A Crafty Police Force Has Hired A Bus To Catch Drivers Using Mobiles

Police in Devon have come up with a novel way to catch people breaking the law at the wheel: they’ve hired a bus.

From the top deck of a specially-hired bus, enterprising police in Plymouth can look right down into cars and catch drivers using mobile phones, not wearing their seat belts and a range of other offences.

The point is apparently to catch more of the people illegally using mobiles behind the wheel, and of 130 drivers and riders pulled over for doing something against the law in just a day and a half, 39 were caught texting or using the Internet. Naturally, one or two outlets have taken a light-hearted look at this.

Amazingly, almost as many people were stopped for not wearing their seat belt, which is prime Darwin Award territory. Some 36 were pulled over for that.

The cops on the bus don’t do the arresting. Using hand-held radios they call colleagues on the road, on motorbikes and in cars, who then appear out of nowhere and take over. The penalty for using a mobile behind the wheel, as we reported on at the time of the change on March 1, is now £200 and a hefty six-point wallop.

Elsewhere in the numbers, 53 drivers were stopped for speeding, two were arrested for drug driving and, presumably by coincidence, two cars were seized for being driven without insurance.

All the parties involved in the pilot scheme are said to be patting themselves on the back for a job well done, with the Plymouth Herald reporting that similar schemes will definitely run again. Plymouth residents, you’ve been warned.