are amazing, drivers are all rubbish because actually the BHS actually do a road users code of conduct for horse riders as well – we’re trying to educate them as well.’

On the one hand, I can imagine people being positive – horses are beautiful – who wouldn’t want to stop and see horses (educational talk and all)? Then I try to imagine myself being stopped if I was running late for work and in a bad mood. Would I really see this bit of education as necessary? I ask him why ‘close passes’ are an issue.

‘You’ve got two independently thinking minds to do one thing. If you imagine driving a car, if you turn the wheel right you’re going to go right. If you’ve got a horse, an independently thinking animal that’s big (ours are about 700 kilos) you can ask it to go right, but if it sees something down the road or down the lane it doesn’t like it’s going to be resistant and react in a number of different ways. It can react by rearing up, by spinning, it can jump up and down. There is a big risk. We had one that bolted, ran out of the park… and jumped onto a car bonnet then took off down the road.’

I suppose when a 700 kilo horse has got a problem on the road, everyone else on the road has a problem, too. There are actually significant risks. You need well trained horses, riders and drivers working together.

‘There’s no age limit either’ he adds ‘so technically you could have a 4 year old riding down a dual carriageway with a 70 mile an hour speed limit. You could have a kid on the road on a horse, and a bus goes past thinking it’s fine because it drove past a police horse back down the road and that was fine, and the kid’s pony isn’t as exposed… most horses aren’t as desensitised as ours.’

The consequences don’t bear thinking about. But Sargent Harris does think about them. He understands that the horse riding community often see the mounted officers as role models, and so is always thinking of ways Merseyside’s mounted section can influence the public in positive ways.

‘People look at us and say ‘they’re wearing hi-vis sheets, okay, I need to get a hi-vis sheet.’

He pulls out his phone and shows me images of a row of horses – their tails entwined with ropes of flashing lights. It’s such an obvious idea – yet Merseyside would be the first force in the country to adopt them. I love that, the oldest mounted section in the country using the newest tech. Perhaps that’s how you stay on top of the hill, as it were – by doing small things all the time so you don’t slip and have to start climbing back up. In the case of Merseyside Police’s mounted section, those small things – education, engagement and exemplar behaviours are keeping riders and drivers alike safe across the region. I’m impressed.

Merseyide’s safety aside, however, I’m not 100% happy with the visit. I don’t get to feed a single carrot to a single horse (and can’t think of a professional reason to ask). I’ll be keeping an eye out for Sergeant Harris’s next road safety initiative so that I can make an excuse to come back and try my luck next time.