Policing Distracted Driving: Contemporary Challenges in Roads Policing (Palgrave's Critical Policing Studies) 3031436571, 9783031436574

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PALGRAVE‘S CRITICAL POLICING STUDIES

Policing Distracted Driving Contemporary Challenges in Roads Policing Leanne Savigar-Shaw · Helen Wells

Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies

Series Editors Elizabeth Aston, School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK Michael Rowe, Department of Social Sciences Newcastle City Campus, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

In a period where police and academics benefit from coproduction in research and education, the need for a critical perspective on key challenges is pressing. Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies is a series of high quality, research-based books which examine a range of cutting-edge challenges and developments to policing and their social and political contexts. They seek to provide evidence-based case studies and high quality research, combined with critique and theory, to address fundamental challenging questions about future directions in policing. Through a range of formats including monographs, edited collections and short form Pivots, this series provides research at a variety of lengths to suit both academics and practitioners. The series brings together new topics at the forefront of policing scholarship but is also organised around who the contemporary police are, what they do, how they go about it, and the ever-changing external environments which bear upon their work. The series will cover topics such as: the purpose of policing and public expectations, public health approaches to policing, policing of cyber-crime, environmental policing, digital policing, social media, Artificial Intelligence and big data, accountability of complex networks of actors involved in policing, austerity, public scrutiny, technological and social changes, over-policing and marginalised groups, under-policing and corporate crime, institutional abuses, policing of climate change, ethics, workforce, education, evidence-based policing, and the pluralisation of policing. Editorial Board: Dr. Matthew Bacon (University of Sheffield) Dr. Isabelle Bartkowiak-Theron (University of Tasmania) Professor Sofie de Kimpe (Free University Brussels) Professor Jacques du Maillard (CESDIP, France) Professor Nick Fyfe (Robert Gordon University) Dr. Laura Huey (University of British Columbia) Dr. Bethan Loftus (Bangor University) Dr. Ali Malik (Northumbria University) Professor Monique Marks (Durban University of Technology) Dr. Angus Nurse (Middlesex) Dr. Louise Porter (Griffith University) Dr. Pamela Ugwudike (Southampton University) Professor James Willis (George Mason University) Dr. Andrew Wooff (Edinburgh Napier University) Prof. K. Jaishankar, (Raksha Shakti University)

Leanne Savigar-Shaw · Helen Wells

Policing Distracted Driving Contemporary Challenges in Roads Policing

Leanne Savigar-Shaw Staffordshire University Stoke on Trent, UK

Helen Wells Keele University Staffordshire, UK

ISSN 2730-535X ISSN 2730-5368 (electronic) Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies ISBN 978-3-031-43657-4 ISBN 978-3-031-43658-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: bagi1998/GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Maisie, who provided purpose and motivation. Leanne Savigar-Shaw To Charlotte, who arrived after the first book so didn’t get a mention and hasn’t let me forget it. Helen Wells

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the work and support of the late Ann Morris—a dedicated campaigner for road safety and a stalwart of Crash Course. We would also like to thank the Office for the Police and Crime Commissioner for Staffordshire, as well as Keele University, who funded the original research project and made it possible. Finally, thank you to everybody who gave time to take part in the research, supported the development of the project, and offered guidance along the way.

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Contents

1

Introduction and Purpose Introduction The UK Roads Policing Context The Issue of Driver Distraction The Focus of this Book The Research Questionnaires Interviews Observations Chapter Synopsis References

2 The Mobile Phone Distraction Problem and Responses to It Introduction Technological Infatuation The Problem of Driver Distraction Driver Attitudes and Behaviour Legislative Responses to Driver Distraction in the UK

1 1 2 6 9 10 12 13 15 15 17 23 23 24 25 28 30

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Contents

Handheld Mobile Phone Use Alternative Distraction-related Legislation Policing and Recording Mobile Phone Use by Drivers Generating Compliance Instrumental Compliance Normative Compliance Educational Approaches Summary References

30 33 35 37 38 40 41 44 46

3

Keeping Up, Staying in Touch, Getting On Introduction The Certainty of Uncertainty Acceleration on the Roads Making the Most of Time Meeting Expectations Summary References

55 55 56 60 62 64 74 75

4

Navigating Risk Introduction The Unpredictability and Proliferation of Risk Risk on the Roads Road Risk and Its Experts The Risky ‘Other’ Legislating for Risk Experts with Lived Experience Summary References

79 79 80 82 83 89 92 97 98 100

5 The ‘Law-Abiding Offender’ Introduction Resisting Roads Policing Why Aren’t They Out Catching Burglars? ‘It’s Not Dangerous When I Do It’ Proper Laws and Other Laws

105 105 107 109 110 115

Contents

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7

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‘Somebody Made Me Do It’ Summary References

117 119 120

Legitimacy, Fairness, and Distracted Driving Introduction Legitimacy and Procedural Justice Fairness on the Roads Perceived Fairness of Roads Policing The Role of Crash Course in Generating Perceptions of Fairness Mobile Phone Behaviour Change Summary References

125 125 126 127 129

Conclusion Introduction Distraction, Driving and the Law Distraction, Driving, and the Twenty-First-Century Condition Distraction, Driving and the Law-Abiding Offender Distraction, Driving, and the Problem of Instrumentalism References

147 147 148

Index

135 137 141 142

150 152 153 156 161

1 Introduction and Purpose

Introduction Globally, over 1.3 million lives are claimed every year as a result of road collisions. Indeed, for some age groups, this is the main cause of death (WHO, 2022). Attempts to address this challenge have included engineering, education and enforcement approaches (known as ‘the three Es’) with each, in their own way, designed to break the chain of events that results in the physical, psychological, emotional, and economic harm generated every minute of every hour by our use of the roads. While the problem remains stubbornly persistent, the causes of these harms changes as technology evolves and behaviours change, ensuring that the challenge for those concerned with reducing the toll of death and injury never stays the same. This book is aimed at those with such an interest, whether that is in frontline policing or education, in vehicle or technological design, or with a broader interest in the criminology, sociology, and psychology of policing society. It takes one particular, and growing (RAC, 2021), road safety challenge—that of distraction caused by the use of a mobile phone—and uses it as a lens through which to explore two of the ‘three Es’—enforcement and education. Specifically, the focus is on the way in which enforcement and education have been © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_1

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combined via the offer of education as a diversion from prosecution for an offence of handheld mobile phone use. This book focuses on a particular approach which operated in one area of the UK, but draws out lessons that will apply to other contexts, other offences, and inevitably reach further into the twenty-first century. This introductory chapter outlines the context within which that discussion is based, providing an overview of the roads policing problem before moving on to focus on how driver distraction is a contemporary social, cultural, and legal problem for roads policing and for road safety. The methodological approach taken to explore the issue will be described, setting the scene for the remaining chapters of the book which take the form of a multidisciplinary exploration and discussion of contemporary challenges in roads policing through the lens of mobile phone-related driver distraction.

The UK Roads Policing Context Around 1800 people die on UK roads each year. This is more than double those killed in homicides and acts of terrorism in the UK combined (PACTS, 2020). An approximate further 25,000 people are seriously injured and 100,000 slightly injured (DfT, 2022a). Data confirms that a large proportion of road deaths and injuries result from a driver committing a road traffic offence (PACTS, 2020; Ministry of Justice, 2021)—offences which the policing of the roads is designed to prevent and prosecute. The contribution of roads policing to reducing deaths and serious injuries is, like many examples where prevention is the aim, hard to quantify. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of offences such as seatbelt and handheld phone use which were issued with a fixed penalty notice on the roads in the UK fell, with speeding (largely detected via speed cameras rather than human officers) a notable exception (Home Office, 2022). While this reduction could, arguably, be due to a reduction in offending, self-reported offending is increasing for certain traffic offences (RAC, 2021). In addition, the number of offences of ‘causing death’ by careless or dangerous driving have not fallen (ONS, 2023) and the numbers of deaths on UK roads has not

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consistently declined in line with detected offences (DfT, 2022a, 2023; HMICFRS, 2020). Indeed, numbers of road deaths plateaued between 2012 and 2019 (before COVID interrupted trends) following decades of reductions (DfT, 2020a; PACTS, 2020) and have now been described as ‘normalising’ to pre-COVID trends (DfT, 2023). The apparent end to year-on-year improvements in KSIs coincided with a reduction in roads policing officer numbers—officers who (in the most part) are responsible for identifying and taking action against those who break road traffic law (RSGB, 2017). Work by PACTS, published in 2020, identified a 13% reduction in roads policing officers over the preceding decade, with a reduction of 22% between 2010 and 2014. By 2019, dedicated roads policing officers accounted for only 4% of officers nationally—and this included those who also had other responsibilities such as firearms1 (PACTS, 2020). The reduction in offences detected, therefore, would appear to be a consequence of there being less officers available to observe and take action against them rather than a reduction in the numbers of offences taking place, with roads policing arguably disproportionately affected by austerity measures brought in in 2010.2 Indeed, drivers themselves have reported a noticeable lack of officers on the roads, resulting in them perceiving that they could evade detection when offending on the roads (AA, 2018). Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Service (HMICFRS) released a critical inspection report in 2020 with the principal finding that in some UK police forces, roads policing was inadequate, while also questioning the value placed on roads policing by such forces. This is despite the contribution of roads policing to broader challenges such as tackling and disrupting wider criminality, and contributing to countering terrorism (in addition to its role in saving lives and preventing injuries on the road network itself ) (NPCC, 2022; College of Policing [CoP], 2021). This was eventually acknowledged in 1 It is important to note that the accuracy of the data supplied by forces is questioned by PACTS. 2 Force spending reductions have seen disproportionate hits to roads policing, with the approximate 6% reductions in expenditure between forces over the time period 2013 to 2019 comparing to approximately 34% of reduced expenditure for roads policing over the same period (HMICFRS, 2020).

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the revised Strategic Policing Requirement in 2023, which recognised the contribution of roads policing to seven national threats (though it did not recognise road death as a national threat in itself ) (Home Office, 2023). Just as the road safety threat remains, cross-border criminality and terrorism are national threats that have not reduced, despite roads policing resources having done so. Indeed, the UK terror threat level has fluctuated between substantial and severe since 2019, meaning that the threat of terrorist activity has been likely or highly likely over that time period (MI5, 2022). In addition, many forms of criminality increasingly have local, national, and international dimensions, such as the overseas transportation of counterfeit goods, the drugs trade and human trafficking, thereby involving criminal use of road networks. Such criminality has substantial financial costs to the economy, as well as psychological and physical costs to those involved (Covlea, 2016; Leiren & Jacobsen, 2018). As such, the policing of the roads links to forms of criminality beyond road traffic offences themselves. Of course, underpinning the contribution of roads policing to the issues identified are multiple pieces of legislation aimed at tackling a range of unsafe driving behaviours, and unsafe ways of using a vehicle. Drivers may find themselves on the wrong side of the law through their behaviour on the road (perhaps through speeding, drink or drug driving, using a mobile phone at the wheel, or not wearing a seatbelt for example), or through their attitude to their vehicle’s compliance (its insurance, MOT or ‘road tax’ status). They may experience policing via a completely automated camera and receive their disposal without interacting with a human at any point (Wells, 2008), they may be pulled over by a specialist or non-specialist officer, or they may (more recently) be dealt with as a result of evidence supplied to the police by another road user (e.g. Go Safe, n.d.). Depending on the challenge being tackled, the offending driver may be advised, warned, referred to a diversionary course, fined, given penalty points on their licence, disqualified, or imprisoned. The legislation which forms the framework on which roads policing operates requires constant revision and updating to reflect new and emerging technologies that intersect with mobility, such as mobile phones (DfT, 2021), new types of technology installed in vehicles such as

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infotainment (DfT, 2021), various forms of driver assistance technology (DfT, 2022b) and even new types of vehicle, such as E-scooters (DfT, 2020b) and those marketed as ‘autonomous’ vehicles (Brodsky, 2016; DfT, 2022b) which ‘no longer require the driver to pay attention to the vehicle or the road’ (DfT, 2022b: para. 20). The rapid and irresistible march of technological development, and the baffling complexity of vehicles, creates a significant regulatory challenge. The slow and cumbersome process of law-making is unable to keep pace with the range of ways in which road uses can put themselves and each other in danger, with the equally complex notion of who is to ‘blame’ yet to be fully understood where autonomous technologies are involved (Lohmann, 2016). Roads policing finds itself at the frontline of operationalising complex debates about risk and responsibility and turning them into disciplinary consequences for individuals, within a context of often political battles relating to resourcing, prioritisation, and legitimacy. In large part, those coming into contact with policing via their use of the roads are unlike (and may see themselves as unlike) the ‘usual’ recipients of police attention (Wells, 2008). Historically, roads policing has had to fight for the right to be seen as a legitimate policing activity (Corbett, 2008) and at times has been the victim of (government facilitated) accusations of ‘victimising’ or declaring ‘war’ on innocent motorists (Wells, 2012). Roads policing has always been a significant touch-point in terms of police-public contact, where members of the public may experience policing for the only time in the role of offender, rather than as a witness or victim. As such, those who police the roads can be seen to represent ‘the public face of the police for many citizens’ (Corbett, 2008: 131). The encounters it generates between the ‘lawabiding’ (Wells & Savigar, 2019) traffic offender and the police have long been a source of tension (Corbett & Simon, 1991; Emsley, 1993). Given the centrality of encounters with the police to the formation of citizens’ attitudes towards the police (feelings which serve to influence future compliance with police instructions and with the law) (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Wells, 2012), roads policing therefore plays an important role in the policing landscape more generally.

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For all these reasons, roads policing occupies an important space at the frontline of growing public health and crime challenges, as well as in relation to contemporary debates around risk, responsibility, mobility, and identity. This book engages with these issues, using one particular case study—driver distraction via use of a mobile phone—as a lens through which to highlight and illuminate the significance of roads policing to life and death in the twenty-first century.

The Issue of Driver Distraction Driver distraction is the diversion of attention from the act of (safe) driving, often resulting from an attempt to multitask, or undertake more than one thought process or activity at the same time. Research has consistently shown issues with attempts to multitask, concluding that the brain cannot (in any effective sense) do two things at once due to the high neuronal energy requirements of information processing and the limited energy availability of the human brain (Carrasco, 2011; Skaugset et al., 2016). When distracted while driving, attention may be diverted to a competing event, activity, object, or person either within or outside of a vehicle and can take physical, visual, auditory, and cognitive forms (Regen & Hallett, 2011). For example, a driver may be distracted by things that they choose to consume while driving, such as food or cigarettes, by their own thoughts and emotions or by others present within the vehicle, including adult passengers, children, or animals. Drivers can be distracted by information external to the vehicle, such as a pedestrian behaving strangely, or an advertisement designed to catch attention. Increasingly, however, drivers can be distracted by technologies that they bring into a vehicle, such as mobile phones, smart watches, or satellite navigation devices as well as technological devices that are increasingly embedded into vehicles, such as touch screen controls, music devices, or infotainment systems. The ‘phone’ first arrived in vehicles via the ‘car phone’—a device fitted within the vehicle and growing in popularity across the 1970s (Bates & Gregory, 2001)—before the genuinely ‘mobile phone’ took over the market (Agar, 2013). Jessop (2006) emphasises that the interlinked

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development of these technologies allows for an understanding of why it has become so difficult to separate the vehicle from the mobile phone; after all, ‘vehicles sustained an integral role in the maturation of radio and cellular telephony. The first radio phones were housed in automobiles; powered by large and heavy batteries’ (Jessop, 2006: 9) and was equivalent to ‘driving around with a complete telephone station in the car’ (Farley (2006) cited in ibid.). The increasing presence of technology in our everyday lives, and our increasing reliance on it, crosses boundaries from outside of, to within, the vehicle. Many mobile phone-related technologies are designed to blend our mobile and stationary, virtual and physical lives, providing a seamless and uninterrupted ‘flow’ between spaces, places, and roles— promising the maximum efficiency from, and enjoyment of, every moment. Now, our vehicle recognises when our phone enters its space, and our phone communicates with our vehicle without us needing to introduce the two. It is separating ourselves from either, or either from each other that actually requires effort. Allowing them to blend seamlessly into one is the default option. Indeed, many mobile phone applications offer in-car interfaces, often with added supposed ‘simplicity’, while others promise to support the driver experience in some way, for example by offering information regarding ‘good-to-know hazards like hidden police cars and potholes’ (Gear Patrol, 2021: para. 3). Interaction between the vehicle and mobile phone has become more simple, and in some ways seemingly more productive, than ever. It is no wonder, perhaps, then that public surveys in the UK appear to show a gradual increase in drivers admitting to ‘using’ a mobile phone while driving in some form. The Crime Survey for England and Wales has showed an increase for both handheld and handsfree self-reported mobile phone use, from 42 to 47% for all mobile phone use and from 5.5% to 6.4% specifically for handheld (DfT, 2022d). Although the RAC Report on Motoring suggests that there has been a slight decline in self-reported handheld mobile phone use by drivers, from 26% in 2021 to 23% in 2022, they do also acknowledge that this may represent a shift for drivers to handsfree mobile phone use (RAC, 2022). Further survey data show that although 95% of Direct Line and Brake respondents claimed handheld phone conversations are a distraction, 22% still

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admitted to regularly making such calls, 3% admitted to sending texts and making handheld calls on every journey, and another 8% claimed to do so on more than half of their journeys (Direct Line & Brake, 2020). This means a significant minority of drivers in the UK admit to regular illegal and distracting phone use. And the UK is not alone. A small survey of Australian drivers found that 11% used a mobile phone while driving out of habit rather than for any particular reason (Budget Direct, 2020) while a study in France found lorry drivers were using their phones for 9% of their driving time (ETSC, 2022). Numerous countries have also reported consistent or increasing problems resulting from wider driver distraction. For example, the US Department of Transportation has reported a roughly constant estimated 13–15% of all incidents being related to distracted driving between 2015 and 2019 (NHTSA, 2021, 2022, 2023). Data from many countries confirms a trend of increasing phone use contributing to more year-on-year reported injuries and deaths (TRL et al., 2015). Many countries have banned use of handheld mobile phone devices by drivers. Recently, several have tightened legislation on phone use and increased penalties imposed on offenders (e.g. UK, 2017 and 2022; France, 2020; Australia, 2020), recognising that it is problematic for road safety. However, handheld phone use, and laws proscribing it, are only part of the problem. Research has shown that handsfree use offers no safety benefit over handheld use (see e.g. Caird et al., 2008; Wells et al., 2021), though it remains legal in most countries. Hence, focusing on the enforcement of mobile phone law represents a partial—and possibly counterproductive—endeavour. This is something we discuss throughout this text. Alongside enforcement, educational efforts have also been used globally to deter mobile phone using, and otherwise risky/offending, drivers. Some efforts are directed specifically at those identified contravening legislation while others are more general, known as specific and general deterrence respectively. General forms of education include television and radio campaigns available to the mass public in relation to a particular road safety problem.

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Targeted educational efforts, aimed at those caught offending, are directly aligned with legislation. In the UK, these can be seen in education/training offered as alternatives to prosecution such as the UK National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme (NDORS) (UKROEd, n.d.). However, as discussed in detail in later chapters, the DfT (2016) recommended the removal of educational/training alternatives to prosecution for mobile phone-using drivers in a supposed effort to generate a more punitive deterrent. As such, education is no longer routinely offered in this format for this action.3 This contextual background informs the discussion which takes place throughout this book.

The Focus of this Book This book offers a combined criminological, sociological, and psychological exploration into the policing of the roads, concerned with a specific focus upon mobile phone use by drivers as a lens through which to focus on the policing of mobility in the UK in the twenty-first century. The disciplines complement each other well when attempting to understand how attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, and experiences create a complex picture of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ and how efforts to control behaviour feature within that—all core issues affecting policing. Furthermore, policing does not take place in a social or cultural vacuum, and to therefore appreciate the more nuanced issues, complications and intricacies influencing police work, the social, cultural, and legal context in which policing takes place will be considered. This book therefore attempts to explore in detail how technologies have come to take on a central role in our everyday lives. Just as the car might be seen as the most transformative technology of the twentieth century, physically connecting us in ways that transformed the way we live, we can see how the mobile phone operates to connect us in ways that are transforming lives in the present century. The bringing together of these two technologies, each with their own cultural meaning and 3 Some mobile-phone-using drivers may be offered the ‘What’s Driving Us?’ course, in limited circumstances.

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behavioural impacts, is where we focus our attention. Specifically, the issues it poses in terms of driver distraction, and the implications of such distraction, are of key focus throughout this book. This book will consider both the issues of legal and illegal distraction, the law, enforcement, and education within one prevalent and highly topical issue facing roads policing—mobile phone-related driver distraction. This exploration will be anchored in empirical data sourced from research in and around one particular practical, frontline initiative aimed at combining education and enforcement to influence the future choices of those identified engaging in risky behaviours. The data from which the analysis emerges has been obtained from the full range of actors intersecting at the frontline of the prevention of harms caused by distracted driving—including police officers, educators, and drivers. The data is both qualitative and quantitative, ensuring a breadth and depth of understanding of the relatively short life of an intervention designed to use roads policing as a gateway into education aimed at changing behaviour and saving lives.

The Research4 The data on which much of the following analysis is based was drawn from research which considered an educational input targeted at mobile phone use by drivers,5 known as Crash Course. Crash Course was a form of education offered as an alternative to prosecution for offenders6 as well as to groups of employees as a training intervention at the request of their employer. For offenders, the course was offered to those who were caught using a mobile phone while driving by a police officer within one force area in England. Providing that they had not attended that same course within 4

The research project that provided the data for this book was undertaken during PhD study, funded jointly by the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Staffordshire and Keele University. 5 Amongst other road safety issues, risky behaviours, and offences. 6 The course was available to those who had been detected either using a mobile phone while driving or driving without wearing a seatbelt.

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the previous three years, those caught offending were given the option to pay a course attendance fee instead of the fixed penalty fine and avoid the penalty points associated with the offence, experiencing the 75-minute face-to-face course as an alternative to prosecution7 For employees, the attendance requirements/criteria and duration were decided upon by their employer. Although the general course content remained the same for offenders and employees, an element of the course that referred to issues of young drivers exceeding the speed limit was removed from the employee version. The course was delivered by a multi-agency delivery team who consisted of current/former employees of the Fire and Rescue Services, Police, Victim Support and Youth Services, all of whom had working and/or personal experience of injury or loss resulting from road collisions.8 Although focused on mobile phone use, other traffic offences such as speeding and drink-driving were highlighted throughout the course, as well as other risky road user actions that are not specifically incorporated in legislation (although they may be considered offences if they impact driver behaviour), such as inappropriate speed, handsfree mobile phone use, and conversing with passengers. The course outlined the costs associated with offending (financial and licence penalties as well as costs of injury) as well as emphasising the moral obligation drivers have to keep themselves and others safe on the roads. This was achieved by outlining several incidents and outcomes resulting from handheld and handsfree phone use, amongst other behaviours. This information was delivered through emotive as well as informative verbal presentation, video footage, images, and personal testimonies of road traffic collisions and their impacts (Hoggarth et al., 2009). The course was developed in 2004 and ran until changes in legislation in 2017 as a result of DfT (2016) recommendations that police forces no longer operate an alternative to prosecution for the offence of using a mobile phone while driving. This coincided with changes in the delivery team, and meant that the course was no longer a delivery option 7

This course was separate and different to the nationally delivered course for mobile phone offences offered in other geographical locations throughout the UK at the time. 8 See Hoggarth et al. (2009) and Savigar (2019) for more information.

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in this structure. The data collection period for this research was between November 2014 and May 2016. The overarching aim of the research was to explore attitudes, behaviours and experiences relating to the growing problem of mobile phone-related driver distraction, and the policing of it. A mixed-methods research methodology was adopted in order to combine qualitative in-depth detail relating to personal experiences, with broader quantitative public perceptions and behaviours data (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004). This methodological triangulation was combined with data triangulation to ensure that perception, experience and behavioural insights were sought from a range of individuals (Maruna, 2010: 135), namely police officers responsible for identifying mobile phone-using drivers, members of the Crash Course delivery team, and drivers who had attended the course.

Questionnaires To understand driver attitudes and behaviours relating to various road user actions, and to gather perceptions of Crash Course, questionnaires9 were distributed to two different groups10 ; those attending Crash Course as an alternative to prosecution and those attending Crash Course as part of their employment. Throughout this book the former will be referred to as offenders and the latter as employees. Those attending via their employment may or may not have committed the offences previously and may or may not have previously received education as an alternative to prosecution for the offence but were not, for the purposes of this research, considered to be ‘offenders’. Three questionnaires were developed to identify any changes in responses over three timepoints; prior to an experience of education (pre-course), immediately after an experience of education (post-course), 9

The questionnaires enquired into; general crash risk attitudes, personal safety attitudes, attitudes towards the police, attitudes regarding seatbelt and mobile phone use, driver behaviour, future driving intentions, evaluation of Crash Course, and demographic details. 10 The questionnaires were the same for both groups, with the exception of a single additional section for employees enquiring into their most recent experience of being ‘caught’ committing an offence, for those that had such an experience.

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and again six months later (follow-up). All individuals attending Crash Course during the data collection period were invited to take part in the research by email, alongside their letter of invitation to the course, where they could access an online version of the questionnaire. If they had not already done so, they were invited to instead complete a paper copy of the questionnaire by the researcher upon their arrival at the course venue. They were invited to complete a second paper-copy questionnaire immediately at the end of the course, before they left the venue. Those who left contact details were also invited to complete a third, follow-up online questionnaire via email six months after their course attendance. Over an 18-month data collection period, between November 2014 and May 2016, a total of 1640 questionnaires were completed by 1387 participants. Broken down according to participant group and phase of completion, for the offender group, 975 pre-course, 201 post-course, and 40 follow-up questionnaires were completed. For the employee group, 285 pre-course, 120 post-course, and 19 follow-up questionnaires were completed.11 A range of descriptive and inferential statistics were undertaken of the questionnaire data and will be presented throughout this text.

Interviews To explore experiences with/perceptions of Crash Course as a tool for tackling mobile phone use while driving, as well as wider road safety attitudes and behaviours, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four groups of participants involved in the courses; (1) those policing the roads—‘police officers’, (2) those delivering the course—‘presenters’, (3) those receiving the driver course as an alternative to prosecution— ‘offenders’, and (4) those receiving the course as part of their employee training provision—‘employees’.

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Only approximately 4% of the initial 975 offender participants completed the final questionnaire six months later. For the employee group, this retention rate at follow-up was 16%. This rate was slightly lower than rates observed in previous research. For example, af Wåhlberg (2010) noted a 20% retention rate observed at six-month follow-up. Given the attrition rate in participation, follow-up analyses are restricted in the following chapters.

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The interview guides differed somewhat for each of the groups, depending upon their role in the process. For officers, the interviews focused upon their experiencing of enforcing traffic law, their knowledge of Crash Course, and perceptions on the course being used as an alternative to prosecution. For presenters, the interviews concerned their experiences of developing/delivering Crash Course and the role of education as an alternative to prosecution. Finally, for offenders and employees, the interview guide focused upon their experiences with roads policing12 their experience of Crash course, and their driver attitudes and behaviours. Five face-to-face interviews were conducted with members of the team responsible for delivering Crash Course (2 male and 3 female). Thirteen further face-to-face interviews were conducted with police officers who had some experience of stopping drivers for mobile phone offences in that County (12 male, 1 female). All police officers currently held a role within the police where they were responsible for roads policing as their primary function or as a proportion of their working time. Nine individual telephone interviews were conducted with offenders (5 male, 4 female). Nineteen interviews were conducted with employees (11 male, 8 female). Interviews were conducted between four and six weeks after attendance at a course. No change in outcome in terms of the charged offence resulted from participating in an interview. Interviews were conducted between November 2014 and May 2016. All interviews lasted between 30 and 75 minutes, were audio recorded, and were transcribed verbatim with full pseudonymisation before being analysed. The interview data were analysed using an inductive thematic analysis approach whereby the research concepts and literatures were drawn from the analyses of the data gathered (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Pseudonyms are used when interview quotes are presented in the discussion.

12 This was also included in the employee interview guide for those who had such experiences to reflect upon (albeit those were distinct to their experience of Crash Course).

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Observations To understand the reality in which Crash Course was delivered as an alternative to prosecution and as part of an employee’s role in their workplace, Crash Course delivery was observed on multiple occasions; 12 offender deliveries and 4 employee deliveries. Observations took place between November 2014 and June 2015. To complement interview and questionnaire data collection, observations were utilised to explore the process of course attendance and how the course was presented. This was used as a complementary, rather than standalone, research method and as such, the observation data will not feature heavily in the analysis presented throughout.

Chapter Synopsis The following chapters explore the issue of mobile phone distraction, roads policing, and education. Chapter 2 situates the discussion about mobile phone distraction in the broad context of technological developments and their growing impact on our daily lives, before considering the consequences of combining mobile phone dependence with driving. Driver attitudes to distraction and offending are discussed, along with the legislation in place to tackle the issue of distracted driving, and statistics relating to its use. The chapter then considers the challenges of actually policing distraction, and the role of education as an alternative, or as part of, enforcement. A theme of this discussion, taken forward in the rest of the book, is the question of handsfree phone use, not currently illegal in the UK, despite having the potential to be as distracting as handheld mobile phone use. Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of the ‘accelerated society’, using empirical data to illustrate the relevance of the concept to the broad topic of mobile phone use by drivers. The discussion explores how the mobile phone apparently offers drivers the opportunity to manage and navigate some of the challenges of living in an increasingly uncertain and insecure world, and hence how many drivers are reluctant to deny themselves access to the world, via their phone, while driving. In particular, the

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chapter suggests that the pressures of being a good parent, good friend, and good employee compete with the notion of the good driver, and that the latter often loses when constant availability becomes an expectation that is hard to deny. Chapter 4 situates the issue of distracted driving in a ‘risk’ context, arguing that this concept helps to understand both the problem and the responses to it. The discussion, again supported by empirical data, suggests that phone-using drivers operate with their own understandings and calculations of risk, and that they are able to locate and deploy contradictory logics which allow them to ignore safety messages and evidence that their behaviour is likely to cause harm. The apparent differences in handheld, as opposed to handsfree, phone use are also discussed in risk terms. While other drivers, and other offenders are identified as causing ‘real’ risk, handheld and handsfree drivers refer to their everyday experiments in risk which have not, so far, resulted in harmful consequences and which make warnings of risk appear as false positives. Chapter 5 considers how, despite evidence of mass law-breaking on the roads, this is a context where drivers strive to maintain a lawabiding identity, and use this as a way to deny the legitimacy of roads policing and of some laws in particular. Drawing on criminological and psychological literature, as well as data from the empirical research underpinning this book, the chapter demonstrates how drivers use various techniques to deny that they are a problem, to question whether there is a problem, and to resist the idea that policing should focus on these types of problematic behaviours. Chapter 6 focuses on the issues of fairness and legitimacy in the context of instrumental and normative compliance. As a context in which so many police/public encounters occur, roads policing sits at the frontline of generating interactions that impact on the way drivers see the enforcement of road traffic law, but also how they see policing more generally. The opportunity presented by educational diversion courses is discussed in terms of (a) its value in helping officers negotiate potentially tricky roadside encounters; (b) its potential to communicate accurate safety messages to those caught using their mobile phone while driving, and (c) for its role in promoting the importance and legitimacy of roads policing more generally.

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The final chapter draws together the arguments and analysis from the preceding chapters, concluding with reflection on the importance of roads policing—and for the education it can facilitate in various ways— for addressing the problem of mobile phone use by drivers, as well as the challenges that reliance on enforcement of the law will continue to pose for all those concerned with reducing the death and injuries caused by those who drive distracted.

References AA. (2018). What’s the chance of being caught for a driving offence? Available online: https://www.theaa.com/about-us/newsroom/driving-offence-enf orcement Agar, J. (2013). Constant touch: A global history of the mobile phone. Icon Books Ltd. Bates, R. J., & Gregory, D. W. (2001). Voice & data communications handbook. McGraw-Hill Professional. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77–101. Budget-Direct. (2020). Aggressive driving and road rage: Australia survey 2020. Available online: https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/ road-rage-study.html. Accessed 18 May 2023. Brodsky, J. S. (2016). Autonomous vehicle regulation: How an uncertain legal landscape may hit the brakes on self-driving cars. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 31(2), 851–878. Caird, J. K., Willness, C. R., Steel, P., & Scialfa, C. (2008). A meta-analysis of the effects of cell phones on driver performance. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 40 (4), 1282–1293. Carrasco, M. (2011). Visual attention: The past 25 years. Vision Research, 51(13), 1484–1525. CoP. (2021). FOIA-2021-125. Available online: https://assets.college.police.uk/ s3fs-public/2021-12/FOIA-2021-125-Roads-Policing.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2023. Corbett, C. (2008). Roads policing: current context and imminent dangers. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 2(1), 131–142.

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Corbett, C., & Simon, F. (1991). Police and public perceptions of the seriousness of traffic offences. The British Journal of Criminology, 31(2), 153–164. Covlea, M. I. (2016). Money laundering – The link between international organised crime and global terrorism. Knowledge Horizons, 8(1), 186–191. DfT. (2016). A consultation on changes to the Fixed Penalty Notice and penalty points for the use of handheld mobile phone use whilst driving. Available online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/494672/hand-held-mobile-phone-driving. pdf. Accessed 27 January 2023. DfT. (2020a). Reported road causalties in Great Britan: 2019 annual report. Available online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl oads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/922717/reported-road-casualtiesannual-report-2019.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2023. DfT. (2020b). Powered transporters. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/gov ernment/publications/powered-transporters/information-sheet-guidanceon-powered-transporters. Accessed 22 May 2023. DfT. (2021). Any use of handheld mobile phone while driving to become illegal . Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/any-use-ofhand-held-mobile-phone-while-driving-to-become-illegal. Accessed 22 May 2023. DfT. (2022a). Reported road casualties Great Britain annual report 2021. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-roadcasualties-great-britain-annual-report-2021/reported-road-casualties-greatbritain-annual-report-2021. Accessed 18 May 2023. DfT. (2022b). Britain moved closer to a selft-driving revolution. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-moves-closer-toa-self-driving-revolution. Accessed 22 May 2023. DfT. (2022c). Rules on the safe use of automated vehicles: summary of responses and government response. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/ consultations/safe-use-rules-for-automated-vehicles-av/outcome/rules-onthe-safe-use-of-automated-vehicles-summary-of-responses-and-governmentresponse. Accessed 22 May 2023. DfT. (2022d). Mobile phone use by drivers: Great Britain, 2021. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/seatbelt-and-mobilephone-use-surveys-2021/mobile-phone-use-by-drivers-great-britain-2021. Accessed 22 May 2023.

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DfT. (2023). Reported road casualties Great Britain annual report 2022. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casual ties-great-britain-provisional-results-2022. Accessed 26 May 2023. Direct Line and Brake. (2020). Direct Line and Brake Reports on Safe Driving: In-Vehicle Distraction. Available online: http://www.brake.org.uk/ assets/docs/dl_reports/DL_In-vehicle_report.pdf. Accessed 16 May 2023. Emsley, C. (1993). ‘Mother, what did policemen do when there weren’t any motors?’ The law, the police and the regulation of motor traffic in England, 1900–1939. The Historical Journal, 36 (2), 357–381. ETSC. (2022). Study shows lorry drivers spending 9% of driving time on the phone. Available online: https://etsc.eu/study-shows-lorry-drivers-spending9-of-driving-time-on-the-phone/. Accessed 22 May 2023. Gear Patrol. (2021). 7 essential apps every driver should have on their phone. Available online: https://www.gearpatrol.com/cars/a679601/best-dri ving-apps-for-iphone-and-android/. Accessed 29 April 2023. Go Safe. (n.d.). Operation Snap. Available online: https://gosafe.org/faq/operat ion-snap/. Accessed 20 March 2023. HMICFRS. (2020). Roads Policing: Not optional – An inspection of roads policing in England and Wales. Available online: https://www.justiceinspecto rates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/wp-content/uploads/roads-policing-not-optional-aninspection-of-roads-policing-in-england-and-wales.pdf. Accessed 28 March 2023. Hoggarth, E., Anthony, D., Canton, R., Cartwright, I., Comfort, H., Payne, P., Shafiullah, M., Wood, J., & Yates, S. (2009). Evaluation of the Crash Course: Report to Staffordshire Fire & Rescue Service. De Montfort University. Home Office. (2022). Fixed penalty notices for motoring offences statistics data tables: Police powers and procedures year ending 31 March 2022. Home Office, available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/policepowers-and-procedures-other-pace-powers-england-and-wales-year-ending31-march-2022/police-powers-and-procedures-other-pace-powers-englandand-wales-year-ending-31-march-2022#fixed-penalty-notices-and-other-out comes-for-motoring-offences. Accessed 31 March 2023. Home Office. (2023). The strategic policing requirement. Available online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/upl oads/attachment_data/file/1138740/20230223_Strategic_Policing_Requir ement__V1.2__-_OS.pdf. Accessed 31 March 2023. Jessop, G. (2006). A brief history of mobile telephony: The story of phones and cars. Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture, 38(3), 43–60.

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Johnson, R. B., & Onwuegbuzie, A. J. (2004). Mixed methods research: A research paradigm whose time has come. Educational Researcher, 33, 14–26. Leiren, M. D., & Jacobsen, J. K. S. (2018). Silos as barriers to public sector climate adaptation and preparedness: Insights from road closures in Norway. Local Government Studies, 44 (4), 492–511. Lohmann, M. F. (2016). Liability issues concerning self-driving vehicles. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 7 (2), 335–340. Maruna, S. (2010). Mixed method research in criminology: Why not go both ways? In A. R. Piquero & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Handbook of quantitative criminology (pp. 123–140). Springer. Mi5. (2022). Threat levels. Available online: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/threatlevels. Accessed 22 May 2023. MoJ. (2021). Criminal Justice statistics quarterly, England and Wales, year ending December 2020. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl oads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/987892/criminal-justice-statis tics-dec-2020.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2023. NHTSA. (2021). Distracted Driving 2019. Available online: https://crashstats. nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813111. Accessed 18 May 2023. NHTSA. (2022). Distracted Driving 2020. Available online: https://crashstats. nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813309. Accessed 18 May 2023. NHTSA. (2023). Distracted Driving 2021. Available online: https://crashstats. nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813443. Accessed 18 May 2023. NPCC. (2022). Roads Policing Strategy 2022–2025. Available online: https:// library.college.police.uk/docs/NPCC/Roads_Policing_Strategy_2022.25. pdf. Accessed 03 May 2023. ONS. (2023). Crime in England and Wales. Available online: https://www.ons. gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinen glandandwalesappendixtables. Accessed 28 March 2023. PACTS. (2020). Roads policing and its contribution to road safety. Available online: https://www.pacts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Roads-PolicingReport-FinalV1-merged-1.pdf. Accessed 21 April 2023. RAC. (2021). Report on Motoring. Available online: https://www.rac.co.uk/ drive/features/rac-report-on-motoring-2021/. Accessed 03 May 2023. RAC. (2022). Report on Motoring. Available online: https://www.rac.co.uk/ drive/features/rac-report-on-motoring-2022/. Accessed 06 November 2023. Regan, M., & Hallett, C. (2011). Driver distraction: Definition, mechanisms, effects, and mitigation. In B. Porter (Ed.), Handbook of traffic psychology (pp. 275–286). Academic Press.

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RSGB. (2017). Lack of traffic police ‘undermines safe driving efforts’ . Available online: https://roadsafetygb.org.uk/news/n-a-5920/. Accessed 22 May 2023. Savigar, L. (2019). Preventing mobile phone use while driving: Appreciating the equivocal nature of identity, safety and legality in an uncertain world (Doctoral dissertation, Keele University). Available online: https://keele-repository.wor ktribe.com/OutputFile/465636. Accessed 6 November 2023. Skaugset, L. M., Farrell, S., Carney, M., Wolff, M., Santen, S. A., Perry, M., & Cico, S. J. (2016). Can you multitask? Evidence and limitations of task switching and multitasking in emergency medicine. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 68(2), 189–195. Sunshine, J., & Tyler, T. R. (2003). The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing. Law & Society Review, 37 (3), 513–548. TRL, TNO and Rapp Trans. (2015). Study on Good Practices for Reducing Road Safety Risks Caused by Road User Distractions. European Commission. UKROEd. (n.d.). The scheme. Available online: https://www.ukroed.org.uk/ scheme/. Accessed 22 May 2023. Wells, H. (2008). The techno-fix versus the fair cop: Procedural (in) justice and automated speed limit enforcement. The British Journal of Criminology, 48(6), 798–817. Wells, H. (2012). The fast and the furious: Drivers, speed cameras and control in a risk society. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Wells, H., & Savigar, L. (2019). Keeping up, and keeping on: Risk, acceleration and the law-abiding driving offender. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19 (2), 254–270. Wells, H., Briggs, G., & Savigar-Shaw, L. (2021). The inconvenient truth about mobile phone distraction: Understanding the means, motive and opportunity for driver resistance to legal and safety messages. The British Journal of Criminology, 61(6), 1503–1520. https://academic.oup.com/bjc/ article/61/6/1503/6262317 WHO. (2022). Road traffic injuries. Available online: https://www.who.int/ news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries. Accessed 28 March 2023.

2 The Mobile Phone Distraction Problem and Responses to It

Introduction Technology has changed, and continues to change, our everyday lives (Sarwar & Soomro, 2013). From the moment we are awoken by an electronic alarm system to the application that switches off the lights before we go to sleep, or even the device that monitors the quality of our sleep, technology offers to weave itself into every aspect of our lives in ways that we could never have predicted but now, often, cannot imagine living without. The ‘mobile phone’ is just one example of a device that has rendered itself essential by offering not just the potential for voice or text communication, but a connection to the virtual, online world with an array of capabilities accessible with the touch of a screen, all in a handy, pocket-sized gadget that begs not to be left behind whether we are moving between rooms, popping to the shops, or jumping in the car. Indeed, in the latter situation, the car and the phone reach out to each other, connecting without the need for us to act, to facilitate the seamless transition from connected biped to connected driver. This chapter will consider how mobile phones becoming such an essential accessory for contemporary lives has impacted upon driver experiences and performance. Issues surrounding both handheld and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_2

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handsfree mobile phone distraction will be explored before moving on to consider legislative and educational responses to driver distraction as attempted means of generating compliance with the law. Legislation is key to the policing of the roads and to roads policing’s contribution to road safety; it is intended to guide road user action and affords police officers the powers to police and respond to unsafe driving. However, it is oversimplistic, of course, to consider the creation of a law as the resolution to any problem. Indeed, this chapter highlights some of the complexities of the law as it currently exists, showing how it may contribute to the problem, rather than the resolution, of distracted driving. The role of education and its relationship to the law in this context will also be critically discussed.

Technological Infatuation Over the last few decades, mobile phones have become integral features of both our working and personal lives. The number of smartphone subscriptions is currently at an all-time high and is predicted to increase further over the next few years (Statista, 2022). While colloquially still referred to as ‘phones’, such devices act not only as communication tools but as diaries, calendars, phonebooks, newspapers, health management tools, medical records, maps, photo albums, music players, document storage, and much more—as well as being portals to the entirety of the internet. They may benefit security and safety in potential cases of emergency (Thulin & Gustafsson, 2004) and provide apparent much-needed opportunities for social interaction (Madell & Muncer, 2007). Mobile phones also inform identities, helping individuals to understand ‘who they are’ as individuals and how to express their ‘self ’ (Bauman, 2001: 14; Baym, 2015), even to the extent that individuals may ‘fear’ what they may be missing out on when forcibly separated from their devices (Przybylski et al., 2013). For these reasons, the relationship between individuals and their phones has been discussed in the language of addiction (Carbonell et al., 2013; Cheever et al., 2014). In particular, a significant number of children and adolescents are considered addicted to their phones (Sahu et al., 2019), as well as adults who

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claim they could only manage for an average of five hours, 11 minutes without using their phone (Express, 2023). This is a problem which is linked to a multitude of psychological harms, such as anxiety and other emotional and behavioural problems (Sahu et al., 2019). It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that contemporary relationships with technologies such as mobile phones have generated complex issues for society to respond to.

The Problem of Driver Distraction A robust research literature shows that drivers who ‘use’, in some form, a mobile phone while driving tend to miss the exit they intended to take (Thulin & Gustafsson, 2004), brake inappropriately (Young & Regan, 2007) and have slower reaction times (Haque & Washington, 2014) than those not using a mobile phone. Handheld mobile phone-using drivers notice far fewer hazards (Caird et al., 2018), take longer to respond to any hazards they do notice (Briggs et al., 2016; Fisher & Strayer, 2014; Strayer et al., 2003), and have a greater crash risk (Atwood et al., 2018; Shaaban et al., 2020). It may seem obvious that dedicating a hand to holding or interacting with a phone reduces an individual’s ability to use driving instruments efficiently and that looking away from the road can cause a driver to miss important developments around them. Indeed, these physical and visual elements of distraction have proven problematic; a driver may be looking away from the road and therefore miss changes to traffic signals, leading them to ‘run’ red lights (Strayer et al., 2003), may have poor lane control when they do not have their hands on vehicular instruments (Owens et al., 2011), or fail to see when other drivers are reducing their speed and slow their own vehicle down accordingly (Consiglio et al., 2003). These driver behaviours all increase driver crash risk and create safety problems, but explain only part of the distracting nature of using a mobile phone while driving. There is also an established body of literature demonstrating the distraction imposed by handsfree use. Handsfree phone use does not necessarily improve hazard detection over handheld use (Atchley et al.,

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2017) or offer any crash risk benefit over handheld phone use (Caird et al., 2018; Dingus et al., 2016).1 The visual attention of a phone-using driver (either handheld or handsfree) tends to be predominantly focused on the immediate forward-facing view rather than the peripheral areas (Desmet & Diependaele, 2019; Recarte & Nunes, 2000). Even when looking immediately at a hazard, phone-using drivers can ‘look but fail to see’ that hazard (Briggs et al., 2016; Strayer et al., 2003) and exhibit limited situational awareness (Briggs et al., 2018; Ebadi et al., 2019) contributing to further deteriorated driving performance. Cognitive, as opposed to the more intuitively obvious physical or visual , distraction is the issue here. This is a result of both driving and mobile phone use drawing on common attentional resources (Briggs et al., 2016), meaning that cognitive effort in one task takes capacity away from the other. This cognitive workload also varies, with tasks such as speech commands requiring greater cognitive workload and therefore having greater negative impacts upon driver performance (Strayer et al., 2003). Furthermore, drivers who use either handheld or handsfree mobile phones while driving tend to engage in compensatory behaviours such as lowering speeds and increasing distances from lead vehicles (OviedoTrespalacios et al., 2017), or deciding to use a phone only in perceived ‘safe’ circumstances, such as on slower roads or when there is less traffic present (Christoph et al., 2019; Savigar, 2019). Accordingly, despite handsfree use having a demonstrable impact on hazard awareness and detection, in the absence of any safety critical event, drivers may feel these mitigations are an effective method of keeping them safe and seemingly offer ‘evidence’ that they can multitask in this way. These compensatory behaviours are further conflated with an ‘illusion of awareness’ experienced by distracted drivers who are largely unaware of their reduced driving performance. Sanbonmatsu et al. (2016) found handsfree mobile phone use not only led to more serious driving errors but also diminished drivers’ ability to accurately self-assess the safeness of their driving. Using a mobile phone while driving, whether handheld 1 It is important to note that some research has reported a lower crash risk for certain forms of handsfree phone use, such as talking or listening to a call, compared to handheld phone use (e.g., Dingus et al., 2019), however, there is an overwhelming body of research which has found handsfree phone use actions to be equally as distracting as handheld.

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or handsfree, may therefore lead drivers to inaccurately perceive safety and produce an overconfidence in one’s multitasking ability. Problematically, the illusion of control and perceived ability to compensate for distracting tasks also predicts greater handheld phone use (Schlehofer et al., 2010), despite more frequent handheld use being associated with a poorer driving record, including number of incidents (Schlehofer et al., 2010). Of course, in-vehicle driver distraction includes more than simply mobile phone distraction. One common experience that is often offered as a comparison for handsfree use is that of conversations with a passenger. One of the key concepts used to explain why the two experiences are, in fact, different is situation awareness. Situation awareness refers to activated knowledge relating to driver task at a given point in time (Salmon et al., 2012) or, simply put, awareness of the surrounding situation relevant to a task at hand. In contrast to the (physically absent) person at the other end of a phone call, a (physically present) passenger is able to share the same situational environment as a driver. Drews et al. (2008) found that conversations with passengers sometimes even revolved around the surrounding driving/traffic context and that complex conversations were less likely to take place during times of increased complexity in the driving environment. The co-present passenger may therefore naturally lapse conversation as the driving task becomes more demanding. These are changes that passengers and drivers create in the shared conversational situation that adapts to the surrounding environment, allowing for greater situation awareness. In contrast, the person on a phone call has no such awareness and will often compete for cognitive demand by (for example) repeatedly calling for a response where none has been given immediately when expected (Wells et al., 2021). Given the ever-changing nature of the driving context, inattention in any of these areas can lead a driver to misjudge or fail to respond to changes in the driving environment (Briggs et al., 2018).

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Driver Attitudes and Behaviour Despite a clear research evidence base of the risks associated with both handheld and handsfree forms of mobile phone use while driving, driver attitudes and behaviour suggest a confused picture in terms of public perception and experience. RAC Report on Motoring publications consistently show handheld mobile phone use by other drivers to be a top concern of motorists. That is despite a significant minority of those same drivers admitting to using a handheld mobile phone to make/receive calls while driving (RAC, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2019, other drivers using a mobile phone was the most commonly cited concern amongst UK drivers, yet still 24% of respondents admitted to using their mobile phone to make or receive handheld calls, increasing to 51% when considering only those aged under 25 (RAC, 2019). In 2020, those numbers had increased, with 29% of drivers admitting to using a handheld mobile phone while driving at least occasionally (RAC, 2020). A 2021 Ipsos Mori report for the DfT found similar results, that 24% of drivers admitted to using a handheld mobile phone while driving at least once over the last 12 months, increasing in younger drivers. Indeed, younger drivers were more likely to admit to feeling attached to their mobile phones, feeling a desire to see notifications as soon as they are received and tapping a screen of a mobile phone while driving to check for incoming notifications (as observed in other research such as Hill et al., 2021). In comparison to previous years, the 2022 RAC Report on Motoring presented a decline in self-reported handheld mobile phone use (with 77% stating they never use a handheld phone to make or receive calls in 2022, compared to 69% in 2016), as well as in the number of drivers reporting handheld phone use of other drivers to be their top road safety concern (from 41% in 2016 to 26% in 2022). The report recognises that this may simply be caused by a displacement to handsfree phone use rather than drivers stopping all types of phone use while driving. Indeed, other surveys show that drivers do self-report a greater frequency of handsfree mobile phone use while driving than handheld use (DfT, 2017; Hill et al., 2021; White et al., 2010) and that drivers turn to handsfree phone use when expected to refrain from handheld use

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(Benedetti et al., 2022). Accordingly, the number of drivers whose top concern is now more generically the ‘poor standard of other motorists’ driving’ has increased (RAC, 2022). This accords with an assumption that some drivers who are refraining from handheld mobile phone use are instead turning to handsfree mobile phone use, and driving less safely as a result. Research has also found that those who self-report handsfree phone use while driving are more likely to do so regularly (once a day or more) than handheld mobile phone users (Sullman et al., 2018), suggesting that the impact on standards of driving will become more obvious with an increasing driver population that is turning to handsfree phone use as an alternative to handheld phone use. As such, handheld laws may simply be generating a displacement effect rather than reducing risk (Cornish & Clarke, 1987). Driver attitudes towards, and perceptions of, handsfree mobile phone use are generally more positive than those of handheld. White et al. (2004) found the perceived risk of handheld mobile phone use to be considerably higher than that of handsfree, with shaving or applying make-up while driving perceived as almost as dangerous as making a handheld call, but handsfree mobile phone use perceived as less dangerous than sneezing while driving. While the 2017 British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) reported that 90% of individuals disagreed that it is safe to talk on a handheld mobile phone while driving, the same BSAS report also showed handsfree mobile phone use while driving to be less of a concern for the general public; a much lower 53% of individuals agreed that the use of any type of mobile phone, including handsfree devices, while driving was dangerous (DfT, 2018). A more recent Direct Line and Brake (2020) survey also found that around half of respondents claimed handsfree use is as distracting as handheld use, with 49% of the same respondents still admitting to making handsfree calls (Direct Line & Brake, 2020). However, the wording of these survey questions do not differentiate between perceptions of safety in other drivers or perceptions of safety in oneself performing the same action, which is an important distinction discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. It is therefore not clear whether individuals are referring to safety (or lack thereof ) in relation to their own mobile phone use, that of other drivers, or both. Some of this risk perception and subsequent behavioural choice

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may be the result of the legal sanctions imposed on these varied forms of distraction as a method of generating compliance with the law rather than necessarily safety (drivers feel a risk of getting caught rather than/as well as a collision), as will be discussed in detail later in this chapter.

Legislative Responses to Driver Distraction in the UK Handheld Mobile Phone Use There are several pieces of UK legislation that relate to the issue of driver distraction, with specific prohibitions relating to handheld mobile phone use while driving. Section 41D(b) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 makes it an offence to contravene construction and use requirements relating to mobile phone use while driving. This legislation was initially introduced in 2003, prohibiting individuals from driving a motor vehicle on a road if they were using a handheld mobile telephone or a handheld device defined as: “a device, other than a two-way radio, which performs an interactive communication function by transmitting and receiving data… For the purposes of this regulation, a mobile telephone or other device is to be treated as hand-held if it is, or must be, held at some point during the course of making or receiving a call or performing any other interactive communication function.” Regulation 110 of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) (Amendment) (No. 4) Regulations 2003

Under this legislation, an ‘interactive communication function’ was stated to include: ‘(i) sending or receiving oral or written messages; (ii) sending or receiving facsimile documents; (iii) sending or receiving still or moving images; and (iv) providing access to the internet’. Although some defining criteria were given, there were complexities with terminology used in this legislation, requiring drivers who wanted to remain compliant with the law to understand what constituted (a) use, (b) handheld, and (c) interactive communication functions, as well

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as the broader legal terminology concerning ‘driving’, ‘road’, and ‘motor vehicle’. Using the given definitions, it was easily possible to ascertain the il/legality of certain actions, such as holding a phone to type and send a text message or holding a phone to take a phone call. Other actions, however, were less obvious in their il/legality. Indeed, the case of DPP v Barreto (2019) highlighted the complexity of the law as it related to using a handheld mobile phone to record videos. The case challenged the legal definition of the term ‘interactive communication function’, concluding that using a mobile phone to video record a collision scene was not using it to communicate and therefore was not covered by the law.2 Within the case, the point was made that the 2003 legislation did not account for all handheld mobile phone actions: It would have been much better to have drafted legislation which was less cumbersome but its effect is clear. The legislation does not prohibit all use of a mobile phone held while driving. It prohibits driving while using a mobile phone or other device for calls and other interactive communication (and holding it at some stage during that process). (DPP v Barreto, 2019: para 47).

The DPP v Barreto case highlighted that there were plentiful actions that mobile phones were capable of in 2019 that were not clearly covered by a 2003 law/terminology. Using the logic within the case—that the 2003 legislation covered only those actions that involved an interactive communication function at the point of being handheld—this would mean that for a device with its communicative potential suspended (for example used in ‘flight mode’) no action would then be considered contrary to this specific law, whether that was composing a text message, recording a video, writing a shopping list, reading the downloaded lyrics to a song and simultaneously searching for that song in a downloaded playlist. Although this case provided some much-needed clarity around 2

The case saw mention of cases of previously quashed convictions including R v Nader Eldarf (2018). While Nadar Eldarf admitted to holding a handheld mobile phone to change music stored on his phone, this action was not deemed to involve any external communication and therefore was not considered ‘use’ of a handheld mobile phone according to the previously worded legislation which specifically referred to interactive communication function as the transmitting and receiving of data.

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the legislation, it also served to undermine the usefulness of the offence and significantly reduce the number of activities that could be prosecuted successfully, making the task of policing evermore complex (Snow, 2019). Of course, there were, and continue to be, a range of offences created by other legislation that could be used when the holding of a phone contributed to poor driving, and these are considered below. However, they are not designed for this specific purpose, may be hard to prove, and are not particularly preventative in that they are unlikely to appear to the public to specifically outlaw mobile phone use. Following this case, in 2022, Regulation 110 of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations was updated to prohibit individuals from driving a motor vehicle on a road if they are using a handheld mobile telephone or a handheld device which is capable of transmitting and receiving data, whether or not those capabilities are enabled (excluding two-way radios such as those used in policing). As with the previous version of this legislation exemptions for the offence exist where a driver is using a handheld device to call 112 or 999 or when responding to a genuine emergency where it is unsafe/impracticable to stop driving.3 Further specificity has also been provided via a list of actions that would be considered ‘use’ of a handheld device, though the list is not exhaustive: . . . . . . . . . .

3

the word “using” includes the following— illuminating the screen; checking the time; checking notifications; unlocking the device; making, receiving, or rejecting a telephone or internet based call; sending, receiving or uploading oral or written content; sending, receiving, or uploading a photo or video; utilising camera, video, or sound recording functionality; drafting any text;

The 2022 amendment also includes an additional exemption of paying for goods/services using a contactless device when a vehicle is stationary.

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. accessing any stored data such as documents, books, audio files, photos, videos, films, playlists, notes, or messages; . accessing an application; . accessing the internet. Although the redrafted legislation may bring about some clarity and respond to the ‘loophole’ associated with the definition of an ‘interactive communication function’, it can only be anticipated that with continuous technological developments, new questions will arise in relation to whether those actions are considered ‘use’ under this law. The focus of wording in this current iteration of the Regulation is on illuminating, checking, unlocking, making, sending, receiving, rejecting, using, drafting, and accessing—effectively prohibiting the touching of the phone without specifically referring to ‘touch’. While the 2022 amendment gives some clarity, it is easy to foresee that it cannot keep up with the development of technology and arguably is already falling behind the extent of forms of use and of interaction between human and device. For example, it is not clear whether devices that can effectively operate as a mobile phone, but are worn not held (such as smart watches) would be captured by this legislation. Fundamentally, however, the amendment does not address the issue of handsfree phone use but instead continues to focus on the physical aspects of phone ‘use’. This means that this particular law continues to ignore the very real, and equivalent, distraction posed by the cognitive aspects of phone use. Although some laws may apply to the use of a handsfree device, to be considered below, there is therefore no specific prohibition of handsfree phone use by drivers.

Alternative Distraction-related Legislation Section 41D (a) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 describes wider contraventions of construction and use requirements relating to the control of a vehicle and view of the road/traffic ahead; Regulation 104 of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986 prohibits driving (as well as causing or permitting another to drive) a motor vehicle on a

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road in a position that a person cannot have proper control of the vehicle or full view of the road and traffic ahead. Many distractions may fall into this category of driving, for example, holding a map up above the steering wheel or applying make-up. As with the legislation relating directly to mobile phone use while driving, this offence focuses on physical/visual in/attention. Section 3 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 outlines offences of careless driving, otherwise referred to as ‘due care and attention’, and inconsiderate driving, which are committed when driving a mechanically propelled vehicle on a road or other public place without due care and attention, or reasonable considerations of others. Section 3ZA, later added to the legislation, clarifies that driving without due care and attention is driving that falls below what would be expected of a competent and careful driver. Key to this, and distinguishing it from other elements of the Act, is the reference to driver standards being below that expected of a competent and careful driver.4 Although this legislation is not directly associated with driver distraction, given the research evidence on the impact of handsfree mobile phone use on driver performance, it would be possible for such a driver to be considered driving below a standard expected of a careful and competent driver as well as to be showing a lack of reasonable consideration for other road users. There is complexity, therefore, not only in specific legislation targeted at handheld mobile phone use but across various pieces of legislation relevant

4 In contrast to dangerous driving, which relates to standards that fall far below those expected of a competent and careful driver. Section 2 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 outlines the offence of dangerous driving. For this offence to be proven, it is necessary that the driving would be obviously dangerous to that of a competent and careful driver and that injury is caused to persons or damage to property. This injury, however, should not be serious as that would then fall under the offence of ‘causing serious injury by dangerous driving’. As such, for driver actions to be considered dangerous, they must fall far below, rather than merely below, the standards of a competent and careful driver, and include either damage to property or injury that is not deemed to be serious. This could include actions that would fall into alternative offences (including phone use) but here the driving is perceived to fall far below that expected of a competent and careful driver. Causing death, rather than injury, is a distinct offence, whether caused by dangerous driving or by careless, or inconsiderate, driving (R v Browning, 2001).

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to the context of driver distraction, and beyond, which inevitably has consequences for compliance as well as intended outcomes.5

Policing and Recording Mobile Phone Use by Drivers Clearly, then, neither the law, nor the public’s engagement with it, are straightforward, meaning that policing mobile phone use is also complex. Indeed, we are not talking about a single law but a raft of potentially applicable pieces of legislation. This is particularly problematic when considering that those tasked with policing the roads have, increasingly, not been specialist ‘roads policing officers’ and are often ‘dual-hatting’— required to perform other policing functions as well as roads policing activity (PACTS, 2020). Police dog handlers are occasionally requested to support specific roads policing activity; neighbourhood officers may be tasked with responding to traffic offences in between other work and firearms officers may be required to police the roads until required elsewhere. For some officers, roads policing is a secondary activity expected of them whereas for others it may play a key role in their day-to-day work. Regardless of any other role, or whether roads policing is merely a secondary task to a primary police function, knowledge of the law and its application would still be a requirement for effective policing of problematic road user behaviour. Whether or not this is a realistic expectation has been questioned in recent years (HMICFRS, 2020), nevertheless, the issue remains at the forefront of roads policing. Not only does this complicate the operational work of those policing the roads, but it also has broader implications for strategic police decision-making and force ability to respond appropriately to the problem of driver distraction. To work proactively to tackle the offences or actions most problematic on global, national or local roads, a clear 5

The purpose of this book is not to define all key terms associated with roads policing legislation, or indeed of distracted driving or ‘mobile phone’ legislation, but to highlight the considerable complexity of the background legislative context that those policing the roads, and indeed those using them, must contend with and how that is responded to by those who do find themselves engaging in some way with the policing of the roads.

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understanding of ‘problem’ prevalence is required. Reliable statistics of this nature are not available for driver distraction, and in particular mobile phone use, as evidenced by the inconsistencies between fixed penalty notices handed out, observed mobile phone use, and selfreported mobile phone use. While there were ‘only’ 19,700 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) for the offence of using a mobile phone while driving in England and Wales for 2021 (Home Office, 2022), this compares to a much greater 1% of drivers observed committing offences (DfT, 2022a) which equates to over 3 million people in England alone. This is despite over 7 million people self-reporting offending (RAC, 2022). In other words, only a very small percentage of offenders are being punished as a result of breaking mobile phone law—something not unrelated to the above point about limited police resources.6 It is also likely that some offences of handheld mobile phone will appear in the statistics in other categories, where other legislation has been used to prosecute them, including the use of a mobile phone to record videos (post Barreto case but pre the 2022 change in legislation) or where a driver has been charged instead with failing to maintain proper control or driving without due care and attention. This further complicates the ‘true’ picture of offending. Layered on top of that is the issue of crash causation. 2021 data records that ‘only’ 20 people were killed, and 596 injured in collisions involving mobile phone use (DfT, 2022b), yet these rely on ‘contributory factors’ recorded by police officers at the roadside and representing the officer’s assessment of likely causation at that point. These may well be changed before the offence is disposed of, especially for phone-related actions which may be difficult to identify or evidence at the scene (Rolison, 2020). Recorded instances of mobile phone use are therefore a product of the attention paid to them by the police, and the ways in which they are recorded, as much as they are a reflection of the ‘real’ level of offending, as they will fluctuate according to the police resource devoted to identifying offending, and the individual confidence of officers in identifying offences and applying the law. For example, enforcement campaigns 6 Although this may change with the introduction of handheld mobile phone offence detecting technology being introduced in England (Devon County Council, 2022) and discussed elsewhere.

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targeting driver mobile phone use (such as those carried out under the National Police Chiefs’ Council enforcement operations calendar) often mean that more officers are tasked with identifying and responding to the behaviour, perhaps for one or two weeks a year. Of those, some officers may be expert roads policing officers with a full understanding of the law, while in other forces, they may be drawn from other areas of policing and may have less confidence applying these complex laws. Contrastingly, in some forces, their campaign activity may involve an alternative approach, such as a media and communication campaign and no additional policing resource. Different approaches will yield different results—results which will appear in recorded offence statistics—and it would be possible to argue that either increases or decreases in prosecutions are a measure of success. A period in which no offences of using a mobile phone while driving are recorded may indicate a persuaded public, refraining from the use of a handheld device, a public that is better able to conceal its use from police view, a police presence that is unable or unwilling to identify phone use, one that was distracted by other ‘jobs’, or one that is opting to use other legislation that that specifically designed to tackle mobile phone use. Of course, even a genuine absence of any handheld phone use would not mean any safety goals had been achieved as every driver may have migrated to handsfree use in order to be ‘safe’ from prosecution, while rendering themselves just as vulnerable to distraction (Wells et al., 2021). Statistics are, then, a product of policing approaches as much as they are a product of the reality of offending on the roads.

Generating Compliance There are various means through which efforts can be made to encourage specific behaviours and deter others. Here we will consider two particular methods of generating compliance; instrumental and normative, before then considering how they apply to legislative and educational efforts to deter mobile phone-using drivers.

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Instrumental Compliance According to the instrumental model of compliance, individuals are motivated by self-interest and behave according to the law due to a fear of being punished if they do not (Tyler & Fagan, 2008: 233). This concept is therefore reliant upon rational decision-making (Hough et al., 2010); the cost of a given behaviour must be understood to outweigh its benefits in order for it to be rejected (Tyler & Huo, 2002). Instrumental compliance as a method of behavioural control therefore often relies upon the use of sanctions and penalties in attempts to reduce the likelihood of non-compliance. In a criminal justice context, implementation of this approach to compliance is seen through a focus on the level of penalty, for example the length of a prison sentence or the cost of a penalty fine. According to this model of compliance, it is the effectiveness of the police in their ability to regulate crime, providing a credible risk of detection and sanction when a crime is committed that defines a successful police force and reduces law-breaking (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). This aligns with the deterrence theory assumption that to be deterred from committing a crime, individuals must perceive an appropriate severity of the associated punishment alongside a likelihood of being caught and punished within a short period of time (Pratt et al., 2006). The focus in these models is largely upon individuals considering the risks associated with punishment before deciding whether or not to break a law, for example, considering the penalty points/fine associated with a given traffic offence. There are several complications with this approach, particularly in the roads policing context. Firstly, for a risk of sanction to be perceived there must be a belief that the offending action will indeed be identified; instrumental compliance relies on the monitoring and policing of behaviour. All behaviour cannot (yet) be monitored all of the time (despite the promises of technology, surveillance and big data both within and outside of the roads policing context). To achieve a state of permanent behavioural monitoring would be both a time-consuming and costly process that the police service under the current economic climate (AA, 2017; Johnston & Politowski, 2016) simply could not provide. There are now increasing opportunities for peer-surveillance, for

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example through public reporting of camera footage, which may help to increase the perceived risk of detection for those who are aware of such schemes. However, these are currently unlikely to be as strong a deterrent as the presence of police officers or technology particularly as mobile phone and other distraction offences may be difficult to capture in enough detail to clearly amount to evidence of an offence. Furthermore, deterrence also depends on the perceived seriousness of any resulting sanction relative to the perceived benefits of the action. In this case the penalty for using a handheld mobile phone could range from 6 penalty points and a £200 fine (under the 2003/2022 law) to as little as 3 points and a £100 fine (under ‘proper control’ and ‘careless’ laws) or a diversion from prosecution entirely.7 In this context, self-interest of a rational individual does not always equate to law-abiding behaviour, as intended (Tyler & Fagan, 2008). For example, if an individual contemplates speeding because they risk losing their job as they are late for work, the possibility of a fine and penalty points may be seen as less problematic than the alternative outcome. Likewise, if an individual perceives exclusion from a social event, for example, to be more of a penalty to their social life than penalty points and a fine, the perceived benefits of engaging with messages while driving may outweigh the consequences. Although an accumulation of penalties may result in loss of licence, this may seem unlikely when individuals have performed those same actions on multiple occasions and never been caught (Bates & Anderson, 2021; Stafford & Warr, 1993; Wells et al., 2021). Finally, as mentioned above in relation to handsfree phone-using behaviours, even where individuals are rationally guided to comply with legislation, that does not equate to safe behaviour. They may use a handsfree device rather than a handheld mobile phone in order to avoid punishment, but that does not necessarily mean that they are driving without distraction. Compliance with the law is sometimes not enough to lead to safe road use. The key point here is that those efforts that are focused upon generating instrumental compliance are reliant upon and concerned with these existing pieces of legislation. It forces a focus on points of terminology

7

Penalties may be much higher and include a disqualification.

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and constantly questioning what does and does not fall into a particular piece of legislation. An instrumental route to generating compliance is therefore tied to the very legislation which is often flawed, or at least questionable, and this has considerable implications for both those policing the roads and those subject to that policing.

Normative Compliance Jackson et al. (2012) have identified multiple pathways that individuals may take in their attempts to comply with the law. The first pathway (Pathway A) is the simple existence of instrumental compliance, as discussed above, whereby individuals behave in ways that avoid punishment. Another pathway (Pathway B) is that of normative compliance, where the individual behaves in accordance with what they perceive to be morally right, regardless of its legality or illegality. A third pathway (Pathway C) focuses upon the perceived morality of the law—individuals obey the law simply due to its existence as a ‘law’ and a moral obligation that the law should be obeyed.8 The final pathway (Pathway D) similarly focuses upon normative obligations, but to the police rather than the law, as individuals obey the law in response to their felt moral obligation to behave as the police assume/desire, regardless of the law in question. In contrast to the instrumental model, therefore, the three normative (or ‘legitimacy’) pathways are concerned with self-regulation. Individuals comply voluntarily according to moral beliefs and/or a notion that an authority has the ‘right’ to dictate their behaviour (Tyler & Fagan, 2008: 236). In these normative versions of compliance, the individual does not need to be watched by an external source in order to comply, nor threatened with a sanction. They would comply whether or not they felt anyone was watching or any consequences would result. Normative compliance in this sense has been described by Tyler and Huo (2002: 82) as ‘acceptance’, rather than ‘compliance’, as it necessitates a voluntary desire to behave in a particular way rather than any forced obligation to act in that way. 8 In these cases, it is crucial, of course, that the law is effectively communicated and understood by individuals (see earlier in this chapter).

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Tyler (2006) claims that normative compliance (particularly pathways C and D) is generally well achieved through the existence of legitimacy within the legal system and those policing behaviour; with police legitimacy associated with a belief that the police are entitled to call upon the public to behave in particular ways and that the public has an obligation to engage with the police/legal authorities cooperatively (Tyler, 2004: 86–87). In the context of mobile phone use by drivers, this could mean that drivers avoid using their phone because they think it is unsafe and therefore wrong, that they do so because they believe themselves to be law-abiding and therefore obey the law (whatever it may be), or because they believe in the legitimate right of the police to dictate their behaviour.

Educational Approaches It is arguable that the solution lies, therefore, either in more effective enforcement (a challenge, for all of the above reasons) or in changing the level of normative commitment to the law. One approach linked to the latter is to educate drivers about the reasons the law exists, and indeed that the behaviour is dangerous regardless of whether or not it is illegal so that they refrain from using their phone whether or not a police officer is likely to see them doing it or it is unlawful. Opportunities to educate exist at various points in the roads policing landscape, but these ‘educational efforts’ could mean a variety of things— to provide information, to change attitudes, even to teach methods of avoiding detection, or a combination of those. When education is used to change attitudes it can be considered an effort at encouraging normative compliance. In the context of mobile phone-using drivers, normative commitment to the law relating to mobile phone use by drivers is an imperfect solution, as the law only relates to one type of problematic distracted driving behaviour. For those who perceive a moral obligation, and therefore normative commitment, to obey the law, this is likely to mean refraining from handheld but not necessarily handsfree phone use. However, as discussed, ‘pathway B’ generates compliance that is aligned specifically to the personally perceived morality of an act, rather than any

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moral alignment with the act simply because it is ‘the law’. Here compliance is motivated by personal moral principles rather than legal ones. As such, individuals may cease to behave in a problematic way, even where that behaviour is legal, if they perceive it to be the morally right thing to do (we might suggest that this is the difference between ‘can’ and ‘should’). This can be encouraged through education. However, education is itself complex and can be delivered at different times, by different people, and using different approaches. In terms of the content style, one of the most commonly used, and academically researched, approaches to education in this context is that of the ‘fear appeal’ (Lewis et al., 2009). Also known as ‘scare ‘em straight’ approaches, these present messages about the negative consequences associated with a particular action (Dillard, 1994: 295). Fear appeals typically presents images or video clips of death or serious injury being caused by the road user behaviour in question. Although there has been a tendency to adopt this type of approach within road safety education historically, there is criticism of the unnecessary upset and adverse impacts upon the audience it generates (Elliott, 2003; Hastings et al., 2004) and some research has found it to worsen rather than improve driver behaviour (Guttman, 2015; Pedruzzi et al., 2017). Other research has suggested a gender difference, with fear appeals being beneficial to improving intended driver behaviours for females but not for males (Goldenbeld et al., 2008), and others still have suggested that fearevoking messages that are followed by fear relief, or a calming stage, provide the greatest benefits to road user behaviours (Algie & Rossiter, 2010; Rossiter & Thornton, 2004). In contrast to efforts to evoke fear, other forms of education incorporate and look to encourage positive emotional responses. There is a growing body of support for the use of educational approaches which adopt a positive emotional message and model positive actions that should be chosen, rather than simply depicting harmful actions that result from those that should not (Box & Dorn, 2023; Gauld et al., 2019; Harré et al., 2005; Lewis et al., 2007). Alongside these emotional styles, education may also take the form of a rational-, or information-, based approach which is concerned with presenting information to encourage logical thinking relating to both the advantages and disadvantages of a behaviour (Leonidou & Leonidou,

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2009), or how to perform a particular action that may support safer road user behaviour. Again, there are mixed findings in relation to the success of rational education approaches in improving driver behaviour (Ker et al., 2005; Stanton et al., 2007), and this is likely a result of the differing ways that such information can be presented and what it can be presented about. Rational information is often associated with informing drivers of associated penalties and legal definitions, i.e. it is illegal to use a handheld phone while driving and if caught you will receive 6 penalty points and a £200 fine. In this way, it can therefore be aligned to efforts to generate instrumental compliance and faces the same limitations of other instrumentally informed approaches. Information which focuses on the legal boundaries of actions and associated instrumental penalties may allow drivers to identify alternative, albeit not necessarily less risky, actions or to understand how to evade detection. However, rational approaches can also be used to present information that drivers may not be aware of in terms of wider road risks and do not necessarily have a sole focus on illegality, i.e. that handsfree mobile phone use can be equally as distracting as handheld, and therefore attempt to encourage attitudinal change through enhanced awareness of risks. Consequently, the content style as well as the content itself included in any educational effort becomes important to its associated outcomes. Alongside differences in content style, education can be broken down into two core formats of provision. Firstly, that of a general approach, which refers to educational efforts targeted at general populations or sub-populations. This includes, for example, media campaigns aimed at the general public. These educational approaches are reliant upon road users independently acknowledging that the messages conveyed are relevant to them and applying them to their own driving. Secondly, specific approaches are efforts to target specific individuals within the population as a result of their behaviour, for example in response to offending behaviour. In other words, attempts at specific deterrence aim at reducing or stopping a behaviour that has been witnessed in a particular individual. Until 2017, specific, targeted, education was offered as an alternative to prosecution for those identified using a handheld mobile phone while driving in the UK. A national course, ‘What’s Driving Us?’, was offered

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to drivers caught throughout police forces in England and Wales apart from a small number of forces that developed and offered their own courses. In 2017, and following a multiple-fatality collision caused by a phone-using HGV driver (Thames Valley Police, 2016), the penalties associated with the offence of using a mobile phone while driving were increased from 3 penalty points and a £100 fine to 6 penalty points and a £200 fine, and the widespread, routine provision of courses as alternative to prosecution for this offence ceased.9 The DfT advised that courses were ‘insufficient or inappropriate to the seriousness of the offence’ (DfT, 2016: 20). This was despite the NPCC (2016) stating that their preference was for a combination of enforcement and education in an attempt not only to catch offenders but also generate awareness and habitual behaviour change. The decision to remove education in this format for the offence emphasises a UK Government focus on punitive sanctions and efforts to generate instrumental compliance, despite the associated limitations of that in the current roads policing climate. Consequently, educational opportunities for generating normative compliance currently primarily take the form of general education, such as media campaigns, and specific education during those police-public interactions that take place in traffic stops. The activities of the police have thus become ever more important in supporting road safety efforts.

Summary Dependence on mobile phones has increased in line with the growth in the range of functionality they offer. This infatuation with mobile phones does not stop at the door of a vehicle; a considerable number of drivers admit to using a mobile phone while driving in some form (RAC, 2022). This is problematic given that research has shown that the driver behaviour of those using a mobile phone while driving is significantly impacted by that phone use. In recognition of this problem, most countries across the world have prohibited handheld mobile phone 9 However, when charged under other laws, mobile phone use may still result in education, as described above.

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use while driving. In the UK, legislation was introduced in 2003 and updated in 2022. There are many complexities to this legislation, largely resulting from an attempt to restrict behaviours associated with an everdeveloping form of technology. The slow legislative processes required to develop and amend such legislation are simply unable to keep up with the progression in mobile phone technology. This has led to drivers questioning what is meant by specific terminology and the identification of loopholes that render the legislation ineffective in prohibiting all forms of handheld phone use. Additionally problematic is that legislation prohibits only handheld phone use. Handsfree phone use, in replacement of handheld mobile phone use, does not necessarily improve driver behaviour or offer crash risk benefit (Atchley et al., 2017; Caird et al., 2018; Dingus et al., 2016). Driver distraction, through the use of mobile phones, is therefore a concern for road safety and remains as such despite the updating of legislation in 2022. In addition to legislation, many forms of education have been delivered to the public, through generally available public campaigns or in more specific forms directed at those caught using a mobile phone while driving. Drivers are not currently routinely offered education as an alternative to prosecution, despite potential opportunities for that education to encourage a moral alignment with road safety—one which is associated with compliance because it is the right thing to do rather than simply because it is the law. Instead, current practice emphasises the instrumental approach to generating compliance which requires drivers to weigh up risks and benefits. Problematically, this has been accompanied by a reduction in funding allocated to dedicated and trained roads policing resource, meaning that the risk of detection and prosecution is likely reducing at a time that it is most needed. This instrumental approach also requires a focus on the law, which can be complicated and quickly become outdated, while also meaning that drivers may resort to an unsafe but legal alternative form of phone use. Subsequent chapters keep both of these forms of distraction in focus.

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Introduction This chapter focuses on the notion of the ‘accelerated society’, using empirical data to illustrate the relevance of the concept to the broad topic of mobile phone use by drivers. The following discussion explores issues of uncertainty and change in contemporary life, before considering specifically how they apply to the context of the roads. The hurried nature of many areas of life will be considered through the lens of using a mobile phone while driving, focusing on how core elements of our daily lives are embedded in, made possible by, or represented through our use of a mobile phone. In particular, we will consider employment challenges associated with current times, as well as the changing nature of social relationships and expectations, and how each creates a role for the mobile phone, both outside of and within a vehicle. The challenges of these developments to the safe and efficient use of the roads will, of course, be the focus of this exploration but we begin with broader theoretical perspectives on the nature of life in uncertain times.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_3

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The Certainty of Uncertainty Writers from both the sociological and psychological perspectives emphasise that numerous aspects of life are now experienced at a quicker rate for shorter periods (Rosa, 2013), pass by with less time for reflection or enjoyment (Wajcman, 2008) and are experienced with a greater level of uncertainty (Reith, 2004). Despite the promises made by technology, it brings with it complexity in how we define and live our lives in a way that may act to complicate, rather than simplify, our day-to-day existence (Wajcman, 2015). These are amongst an array of other complex influences on contemporary lifestyles and decision-making that are important in what Rosa (2013) terms the ‘acceleration society’. As we embrace greater social, and physical, mobility, we experience an increasing number of interactions with ‘new’ people to whom we must present ourselves. Our identities must be built and rebuilt, framed and reframed depending on the occasion, around concepts such as occupation, family circumstances and leisure choices (Beck et al., 1994; Wajcman, 2015). Options and opportunities in many aspects of life have multiplied. Although this may appear exciting, this continually requires decisions to be made and the possibility of the wrong choice being made. Aspects of life that were once defined by tradition are often not so predictable, with uncertainty having become the unnerving norm (Giddens, 1990). According to Giddens (1990), individuals may subsequently feel a sense of ‘ontological insecurity’, or a lack of emotional and psychological certainty. For many, anxiety overrides the sense of autonomy resulting from increasing opportunities and choice (Giddens, 2002: 46) with experiences of uncertainty, instability and unpredictability characterising what Giddens has termed the ‘runaway world’ (1999). The perceived uncertainty that writers emphasise of contemporary life (Reith, 2004) may have resulted, in part, from social change within relationships, religion, and broader values which have facilitated a process of detraditionalisation (Giddens, 1995), or what we might consider to be the loss of ‘traditional tradition’. Data is showing an increasingly secular society (ONS, 2022a; Pew Research Centre, 2021), which brings with it less apparent certainty about life after death and, arguably, a newfound

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sense of the value of time spent on earth. Additionally, while religion had historically offered opportunities for understanding and expressing oneself, with more people than ever considering themselves to have no religious affiliation (e.g. ONS, 2022a; Pew Research Centre, 2021), individuals must find alternative ways of understanding who they are and expressing themselves. Giddens (2002) argues that self-identity is now reflexively created and recreated on a more active basis than ever before; it is not a fixed and universal concept and therefore does not offer any level of certainty or stability. Religion is not the only area of flux that informs this reflexive selfidentity. Bauman (1996: 26) suggests that we are increasingly surrounded by ‘strangers’ that we interact with but never really get to know. Every day holds the possibility of a new social environment where we are surrounded by such strangers, where the purpose of interaction is to ascertain similarity or difference and therefore know whether those individuals are like us, or the ‘Other’ (Bauman, 1999). Few relationships (be they romantic or social) are ‘for life’ but it is these interactions which also provide the basis for building relationships with new potential acquaintances, friends or partners. Here, still, there is uncertainty, with a considerable percentage of marriages ending in divorce (Ortiz-Ospina & Roser, 2020), and a requirement to adhere to a set of unspoken rules in an attempt to maintain long-term friendships (Argyle & Henderson, 1984). Where those relationships do break down, a further redevelopment and presentation of one’s self-identity is required. As such, identity presentation is a continuous process that is expected of individuals on a daily basis and in various aspects of life (Beck et al., 1994). Considering alternative areas in which individuals present their self, Wajcman (2015) suggests that while previously leisure time often defined an individual’s identity, employment and economic value are now some of the highly valued aspects of identity. As with religion and relationships, employment and its associated economic valuing brings an element of uncertainty. Employment is now largely based upon the present, rarely identifiable by the past or indicative of the future. A considerable proportion of individuals now encounter part-time or temporary work (ONS, 2022b), with many jobs/careers being experienced by people across the life course. Even those in full-time work worry

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about the prospect of becoming unemployed (Mental Health Foundation, 2020), producing added pressures to the employee. Rather than have a legitimate expectation of a ‘job for life’, ‘[e]veryone who does not wish to fall behind, be left on the shelf or lose their professional standing must ‘update’ their knowledge, their expertise - in short, their practical range of skills’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 100). Individuals are recognised and defined by their performance in any given role rather than the role itself (Rosa, 2010: 97) and increasing amounts of effort are required to simply maintain the status quo, to avoid falling behind the known or anonymous ‘others’ with whom individuals are in constant competition. Life becomes one long job interview where the hopeful candidate has to compete constantly to be (or continue to be) the most flexible, adaptable, indispensable, tolerant, and hard-working employee imaginable (Beck et al., 1994). Efforts to adapt to uncertainty therefore have implications for who we are and what we perceive to be essential activities of day-today life. As such, it could be argued that a multiplicity of opportunities, possibilities, choices and associated autonomy have replaced single truths and consistency. Alongside this social and cultural change, technological change continues to imprint itself on our daily lives. Whether they offer to facilitate traditional tasks or introduce whole new experiences to our lives, whether they claim to be necessary or add luxury, technologies have changed our ways of doing things and—importantly—our relationships with each other, with the planet and (of particular relevance for our purposes here) with time. Claims that technological developments would produce a ‘leisure revolution’, have not translated into reality (Wajcman, 2008). The expected ‘spare’ time that we envisaged technology could create has been taken up by additional tasks, activities and possibilities. The ability to complete many tasks in less time, promised by technology, has simply resulted in more time being made available for alternative tasks, and an associated expectation that twice as many possibilities are fulfilled. Even the decision-making processes necessitated by the growth in choice have become time-consuming—because we have more choices, we have to spend time considering options and making decisions (Schwartz, 2004). Consequently, individuals now report feeling hurried, having less

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time available for each task expected of them, and general dissatisfaction with the time available for leisure activities (Evans et al., 2015; Jacobs & Gerson, 2004; Southerton, 2003). This has, Rosa (2003) suggests, resulted in a contraction of time—the amount of time individuals have for each possible activity decreases as they desire to perform more activities. With this contraction of time, the desire to do more requires individuals to rely on technological support to achieve more in less time, a cyclic process of reliance which Rosa (2003:11) refers to as the ‘acceleration cycle’. The consequence of this is that the ‘to-do’ list is never completed. Technologies that promise to do things quicker, to save us time, to give us new and improved experiences, and to multitask are therefore attractive. They allow us to draw less on our sum total of time, to waste less of our allocation of years, days and minutes—to make the most of every moment. Consequently, even if more of life is being lived online—as ‘onlife’ (Floridi, 2011)—(and recent lockdowns associated with the Covid-19 pandemic have caused us to revisit our need to be physically co-located with other people in order to work and socialise), that shift only encourages us to think that we can do anything, with anyone, at any time, if we have the right technology. Naturally, others will expect the same of us. As an apparent enabler of all these goals, a portable technology that appears to facilitate connections, to maintain contacts, to demonstrate availability, to multitask and to make productive use of ‘dead time’ is likely to be particularly attractive. The trick of the mobile phone is to allow for tasks to be completed in small pockets of otherwise wasted time—tasks that would otherwise require us to carve out minutes or hours from our day later on. While we are standing in the queue at the checkout, waiting for a child to emerge from school, or even walking to our destination (Schneider et al., 2022) our phones connect us to a world where jobs can get done, producing a feeling of enhanced productivity, of cheating time, of bringing some certainty to uncertainty (Google, 2017). For Rosa, these various pressures constitute an ‘accelerated society’, ‘characterised by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking-up of the

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general pace of life’ (Rosa, 2003: 3). Constant technological development and perpetual social change produce a society with less and less stable points of reference. Life is a process of continual reflexivity and decision-making. Standing still is not an option. Rosa (2013) describes this as the ‘slippery slope’ phenomenon; ‘standing still’ actually means slipping behind, losing the race, and seeing others win. The ‘acceleration society’ therefore represents an era in which social growth outpaces rates of achievable acceleration—we cannot keep up (Rosa, 2013). A ‘good life’ is increasingly understood to be a ‘full life’ (Rosa, 2003: 13) as we strive to have more, do more and be more, pursuing an illusive sense of fulfilment. But, of course, all this takes time, and time is limited. Activities and interactions that use time most efficiently therefore become attractive, and activities that we do not have time to do, or that take ‘too long’ are regretted. Individuals experience a fear of missing out or ‘FoMO’, whereby anxiety and apprehension result from individuals believing themselves to be absent from activities/events that others are experiencing or benefitting from (Przybylski et al., 2013: 1841). The anxiety caused by a failure to be involved with particular experiences ensures that individuals constantly strive to do more and miss out on less.

Acceleration on the Roads With clear links to notions of ‘speed’ and ‘acceleration’, physical mobility is another battleground for the citizen of the increasingly contingent and fluid society described above. Roads therefore have a key role in this ‘speed up’ of society that Rosa (2003) refers to as ‘acceleration’, allowing access to new people, geographies, and experiences. Along with increased opportunities to travel further and see more, however, comes the expectation that individuals will do just that—although the destination, rather than the time spent actually travelling is usually the goal. As such, time spent travelling may increasingly be seen as ‘unproductive, wasted time in-between ‘real’ activities, which should be minimised’ (Lyons & Urry, 2005: 1), where ‘all’ we are doing is moving our corporeal self, or some other physical item, from one location to another, at

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the whim of traffic jams, train delays, or buses that fail to materialise. Indeed, a survey undertaken by We Buy Any Car (2019) found that over the course of a lifetime for those drivers surveyed, the equivalent of 15 days would be spent driving lost or in the wrong direction, two months’ worth of time would be spent merely finding a parking space and 85 hours would be spent fuelling the vehicles that allow drivers the privilege of spending 8 months stuck in traffic. Pre-pandemic statistics also suggested that the average delay on the strategic road network had been increasing and the average speed decreasing (DfT, 2020). There is therefore an important link between time and the roads. Given that most of us have in our possession technologies that allow us to stay in touch and ‘reach’ people and information anywhere at any time, why would they not appear an attractive addition to that often frustrating and unrewarding experience of physical movement? Drivers may be increasingly asking themselves what journeys are actually for and whether time could be better spent, whether on personal or work-related activity.1 Viewed in this way, then, the phone may be seen as an enabler or productivity tool while our vehicles may now be seen as the opposite. Beyond this, the phone may be seen as an effective counter to the frustrations of travel, offering itself up as a method of regaining lost efficiency while on the move. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that drivers may feel tempted to combine the two and to utilise the phone to overcome the shortcomings of the vehicle (or perhaps, more accurately, the road network). If one task is completed at the same time as the other, then a feeling of productivity may increase. In the sections that follow we explore the salience of these claims about life ‘today’ through the words of those who participated in our research. We provide the discussion before as a lens through which to view the experiences and feelings of those whose mobile phones are used

1 However, given that those working from home in 2020 reporting working an average of 6 hours of unpaid overtime per week (ONS, 2021b), more than those not working from home, it may actually be that more time in total is being spent on work tasks rather than there simply being an increased level of productivity. In other words, we are doing more work when we are not travelling to a place of work and that is likely to inform perceptions of travel time as wasted time.

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while driving, whose attempts to resolve the contradictions and expectations set out above, have brought them into contact with the criminal justice system. We start, however, with some reflections on speed—and speeding—to illustrate our wider points about the perceived attractiveness of driving while using a mobile phone—the challenge on which this text is focused.

Making the Most of Time Within the research, the apparent hurriedness of life and the desire to utilise time most effectively was emphasised by many individuals. When asked about road user behaviour at a general level, rather than focusing solely on mobile phone use, it was this wider pressure that featured in drivers rationalisation and justification of their own and others’ speeding behaviours: “In the car I would be moaning and whinging, ‘hurry up’, you know, ‘let’s go home’, and I think you don’t realise you’re doing it.” (Employee Lucy) “I think most offences, speeding especially, come down to time pressure. I don’t think it’s actually someone’s intention to put their foot down and speed. I don’t think there’s any thrill to driving your van at 90 miles per hour down the road. I don’t think anyone does that as a pleasurable thing. I think they do it because of time constraints that they’re trying to meet, deadlines, and trying to get through their working day.” (Offender Kevin)

Not only did drivers talk about the harried nature of life seeping out into the roads context in this way, but police officers did too: “There is a modern-day problem unfortunately that people need to get everywhere quick and the roads are so blocked, when they get a chance to put their foot down they do because of the pressure from their work, home life, generally a lot of the time.” (PC Frank) “Everyone these days is just rushing around, there’s just no time.” (PC Rob)

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Interviewees therefore considered time spent driving as time that is ‘wasted’, and therefore necessitating attempts to catch up on that lost time in some other way. As such, speed can easily overtake other considerations such as safety or compliance with the law, as it appears to be the solution to the most pressing and ‘real’ stress impacting on a driver in a given situation. Rather than simply acting according to how one perceives that they ought to in an ‘ideal world’, they may act how they perceive they ought to in an accelerated society concerned with saving time and achieving maximum productivity. Exceeding the speed limit was observed as an obvious way in which individuals were able to minimise ‘wasted time’ spent simply physically travelling from place to place (Lyons & Urry, 2005). There are many circumstances in which drivers experience forced deceleration, including when encountering traffic jams, breakdowns, collisions, speed limits, speed limiters and slower drivers, potentially making it more attractive to speed where the opportunity does present itself. Nevertheless, following attendance at a driver education course, some individuals reflected on those previous speed choices, seeing the benefits as insufficient: “I find driving like that [slower] it would normally take me about three and a half hours now to get to [place] where it probably took me three and a quarter hours before when I was pushing along a lot quicker, well it’s not worth it for 15 minutes is it? It just isn’t worth it.” (Offender Keith) “I’ve just worked out, I remember one day in particular I was driving back from [place] and I was just over the speed limit to be honest and I was amazed that I had done it for so long, I was doing 75, 77, you know, just going right up to the limits where I couldn’t, where they say 10% plus two.2 I was just trying to escape getting into trouble but trying to pinch a few miles to get home that bit faster, and I was amazed that I had done that for nearly an hour at one point and it only equated to about five-six minutes difference, and I thought what are you going to do with five or six minutes?” (Offender Kevin) 2

This is a reference to a widely perceived ‘tolerance’ applied by the authorities in relation to the enforcement of speed limits.

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In this sense, the unfulfilled promise of speeding may only serve to further enhance the perceived benefits of using a mobile phone while driving—a tool which offers apparent opportunities for multitasking over the entirety of a journey, even when physical progress cannot be made, when speed is limited, when other people are in the way, or when speeding up has failed to deliver the expected goods in terms of reclaiming time. In comparison to the five minutes gained by exceeding the speed limit, this may be particularly attractive. An hour spent in the car may be perceived as an hour also spent doing something else. A mobile phone therefore provides the apparent possibility for acceleration in a wider societal sense, even when immobility is forced upon a driver. A reminder can be set, a task completed, a conversation held and plans made in time that would otherwise need to be ceded from elsewhere. The satisfaction of completing a task, of stealing back a little time, or getting ahead of where you might otherwise be, means that that behaviour is reinforced, becoming more likely to be adopted as a strategy in future (Jager, 2003; Wells et al., 2021).

Meeting Expectations As well as ’what they do’ mobile phones can be used as a means of expressing ‘who we are’, from the type of phone we own, the way we adorn it, the ringtone we choose to use, the way that we use it. With the high levels of mobile phone ownership today (USwitch, 2022) come certain social expectations; effective communication through technological means requires both (or more) parties to be contactable, whether in initiating and/or accepting contact made and/or responding to that contact (Höflich, 2010). In this way, telephonic communication can be understood as a social contract whereby both parties must cooperate in order for that communication to be successfully accomplished. During an interview, Jamie described this as a social obligation:

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“People do feel obliged to use their phone. Even if they’re told not to, they’ll quickly say ‘I’m not supposed to be using it but, you know, I’ll call you back later’ and people just feel obliged when someone’s calling them because, you know, it’s quite a personal thing” (Employee Jamie)

Rather than mobile phones simply providing opportunities for connecting with others, these may be seen as an expectation, required of individuals regardless of their physical environment at that given time. Where this unspoken social contract regarding communication is broken, there are implications for both parties. These may be frustration, or concern on behalf of the caller, or ‘FoMO’ (Fear of Missing Out) (Przybylski et al., 2013) when a ‘missed call’ is seen by the other party and its content can only be speculated about. The freedom that is often associated with the development of new technologies actually fails to be realised in such circumstances, where social contracts and expectations overwhelm. The provision of communication technologies within vehicles exacerbates these issues. With handsfree technology, it is arguably no longer socially acceptable to claim that one’s phone was out of reach or could not be answered. Thanks to mobile phones, it is no longer legitimate to claim that we did not know someone had called, or that we were not at home. The formation, reformation and reflexivity of identity also play a key role in the attraction of using a mobile phone while driving (Buckingham, 2008). This was described by a number of interviewees who defined themselves via their identity as a responsible parent—but admitted that it had resulted in the use of a mobile phone while driving as they strove to maintain that identity: “You might think well a quick text while I’m stuck in traffic, you know, I’m not going to lie, I’ve done it before, stuck in traffic, checking your phone, have the nursery rang, you’re running late, you know, you do tend to pick up your phone.” (Employee Lucy) “I was late picking my daughter up, I’d forgotten what time it was, she was ringing and ringing and ringing me, ‘where are you, where are you’? I knew I’d got 5 or 6 missed calls while I was driving so I literally went to pick the phone up off the seat to say I was on my way, you know, and that’s what happened, I got caught with it.” (Offender Rachel)

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A parent driving to collect their children (for example from school) may strive to be a responsible parent and a safe driver, but if they are late, one of these identities must be compromised somewhat. They may exceed the speed limit or pick up their phone to ensure that their children are safely collected, on time, jeopardising their identity as a safe driver but maintaining that as a responsible parent. Alternatively, they maintain their identity as a safe driver but not necessarily that of a responsible parent by abiding by speed limits, not picking up the phone, and risking their children being collected late from school, for example. The opinion of the nursery worker, the grandparent, and the teacher may be seen as more important, more in need of maintenance, than the opinion of some nameless and faceless driver with whom we barely interact or with some diffuse notion of wider society. In such a scenario, the speed limit may be broken, or the phone picked up ‘just for a second’. Although Rachel explained that it was not ‘normal’ behaviour for her to use a handheld mobile phone while driving, when forced into a situation where her identity as a caring, responsible parent was at risk, the attractiveness of the behaviour increased. On the road, identities are formed and can be shaken off again in an instant in a largely anonymous and unaccountable environment. The driver we accidentally cut up will soon be out of sight and our slate is clean again, but the same cannot be said for those that are of significance in our lives. On this theme, when asked what individuals believed were acceptable reasons for using a handheld mobile phone while driving,3 the majority of participants stated that there were no acceptable reasons. However, the most common selection was making calls to emergency services (this was selected by 25% of participants and is a legal form of phone use). This was followed by the option ‘answering what could be an emergency phone call’ which was selected by 19% (and is distinct to making a call to emergency services and therefore not a legal form of phone use4 ). A ‘potential emergency’ incoming phone call is therefore deemed to be

3

Prior to experiencing Crash Course, for the offender group. Participants were asked to select ‘all that apply’ and there is considerable overlap between participants who selected these responses. 4

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almost as acceptable/important as an issue that would require the attention of the emergency services. ‘Emergency’ of course is a subjective term and cannot be ascertained before the call is answered. It may, of course, be a useful technique for justifying breaking the law: it could be an emergency, meaning that the driver is using a technique of neutralisation (Sykes & Matza, 1957) for their offence known as the ‘appeal to higher loyalties’, discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 where an offence is justified by the offender’s belief that something of greater significance was being addressed that sees their offence appear insignificant by comparison. Where individuals draw on such techniques it is generally accepted that this is because they have an underlying commitment to the law as a concept and need to explain away a deviation from how they wish to be seen and to see themselves. Also explained in Chapter 5, the lawabiding identity is another significant identity that plays a central role in the representation of who we are, on the roads and elsewhere (Wills & Wells, 2012). This may, however, compete with other identities that are central and salient when in-vehicle technology flashes up the name of our child or (as discussed below) our boss and reminds us of our other significant identities. Consequently, the use of a mobile phone while driving offers opportunities for acceleration in defiance of decelerative forces on the roads. It also offers apparent opportunities for maintaining identities important to our personal as well as working lives. A combination of these appeals was most frequently cited in interviews with drivers who drove as part of their working day, whether for work or to get to a place of work, and where it offered opportunities to increase productivity and perceived value as an employee. Time continues to have a firm relationship with money, as Marx suggested over 100 years ago (Marx, 1902/1968), and Jamie and Simon, below, reiterate: “When you travel so much for so many hours and you’re trying to do business at the same time, unfortunately it [using a phone while driving] ends up being a necessity otherwise you can’t do, you can’t conduct business so it’s kind of, you know…a lot of people do see using handsfree kits as part of their business because if you didn’t, you know, if you’re driving

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6 or 7 hours a day that 6 of 7 hours’ worth of business that’s potentially being lost and stuff that you can’t catch up on.” (Offender Jamie) “Not to use your mobile phones will be a stressful situation for a lot of people when they’re driving, and it will alter their work environment and a load of other things, so it will mean they will have to work longer hours, because a lot of people phone on their way home in the evenings, to finish off that last meeting, that last discussion, to get hold of that person they needed to, they are going to have to work an hour later or 40 minutes later.” (Employee Simon)

Mobile phone technology allows those tasks to be completed in small gaps of time, regardless of where an individual may be at that time. This potentially becomes essential , or at least perceived to be so, for those spending a significant proportion of their working day driving (Laurier, 2004: 265). Both mobile phone use while driving, and other offences such as speeding discussed earlier, appeared to offer drivers the chance to ‘keep up’ (Wells & Savigar, 2019) in a world that was changing around them, and which threatened to leave them behind. The ‘mobile phone’ offers far more than simple communication and, as such, its apparent value grows with its capabilities, making its name something of a misnomer. Functioning effectively as a laptop or desktop computer, the mobile allows for the creation of documents, diary management, sending and receiving feedback, planning strategy, and indeed everything that can be done from the office without the inconvenience of actually being there. As such, the car becomes an extension of the workplace (Eost & Flyte, 1998; Laurier, 2004; Yang & Parry, 2014) and drivers and employers alike are likely to realise this and come to expect that it is used, productively, as such. The mobile phone’s existence allows for the blurring of the distinction between work time, leisure time and home time. Indeed, Allvin (2008) has suggested that the instability, insecurity, and risk surrounding work in contemporary society has led to the emergence of the ‘boundaryless job’ (p. 20), where developments such as ‘flexibility’ are touted as positives but experienced as the opposite. In such an era of uncertainty and unpredictability, and the

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specific vulnerabilities of increasingly precarious contemporary employment (Giddens, 2002), the effect is to compel employees to work harder and for longer (ONS, 2021a, 2021b). Even while reflecting on his attendance at a course about distracted driving, James observed that the time he was required to be ‘out of touch’ to complete the course was experienced as a source of anxiety for employees: “There’s a few things I know about that hotel [where the course took place] because I’ve been to a few events there; people know they have got to get in the bus to get back to the office, they’ve had a day out of the office, and there’s no reception for EE so we can’t access our emails and all our company phones are EE, so sometimes it’s a good thing, but people are rushing out immediately to see if they have any emails or to get the Wi-Fi code or whatever.” (Employee James)

Although the course took place during work time and was required by their employer, individuals still felt the burden and anxiety of having been without a phone signal for almost two hours. Research observations of the course revealed similar themes, with many attendees looking at their mobile phones immediately upon course end and one instance of a course attendee being asked by the presenter to put their phone away mid-course. James’ quote suggests that course attendees were keen to get back to the arranged transport back to the office, perhaps sensing that no allowance would have been made for their absence and that their tasks would be stacking up. The expectations of employers were seen to play a considerable role in the driver behaviour of individuals and their decision to choose to use a mobile phone while driving, as Simon pointed out: “You are expected to be contactable, you have operational needs, you are on call, that is what you get paid for, so you are changing your working conditions if you don’t do that... I mean, if you sit in one of our dispatch centres they will say ‘I cannot get in touch one of the engineers, why is he not picking up that phone?’. And they will be brought to one side to talk about it.” (Employee Simon)

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At Simon’s place of work, and no doubt many others (Wahla & Awan, 2014) an individual who fails to respond to contact made by employers or colleagues, may have their work ethic questioned. Safety is unlikely to be an acceptable defence when many company policies endorse the use of handsfree technology as a legal facilitator of employee surveillance (Christie & Ward, 2019). The ubiquitous spread of surveillance technologies in the workplace (a workplace broadly construed to include the vehicle, evidently), allows employers to identify the location of their staff, what they are doing, and how fast they are working, with speed and efficiency coming to be conflated as indicators of Good Work. Being out of contact is cause for suspicion, may cause a delay to the person trying to make the contact, and may lead to questions being asked the next time the employee is back in touch. To resist contact from an employer or colleague is, then, to flag oneself up as problematic, and to be problematic is dangerous in the world of the temporary contract, and the disposable employee (Bauman, 2000). This link between employment and offending actions was further emphasised through survey responses from those who had attended Crash Course. When asked to self-report the frequency of offending actions on the road, those who used a vehicle for work purposes were significantly more likely to have admitted offending ‘quite often’ or ‘nearly all the time’ in comparison to those who primarily drove for domestic or pleasure reasons.5 The risk of losing employment is perceived to be high and is a concern for many (Sverke & Hellgren, 2002) and therefore may well manifest as a more ‘real’ and likely risk than the alternative risk of a collision or prosecution. With an actual and felt decline in traffic officer numbers in recent years (House of Commons, 2016; PACTS, 2020), the risk of being caught is potentially reducing as it becomes simultaneously more important to abide by employer expectation and function as a good employee 5 A t-test performed on these statistics in relation to frequency of self-reported mobile phone offending behaviours identified that those in the offender group who primarily used a vehicle for work purposes (M = 7.35, SD = 2.28) were significantly more likely to have admitted offending (hardly ever, occasionally, quite often, or nearly all the time), or to have offended more frequently, than those who primarily use a vehicle for domestic and/or pleasure (M = 5.88, SD = 2.75), t (393) = 3.12, p < .005. Similar results were found for employees.

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when on the roads (Dorn, 2017). If that expectation includes perpetual availability, it is likely to be a more pressing concern than an apparently remote chance of being caught or crashing. For the citizen of acceleration society, who does not believe that they are distracted even when they are (see Chapter 4) the law may be conceptualised as a hindrance to productivity and competitiveness rather than a useful guide to behaviour (Wells & Savigar, 2019). In contrast to expectations for using a mobile phone while driving, there are alternative expectations that can come from the workplace, including those where a driver is expected to refrain from using a mobile phone while driving. Where safeguards through the form of company policy were in place for employees, there was a lesser expectation and desire to do so. Such policies therefore appeared to have a protective effect: “In the team I’m in, we say that, you know, if we’re driving we wouldn’t be expected to answer at all, you’d pull over into the safest place. I think there might be a pressure in other teams that you should answer your phone.” (Employee Linda) “It says in our contract you are not allowed to answer your phone while you are driving. We all have voicemail on our phones so anything urgent will have to wait until I stop and deal with it. Basically its tough, if you’re driving you don’t answer it. No matter how important it is, it’ll have to wait. Its, its erm, a really quite serious, you would be called up in front of, not just your line manager but their manager, if you were caught using your phone while you were driving.” (Employee Sarah)

Of course, these employees are not a random sample of the drivingfor-work population. They were part of the sampling frame for this research because their employer had sought out education on the dangers of using a mobile phone while driving and compelled their employees to attend it. It is therefore unsurprising that they report more responsible policies are in place where they work. For Linda, the rule was apparently something that operated on a sub-company level, whereas for Sarah there was the added protection of company policy. Where these rules and requests for behaviour are formalised through the workplace, employees are more likely to be able to resist any felt pressure to use a phone while

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driving. They are also more likely to be dissuaded from use for instrumental reasons if they perceive that using a phone is more likely to cost them their job than secure it. In this sense, a company policy against phone use can draw strength from the same fears of job vulnerability that compel use for drivers whose employers expect it. For employers, of course, perceptions of productivity and profit will compete with beliefs about employee and wider road-user safety. Whether a policy against use materialises or not is likely to be down to how those considerations are weighed by those in positions of power. However, as previously shown, employers who are primarily concerned with driver compliance rather than driver safety may decide only to prohibit handheld phone use. Whether this limitation is imposed intentionally or otherwise (because employers want to do the minimum required by law or because they do not appreciate the dangers of handsfree use), a focus on what is legal and what is illegal will not protect drivers from the consequences of distracted driving. Policies focused on reflecting the law may actually encourage drivers to use a handsfree device while driving (Yang & Parry, 2014). As well as exerting an influence on drivers in terms of their reasons for offending use of a mobile phone, employment also played a part in driver responses to being caught in the act. The driving licence was an oftenmentioned qualification or resource that drivers again saw in productivity and employability terms. Within interviews, both drivers and police officers highlighted the importance of the driving licence, and in particular the ‘clean’ driving licence free of penalty points when discussing the offer of education as an alternative to prosecution: “I think a lot of people will think that ‘I’d rather take the course because it saves me getting 3 points’ and you feel that, I mean you sort of feel, not that you’ve got away with it, but you’ve had the easy option, like you’ve had a slapped wrist instead of a kick up the bum [laughs], and it was like, yeah I can do that, at least it won’t have any implications for my job with points on my licence, it won’t have implications with my insurance.” (Offender Kevin) “The majority don’t want points on their licence, there’s implications around insurance premiums perhaps going up and things like that, and

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people that drive for a living, they have concerns about their, you know, their livelihood being affected and things like that.” (PC Thomas)

Some employers specify a clean driving licence (presumably as an indicator or a good driver, or of lower risk) as a requirement for their employees. Others will dismiss an employee for accumulating a set number of points on their licence.6 In other cases, the consequences may be less immediate but may accrue over time, when a driver is banned from driving for accumulating 12 points and is no longer able to fulfil the requirements of the job. For increasing numbers of individuals, when one’s licence is at risk, one’s livelihood is at risk (Wells, 2012: 113). This is apparent when drivers are caught committing an offence; 87% of offenders who completed an initial questionnaire as part of this research agreed that their decision to attend a Crash Course was influenced by the desire to avoid penalty points on their licence. This is a considerable proportion of course attendees, suggesting that a ‘clean’ licence, or one with a reduced number of penalty points attached is central to the daily lives of drivers and acts as a point of leverage in their decision making. Furthermore, of those participants, the survey results showed a significant difference between those who primarily used a vehicle for work purposes and those who primarily used a vehicle for domestic reasons and/or pleasure. Those who indicated their primary vehicle usage was driving-for-work purposes were more likely to agree that they chose to attend the course to avoid penalty points than those whose primary vehicle usage was for domestic or pleasure reasons.7 This is further evidence that maintaining a ‘clean’ or ‘clean-ish’ licence is linked to an individual’s employment status.

6 It would be interesting to study the mobile phone polices of employers who also require a clean licence as some may, of course, be mandating a form of dangerous driving behaviour that could also be a contributor to an ‘unclean’ licence. 7 There was a significant difference between those who primarily used a vehicle for work purposes (M = 4.42, SD = .86) and those who primarily used a vehicle for domestic reasons and/or pleasure (M = 3.95, SD = 1.34) in relation to the decision to attend an education course based upon the ability to avoid penalty points, t (372) = 2.35, p < .05.

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Summary The use of a mobile phone while driving is a useful lens through which to explore issues of societal change in the twenty-first century, and— vice versa—those changes contribute significantly to the challenge that is distracted driving. Mobile phone use while driving is notable for its apparent potential to save time as it can be performed where traffic jams or breakdowns prevent other forms of (literal and symbolic) acceleration from taking place. Not only do we know that the phone offers us unbroken connectivity, but others know this too, turning an opportunity into an expectation. The good parent, the good friend, and the good employee may all be identities that encourage mobile phone use. For some, they may compete with the identity of good driver, but for others, phone use (and particularly handsfree use) may appear entirely compatible with safe driving. It is, after all, compatible with a law-abiding identity (Wells & Wills, 2009). Ironically, the use of a mobile phone while driving may feel like it provides an antidote to feelings of loss of control brought on by the riskiness of a runaway world. The use of a mobile phone while driving may therefore be seen as a way of managing the stresses of an accelerated and increasingly insecure life. The risks of nonengagement, and unavailability may well seem more real and more pressing than the more abstract danger of a collision or prosecution. After all, the more a driver uses their phone while driving and does not crash and is not punished, the more it may appear that the driver is capable of effectively multitasking. Punishment avoidance (as Stafford & Warr have described, 1993) may embolden offenders and encourage offending. Given these various influences and beliefs, it is apparent that advising putting a phone out of reach or turning a phone off are unlikely to appeal to the driver who is juggling domestic, social, and professional concerns—not to mention broader existential anxiety or feelings of ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991). Furthermore, as shown in Chapter 6, they are unlikely to be persuaded by the suggestion that handsfree is not a viable alternative—given its apparent and appealing ability to allow contact to be maintained with significant others, without the threat of legal sanction. The perceived risks and benefits associated with these

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actions are important considerations for understanding how and why drivers make behavioural choices on the roads—the focus of the next chapter.

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ONS. (2021b). Business and individual attitudes towards the future of homeworking, UK. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandla bourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/businessa ndindividualattitudestowardsthefutureofhomeworkinguk/apriltomay2021. Accessed 20 April 2022. ONS. (2022a). Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021. Available online: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021. Accessed 24 April 2023. ONS. (2022b). Full time, part time and temporary workers. Available online: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/emp loymentandemployeetypes/datasets/fulltimeparttimeandtemporaryworkerss easonallyadjustedemp01sa. Accessed 24 April 2023. Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2020). Marriages and divorces. Available online: https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces. Accessed 24 April 2022. PACTS. (2020). Roads policing and its contribution to road safety. Available online: https://www.pacts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Roads-PolicingReport-FinalV1-merged-1.pdf. Accessed 21 April 2023. Pew Research Centre. (2021). About three-in-ten US adults are not religiously unaffiliated. Available online: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/ 2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/. Accessed 24 April 2022. Przybylski, A. K., Murayama, K., DeHaan, C. R., & Gladwell, V. (2013). Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 1841–1848. Rosa, H. (2003). Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized highspeed society. Constellations, 10 (1), 3–33. Rosa, H. (2010). Alienation and acceleration: Towards a critical theory of latemodern temporality (Vol. 3). NSU Press. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press. Schwartz, B. (2004). The tyranny of choice. Scientific American, 290 (4), 70– 75. Stafford, M. C., & Warr, M. (1993). A reconceptualization of general and specific deterrence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30 (2), 123–135. Reith, G. (2004). Consumption and its discontents: Addiction, identity, and the problems of freedom. British Journal of Sociology, 55, 283–300.

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Schneider, S., Liu, Y., Tomita, K., & Kanda, T. (2022). Stop ignoring me! On fighting the trivialization of social robots in public spaces. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 11(2), 1–23. Southerton, D. (2003). Squeezing time’ allocating practices, coordinating networks and scheduling society. Time & Society, 12, 5–25. Sverke, M., & Hellgren, J. (2002). The nature of job insecurity: Understanding employment uncertainty on the brink of a new millennium. Applied Psychology, 51, 23–42. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670. USwitch. (2022). Mobile statistics. Available online: https://www.uswitch. com/mobiles/studies/mobile-statistics/#:~:text=At%20the%20start%20of% 202022,i.e.%20personal%20and%20work%20phones. Accessed 24 April 2022. Wahla, R. S., & Awan, A. G. (2014). Mobile phones usage and employees’ performance: A perspective from Pakistan. International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, 4 (4), 153–165. Wajcman, J. (2008). Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time. The British Journal of Sociology, 59, 59–77. Wajcman, J. (2015). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. University of Chicago Press. We Buy Any Car. (2019). Drive of a lifetime. Available online: https:// www.webuyanycar.com/about-us/press-centre/drive-of-a-lifetime/. Accessed 24 April 2023. Wells, H. (2012). The fast and the furious: Drivers, speed cameras and control in a risk society. Ashgate Publishing. Wells, H., Briggs, G., & Savigar-Shaw, L. (2021). The inconvenient truth about mobile phone distraction: Understanding the means, motive and opportunity for driver resistance to legal and safety messages. The British Journal of Criminology, 61(6), 1503–1520. https://academic.oup.com/bjc/ article/61/6/1503/6262317 Wells, H., & Savigar, L. (2019). Keeping up, and keeping on: Risk, acceleration and the law-abiding driving offender. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19 (2), 254–270. Wells, H., & Wills, D. (2009). Individualism and identity: Resistance to speed cameras in the UK. Surveillance & Society, 6 (3), 259–274. Wills, D., & Wells, H. (2012). Surveillance, technology and the everyday. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 12(3), 227–237. Yang, S., & Parry, R. (2014). Cell phone use while driving: Risk implications for organizations. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Winter, 65–72.

4 Navigating Risk

Introduction Concerns about, and calculations of, ‘risk’ play an increasing role in our everyday lives (Beck, 2009; Garland, 2003; Lupton, 1999). Road risk, however, is often referred to as a type of risk that is accepted, normalised, and fails to generate much anxiety (Beck, 1992), even though it constitutes the global leading cause of death for those aged 5–29 (WHO, 2022) and accounts for over 1.3 million deaths globally per year. As set out in the previous chapter, rather than being determined by birth or random chance, life is increasingly viewed as a project over which the individual ‘must exercise a deliberate and long-term calculative effort’ (Hunt, 2003: 169), constantly making choices and living with the risk of consequences of their decisions, whether they be related to the food we eat, the careers paths we choose, the places we live, the investments we make, the people we let into our lives, the cars we drive, or the ways we drive them. This chapter considers how the languages and logic of risk further help to understand and illuminate the challenges associated with distracted driving through the use of a mobile phone. Whether in the actuarial sense of ‘probability’ and ‘calculation’ that underpins the outlawing of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_4

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handheld use by virtue of its association with collisions, injury and death (Garland, 1996), or the cultural sense of risk as socially constructed and informed by experience and bias (Douglas, 1985), risk logics underpin the social reality of phone use by drivers. The chapter will begin with a general exploration of risk as a way of thinking about and understanding contemporary society before exploring that in relation to the road context, and more specifically, research data relating to driver mobile phone use. Complexity will be introduced through a discussion of Beck’s (1992) concept of the Risk Society and, within that, the concept of the ‘demonopolisation of expertise’. This concept is particularly useful for understanding risk in the context of road use, and the impact of risk-based thinking on personal actions. This will be considered in relation to how drivers navigate information related to risk and how risk-based thinking generates insecurity and uncertainty, despite its supposed potential to ‘colonise and control the future’ (Garland, 2003: 49).

The Unpredictability and Proliferation of Risk According to Ulrich Beck (2006), we live in a complex and ambivalent ‘risk society’ (p. 62); a society obsessed with thinking about, trying to understand and trying to prevent future hazards—hazards that, increasingly, have been produced and spread by the scientific and technological developments of the processes of modernisation (Beck, 1992: 19). Whereas past civilisations were preoccupied with the threats of natural disasters, or floods, plagues and famines that were outside of human control, we now have to face the consequences of the hazards we have produced, or ‘manufactured’ as a direct result of human action (Beck, 1996). In its purest form, risk is ‘actuarial’—by knowing more, analysing more and calculating more, we can understand and prevent danger. We can establish the probability of different outcomes and decide on the appropriate approaches to tame them (Garland, 1997; O’Malley, 2006). Actuarial—or artefact—notions conceptualise risk as a calculable ‘thing’, attaching levels of certainty to different eventualities and allowing us to

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make decisions about where and when we are prepared to tolerate which dangers, and to make plans to minimise the consequences when bad things happen. In some areas of life, this actuarial conceptualisation still dominates. Insurance premiums and credit scores, for example, still rely on aggregate data about ‘people like us’ and the things we tend to do, and not do, in different circumstances. In the criminal justice system, the sentence someone receives may be more or less explicitly based on how other ‘people like them’ responded to different disposals in the past, with the objective being to minimise the risk that an individual can pose to others (Hudson, 2001). In our general context, the driver who accumulates penalty points on their license will be judged to be a higher insurance risk and will be required to pay a higher premium for their insurance cover. Ultimately, they may be banned from the roads if they accumulate too many points (an exercise intended to reduce the risks that they can pose to others through their driving by removing them from the context in which they have exhibited risky behaviour). Previous ‘form’ for particular offences, such as speeding, during a certain period becomes a criterion for judging whether or not a driver may be offered education as a diversion from prosecution or will be prosecuted for their actions and receive a fine and some more risk markers in the form of penalty points. However, an arguably more significant ‘version’ of risk coexists with the actuarial version and its claims of scientific rationality and objectivity. Risk is increasingly understood to be a social construction—something which we interpret subjectively, act on incongruously and recognise inconsistently (Hudson, 2003). We do not respond to actuarial risk assessments in a predictable fashion, we do not fear the things we ‘should’ fear and we worry irrationally about things that are statistically unlikely (ibid). The artefactual promise of certainty and calculability in an uncertain world has created an increased focus on risk (Garland, 2003), but its calculations have failed to deliver because of the unpredictability of the social world which receives them. Our demand for knowledge about the future, and our unwillingness to accept the inevitability of anything means that we increasingly view our lives as projects, necessitating research into the best and worst options. As discussed in the

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previous chapter, we compete with others to get ahead, to succeed, to move that bit faster, and our lives become projects that require that we dedicate time and effort to constant research and decision-making (Mythen, 2005) to make sure that we choose the best route. According to Giddens (2002), this desire for knowledge is both caused by and a response to the risks brought about by modernisation—with technology centrally implicated in this vicious circle.

Risk on the Roads Writing about the ‘Risk Society’, Beck gives road-based risk as an example of an area where risk has become ‘tolerated’—accepted as a trade-off for the benefits of personal and independent mobility. As such, it is a context where actuarial notions of risk and cultural constructions of risk meet head on, and compete for dominance: Risk… is tolerated in modern areas of social life. The deaths from traffic accidents, for instance. Every year a middle-sized city in Germany disappears without a trace, so to speak. People have even got used to that. (Beck, 1992: 46)

The car is a classic example of the manufactured nature of risk in late- or post-modernity, simultaneously bringing great benefits and great harms. Possibilities are created for travel, work, relationships and socialising that were previously unimaginable. But in exchange, we see pollution, respiratory disease, the destruction of natural habitats, divided communities, maiming and death, on a scale that (as Beck notes) would constitute national crises if caused in other ways. The cycle of manufactured risk then continues with the promise of better, safer, but also faster and more powerful cars, allowing their occupants to feel they are less likely to have a collision, more protected should one occur, and more comfortable and entertained in the meantime (see for example Ford, n.d.; Grand Forks Honda, 2021; Volkswagen, n.d.). These developments are then subject to their own cultural reconstruction. An improved braking system may cause drivers to follow

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another car more closely, an improved alarm system may lead drivers to leave valuables in sight and the provision of a handsfree system may encourage drivers to use a phone more frequently while driving. Handmer and James (2007) describe such a process as a layering of risk (p. 120) whereby one danger may simply be covered, or reconfigured, by another, making it difficult to identify many forms of risk that have been ‘hidden’. It is these risks that, according to Handmer and James, create considerable problems for populations as they often go unnoticed or ignored. Behavioural adaptations to these technological ‘layers’ accord with a desire for risk homeostasis, that is maintaining a level of risk we, individually, feel comfortable with or target as a consistent level of risk (Wilde, 1998). This adds a personal element to our assessments of risk. Indeed, Douglas (1985) has argued that cultural discussions of risk are influenced by the values we hold, the interactions we share with others and our overall life experiences. She argues that individuals develop their own notions of risk, what is risky and how to behave according to that risk, with those ideas being largely informed by surrounding social influences and shared within communities (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982). The use of a mobile phone while driving is, we might suggest, ‘heard’ and understood in a social context that means actuarial data about the dangers it poses is not simply transmitted to relevant audiences. Indeed, if it was, interventions like Crash Course would not be needed. Below, we explore the various influences that determine driver behaviour in respect of mobile phone use while driving including, but not limited, to the research evidence about risk, the statistics about harm, the law relating to use and the self-proclaimed expertise of the driver. These are, to use Beck’s term, the various sources of expertise about the dangerousness of using a mobile phone while driving that are available to drivers.

Road Risk and Its Experts The road risk landscape is replete with various expert voices (Wells, 2011), and arguably is particularly susceptible to this phenomenon of ‘demonopolization of scientific knowledge claims’ (Beck, 1992: 29).

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Wells (2012) noted a decade ago that the debate around the use of speed cameras was comprised of a range of ‘experts’ offering competing—and often scientific-sounding—arguments and counter-arguments around the use of camera technologies, such that any member of the intended audience for this expertise could find persuasive evidence to support whichever perspective they sought. While in contemporary parlance, much of this might be categorised as ‘fake news’, its existence contributed to a confused and apparently contradictory expert picture that many speeding drivers found useful in justifying their behaviour (Wells, 2012). In support of both Beck’s (1992) and Giddens’ (1999) claims that individuals are now exposed to a range of experts in a single given area of expertise, throughout the interviews conducted as part of the research underpinning this book, offenders were able to identify various pieces of information on which they based their knowledge and understanding of road user safety. In the following examples, this information came from knowledge developed from learner driver experiences, such as the driving test, driving instructors and/or the Highway Code (one set of expert voices) but also government campaigns to enhance road safety awareness (another expert voice). While these voices were relatively consistent, they had not succeeded in persuading the drivers to change their behaviour prior to attending Crash Course: I don’t necessarily think it [Crash Course] told me anything I didn’t know but it did, it did reinforce and remind me of some things I haven’t heard since my driving test and that was 20 years ago. The things, also, some of the things, you know, you shouldn’t do but you probably still do. (Employee James) It’s really silly because I’ve seen loads of adverts with the crash test dummies and all kinds of things about not wearing your seatbelt and it had never really triggered with me until I went to the Crash Course. (Offender Jean) It [Crash Course] makes you think, because you drive down a lot of roads now that have got signage on them that says ‘high risk route, three collisions, three deaths in the last year’, you see those sorts of signs as you’re going down the country, and you actually don’t really think about it, you think, ‘there must be a million cars that have been down this road in the last three years, that’s quite good odds’ and then when you

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actually go to this course it brings it home a bit more and you think it doesn’t matter if it’s only 3 people that have been hit on that road, it’s the fact that 3 people have lost their lives on that road, that’s actually what matters. (Offender Kevin)

Although not explicitly explaining what it was about the course that changed their perception of the message, drivers described how course attendance had allowed them to reflect differently on messages they had previously seen and were already aware of. Kevin explained how he was previously able to take expert advice and actuarial risk information and convert it into an educational message that allowed him to carry on driving as he was rather than interpreting it in a way which would suggest a need for a change in behaviour. However, course attendance allowed reflection on that loss of life in a qualitative and personal manner, bringing the message home, rather than in a statistical and quantitative manner, and that this changed his perspective on that same message. The actuarial data remained the same but the social construction changed. Presenting messages by different experts in different ways can therefore seemingly allow it to be interpreted differently too. While we all might actually agree that the shared goal is ‘safety’, for example (few people, presumably intend to do harm), slight nuances in the presentation or interpretation of information which may be considered contradictory and conflicting advice creates confusion in those presented with such information. For those wishing to remain safe from other road users, collision avoidance systems or automatic emergency braking is an important addition (Stoneacre Motor Group, 2019). For those focused on being safe from driving an outdated vehicle, the multifunctionality of a vehicle may guide behavioural choice (e.g. Grand Forks Honda, n.d). For those who wish to keep themselves and others safe from injury or death, acting in ways beyond merely ‘behaving legally’ or purchasing the most technologically advanced vehicle is necessary. For those who wish to remain safe from prosecution, advice to purchase devices that assist in the avoidance of detection may be followed (Wells, 2007). Ultimately, we can access a range of ‘experts’ promoting different versions of expertise and suggestions for behaviour. As shown in the previous chapter, of course, in many situations, the issue of ‘safety’

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applies well beyond the immediate roads context, and may include being ‘safe’ from the disapproval of a manager or colleagues, or from a caregiver, and may drive behaviours that are unsafe in a road safety sense. Compounding this, individuals are increasingly taught that they must become ‘responsibilised’ (Garland, 2003) and assume control over and responsibility for their own risk management. They are the project managers of their own lives (Hunt, 2003; 169). Avoiding danger, and censure means adopting an active and inquisitive approach to navigating daily life. Drivers are warned of the risks that exist, provided with technological and scientific developments to reduce their risk and therefore are given the responsibility, and associated accountability, of handling such risk (Gilling, 2001). In this way, accountability is taken away from political institutions and passed onto individuals in territories of the unknown. This ‘governmentality’ perspective of risk assumes that individuals are information-seeking, rational individuals (Foucault, 1991), who desire to be ‘good citizens’ (Lupton, 2006: 14). Such a viewpoint dictates that individuals should inform themselves of the information that is needed to keep them safe and are consequently seen to be to blame when they do not do so sufficiently. As such, individuals look to experts for advice on how to behave and keep themselves safe. Difficulties arise, however, when expert information is not unanimous and guidance for behaviour is contradictory. In such circumstances, individuals may look closer to home for expert guidance. Beck gives examples of simmering risk issues such as global warming, radiation, and contaminated food as dangers that the general public is unable to observe, understand or interpret, but road risk is one area where a significant proportion of the public is able to believe that it has something to bring to the table and is not ‘left panting in ignorance’ (Beck, 1992: 13) or dependent on the ‘crumbs of information’ which traditionally-conceived experts are prepared to share (ibid: 223). As such, in addition to the challenges posed by a range of expert sources—or the demonopolisation of expertise—the roads context is particularly vulnerable to what Beck (ibid 191) calls this process of the ‘equalization’ of experts and non-experts, with expertise (or at least perceived expertise) having been ‘democratized’ (Wells, 2011). Indeed, where experts seem to disagree, and ‘truth’ seems increasingly illusive, or where a dominant

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truth is unpalatable or inconvenient (see Chapter 3) it is perhaps logical that drivers would preference their own experience as a way of reconciling different perspectives and arriving at a way of ‘going on’ that meets their need (Giddens, 1990). Driving a car is one ‘everyday risk’ issue (2003: 167) where, arguably, this is particularly likely and where drivers can secure ‘emancipation from this bewildering dissensus’ by turning ‘to an altogether more trustworthy and apparently much more definitive source – personal experience’ (Wells, 2011: 236). As Kevin, above, observes, his own odds appear to be pretty good, and he has successfully and uneventfully navigated these roads many times. Over the course of a journey, from moment to moment, at every turn taken, on every different road, when passing any road user, when accelerating, steering, signalling, overtaking, merging, and even when braking, risks are being generated, but in ways that cannot be known or predicted with any reliability. However, risk is a possibility that often fails to be realised (Wells et al., 2021). Collisions, statistically speaking, are rare events and most journeys are completed successfully despite moments of intense risk along the way. Risks themselves generally fail to materialise, despite what drivers are told about dangerous behaviours and why they must avoid them. On the other hand, the perceived benefits of speeding, of close following or close passing, of driving after drinking, while tired, or with bald tyres will seemingly accrue with much more regularity and predictability (when drivers ‘get away’ with them), in apparent defiance of the science of actuarial risk assessment which argues that, in aggregate, these behaviours cause death, injury and damage. As discussed in Chapter 3, the perceived benefits of mobile phone use while driving are readily apparent to drivers, and their experiences of safe (or we might say lucky) usage will jar with the abstract statistics and educational messages that claim otherwise. At the centre of these circumstances lies the hugely significant fact that between 80 and 90% of drivers believe that their driving skills are better than average (Delhomme, 1991; Svenson, 1981) and, as such, might consider themselves to legitimately claim the status of expert. Indeed, many participants in this research chose to self-describe in ways that foregrounded their experience and claims to expertise:

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I’m a very calm driver, I tend to stick to the speed limits… yeah, well I’ve drove a van for 7 years without having any kind of accident or didn’t get any single speeding ticket or whatever, so generally pretty safe. (Offender Mark) I’d say in general I’m a pretty safe driver. Touch wood, I’ve never had any convictions or any accidents and I’ve been driving for over 30 years. (Employee Andy) I’ve probably been to the moon and back four times with the equivalent mileage over my lifetime, so yeah I feel confident. (Offender Kevin) I think I feel pretty safe, erm, I think I’m a pretty good driver and I’ve got a pretty good record. (Employee Matt)

Experience, in the form of the number of years with a driving license and lack of associated collisions, is used to confirm a self-perception of being a ‘good driver’. Mark and Kevin’s confidence was not, notably, dented by the fact that they were taking part in a research project by virtue of having been caught offending. Indeed, the fact that they were ‘only’ attending a diversion course may have been seen as evidence that they had not caused any actual harm, as this would not have been the outcome had they been involved in an incident. Similarly, Zara discussed her attendance at a speed awareness course but justified that by describing how a number of individuals were ‘caught out’ at the same time: I thought I was in a 40 and it was a 30, and a whole load of us got caught out by a camera at the same time, there were 10 of us out of 20. (Employee Zara)

This type of framing suggests that detection is something of a technicality rather than something in any way linked to the actual causing of harm. For drivers who believe that they are better than average, it is possible that diversionary courses and fixed penalties heighten the impression that they can offend without causing harm. In these cases they certainly didn’t serve to undermine that sense of superiority. As Kevin suggests above, the successful completion of countless journeys by car serves to undermine the causal implication that particular

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offences will somehow inevitably and unavoidably increase the chances of having a collision. As Wells argues elsewhere ‘lived experience therefore appears directly to challenge the causal interpretations favoured by the authorities, and a probabilistic risk issue can be rejected on the grounds that it has failed to be deterministic’ (2011: 236). The use of personal experience as a claim to expertise is particularly problematic as such personal information concerning driver ability and road risk have been found to be biased and often incorrect (Svenson, 1981). Comparative optimism (also known as optimism bias) is a concept suggesting that individuals generally believe they have a greater likelihood of experiencing positive outcomes than other people (Weinstein, 1980: 806). As McKenna states, ‘it is not so much that individuals believe that negative events will not happen, but rather that these events are relatively unlikely to happen to them’ (1993: 39). As such, information used to create a sense of self-expertise is likely to be flawed, and any subsequent notion of risk flowing from that is too.

The Risky ‘Other’ Linked to the observed tendency for drivers to overestimate their own abilities, prior to attending Crash Course, participants were asked about their perceptions of risk regarding a range of driver actions. They were asked about this in two distinct ways; to what extent they agreed an action increases the risk of a driver being involved in a crash (in other words, asking about general risk) and to what extent they would feel (un)safe performing the same actions (in other words, personal risk).1 For those attending the course as offenders, their perceived general risk of holding a conversation on a handheld mobile phone while driving was higher than their perceived personal risk for the same action, suggesting drivers considered it more risky in others than if they were to do it themselves. Although that same result was found for those attending the

1 It is recognised that these scales are not direct opposites (the former asks about perceived crash risk and the latter about perceived personal safety, not crash risk) but can be usefully compared to provide some understanding of the difference between general and personal risk.

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course as employees, the discrepancy between general risk and personal risk perceptions was smaller.2 It is possible that this greater discrepancy informed the offending actions of those who were attending the course as a result of offending. In other words, it appears that those who use (or at least are caught using) a mobile phone while driving have a stronger self-enhancement bias than other drivers and use that element of self-expertise to inform what they do on the roads.3 For both groups, this gap between general and personal risk was even greater in relation to using a phone handsfree while driving, with individuals perceiving the risk associated with handsfree mobile phone use in general drivers as significantly higher than they perceive their own risk of the behaviour.4 This risk perception has implications for attempts to tackle such risky behaviour on the roads; if people perceive themselves as of little risk when driving distracted, particularly where those actions are legal and therefore do not pose a legal risk then they may consider strategies to target ‘risky’ or ‘problem’ drivers not to be of relevance to them, and instead targeted at ‘other’ drivers less capable than themselves and more worthy of police attention or efforts to control behaviour. Throughout the interviews drivers did point out an awareness of the risk associated with many driver behaviours, but emphasised and/or reflected on perceptions of the danger of other road users rather than a danger in their own behaviour: You look around at other road users and you think well if you just take a little bit more time and read a little bit further ahead as to what is happening on the road then you might not have got yourself into that 2 For offenders, there was a significant difference between general and personal risk, with general risk (M = 4.10, SD = 1.09) perceived as higher than personal risk (M = 4.00, SD = 1.03), t (951) = 2.69, p < .01. For employees, a non-significant difference was observed between general risk (M = 4.53, SD = .95) and personal risk (M = 4.45, SD = .74), t (282) = 1.17, p > .05. 3 As previously noted, those in the employee group may also have prior offending experiences, but self-reported less frequent handheld phone use while driving than the offender group. 4 For offenders, the general risk associated with talking on a handheld mobile phone while driving (M = 3.04, SD = 1.06) was significantly different to the personal risk associated with the same behaviour (M = 2.77, SD = 1.16), t (952) = 7.40, p < .001. For employees, a similarly significant difference was observed between general risk (M = 3.65, SD = .92) and personal safety (M = 3.07, SD = 1.12), t (280) = 8.98, p < .001.

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difficulty. It’s all about anticipation and watching out for what other road users are doing and anticipating what they might do because people will do the most unexpected things. (Employee John) My driving, I feel safe, it’s others potentially that, you know, I wouldn’t necessarily like to be any closer to than I am... there are idiots on the road. I try and stay as far away from them as possible. (Employee Jane) I don’t often end up in the car very often with other people driving but other people tend to scare me a bit. People don’t, people seem to leave braking very late, erm, and my brothers in particular seem to spring to mind. They seem to drive a little too fast and seem to leave braking a little too late, you know, too much faith in the car I think. (Offender Mark)

There is a danger that receiving education such as Crash Course does not prevent drivers from believing that it is those less skilled on the roads that require changes to be made to their behaviour (in addition to, or rather than, our own). This was reinforced by course attendees emphasising the value that course attendance would have on other drivers: I was talking to somebody the other day about the, well two recently, one was an elderly parent who was still driving and they were trying to convince them to stop driving and all the parent can think about at the moment is “oh, well, I’d lose my independence!” and their friends are saying about their potential impact on other people, and usually that would be, again, it was a way of getting the message through a similar, maybe, I don’t know, if they’d, if the elderly person saw it they would be like “ok, maybe not!”. (Employee Sue) I actually think you should be made to watch that, have a course like that, as part of your driving lessons. (Offender Michelle) I sometimes feel like saying to people ’I wish you could see that course to see the outcome of what, you know, you could be doing’. (Employee John)

Older drivers, younger drivers and other drivers generally were all referred to as potential beneficiaries of the course, both in response to actual and potential problematic driver behaviour. This continued effort to focus attention on other drivers as problematic supports previous

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research (such as Harré et al., 2005) that fear-based education may be ineffective in tackling self-enhancement bias, or belief that one is a better driver than others. Therefore, the complex ‘expert’ environment that may encourage drivers to refer back to self-conceived expertise is likely problematic to efforts to tackle such road safety issues.

Legislating for Risk In a crowded expert marketplace, comprised of personal experience, safety campaigns and even the advertising messaging of car manufacturers, one voice competing for legitimacy is that of the law. Legislation, designed to deter individuals from partaking in unsafe activities, seeks to reduce the aggregate number of such activities, subsequently producing a reduction in the harm caused by those activities. In the roads context, for example, statistics are gathered (primarily in the form of STATS19 collision causation data collected by the police) and aggregated to suggest which behaviours should be deterred through the introduction of laws prohibiting them (Linkov et al., 2006). Of course, the existence of legislation does not in and of itself solve a risk problem like speeding or distracted driving, or indeed any harmful activity. If it did, laws would be created whenever a new risk issue presented itself, they would be operationalised by the appropriate authority, and the risk issue would be eliminated. In reality, and indeed in the case under discussion here, legislation may not accurately reflect the newly discovered risk, it may not be enforced effectively, and offenders— unconvinced or unpersuaded by its logic as discussed previously—may devote energy to trying to evade successful detection, prosecution and punishment (Oviedo-Trespalacios et al., 2020). Problematically for ‘expert’ drivers engaging in ‘everyday experiments’ in risk (Beck et al., 1994: 59) laws often govern ‘what might be’ rather than ‘what has been’ (Gaventa, 2005: 28), not based on any notion of mens rea, or the existence of a guilty mind but simply as mala prohibita, or punishable simply due to its prohibition (Brooks, 2015; Ross, 1960). Offences relating to road use can therefore often be strict liability offences (Wells, 2012) requiring no evidence of intent for guilt

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to be established. Strict liability is, from a risk point of view, a logical way of structuring the law. It does not matter whether or not a driver deliberately offended. What matters is the prevention of the behaviour understood to cause increased danger, so any attempt at offering mitigation (for example) is irrelevant. Similarly, no harm needs to have been caused for an offence to be committed. The act of using a mobile phone itself or driving faster than 30 miles per hour in a 30 zone is enough to warrant police attention and prosecution because the goal is a reduction in the aggregate of risky activities taking place on the assumption that that will reduce the harm which is sometimes caused by those risky activities. As noted above, this means that those drivers attending diversionary courses or receiving a Notice of Intended Prosecution (as opposed to being prosecuted for causing harm) are provided with evidence that their offending did not cause any tangible harm—that it was a false positive in terms of the risk-harm calculation. The logic of strict liability, risk-based laws is in deterring individuals from offending. Once the individual has offended, however, the logic (and punishment) has to shift towards deterring the next offence because there is no harm to be punished. For individuals who already believe themselves to be better than average drivers, the experience of being problematised for demonstrably causing no harm may be dissatisfying. Crucially, and predictably, given the risk lens and the risk society framing we have adopted here, a further challenge facing legislating in this context is the continual development of technology, its capabilities and its capacities in ways, and at speeds, that the legislative process simply cannot keep up with. Acceleration (see Chapter 3) here, too, leaves our traditional institutions and frames of reference unable to keep up with the pace of change. ‘Mobile phones’ have changed beyond recognition since the laws governing their use in vehicles were originally formulated in 2003 (as discussed in Chapter 2), though a change in law that attempted to reflect this did not come into effect until 2022. Furthermore, vehicles increasingly have technology installed at point of manufacture that performs similar functions to a mobile phone but are not covered by legislation as they do not correspond to the technologies

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envisaged and described in law. Many such technologies cause distraction (the original ‘risk’ at the heart of this) but their use is not prohibited, even in the 2022 updated legislation. Handsfree phone use is, as we have argued earlier, a classic case of a behaviour which is proven to increase risk, but which is not covered directly in law. As discussed elsewhere, other laws may be used to punish a driver distracted by handsfree phone use, but only when their driving has been negatively impacted to the extent that it is dangerous, careless, or they are not in proper control. Such laws, then, are not focused on preventing risk in the same way as a strict liability law and require risk to manifest before action can be taken. For those (many) drivers that don’t believe their driving will be negatively impacted by something like phone use (because they are, of course, better than average), these laws are unlikely to act as much of a deterrent. Despite being as dangerous as handheld phone use (Atchley et al., 2017; Caird et al., 2018; Dingus et al, 2016), handsfree use is legal and it seems there are a variety of reasons for this. The inability of the law to keep up with technological change has been mentioned previously, but the law relating to mobile phone use has been changed several times since the invention of handsfree technologies so it seems this is not the reason. Rather, as the Transport Select Committee observed, while there ‘may be’5 research demonstrating the distraction caused by handsfree use, a law banning it would be unenforceable (Transport Select Committee, 2019). Handsfree phone use is, indeed, likely to be particularly hard to prove, given that a driver apparently conversing may in fact be singing or talking to themselves, but the result has been that a dangerous behaviour is not outlawed and potentially is not understood as being unsafe by those citizens of risk society who look to the law as their guide to safe and dangerous behaviour. Of course, those drivers only concerned with the risk of being caught (because they may well believe they will not be involved in an incident) will also be encouraged to use handsfree alternatives by a law that excludes them.

5

There is.

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Questionnaires completed by drivers prior to attending Crash Course showed a clear contrast between driver acceptance of the risks associated with handheld (illegal) and handsfree (legal) phone use. While the majority of individuals, both offenders and employees, acknowledged the crash risk associated with handheld mobile phone use while driving, a much smaller proportion recognised that associated with handsfree mobile phone use.6 Although 80.1% of offenders agreed that the use of a handheld device increases crash risk, only 31.5% agreed that the use of a handsfree device does. For employees, these percentages were 91.9% and 61.8%, respectively7 .8 This finding may partly be accounted for by the fact that the law implies one version of phone use is dangerous while another is not, but there may be other reasons too—and again the perceived expertise of the driver is of relevance here. Data obtained from interviews with drivers clearly shows a working assumption of physical rather than cognitive distraction. Put simply, participants (including police officers) ‘get’ that having your hands occupied with something else can negatively affect the driving task but are less likely to recognise the dangers of having the brain occupied with something else: It seems more blatant when someone’s got one hand up to their ear and one hand disabled because they’re holding their phone. (Offender Kevin) If you’re holding a mobile phone whilst you’re driving and you’re talking to it or whatever, you’re not in proper control of your vehicle, you’ve got a device in your hand and that’s taking an element of your responsiveness away from controlling a vehicle, so should you have to stop in an emergency, make a left or right, avoid an object or a person 6

When asked to what extent the actions increase the risk of a driver being involved in a crash. To assess the significance of these differences, paired-samples t-tests were conducted upon perceptions of risk for handheld and handsfree mobile phone use at pre- course. There was a statistically significant difference in the attitudes towards handheld risk (M = 4.09, SD = 1.10) and handsfree risk (M = 3.03, SD = 1.06) for the offender group; t(963) = p < .001 and also in the attitudes towards handheld risk (M = 4.53, SD = .95) and hands-free risk (M = 3.65, SD = .92) for the employee group; t(282) = p < .001. 8 These percentages increased following course attendance, with 77.1% of offenders agreeing or strongly agreeing that hands-free phone use increases the risk of a driver being involved in a crash when asked post-course, compared to 96.5% agreeing that the use of a handheld device increases said risk. For employees the percentages were 93.2% and 97.5% respectively. 7

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or anybody stepping out, your ability to do that is greatly compromised if you’ve got something in your hand already. (PC Bob) I had really thought, ‘ok I understand why it’s dangerous to actually hold a mobile phone to your face’, that’s quite obvious because you can’t control the car as well as you can with two hands, so that was obvious, but I thought using my handsfree kit was pretty safe really. (Offender Debbie)

These quotes show how individuals can find it difficult to recognise risk where it manifests in largely invisible ways. Where risk cannot be seen or felt in tangible physical ways, it can seemingly be easily ignored. Problematically, and in accordance with the above quotes, research has demonstrated that distracted drivers are indeed generally not even aware of the fact that they are distracted (Sanbonmatsu et al., 2016) and this contributes to a sense of ‘knowing’ risk and considering oneself as being able to self-manage it, as Zara describes: I was really shocked by one of my friends because she said even afterwards she would carry on using handsfree, because it would be an emergency call if it was a handsfree one, so she said she would take it anyway, and she would try to drive slower or something because she said you should manage your own risk. (Employee Zara)

This further supports claims made by Wilde (1998), that individuals manipulate their behaviour in order to maintain a certain level of risk, adapting to the surrounding environment to mitigate for their behavioural decisions. In our specific context, research by Choudhary and Velaga (2017) and Oviedo-Trespalacios et al. (2020) shows the compensatory strategies employed by distracted drivers, such as driving more slowly. When a decision to use a mobile phone is positively reinforced (a driver ‘gets away with it’) (Wells, 2012), when distraction is not recognised (Sanbonmatsu et al., 2016), and when other drivers—unbeknownst to us—take evasive action to cover up for our mistakes (Ljung et al., 2004), it is not surprising that drivers may come to belief that they are pretty adept at knowing and managing risk.

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Experts with Lived Experience One final expert voice in this particular manifestation of the risk landscape, was that of the presenters of the Crash Course intervention—all of whom had either direct personal or direct professional experience of harm caused by road traffic offences (and distracted driving in particular). While we have noted elsewhere that ‘shock’ tactics are not considered to be particularly effective in securing behaviour change and other methods may be preferable (Box & Dorn, 2023; Goldenbeld et al., 2008), Crash Course attendees did frequently mention the expertise of the presenters which came from their lived experience of collisions that they described in graphic detail. When asked what they remembered about the course or what stood out to them, Jean and Michelle suggested that it was the expert status of the presenters, which validated the information presented within the course: I appreciated the fact that the three people who delivered it had all suffered through either their own driving or somebody else’s driving so that was, that sort of really brought it home. They knew what they were talking about… to have those people, I think that’s what speaks so much, their experiences, that it’s not just them doing it because that’s what they’ve learnt and they’re telling other people, it’s because they know because of their experience. (Offender Jean) Mainly it was listening to the people telling you about their experiences and witnessing first-hand, even now, professional people, the effect it has on them. (Offender Michelle) This is what the course was all about, it was a risk assessment, and these people [presenters] were prime examples of where they had took the risk and it went wrong, their decisions had a consequence, whereas for others they didn’t have a consequence and just because they are not seeing it doesn’t mean the risk is not that high. (Employee Mary)

Clearly, experience is of importance in the defined expert status of individuals, both police officers and Crash Course presenters. Due to their experience with the consequences of road risk, the above attendees suggest that the course presenters have a level of credible expertise

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that enhances the likelihood of the information they are presenting being used by course attendees in a way that may improve their driver behaviour. It may be that being situationally co-present with people who were able to link statistics to tangible outcomes made the examples harder for attendees to dismiss. As Michelle describes, drivers were ‘witnessing first-hand’ the harm that other people like them had caused by behaving like them and many attendees suggested that this experience had succeeded in overcoming their previous ability to deflect responsibility or liability. This is important given the maintained focus on the problematic ‘other’ driver that is seen by some even after course attendance, as described above. Overcoming that self-enhancement bias and tendency to consider other drivers as more problematic than ourselves appears key but also complex in road safety efforts, with expert voices from those with lived experience seemingly one useful way of challenging a focus on the self as expert—something we know hampers efforts to regulate risk on the roads.

Summary Actuarial attempts to scientifically measure and predict risk often clash with a social construction of risk which is personal, subjective and inconsistent, and the context of driving offences provides a complex case study for this phenomenon. The risk landscape is populated by a range of expert voices communicating often conflicting logic and from a variety of ontological positions. At a general level, too, road death and injury itself occupies a peculiar position in relation to other quantitatively similar harms—it is broadly tolerated. Advances in technology (still the ‘solution’ that we routinely place faith in), promise a range of improved experiences including, but not limited to, safety. Some, furthermore, add layers of risk to already risk situations. The ‘carphone’ morphed into the mobile phone and subsequently into the handsfree kit, while parallel developments in in-car ‘infotainment’ blurred the boundaries between control and communication functions. Traditional forms of risk-management architecture, such as legislation, fall behind, or prove

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themselves unwieldy in the face of new risks. Individuals, living accelerated lives and instructed to take responsibility for their own risks, are assaulted from all directions with messages about risk and reward that must be navigated and managed at the moment—and in our case, while driving. In this context, the citizen of risk society is able to feel like they have the skills to claim expertise themselves by virtue of daily experience (something that cannot be said for, for example, the climate crisis, or vaccinations). Individuals, when looking to various sources of ‘expertise’, may therefore even turn to their own experience as a seemingly appropriate guide to behaviour in efforts to responsibilise themselves. However, that self-guidance is likely to be a misjudged perception of risk associated with actions such as using a mobile phone while driving, particularly where experience tells us we can do these things over years of driver experience without experiencing collisions or being detected. When combined with a tendency to focus on the riskier ‘other’—the driver who is perceived to be more problematic than ourselves—actions guided by the self as expert become even more biased in favour of the self as a ‘good’ driver that is capable of taking a call or reading a text message while driving. Handsfree use appears an even more stubborn challenge with all expert voices (apart, perhaps, from some elements of the course itself ) mitigating against its perception as dangerous. The law implies that it is a safe alternative to handheld use, it doesn’t feel dangerous, it may even be recommended as an alternative by experts (see Chapter 6) and it allows the driver to feel like they are cheating time (see Chapter 3). Other sources of expertise, such as those with lived experience, appear to be more beneficial in efforts to generate safe behaviours (whether legal or not) than the law as expert or indeed the self as expert, as they highlight how people ‘like us’ can encounter the consequences that we may have so far managed to avoid. The massification or demonopolisation of expertise in the roads context, therefore, provides a context in which individuals can choose which information guides their actions and which they wish to ignore. This risk expertise generates a distorted view of risk on the roads, with individuals perceiving their own actions as safer than that of other

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drivers, and the use of handsfree devices as significantly safer than handheld. This is a significant challenge for roads policing, where the eradication of handheld use might coincide with no improvement in the statistics relating to collisions caused by distracted driving.

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Hudson, B. (2001). Punishment, rights and difference: Defending justice in the risk society. In K. Stenson & R. Sullivan (eds.) Crime, risk and justice (pp. 144–172). Willan. Hudson, B. (2003). Justice in the risk society. Sage. Hunt, A. (2003). Risk and moralization in everyday life. In R. Ericson & A. Doyle (Eds.), Risk and morality (pp. 165–192). University of Toronto Press. Linkov, I., Satterstrom, F. K., Kiker, G., Batchelor, C., Bridges, T., & Ferguson, E. (2006). From comparative risk assessment to multi-criteria decision analysis and adaptive management: Recent developments and applications. Environment International, 32, 1072–1093. Ljung, M., Huang, Y. H., Aberg, N., & Johansson, E. (2004, September). Close calls on the road–A study of drivers’ near-misses. In 3rd International conference on traffic and transportation psychology (ICTTP3), 5th-9th September, University of Nottingham. Lupton, D. (1999). Risk. Psychology Press. Lupton, D. (2006). Sociology and risk. In G. Mythen & S. Walklate (Eds.), Beyond the risk society: Critical reflections on risk and human security (pp. 11– 24). Open University Press. Oviedo-Trespalacios, O., Afghari, A. P., & Haque, M. M. (2020). A hierarchical Bayesian multivariate ordered model of distracted drivers’ decision to initiate risk-compensating behaviour. Analytic Methods in Accident Research, 26 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amar.2020.100121 McKenna, F. P. (1993). It won’t happen to me: Unrealistic optimism or illusion of control? British Journal of Psychology, 84, 39–50. Mythen, G. (2005). Employment, individualization and insecurity: Rethinking the risk society perspective. The Sociological Review, 53, 129–149. O’Malley, P. (2006). Criminology and risk. In G. Mythen & S. Walklate (eds.), Beyond the risk society: Critical reflections on risk and human security, Berkshire, Open University Press Ross, H. L. (1960). Traffic law violation: A folk crime. Social Problems, 8, 231–241. Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Strayer, D. L., Behrends, A. A., Ward, N., & Watson, J. M. (2016). Why drivers use cell phones and support legislation to restrict this practice. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 92, 22–33. Stoneacre Motor Group (2019). Drive assist features—What you need to know. Available online https://www.stoneacre.co.uk/blog/drive-assist-fea tures. Accessed February 12, 2023. Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 47 , 143–148.

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5 The ‘Law-Abiding Offender’

Introduction The roads context is a unique one both in terms of how it is used as a public social space and the frequency of unlawful behaviour within it. There were over 626,000 prosecutions at magistrate’s court for motoring offences in the year to September 2022 (MoJ, 2023) and over 1.75 million people attended a National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme in 2022 (NDORS) course (UKROEd, n.d.). Despite the frequency of unlawful behaviour and prosecutions (or alternatives to prosecution) experienced, the road network is a context where individuals do not consider themselves ‘real criminals’ (Orr et al., 2013) deploying ‘a selfascribed identity of normal, respectable, non-criminal’ (Wells & Wills, 2009: 260). As shown in Chapter 3, identities are no longer solid and reliable but are ‘discursively constructed, multiple and plural, contingent and open to change, vulnerable’ (ibid.: 263), meaning that efforts must be made to preserve these ‘good citizen’ identities when an individual is faced with an enforcement encounter (Lupton, 2006: 14). This chapter will consider how individuals conceptualise offending on the road and how they are able to both offend and engage in legal but dangerous behaviour behind the wheel while maintaining a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_5

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non-offending, ‘decent’, ‘respectable’ identity (Wells & Savigar, 2019; Wells & Wills, 2009). Here, we consider a range of strategies that drivers appear to utilise when faced with an accusation of behaviour that contradicts how they would like to see themselves, including challenging the logic or relevance of the law, challenging the reality of risk or harm, and attempting to deflect attention onto others. The possibilities for rationalisation and neutralisation of actions that take place on the roads will be described, drawing on Sykes and Matza’s (1957) theory of delinquency and the use of ‘techniques of neutralisation’. These techniques, while not a complete explanation for or theory of offending, are useful here because they operate from an assumption that the user of the technique subscribes to the idea of the law and are not ‘immune from the demands for conformity’ (Sykes & Matza, 1957: 665), but can occasionally find ways to take a ‘moral holiday’ (ibid.) which allows them to justify deviating behaviour without fundamentally questioning who they are. This, we feel, makes them particularly useful for understanding ‘traffic’ offending and the oxymoronic ‘law-abiding offender’. According to Sykes and Matza (1957), feelings of guilt and shame that are often associated with involvement in deviant acts result in ‘techniques of neutralization’ whereby personal emotional responses to deviancy can be reduced or overcome entirely. This allows individuals to continue their involvement with deviant behaviour while minimising or overcoming any negative associations with them. Sykes and Matza (1957) proposed five techniques of neutralisation. The first of these techniques—denial of responsibility—allows individuals to deflect the accountability associated with deviant acts onto others, perceiving and describing their behaviour as acting outside of their control or because of the actions of others. The second—denial of injury—refers to the belief or claim that the behaviour has resulted in no clear harm or damage. The third technique—denial of victims—sees the victim as deserving or causing the problem behaviour. The fourth—condemnation of condemners— refers to a shifting of blame from oneself to those who are questioning one’s behaviour, with the claim that those ‘condemners’ are potentially criticising the behaviour as a way to deflect from their own deviance or offending behaviours. The fifth and final technique—an appeal to higher loyalties—suggests that the deviant actions are perceived as being

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committed with the intention of providing benefit to some people in some way and that a duty to those individuals overrides the need to obey the law in that particular moment. Notably, the approach suggests that there are some actions that offenders will not engage in regardless of the availability of neutralisation technique and that they will often express admiration for honest, law-abiding individuals (ibid.). With this a key focus, we draw, here, on data from interviews with course attendees and police officers to explore issues such as harm, intent and morals as they relate to drivers’ conceptualisations of their own lawabidingness. We begin by considering the broader context of resistance to roads policing.

Resisting Roads Policing The policing of the roads and those that use them is subject to a nuanced form of public discourse that differs in many ways from that surrounding discussion of other policing contexts and issues (Corbett, 2003; Wells, 2018). As discussed in Chapter 1, the average ‘law-abiding’ citizen is most likely to encounter policing via their use of the roads (Corbett, 2008) and this is not something that has historically enjoyed uncritical support (Emsley, 1993; Wells, 2016, 2018). Despite considerable and relatively consistent levels of support for the police in their work targeted at other issues (Merry et al., 2012), roads policing has (in the past) been less well supported. An IPSOS/MORI poll in 2012, for example, found that less than one in five people thought that roads policing was an appropriate policing activity (IPSOS/MORI, 2012) while earlier work reveals that the public placed the task of ‘control[ling] and supervis[ing] road traffic’ 31st out of a list of the perceived importance of 37 tasks currently carried out by the police (Redshaw et al., 1997: 291). Policing strategies relating to the policing of the roads are often described as being unfair (see Wells, 2008) and even putting road users ‘at risk’ rather than being motivated by protecting road users from risk (Delaney et al., 2005; Wells, 2016). Media dialogue and headlines have long taken this approach with phrases like ‘scameras’ and ‘traps’ being popularised

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(Wells, 2012) and some participants in this research continued to refer to these ideas: There’s the old idea where you believe that the police are stopping you because they’re revenue collectors and you do wonder when they are parked up and they’re observing traffic and obviously you think, ‘they’re not preventing offences, they’re just observing them’, and then they’re actually taking action and it’s just boosting up their arrest rate, which is apparently a myth but that seems to be the general way of thinking with regards to the police. (Offender Kevin)

Responses such as these may be seen, in line with the framework introduced above, as examples of a form of ‘condemning the condemners’ (Sykes & Matza, 1957). While they may highlight examples of the enforcing authorities hypocritically engaging in the problematic behaviour themselves (see Wells, 2012) they can also use an accusation of inappropriate motives or corruption to imply that the authorities are also breaking ‘the rules’ albeit in a different sense. In doing so, they imply that the authorities are illegitimate and therefore have no right to dictate the behaviour of others (see Chapters 2 and 6). For the individual keen to resist a challenge to their identity, this may be a helpful stance to take, in that the experience of being ‘problematised’ by law enforcement representatives is particularly unsettling. This is especially the case where the criminal law is the method of enforcement and there are strong moral connotations associated with it (Wells & Wills, 2009: 262) Additionally, the police carry symbolic meaning or ‘aura’ which adds a layer of meaning and morality to the subjects that they touch upon (Loader & Mulcahy, 2003). Strategies that undermine the moral legitimacy of policing may therefore help dismiss their condemnation.

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Why Aren’t They Out Catching Burglars? A further method of resisting the unpleasant implications and accusations of an encounter with roads policing—in order to maintain a sense of respectability and decency—is to suggest other targets for policing that are more appropriate. In this way, drivers can reaffirm their commitment to the rule of law and their support for policing per se, by highlighting other, worse behaviour committed by other, worse people which they absolutely do see as deserving of censure. The use of variations on the theme of ‘why aren’t they out catching burglars’ within debates around roads policing (Wells et al., 2021) is an example of this strategy and was something familiar to participants in this research: Most people see it as a minor, a minor offence compared to what the police service delivers as a whole, i.e., dealing with more serious matters, i.e., murders or manslaughters or serious sexual offences, and that is probably one of the most common things they will say, ‘why are you not dealing with something more important?’ (PC Rob) I’ve experienced, amongst those car cruisers who, among their own admission, would say yes, some of them didn’t quite comply with the law of the land in terms of seatbelts, phones and speed or what not. They always came with… ‘have you got nothing better to do than target, you know, innocent motorists?’ (PC Tom)

Pleas to redirect police resources to the ‘usual suspects’ to ‘real criminals’ (Orr et al., 2013) who are the police’s ‘proper objects of control’ (Fiske, 1993: 235, quoted in Coleman, 2004: 8) focus on the ‘danger posed by other groups which, being constructed as genuinely and uncontroversially deviant, [and] more worthy of surveillant attention’ (Wells & Wills, 2009). The kinds of offences listed are, notably, those which the speaker is more likely to be a victim of, rather than an offender, and it has been argued that ‘victim’ is a more comforting identity than offender for individuals who are used to viewing the police as a source of protection than a source of discipline (Wells, 2007). A further development on this theme is the accusation that enforcement itself is a source of danger and hence that the driver is a victim of policing. Wells (ibid.) has claimed that those who see themselves, generally, as ‘at risk’ rather than ‘risky’

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(more often as beneficiaries of police attention than as targets of discipline) have managed to reconceptualise themselves once again as victims in a roads policing context. They see themselves as victims of revenueraising, inaccurately placed, unfairly used devices (p. 14), deploying the technique of ‘condemning the condemners’ to undermine accusations of dangerousness or law-breaking, while reaffirming their commitment to policing when it is directed at the ‘right’ targets. Some driving offences, however, can also be singled out as more deserving of attention, such as drink-driving, drug driving or driving while disqualified, as these all are seemingly understood to be committed by real offenders in vehicles, rather than unfortunate motorists. They are, then, also seen as more suitable opportunities for targeted police attention (Wells & Wills, 2009). The ‘law-abiding’ driver is thus able to position themselves in a narrative which emphasises the wrongdoing of numerous others who are considered to be worse offenders and therefore more worthy of police time, effort and attention (Kaviani et al., 2021). Despite there historically being some resistance to roads policing, this helps to explain why there simultaneously continues to be broad support for the enforcement of traffic law, increases in penalties associated with offending, and calls for more visible roads policing (PACTS, 2020); in this way, it is possible for drivers to resist policing of their own actions while simultaneously encouraging the policing of other road users. In that sense, and if that means that they can see laws and campaigns as applying to other road users (other less skilful road users who may be putting them in danger), then they may be able to see themselves as doubly at risk from inferior drivers and unjustified enforcement (Wells & Wills, 2009).

‘It’s Not Dangerous When I Do It’ As discussed in Chapter 4, drivers often believe that their abilities are better than average and can thus argue that using a mobile phone is dangerous when other people do it but that their own abilities mean that no offence was really committed when they engaged it because

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they were able to do it safely (Wells et al., 2021). As explored previously, some of this effort at rationalisation is seen through perceptions of the self as a superior driver to others. Drivers do indeed continuously show a self-enhancement bias and crash-risk optimism; drivers rate their own driver skill as better than that of other drivers (e.g. McKenna et al., 1991; Harré & Sibley, 2007) with up to 90 per cent of drivers believing that their skills are better than average (Delhomme, 1991). Drivers also frequently demonstrate an illusion of control, considering themselves more capable than other drivers in a way that reduces their self-perceived likelihood of being involved in any type of incident or collision (Ashforth & Anand, 2003; McKenna, 1993). For individuals that use this strategy, the link between the offence and the causing of actual harm (not ‘just’ risk) is seemingly key—it is deemed not possible to be an offender when no injury or harm has been caused (see Chapter 4), or when the intent was missing. Real crimes (worthy of police attention) are then constructed as those where there was an intent to harm and harm was caused. The idea that individuals should not be morally judged for offences which were not based upon bad moral choices (Wells & Wills, 2009) was supported by some officers, such as Daniel, below, whose perspective also endorsed the technique of denial of injury: The motorist is one of the most hard done to criminals in the world, in the UK, because you burgle a house, you get a caution, you park on zigzags or you get caught speeding, you get 3 points and a £100 fine. Whereas, you know, that’s not, all you’re doing is affecting yourself, unless you crash, whereas if you’re burgling somebody it, you’ve, you know, invaded their privacy, you’ve done all sorts of stuff, and it affects them. (PC Daniel)

Drivers, too, differentiated between different types of offenders in their discussions of what was the ‘proper’ and appropriate outcome for essentially committing the same offence. Course attendees did not consider a course to be an appropriate response to all offending drivers caught using a mobile phone while driving, though presumably they saw

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it as appropriate in their own case. Indeed, there were nuanced discussions about who could/should be considered eligible to attend such a course, with the emphasis being on first-time offenders and those considered to be breaking the law to a minimal extent. The presence or absence of intent was, here, inferred from the level of excess speed, knowingly speeding or the presence or absence of ‘previous’ for the same offence: There’s got to be a bit of a limit to the seriousness of the offence, so if you’ve got caught doing 33 or 35 in a 30 or 45 in a 40 or 65 in a 60, I think that’s fine, I think the course is an alternative to that, or maybe committing a minor traffic offence where you’ve shown some, you’ve held your hands up and said ‘I’m sorry, I was distracted, I’d rather not get the points because of my insurance’, I think that would be fine, I think if it goes up much more serious than that, I don’t think it should be an alternative. Employee James You can involuntarily speed and I think a lot of people do get done for that. You don’t realise, they’re not purposely speeding, they’re just driving along and they drive too fast and then get done. (Offender Jamie) Certainly for a first time offender, 100% I would have no hesitation in saying if you have never been on one of these courses before, for goodness sake, go and do it. Employee John If I was caught again, I mean I hope and pray I’m going to be really sensible and I’m never going to do anything again, but if I was, I personally, and I’m being really honest because this isn’t what I would like, but this is what I think should happen. I think it should be said you’ve done the Crash Course, if that didn’t speak to you, you jolly well get the points and the big fine because once you’ve done that I don’t see, you know, you’re really, really daft if you do it again. Offender Jean

Consequently, therefore, drivers deemed courses to be appropriate only for those they considered to be situated within their definition of what it means to be ‘law-abiding’ in the roads context. That is, drivers ‘like me’ who may have committed a minor offence and had no intention to break the law. As such, courses provided in this format are not considered suitable for all drivers but are seen as an appropriate response to the so-called law-abiding offender.

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Specifically considering the above arguments in the context of mobile phone-using drivers, Hill et al. (2015) found that while 46% of drivers claimed they themselves were capable of talking on a mobile phone while driving, only 8.5% considered other drivers to be capable. As such, drivers may use the notion that they are ‘better than average’ to rationalise a contradiction between their own driver behaviour and what they consider inappropriate or worthy of police attention in other drivers. White et al. (2004) found that survey respondents identified the use of a handheld mobile phone while driving to make a phone call as the second most risky driver distraction1 amongst 15 other distracting behaviours. Despite this, almost half of those same individuals admitted to using their handheld mobile phone while driving either once or twice (24.6%), occasionally (14.4%) or regularly (8.5%). Lee and Humphrey (2011) also found that of those who self-reported using a mobile phone while driving at least once in the last 12 months, 30% still also considered themselves to be ‘law-abiding’. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the suggestions, above, that drivers are operating on their own definitions of what it really means to be law-abiding or a law-breaker and that these are not entirely aligned with what is actually against the law. Any doubts that drivers had about their offence being ‘real’ or not might have received support from their encounters with the criminal justice system and the interactions with officers that led to those outcomes. The way in which police officers talk about drivers and the outcomes they receive is influenced by their own beliefs about the proper and improper objects of police attention, with officers like Daniel (above) believing that a driver is ‘one of the most hard done to criminals in the world’ and Mike (below) seeing different types of treatment being deserved for ‘decent’ people: These kinds of offences are probably the only offences really which we have contact with decent members of the public as offenders, you know, not normally, they’re not burglars, they’re not drug dealers, they’re just

1

Shaving/applying make-up was reported to be the riskiest driver distraction.

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people using their mobile phone, so sometimes a bit of reassurance doesn’t go amiss. (PC Mike)

The police officers here appear to identify with road users as a group of people, perhaps seeing them as broadly similar to themselves (and certainly more similar than their usual targets). This links into the ideas of positive identity-based relations that Bradford et al. (2014) claim promote cooperation with the police. Those who commit offences such as burglary are an ‘out-group’ or a group that does not share the beliefs and norms of that ‘preferred’ social group (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). While officers used the option of a course as a way of navigating the roadside encounter (Snow, 2019) with ‘decent members of the public’, the availability of a diversionary option that resulted in no long-term consequences for the driver also potentially undermined the implication that any offence had actually been committed, bolstering an ability to neutralise offending actions: People will see it as an easy way out at first, they will see it as, I don’t have to get the fine, I don’t have to get the points, or I don’t have to get both, and therefore I can fall asleep for the next two hours, ignore it, go out and do the same problem. Erm, and that’s one of those things that people at first will assume, it’s the easy option. (Employee Carl) I think a lot of people will think that ‘I’d rather take the course because it saves me getting 3 points’ and you feel that, I mean you sort of feel, not that you’ve got away with it, but you’ve had the easy option, like you’ve had a slapped wrist instead of a kick up the bum [laughs], and it was like, yeah I can do that, at least it won’t have any implications for my job with points on my licence, it won’t have implications with my insurance. (Offender Kevin)

If a denial of the offence, or denial of any injury, are being used by drivers to resist the implication that handheld phone use is an offence, and that they are therefore offenders, it is clear that handsfree phone use (where the user may have no intention to cause harm, does no harm, and does not break any law) represents an even bigger behaviour-change challenge. What this interpretation suggests is that drivers engaging in dangerous behaviours have been able to neutralise the psychological

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consequences of accusations of law-breaking by applying their own interpretations of what makes a proper law, and one that is worth obeying. Of course, they are often doing this from a standpoint of ignorance with respect to their own skills and their own understanding of the effects of the behaviours they engage in. This is discussed below.

Proper Laws and Other Laws Other techniques for resisting the enforcement of laws on the roads centre on what makes a ‘good’ law that is worth obeying. A further method of resisting unsettling implications for identities focuses on what constitutes an offence and the difference between ‘real’ crimes (as given as examples in the quotes above) and what the individual has done, (or even why the same offence, committed by someone else is a worthy policing target, as above). In categorising offences, drivers seemingly distinguish between offences which they believe require some sort of harmful or criminal intent and those which need not. This helps drivers who undeniably break the law to maintain a law-abiding (or perhaps more accurately non-offending) identity (Orr et al., 2013; Wells & Wills, 2009) where an ‘offence’ is seen as something morally wrong or dangerous, not just something which breaches a law. Many ‘traffic’ offences are relatively new creations, designed to regulate and control increasingly complex areas and activities. They are classed as mala prohibita offences—meaning that they are illegal because they are forbidden, rather than that they are morally wrong (Lee, 2022). Of course, as Chapter 4 showed, many laws are laws because behaviour is dangerous and can cause death and injury, even when the action is unintended. They are often strict liability laws, which means that intent (something seemingly central to many drivers’ understanding of what makes an action criminal) is irrelevant. Immorality, or a ‘guilty mind’, is not a prerequisite for being a criminal or at least for receiving enforcement attention where strict liability laws are concerned, though it appears important for those subject to those laws. This may contribute to some laws being seen as creating more ‘technical’ offences than ‘real’ offences, further allowing those that commit

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them a way of resisting the label of offender or criminal. In comparison to other traffic offences, Sharp et al. (2020) found that mobile phone use by drivers was perceived to be intentional and therefore more worthy of police attention, but this was still, for our participants, juxtaposed with the notion that their own such offending would be classified as a behavioural lapse, whereas the same action in other drivers was considered deliberate. For the two offender attendees below, the undeniable fact of their offending was explained as a deviation from their normal behaviour, rather than an indication of who they fundamentally were as a person: It’s not something I would normally do because I’ve got a handsfree kit. (Offender Rachel) [I] never use my mobile phone while driving generally speaking. I have a hands free kit so I don’t ever hold it to my face usually. (Offender Debbie)

As such, the fact of their detection by an officer was an unlucky, chance, event—and their presence on a diversion course is a testament to the fact that no injury was caused by this lapse. Alternatively, offenders described how they had acted in good faith and intended to obey the law, but were guilty on the basis of what might be termed a technicality: One thing I was staggered about was when the policeman told us that they considered the highway to be hedge way to hedge way. So, if you’re parked in a layby with the engine running you can actually still get in trouble for using your mobile phone and I’ve done that countless times where I’ve pulled in a layby, and I always thought I was doing the right thing. (Offender Kevin)

For the offences referred to, in many cases at least, there are no immediately discernible victims and no harm has been caused to another. They may appear as false positives allowing drivers to use the technique of denial of injury (Sykes & Matza, 1957). Actually, drivers do not have to work hard to make this neutralisation fit with those offences such as using a mobile phone while driving because if harm had been caused then they would have been charged with an alternative, more serious

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offence, and would not have been offered a diversion course. Therefore, it is easy for drivers to acknowledge and admit performing the action whilst simultaneously suggesting that enforcement action is unnecessary as nobody has been harmed by their actions, again rationalising those actions in a way that remains consistent with their law-abiding identity. Seemingly they struggle with strict liability laws and with risk-based laws that problematise actions that cause risk, rather than actions that cause harm. ‘Real’ offenders, seemingly, are conceptualised as those that deliberately cause harm, not those that may unintentionally cause risk.

‘Somebody Made Me Do It’ If other techniques are not available or appropriate, a driver may opt for an approach which allows them to deflect responsibility by pointing out the role of others in their actions. This may involve an ‘appeal to higher loyalties’ by identifying a perceived greater need or greater good served by the action, or it may involve the identification of circumstances in which offending was orchestrated by someone or something else. As described in Chapter 3, some drivers were keen to explain away their offending by referring to employers, children, friends whose needs were thought to be greater than the need to abstain from phone use. In these cases, another identity (employee, parent, friend) competed successfully with the need to be a law-abiding driver. Their offence was therefore recast as a logical and moral response to a set of circumstances that were not ideal. Presumably, the fact that no harm was caused could be taken as validation of the decision made. Nobody lost their job, nobody was left uncollected outside school, nobody’s personal crisis was left unacknowledged and (despite the use of a mobile phone) on this occasion nobody was hurt: My son who’s got autism, he’d just broken his arm and he was going to have an x-ray and they thought he might need an operation on it...and of course at the time I was quite concerned about that … and I’ve got my phone on the passenger seat of the car, and as I come out of the services I looked to see whether it had got signal, I wasn’t actually even using my

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phone, I’d just looked to see whether it had got signal, and I saw that it had got one bar and I picked it up. (Offender Kevin)2

Offenders who use this strategy are keen to note that the behaviour is out of character, and that it did not benefit them directly but served the needs of some absent other who was worried, injured, or even in danger (see Chapter 3 for other examples). Demonstrably, nobody was harmed on this occasion, and (moreover) harm was potentially avoided. Positioning their actions in this way, allows for a neutralisation of the negative connotations associated with an offender status and instead maintains and actually emphasises their devotion to other identities and people, which would be expected of a ‘decent’, ‘responsible’, and ‘hard-working’ citizen (Orr et al., 2013; Wells & Wills, 2009). But in a different sense, drivers also may be able to portray themselves as victims of the circumstances in which they find themselves. As discussed at length elsewhere (Wells et al., 2021) there are a variety of ways in which drivers can claim that the structural signals they receive are conducive to distracted driving. As discussed in Chapter 2, cars and phones helpfully pair themselves when in range of each other, cars are fitted with an array of technologies that require interaction to function (whether for driving function or entertainment), laws are confusing and often get tweaked, job roles are increasingly dependent on continual contact and availability (see Chapter 3). Moreover, drivers may consider certain traffic offences to be a social norm, observed frequently amongst the driver population leading to the claim that ‘everyone is doing it’ (Coleman, 1994). As the discussion in Chapter 3 demonstrated, if others are doing it, they may well be viewed as gaining an advantage that we deny to ourselves at our own risk. For actions such as speeding and handheld mobile phone use, that drivers can easily observe others doing, the prevalence may be perceived to be higher than for those that are difficult to detect such as handsfree phone use. In support of this, Beck and Watters (2016) found that drivers were more likely to text and drive where those closest to them had also been observed texting while driving.

2

See Chapter 3 for additional quotes exemplifying this point.

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Summary Despite high levels of offending on the roads, the road network is a context where individuals do not consider themselves ‘real criminals’ and instead maintain a notion of the self as law-abiding (Orr et al., 2013). Many strategies of neutralisation (Sykes & Matza, 1957) and rationalisation are used to allow drivers to maintain a ‘law-abiding’ identity despite clear and apparent law-breaking and encounters with the police as a result. These include efforts to position themselves relative to others— to ‘real criminals’—who are acting in ways that are described as more criminal, more intentional and more immoral (Harré & Sibley, 2007; Orr et al., 2013; Savigar, 2019). Other strategies include denying the harm caused by the behaviour, something which is at odds with the risk-based preventative thinking that underpins the law. As a result, some drivers are also able to deny that there are any victims created by their behaviour. In some cases, it appears that they prefer to take on the identity of the victim instead by arguing that enforcement is unjustified or motivated by improper concerns, or that a focus on traffic offending is distracting the police from ‘real’ criminals who can offend with impunity. This demonstrates how and why contexts, where mala prohibita laws are the norm may struggle to capture the hearts and minds of those they target, leading to any compliance being for instrumental rather than normative reasons. For some drivers, offending was reconciled with an identity based on compliance via the use of an appeal to higher loyalties that compelled the driver to offend in order to achieve a greater good for another person. Their presence on an educational course can then be seen as confirmation that they made the right choice, as if their decision had caused harm they would not have been eligible for the course. As such, attendance on courses may contribute to a sense of superiority that drivers are known to exhibit, in the same way that a fixed penalty notice of intended prosecution may remind drivers that no harm resulted from their actions. Again, the basing of laws on risk may generate a challenging number of prosecutions that are experienced as false positives.

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Other offenders, who perhaps accept the problematic nature of their behaviour, may present it as an out-of-character lapse (further reinforcing the idea of a normally law-abiding and respectable character). This neutralisation may help to explain why drivers consider themselves law-abiding individuals despite breaking the law in this context, and may see other drivers and their actions to be problematic but see themselves as safe and appropriate (Wells et al., 2021). This, and other strategies used by drivers, may also explain support for the use of education courses as an alternative to prosecution only for some types of offender (first time offenders, those committing marginal offences, offenders ‘like me’, etc.). Interestingly, this research has shown that police officers also mirror many of the beliefs of drivers, seeing them as decent, hard-working, lawabiding individuals who experience hardship as a result of the way the roads are policed, and different to the ‘usual suspects’ they encounter. This manifests in the way that some officers marketed courses to drivers primarily as a one-time offer, a chance to avoid a penalty, in ways that are unlikely to challenge how drivers deploy identity as a form of resistance to implications of dangerousness.

References Ashforth, B. E., & Anand, V. (2003). The normalization of corruption in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 25, 1–52. Beck, K. H., & Watters, S. (2016). Characteristics of college students who text while driving: Do their perceptions of a significant other influence their decisions? Transportation Research Part f: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 37 , 119–128. Bradford, B., Murphy, K., & Jackson, J. (2014). Officers as mirrors: Policing, procedural justice and the (re) production of social identity. British Journal of Criminology, 54, 527–550. Coleman, J. (1994). The criminal elite: The sociology of white collar crime. St. Martin’s Press. Coleman, R. (2004). Reclaiming the streets. Willan. Corbett, C. (2003). Car crime. Willan.

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Corbett, C. (2008). Roads policing: Current context and imminent dangers. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 2(1), 131–142. Delhomme, P. (1991). Comparing one’s driving with others: Assessment of abilities and frequency of offences. Evidence for a superior conformity or self bias? Accident Analysis and Prevention, 23, 493–508. Emsley, C. (1993). ‘Mother, what did policemen do when there weren’t any motors?’ The law, the police and the regulation of motor traffic in England, 1900–1939. The Historical Journal, 36 (2), 357–381. Delaney, A., Ward, H., Cameron, M., & Williams, A. F. (2005). Controversies and speed cameras: Lessons learnt internationally. Journal of Public Health Policy, 26 , 404–415. Harre, N., & Sibley, C. G. (2007). Explicit and implicit self-enhancement biases in drivers and their relationship to driving violations and crash-risk optimism. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 39 (6), 1155–1161. Hill, L., Rybar, J., Styer, T., Fram, E., Merchant, G., & Eastman, A. (2015). Prevalence of and attitudes about distracted driving in college students. Traffic Injury Prevention, 16 , 362–367. IPSOS/MORI. (2012). Poll on police and crime commissioner elections PCC omnibus survey for the transitional board for APCC . Kaviani, F., Young, K. L., Robards, B., & Koppel, S. (2021). “Like it’s wrong, but it’s not that wrong:” Exploring the normalization of risk-compensatory strategies among young drivers engaging in illegal smartphone use. Journal of Safety Research, 78, 292–302. Lee, Y. (2022). Mala prohibita, the wrongfulness constraint, and the problem of overcriminalization. Law and Philosophy, 41(2–3), 375–396. Lee, L., & Humphrey, A. (2011). Attitudes to road safety: Analysis of driver behaviour module, 2010. NatCen Omnibus Survey. Loader, I., & Mulcahy, A. (2003). Policing and the condition of England: Memory, politics and culture. Oxford University Press on Demand. Lupton, D. (2006). Sociology and risk. In G. Mythen & S. Walklate (Eds.), Beyond the risk society: Critical reflections on risk and human security (pp. 11– 24). Open University Press. McKenna, F. P., Stanier, R. A., & Lewis, C. (1991). Factors underlying illusory selfassessment of driving skill in males and females. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 23, 45–52. McKenna, F. P. (1993). It won’t happen to me: Unrealistic optimism or illusion of control? British Journal of Psychology, 84 (1), 39–50.

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Merry, S., Power, N., McManus, M., & Alison, L. (2012). Drivers of public trust and confidence in police in the UK. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 14 (2), 118–135. MoJ. (2023). Criminal justice statistics quarterly: September 2022. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-statisticsquarterly-september-2022/criminal-justice-statistics-quarterly-september2022-html#out-of-court-disposals (Accessed 22 May 2023). PACTS. (2020). Roads policing and its contribution to road safety. Available online: https://www.pacts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Roads-PolicingReport-FinalV1-merged-1.pdf (Accessed 21 April 2023). Orr, K. S., Le Masurier, P., & McCoard, S. (2013). Prolific illegal driving behaviour: A qualitative study. Available online: https://www.transport. gov.scot/publication/prolific-illegal-driving-behaviour-a-qualitative-study/ (Accessed 18 May 2023). Redshaw, J., Mawby, R. I., & Bunt, P. (1997). Evaluating core policing in Britain: The views of police and consumers. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 25 (3), 288–301. Savigar, L. (2019). Preventing mobile phone use while driving: Appreciating the equivocal nature of identity, safety and legality in an uncertain world (Doctoral dissertation, Keele University). Available online: https://keelerepository.wor ktribe.com/OutputFile/465636. Accessed 6 November 2023. Sharp, R., Wells, H., Medina, F., & Helman, S. (2020). Perceptions of compliance and enforcement on the strategic road network. https://trl.co.uk/upl oads/trl/documents/PPR954-Perceptions-of-compliance-and-enforcementon-the-SRN---Focus-groups-and-interviews-report-(2020)---Highways-Eng land.pdf (Accessed 22 May 2023). Snow, A. (2019). Receiving an on the spot penalty: A tale of morality, common sense and law-abidance. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19 (2), 141–159. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin, & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp 33–47). Brooks/Cole. UKROEd. (n.d.). Trends and statistics. Available online: https://www.ukroed. org.uk/scheme/trends-statistics/ (Accessed 5 May 2023). Wells, H. (2007). Risk, respectability and responsibilisation: Unintended driver responses to speed limit enforcement. Internet Journal of Criminology, 1–17.

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Wells, H. (2008). The techno-fix versus the fair cop: Procedural (in) justice and automated speed limit enforcement. The British Journal of Criminology, 48(6), 798–817. Wells, H. (2012). The fast and the furious: Drivers, speed cameras and control in a risk society. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Wells, H. (2016). PCCs, roads policing and the dilemmas of increased democratic accountability. British Journal of Criminology, 56 (2), 274–292. Wells, H. (2018). The angered versus the endangered: PCCs, roads policing and the challenges of assessing and representing ‘public opinion.’ The British Journal of Criminology, 58(1), 95–113. Wells, H., Briggs, G., & Savigar-Shaw, L. (2021). The inconvenient truth about mobile phone distraction: Understanding the means, motive and opportunity for driver resistance to legal and safety messages. The British Journal of Criminology, 61(6), 1503–1520. Wells, H., & Savigar, L. (2019). Keeping up, and keeping on: Risk, acceleration and the law-abiding driving offender. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19 (2), 254–270. Wells, H., & Wills, D. (2009). Individualism and identity: Resistance to speed cameras in the UK. Surveillance & Society, 6 (3), 259–274. White, M. P., Eiser, J. R., & Harris, P. R. (2004). Risk perceptions of mobile phone use while driving. Risk Analysis, 24, 323–334.

6 Legitimacy, Fairness, and Distracted Driving

Introduction Many efforts have been made to explain how and why people (dis)obey the law (see for example Tyler, 2006; Truelove et al., 2019; Wikström et al., 2011; Wingrove et al., 2011). This chapter will consider how interactions between the police (and other actors in the process) and public, play a key role in informing driver actions (both legal and illegal), linking the concepts (previously discussed) of instrumental and normative routes to compliance to broader concepts of legitimacy, fairness and procedural justice. These concepts will be explored in a general sense before considering how they apply to the roads context, and then specifically how they relate to mobile phone use by drivers. Finally, the chapter will explore how the use of education as an alternative to prosecution is offered to and experienced by drivers, and the role that plays in informing driver behaviour via the concepts of legitimacy and fairness and the playing out of procedural justice.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_6

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Legitimacy and Procedural Justice Often found to be of primary importance to understanding attitudes and behaviours towards the law and compliance with it, is procedural justice; that is the fairness of police procedures during their interactions with the public (Tyler, 2003). There are four key principles strongly associated with procedural justice; trustworthiness, neutrality, respect, and voice. Authorities that are seen to be acting with trustworthy motives, or in ‘good faith’ (Tyler, 1990: 117) and with consistency that suggests neutrality/impartiality in procedures they follow (Tyler & Lind, 1992) are seen to be acting in a procedurally just manner. In addition to this, treatment of those involved in such procedures must be seen to be operationalised in a respectful and polite manner (Meares et al., 2015) with opportunities for a point of view to be vocalised, or voice to be given (Tyler & Huo, 2002). Procedural justice is, in turn, seen to underpin and inform perceptions of police legitimacy. Although there are some complexities in defining the term, legitimacy of an authority such as the police can be generally considered a perception of appropriateness, rightness and justness which leads individuals to follow the rules of that authority (Tyler, 2006). Legitimacy has also been linked to the degree to which individuals consider that authority to have the right to exercise power (Tankebe, 2013). Several decades of work have emphasised the importance of police procedures and interactions with the public in informing what the public thinks of authority figures and (importantly) whether or not they subsequently comply with the law (Murphy et al., 2009; Reisig et al., 2014; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 1988). Sunshine and Tyler (2003) found that perceptions of police legitimacy influenced compliance with the law, cooperation with the police and public empowerment of police work. In other words, those who are treated in fair (‘procedurally just’) ways that give them confidence in criminal justice processes and procedures are more likely to comply with the law because they think that laws and law enforcers are legitimate. As such interactions between the police and the public are seen to be key to public perceptions of legitimacy and in turn, to levels of law-breaking and compliance. In some respects, this has similarities to

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Jackson et al.’s (2012) Pathways B-D to compliance, which are guided by normative commitments (to moral appropriateness, the law, or the police, respectively) as both these normative and legitimacy routes to behaviour rely on positive actions, experiences and/or information to guide safe and/or legal behaviour. This, as discussed in Chapter 2, is very different to a scenario in which people comply instrumentally—through fear of detection or punishment. Encouraging compliance through legitimacy or normative means is valuable as it requires less police resource; individuals comply with the law because they consider it the right thing to do, or because the authorities are right to demand it, and not because they think they will get caught and punished. Where individuals comply only as a result of fear of being caught, a significant police presence is required to identify offending behaviour, or otherwise deter it from taking place. Where compliance is normatively motivated, individuals obey the law even when no one is watching.

Fairness on the Roads In the context of roads policing, where resources are limited and the opportunities for offending are great, generating compliance via legitimacy and normative commitment is arguably essential to the smooth and safe running of the roads. The police (or their automated proxies— cameras) cannot be everywhere all the time and cannot, therefore, offer the realistic prospect of detection needed for instrumental deterrence from offending on the roads. Where drivers are able to avoid detection of offences, they are more likely to continue committing them (Truelove et al., 2023), and therefore a limited physical road policing presence is likely to have a detrimental impact on road safety where we rely on instrumental compliance. Roads policing encounters are the most common reason for an individual to experience policing attention (not police service as when a victim or witness) (Corbett, 2008) making them key encounters or ‘touch points’ for procedural justice and therefore in terms of perceived police legitimacy both in respect of roads policing and policing more widely.

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Efforts to generate positive experiences through procedurally just encounters have been found to result in positive outcomes in the roads context specifically. Mazerolle et al. (2012) found that when drivers were subject to a procedurally just traffic stop (as represented by a predefined cue card discussion reflecting the concepts of neutrality, voice, respect and trustworthiness) both perceptions of the dangers of drink-driving and self-reported intention to comply with the law improved significantly when compared to those not offered the same procedurally just experience. However, it is not simple to train officers to deliver a singular, scripted dialogue that will be considered procedurally just by all parties involved in an interaction. Although Mazerolle et al. (2012) found benefits of this approach, MacQueen and Bradford (2017) did not. MacQueen and Bradford suggested that this contrasting outcome was likely the result of implementation failure, with officers adopting the pre-defined procedurally just script in their interactions with the public but without authenticity, resulting from a resistance to the premise of the training and how it could inform their practice. It appears, therefore, that officers need to believe in what they are saying and doing for it to come across as authentic and be appreciated. Additionally complicating such efforts to ‘insert’ fairness into interactions, police–public interactions are more likely to take the form of a nuanced and fluctuating dialogue (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012)—they are not fixed in a way that necessarily allows a simple script to be followed. Furthermore, different traffic offences are viewed with different levels of legitimacy. Watling and Leal (2012) reported a lesser perceived legitimacy for stops relating to speeding than failure to wear a seatbelt and drink-driving. Policing of offences that are perceived to be unworthy of police attention, minor in their consequences, or unnecessarily targeted, may generate perceptions of police illegitimacy simply by their existence and regardless of the nature of the encounter (Harcourt, 2001). There therefore appears to be a difference between belief in the legitimacy of the rule of law as a general principle and belief in the legitimacy of particular laws (Murphy et al., 2009). When drivers refer to their law-abidingness as a defence to allegations of criminality (adopting the identity of the

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‘law-abiding offender), it may be this distinction that they are trying to make (see Chapter 5). Overall, although legitimacy-informed compliance naturally has an appeal, and there has been a considerable body of support for the link between procedural fairness, legitimacy and subsequent compliance (Nagin & Telep, 2017; Walters & Bolger, 2019), it is not simple to attempt to generate compliance with road traffic law, or safe road user behaviours, through procedural justice. Roads policing may, for all the reasons explored in previous chapters, be a ‘special’ context.

Perceived Fairness of Roads Policing To explore driver perceptions of fairness in policing (in various senses), various questions were included within questionnaires completed by offenders and employees experiencing Crash Course.1 Three questionnaire items asked individuals to what extent they agreed or disagreed that the police enforce the law fairly; that the police make their decisions neutrally, and based only upon facts; and that the police treat people with dignity and respect. These questions all relate to accepted antecedents of procedural justice in some way (although do not cover all components of procedural justice) and are collectively referred to here, for simplicity, as procedural justice. These questions were asked in relation to the police in general, perceptions of roads policing officers and perceptions of the police during their encounter that led to their attendance at Crash Course (for offenders) or their most recent encounter with roads policing (if they had ever had one, for employees). In the pre-course survey completed by drivers prior to attending Crash Course, offenders were significantly more likely to feel that the police in general acted in procedurally just ways (being fair, respectful and neutral) than they were to think this of roads policing officers specifically. A similar statistic was obtained for employees, supporting claims that the policing of the roads is generally perceived as less fair than other forms of policing (Lundman & Kaufman, 2003). However, both offenders and employees 1

See Savigar (2019) for more detail of the questionnaire.

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showed a higher mean perceived procedural justness associated with their own most recent experience with roads policing officers than their overall perceived procedural justness of roads policing officers and the police in general.2 This difference in perception between the procedural justness of roads policing generally in comparison to personal experience was considerably higher for those in the offender group (those who had been offered Crash Course as the outcome of specific roads policing encounter). This is intriguing as it suggests that although, generally, those policing the roads might be seen as less legitimate than ‘the police’ at a broader level, specific officers in specific encounters are seen to be acting in procedurally just ways. Participants’ personal experiences, pre-course, however, did not override their general beliefs about roads policing as an area of police business. This accords with what previous research has shown; that a single positive experience with the police does not wholly counteract negative perceptions of the police (Hinds, 2007; Skogan, 2006). This suggests that while single, personal encounters are important, other factors influence general perceptions of police fairness and legitimacy too, which may include other previous experiences, vicarious police experiences or even media representations of the police. During interviews, drivers described how certain specific roads policing approaches informed their perceptions of the police. These were often raised where they were considered to be, in some sense, ‘unfair’: “There was a patrol there who were out to get people and the deal was that there were actually two plain clothed guys at the lights and they had called through to the guy to say, you know, “get this car here, the white Fiat…” and then it was just made worse by the fact that these guys were in plain clothes - which they are allowed to be and I know that is what they do, you could expect it - but I just felt it was a bit underhand, a bit smarmy. That’s purely a subjective thing, it’s got nothing to do with the

2 Paired samples t-tests showed a significant difference between scores on the roads policing procedural justice scale (M = 10.28, SD = 2.57) and the personal experience procedural justice scale (M = 11.47, SD = 2.36), for offenders, t (925) = -17.00, p < . 001, and also for employees, with a significant difference between roads policing (M = 9.66, SD = 2.28) and personal experience (M = 10.72, SD = 2.37), t (147) = -5.62, p < . 001.

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legality or the appropriateness of their actions. It just felt a bit sneaky, they didn’t even have uniforms on you know.” (Offender Lee) “I didn’t realise there was a police car behind me, a plain police car.” (Offender Rachel)

These participants identified the use of covert roads policing approaches as being ‘not quite right’ because they appeared to be designed to ‘catch’ people out and were therefore ‘unfair’. These drivers implied that policing should be highly visible and overt, presumably to give drivers the chance to modify their behaviour and avoid detection and implies only an instrumental commitment to the laws being enforced (Wills & Wells, 2012). Despite having deemed the general tactic of using unmarked cars to be a little sneaky (Simpson, 2019)— not quite a ‘fair cop’ (Wells, 2008)—Lee then went on to describe the encounter that resulted, in more positive terms: “Oh, they were terrific, the man [police officer], lovely.” (Offender Lee)

It appears that, as the survey data would suggest, it is possible to disassociate individual officers from the tactics that they are perceived to employ en masse. In this case, while they were in the police car, the officers were perhaps seen as representing ‘policing’ in a general sense. Once they were outside of it and were interacting with the driver, they were seen as individuals, operationalising dubious laws in the fairest way they could. Several participants described ‘their’ officers in ways that reflected a perceived fairness, or procedural justness, of the actions of those individuals, particularly in relation to respectful treatment: “They were very good, I mean obviously they’re still police so they’re still gonna do you for what you done but they were very good, very courteous, they were very nice, they were both professional.” (Offender Jamie) “He was really, really, really friendly, and actually I emailed the police station to get a personal thank you to him because of how nice he was.” (Offender Michelle) “Overall, as experiences of being nicked can be [laughs], he was a very polite chap.” (Offender Mark)

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The above quotes imply that, while individuals may not have initially responded well to the implications of being stopped by the police, they did perceive their experience with the police to be positive, and even more positive than initially expected. As already described, many course attendees considered their own experience with the police to be fairer than their overall perception of roads policing. Participants, seemingly, appreciated that officers were ‘just doing their job’ and, while the laws they were enforcing were not necessarily viewed as legitimate, their approach to enforcing them was. Although previous research has consistently highlighted that individuals focus on the perceived fairness of the procedures over and above their consideration of the outcome in making these judgements (Bradford et al., 2015; Engel, 2005; Mazerolle et al., 2012), interviews emphasised how the possible outcome of a diversion from prosecution informed interactional processes between police and driver. Officers focused on how they utilised the possibility of a course instead of a fine and points as a conversational tool to navigate interactions: “For me, it’s a good way of keeping a good working relationship between police and the public because we’re not going straight in for the kill, i.e., we’re not going straight for the prosecution, we’re giving them an opportunity, yes they may have committed an offence, but we’re giving them the opportunity to take our advice and put it right.” (PC Rob) “It’s a relief to them a lot of times when they realise they’re not going to get points and they realise this course is available to them, and I think in some ways they’re almost grateful to you that you are offering that [Crash Course] to them… [it] makes for a better relationship with you and that person, certainly towards the end of that contact that you’ve had with them once, you know, that the course has been mentioned and it’s been explained to them. They are normally reasonably positive when they go away, if that’s possible.” (PC Thomas) “I’ll say to them then and there, ‘have you ever been on a course for this? Have you ever had any points for this before?’ …You tend to get a good reception then, you tend to get ‘thank you very much, very kind of you, much appreciated’.” (PC John)

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The ability to talk about an offer of education as a fair alternative to prosecution was described in ways that were to their advantage in developing relationships, building rapport and enhancing the perceived positivity of interactions with members of the public. Police officers focused on how their interaction could involve ‘selling’ the benefits of a driver education course as an opportunity to learn (Snow, 2015), while simultaneously acknowledging that the likely perceived benefit would be the avoidance of penalty points/fine. The fact that they were being sold an offer did not escape drivers: “He said ‘look, I can’t promise that you will end up with a course, you might end up with points etc., but I will recommend that you go on the course because it’s your first offence’, you know, he obviously checked, I gave him my registration and he checked that it was my first offence and on that basis he said that he would recommend that I would end up going through a course system rather than going through the courts and I was made aware of that.” (Offender Debbie) “He did explain to me that it was a very worthwhile thing to do, while I might not be properly believing everything that he was saying, he recommended strongly that I give it a chance. Erm, and so yeah, I said ‘absolutely, I will’.” (Offender Keith) “He said they weren’t, they weren’t looking to charge anybody, they were basically just offering anybody that they caught the opportunity to go on the course to kind of raise driver awareness… he made it clear that I was being done for it but it was a, more of a… more of an awareness thing rather than trying to penalise you for it.” (Offender Mark)

This process of ‘selling’ the course during that interaction may have added to the perceived fairness of the interaction itself and subsequent judgments about the procedural justice associated with that interaction, leaving drivers feeling that they had experienced a respectful officer who had recognised and responded in a way which, to some extent, supports the maintenance of their law-abiding identity (Wells & Savigar, 2019; Wells & Wills, 2009) (Chapter 5). Of course, being popular should not be the priority for roads policing, and such encounters should not give the impression that the officers concerned are reluctant to enforce the law. It is understandable that officers want to navigate encounters with

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road users in the least confrontational way possible, but this can be done in a way that foregrounds the educational benefits of a course rather than the avoidance of consequences. In that sense, offending drivers should not get the impression that this was their ‘lucky day’ or indeed that drivers receive a special kind of treatment that other offenders do not (Savigar-Shaw et al., 2022). It is crucial that officers explain that the course is an opportunity to learn about the dangers of distracted driving, not simply an opportunity to avoid a fine and penalty points. However, while such negotiations may be positive in terms of increasing the perceived fairness and legitimacy of roads policing, they were also, evidently, a missed opportunity for encouraging commitment to safety: “I would advise them either to get a proper Bluetooth headset, or get something in the car that would enable them to have it hardwired in the form of some sort of handsfree kit. I think … the tendency mid conversation would be to pick the phone up, and then obviously they commit the full offence and that’s when distractions can occur.” (PC Bob) “Well I stopped a tractor, coming back with Geoff from [location] the other day… a tractor driver who’s got his handsfree on and he’s got his phone in his hand, we sat behind him, he’s got his phone in his hand and he’s going like this on his phone [holds out his phone below his face], big glass cab, and I pulled him over, and I go to speak to him, and he says ‘I was using my handsfree’, well, you’re still holding your phone. You know, he was like, ‘yeah but I’m not talking on it’. I’m like, no, that’s not the point [laughs]. It’s not about the talking, it’s about what you’re doing, the holding it, pushing buttons, ‘well how am I supposed to ring somebody then if I’m driving?’ I’m like [pulls face] ‘pull over maybe, if you got voice command, or something like that’.” (PC Tom)

By recommending handsfree use as part of a strategy for negotiating a potentially tricky encounter with a member of the public, officers may be prioritising a quest for legitimacy and compliance at the expense of safety. Efforts to appear fair may be popular with drivers in the short term, but in the longer term will actually be doing them a disservice in that they encourage unsafe behaviours. Furthermore, this positivity might be reinforcing some unhelpful self-perceptions amongst drivers

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that they are deserving of different treatment, that they are not ‘really’ criminals, that they are not capable of causing real harm and/or there are ways around getting caught (when using handsfree rather than handheld devices). Similarly, if courses are marketed for what they are not (avoiding nasty penalties), not what they are (a chance to learn why your behaviour is dangerous) then they will potentially offer little deterrent to would-be phone users and may further the view that drivers are a special case—that they are essentially only law-abiding offenders (see Chapter 5).

The Role of Crash Course in Generating Perceptions of Fairness As well as the roadside interaction that led to participants attending Crash Course, the course itself may be considered an extension of interaction with ‘policing’ in its wider sense. As such it is both an outcome of a process and part of the process itself. Interestingly, analysis of the questionnaire data completed by course attendees showed changes to perceptions of police fairness3 following course attendance. After the course, both offenders and employees showed a significantly higher perceived fairness of the police in general, of those who police the roads, and of the police during the specific interaction that led to Crash Course attendance (or their most recent interaction with the police, for employees). For example, for offenders the percentage that strongly/agreed the police enforce the law fairly, in general, increased from 57% (pre-course) to 74% (post-course), the percentage that strongly/agreed the police enforce traffic law fairly increased from 50 to 75%, and for their experience that led to attendance at Crash Course, it increased from 71 to 87%.4 3 A single item asking about perceived fairness, not the summed scale using different elements of procedural justice as presented above. 4 For employees, the percentage that strongly/agreed the police enforce the law fairly in general increased from 56 to 66%, the percentage that strongly/agreed the police enforce traffic law fairly increased from 49 to 61%, and for their experience that led to attendance at Crash Course, it increased from 64 to 75%.

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The experience of attending the course—rather than just the offer of it as a disposal—therefore significantly increased driver perceptions of fairness of a range of policing forms. This suggests that the response to offending actions (in this case, Crash Course) is important in developing retrospective perceptions of fairness about the police. Perceptions of the fairness of a single interaction (the roadside stop) can change as time passes and subsequent information causes the individual to reflect differently on a past event. The perceived justice of an experience with roads policing officers is not necessarily a ‘done deal’ when the police and offender go their separate ways, with subsequent experiences, such as Crash Course, able to provide drivers with more information with which to understand what has happened to them. Rather than simply being an ‘easy option’ (RAC, 2017) that allows offenders to ‘avoid punishment’, education may therefore actually be a tool for shaping and manipulating feelings of fairness and legitimacy (Savigar-Shaw et al., 2022). Where mala prohibita offences are concerned, educational diversions offer individuals the chance to learn about the reasons and logics behind apparently ‘technical’ regulatory offences, potentially contributing to normative compliance in future. Indeed, course attendees were keen to identify that the delivery and content of the course generated emotional and moral feelings about offences that had been absent previously: “I think you do remember the faces, you do remember the atonement [sic] in their voices, you hear their voices change as they are relaying these stories to you. I think its visual and, you’ve got the voice in your head that doesn’t want to go away. You can hear it when you’re in circumstances when the weeks and months went by.” (Offender Kevin) “I just felt that overall the dreadful, dreadful consequences of driving selfishly, when you think of the families whose lives are permanently changed, and they’re changed in a minute and a second, you know, life’s ticking along quite normally and reasonably, all of a sudden, you know, somebody’s gonna get a knock on the door and get some dreadful, All of these pre- to post-course changes were significantly different, mostly at p < .001, with the exception of the employee group in relation to their perceptions of the police in their most recent personal encounter, which was significantly different at p < .005.

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dreadful news and it ruins their life. And it’s terribly selfish isn’t it?” (Offender Keith)

In this sense, the course contributed to a potential increased intention to comply via direct normative commitment (a commitment to acting in ways that are seen to be morally right) and in turn, via an increased sense of procedural justice (where roads policing came to be understood as legitimate by virtue of enforcing legitimated laws). Statistical analyses also supported the importance of the course in explaining future behavioural intention; when considering together a) overall perceptions of roads policing officers, b) overall perceptions of one’s experience with roads policing officers, c) overall perceptions of the police in general, and d) evaluation of Crash Course, it was the latter that provided the greatest contribution to predicting future behavioural intention.5 The ability of the course to provide information which encourages legitimacy-based/ normative commitment to road safety is therefore valuable, given that it is evaluations of the course itself that play an important role in intentions for future behaviour on the roads.

Mobile Phone Behaviour Change In terms of actual changes to self-reported behaviours (rather than merely intentions), the course also had positive impacts. Prior to course attendance, 66% of offenders admitted to talking on a handheld mobile phone while driving at least once in the last six months prior to Crash Course, with 33% admitting to doing so either occasionally, quite often

5 Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted of post-course offender data. The proposed model including overall perceptions of roads policing officers, overall perceptions of one’s experience with roads policing officers, overall perceptions of the police in general and evaluation of Crash Course accounted for 44% of the variance in future behavioural intention. Of these variables, overall perceptions of roads policing officers made a significant unique contribution when considered alone (β = .39) but within the final model, including all of the variables relating to perceptions of the police and perceptions of Crash Course, it was perceptions of Crash Course that were the most significant factor predicting future intentional behaviour (β = .45). See Savigar (2019: 286) for more detail on the questionnaire items included in this analysis.

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or all the time. When asked that same question at follow-up,6 a much smaller 16% admitted to talking on a handheld phone at least once over the last six months (all 16% responded hardly ever, with 0% admitted to doing so occasionally, quite often or all the time). For employees prior to course attendance, a much smaller 33% of offenders admitted to talking on a handheld mobile phone while driving at least once in the last six months prior to Crash Course, with only 9% admitting to doing so either occasionally, quite often or all the time. At follow-up, only 5% admitted to talking on a handheld phone at least once over the last six months (again, all 5% responded hardly ever, with 0% admitted to doing so occasionally, quite often or all the time). Therefore, participants were considerably less likely to self-report having used a handheld mobile phone for a telephone call while driving in the six months following course attendance. In addition to this focus on handheld mobile phone use, a key part of the course also focused on informing the audience of the underlying risk and consequences associated with handsfree phone use. This is something that the (currently favoured) route of penalty points and fines for handheld use not only fails to communicate but can arguably make worse (Savigar-Shaw et al., 2022). Handheld offenders who receive penalty points and a fine are (at present) offered no information about the reason for the law, and no information to discourage a shift to the legal way of achieving the same outcome. In addition to changes to handheld mobile phone use, drivers were asked about their legal handsfree use. Of note is the fact that course attendees also self-reported less handsfree phone use in the six months following course attendance than the six months before it, particularly for those completing the survey in the ‘offender’ category. For offenders at pre-course, 79.7% admitted to using a handsfree mobile phone while driving for talking at some point within the last six months. This reduced to 67.7% at follow-up.7 Although this does not appear a considerable 6

The invitation to complete a follow-up questionnaire was sent 6 months after course attendance. 7 Follow-up questionnaires were sent to participants six months after course attendance and were asked about their behaviour in the previous six months (i.e. the time in between course attendance and now).

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percentage change, those who self-reported using a handsfree device for talking ‘nearly all the time’ or ‘quite often’ reduced from 42.2% to 13%, suggesting that the frequency of such use reduced even if it was not ceased completely. A reduction in handsfree use was also reported by employees; 84.9% self-reported using a handsfree mobile phone while driving for talking within the last six months prior to course attendance with a considerably lower 47.4% self-reporting doing so at follow-up (in other words in the six months after course attendance8 ). Furthermore, prior to course attendance 51.1% of employees admitted to using such a device nearly all the time or quite often, with this dropping to 21% at follow-up. Interview data further emphasised that drivers admitted to using handsfree devices less, but rarely did they suggest that they had completely stopped all use of a mobile phone while driving: “Whereas previous to that course I would answer every [handsfree] phone call that came in, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, whatever kind of road type I was on, whatever road conditions I was in, whereas now, because obviously the caller display comes up and I can see who is calling me, now I would think twice about whether I would need or want to take the call. So, it’s a couple of second thought of ‘am I comfortable taking this call right now?’” (Employee Steve). “I’ve limited my handsfree use to only important calls to do with my destination basically, to tell them I won’t be there on time and if I’ve had an opportunity to pull over I’ve done that instead rather than use the handsfree”. (Offender Debbie) “I’ve made much fewer calls using my handsfree than I had before. I used to use it as, you know, if I’ve got 2 hours to drive to a meeting that’s a good time to phone my mum because it will save me some time, that kind of thing, and I cut down on that a lot and thought actually I shouldn’t really be on the phone at all, unless it’s an important call, so I’ve really only made important calls using a handsfree kit since the course and only then brief, you know, I’m going to be 10 minutes late or that kind of thing, rather than phoning people using a handsfree kit to chat.” (Offender Debbie)

8

Presuming they completed their questionnaire shortly after receiving it.

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While drivers admitted to reducing their handsfree use and talked of the course as having provided a learning experience in relation to handsfree risk, the course alone was not enough to eradicate this behaviour. Clearly, the fact that the behaviour was legal meant it retained some appeal. Although seemingly more likely to be guided by a general sense of moral appropriateness (Pathway B according to Jackson et al.’s (2012) pathways to compliance) following course attendance, ‘the law’ (and presumably getting caught) clearly remains important in influencing road user behaviour. Nevertheless, a reduction in road risk offered by reduced handsfree use is a valuable outcome of course attendance, and this suggests that education is able to provide some room for encouraging normative compliance with safety, rather than solely normative compliance with the law. This is particularly valuable when the desired result and underlying rationale for the law is safety, but the law fails to reflect that. These novel findings suggest that education as a criminal justice outcome for drivers caught using a mobile phone while driving can perform a multitude of functions within the area of traffic law enforcement, including (retrospective) perceptions of the fairness of the interaction they experienced, and normatively motivated intentions for both future compliant, and future safe, driver behaviour. Despite this apparent benefit, since this research was completed, a government decision was made to end the widespread availability of courses for mobile phone-using drivers (see Chapter 1). The reasoning given was that courses were deemed to be ‘insufficient or inappropriate to the seriousness of the offence’ (DfT, 2016: 20). This suggests a government concern with sanction severity, and a prioritisation of an instrumental approach to compliance rather than one of normative compliance that education seemingly helps to encourage. Ending the provision of education for this offence on the grounds that is not a ‘serious enough’ penalty or that it allows drivers to ‘get away with it’ is, arguably, a short-sighted decision that assumes that the primary motivation for compliance is simply (and can only be) the avoidance of legal consequences (an instrumental motivation).

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Summary Despite its complexities, generating normative compliance—that is compliance according to the moral rightness of actions—is preferable to other approaches which are impractical in the roads context particularly. In addition to this, normative compliance with safety, rather than with the law when the two conflicts, is essential when the goal is improved road safety statistics rather than simply improved compliance statistics. The law, in this case, and no doubt many others, is based on a desire for improved safety, but total compliance with it could mask a simple displacement onto other legal but equally unsafe behaviours, producing no discernible impact on casualties. Although some drivers foreground their otherwise law-abiding status and focus on their commitment to the law, the roads context provides a uniquely complex arena where these intentions can conflict with safety objectives. Despite this, personal experiences with police officers in this context were described in overwhelmingly positive ways, and indeed as being considered fairer than the policing of the roads at a more general level, or policing more broadly. Educational alternatives to prosecution were explained to drivers in ways that encouraged a shared sense of understanding of the impact of penalty points, and these opportunities for engagement with drivers were seen as opportunities for relationship building that improved perceived legitimacy. Although an individual’s personal experience with roads policing officers was described as important throughout the interviews by both the police and course attendees, these analyses particularly highlight the importance of the eventual criminal justice response in relation to that experience. Attendance at Crash Course had many positive influences on driver attitudes and behaviours, including perceptions of fairness of their interactions with the police that had led to their attendance at the course, suggesting a core role for interaction outcomes in public perceptions of procedural justice and legitimacy (and hence future compliance). The course was also able to encourage normative compliance through a focus on safety, not just the law, with drivers admitting to using their phones handheld and handsfree less after the course. As such, it appears that the provision of education can enhance perceptions of fairness and

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justice beyond the police encounters that procedural justice theory tends to focus upon, and has the potential to guide safe road user behaviours that are not reflected in law. However, the fact that handsfree behaviour was moderated rather than eradicated suggests that a focus on the law continued to play an important role in guiding driver behaviour (SavigarShaw et al., 2022). For many drivers, what they could do continued to be more important than what they should do, suggesting that they still believed that detection was a more likely consequence of phone use than a collision. While the law remains as it is, and while education is off the disposal menu, this will be hard to challenge.

References Bottoms, A., & Tankebe, J. (2012). Beyond procedural justice: A dialogic approach to legitimacy in criminal justice. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 102(1), 119–170. Bradford, B., Hohl, K., Jackson, J., & MacQueen, S. (2015). Obeying the rules of the road: Procedural justice, social identity and normative compliance. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 31, 171–191. Corbett, C. (2008). Roads policing: current context and imminent dangers. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 2(1), 131–142. DfT. (2016). A consultation on changes to the Fixed Penalty Notice and penalty points for the use of handheld mobile phone use whilst driving: Response to consultation. Available online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/gov ernment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/565099/hand-heldmobile-phone-driving-consultation-response.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2023. Engel, R. S. (2005). Citizens’ perceptions of distributive and procedural injustice during traffic stops with police. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 42, 445–481. Harcourt, B. (2001). Illusion of order: The false promises of broken windows policing. Harvard University Press. Hinds, L. (2007). Building police—Youth relationships: The importance of procedural justice. Youth Justice, 7 (3), 195–209. Jackson, J., Bradford, B., Hough, M., Myhill, A., Quinton, P., & Tyler, T. R. (2012). Why do people comply with the law? Legitimacy and the influence of legal institutions. British Journal of Criminology, 52(6), 1051–1071.

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Tankebe, J. (2013). Viewing things differently: The dimensions of public perceptions of police legitimacy. Criminology, 51(1), 103–135. Truelove, V., Freeman, J., & Davey, J. (2019). “you can’t be deterred by stuff you don’t know about”: Identifying factors that influence graduated driver licensing rule compliance. Safety Science, 111, 313–323. Truelove, V., Watson-Brown, N., & Oviedo-Trespalacios, O. (2023). External and internal influences on mobile phone use while driving: Combining the theories of deterrence and self-determination. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 93, 280–293. Tyler, T. R. (1988). What is procedural justice-criteria used by citizens to assess the fairness of legal procedures. Law & Society Review, 22(1), 103–136. Tyler, T. R. (1990). Why people obey the law. Yale University. Tyler, T. R. (2003). Procedural justice, legitimacy, and the effective rule of law. Crime and Justice, 30, 283–357. Tyler, T. R. (2006). Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation. Annual Review of Psychology, 57 , 375–400. Tyler, T. R., & Huo, Y. J. (2002). Trust in the law: Encouraging public cooperation with the police and courts. Russell Sage Foundation. Tyler, T. R., & Lind, A. E. (1992). A relational model of authority in groups. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 115–191. Walters, G. D., & Bolger, P. C. (2019). Procedural justice perceptions, legitimacy beliefs, and compliance with the law: A meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 15 (3), 341–372. Watling, C., & Leal, N. (2012). Exploring perceived legitimacy of traffic law enforcement. In Proceedings of the 2012 Australasian College of Road Safety National Conference (pp. 1–13). Australasian College of Road Safety. Wells, H. (2008). The techno-fix versus the fair cop: Procedural (in) justice and automated speed limit enforcement. The British Journal of Criminology, 48(6), 798–817. Wells, H., & Savigar, L. (2019). Keeping up, and keeping on: Risk, acceleration and the law-abiding driving offender. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19 (2), 254–270. Wells, H., & Wills, D. (2009). Individualism and identity: Resistance to speed cameras in the UK. Surveillance & Society, 6 (3), 259–274. Wills, D., & Wells, H. (2012). Surveillance, technology and the everyday. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 12(3), 227–237. Wikström, P. O. H., Tseloni, A., & Karlis, D. (2011). Do people comply with the law because they fear getting caught? European Journal of Criminology, 8(5), 401–420.

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7 Conclusion

Introduction This book has drawn on empirical research with drivers, police officers and educators involved in responding to the contemporary challenge that is mobile phone distraction, in order to inform understanding of the problem and options for addressing it more effectively. While the focus has been on mobile phone distraction specifically, the arguments and insights often apply to the roads policing context more generally, and our aim has been to use this case study to illuminate and discuss this broader—and arguably neglected—topic. As well as exploring the current enforcement and education landscape of relevance to mobile phone distraction, the discussion has considered the wider societal pressures that make mobile phone use an attractive (perhaps irresistible) option for some drivers, in a context where road death and injury are largely tolerated as the acceptable collateral damage of a mobile and maximally efficient society. It has explored how this risk issue is understood by the actors involved, and how (mis)understandings of risk contribute to a sense that the behaviour is not dangerous and/ or that it is not personally risky. The concept of identity has also been considered as offering opportunities to, and motives for, resisting and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1_7

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challenging implications of dangerousness and criminality. Finally, we have explored concepts such as legitimacy and fairness in policing, and in roads policing specifically, and their compatibility with current methods of tackling the issue of distraction. An underpinning theme of all these discussions has been the issue of handsfree phone use—the legal but no less dangerous version of mobile phone use—that remains unaddressed, and arguably encouraged, by much current activity. This chapter will summarise some of those arguments and consider how they are influencing the contemporary policing of the roads, but also provide thoughts on how we can inform and develop that policing in efforts to respond to and overcome some of the challenges associated with it.

Distraction, Driving and the Law Globally, a significant minority of drivers admit to regular illegal and distracting phone use (Direct Line & Brake, 2020; ETSC, 2022; NHTSA, 2023) and data from many countries suggests a trend of increasing phone use that is contributing to more year-on-year reported injuries and deaths (TRL et al., 2015). In the UK, it has been an offence to use a handheld mobile phone or other handheld device while driving since 2003, as described within Sect. 41D (b) of the Road Traffic Act 1988. Subsequently, in 2022, Regulation 110 of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations was updated. This update prohibits individuals from driving a motor vehicle on a road if they are using a handheld mobile telephone or a handheld device which is capable of transmitting and receiving data, whether or not those capabilities are enabled (excluding two-way radios such as those used in policing), providing some clarity to what it means to ‘use’ a ‘handheld mobile phone’ while driving. Despite closing a significant loophole in the legislation as it relates to currently available technology, it is clear that the law will continue to struggle to keep up with developments in technology that, for example, are likely to challenge even the concepts of ‘driving’ and ‘vehicle’ over the coming years. The law—and hence enforcement—is, arguably, only ever going to be playing catch-up with the safety problems posed by technology.

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As we have argued at length, compliance with a law that does not align itself with the safety problem that supposedly underpins it, is never going to be able to secure the desired reductions in road deaths and injury from distracted driving. It appears that although there may have been a slight decline in self-reported handheld mobile phone use while driving recently in the UK, drivers increasingly turn to handsfree as an alternative (Benedetti et al., 2023; DfT, 2022; RAC, 2022). Public surveys appear to be showing a gradual increase in drivers stating that they ‘use’ a mobile phone while driving in some form, particularly handsfree (DfT, 2022). This is, we have argued, problematic given that research has shown that the behaviour of those using a mobile phone while driving is significantly impacted by both handheld and handsfree phone use, including resulting in drivers missing exits they intended to take (Thulin & Gustafsson, 2004), braking inappropriately (Young & Regan, 2007), noticing fewer hazards (Caird et al., 2018) and reacting slower to those hazards (Briggs et al., 2016). In short, mobile phone-using drivers having a greater crash risk than those not using a mobile phone (Atwood et al., 2018; Shaaban et al., 2020). While (as shown in Chapter 4) most drivers recognise that handheld use causes a distraction, this is not the case for handsfree. But handsfree phone use, unfortunately, does not necessarily improve hazard detection over handheld use (Atchley et al., 2017), nor does it offer any crash risk benefit over handheld phone use (Caird et al., 2018; Dingus et al., 2016). This is due to the cognitive distraction it poses which means that—even when looking directly at a hazard—phone-using drivers can fail to see it (Briggs et al., 2016; Strayer et al., 2003). This form of distraction is not observable in the same way as physical or visual distraction and is thus less intuitively obvious to drivers who are unaware of how unaware they actually are (Horrey et al., 2008). Even 100% compliance with the law as it stands in the UK will, then, for all these reasons, be insufficient to achieve a ‘Vision Zero’ with regards to distraction-related crashes. The more enforcement of the law there is, the more handsfree phone use will become attractive, particularly when little is being done to dissuade drivers from this apparently logical alternative. While other laws do exist that could potentially target the distraction caused by handsfree, they are not preventative laws. They require driving to have already become impaired in order to apply

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(and for that to be observed) and are unlikely to deter drivers who are unlikely to believe that their own driving will become impaired by their phone use (Horrey et al., 2008; Overton et al., 2015). Furthermore, this alternative legislation is less likely to intuitively appeal to those tasked with policing the roads who have, increasingly, not been specialist ‘roads policing officers’ but maybe ‘dual-hatting’ (required to police the roads as part of other roles—PACTS, 2020).

Distraction, Driving, and the Twenty-First-Century Condition Research, law, and enforcement then also play out in a social context that is undergoing huge transformations. The only constant is change and, increasingly, our working, social and home lives generate pressures that require us to be all, see all, do all, or risk falling behind in the race against others—to maximise the productive use of our limited time on earth. Mobile phones, although actually adding to sum total of pressure (Wajcman, 2008), claim to offer opportunities to keep up, to get ahead, and to multitask, whether that is to hold a work meeting, check the family calendar, order the weekly shop or make arrangements for our ‘free’ time. Life in the twenty-first century brings pressures that mobile phones claim to offer to solve, while at the same time driving has become easier, and traffic has become more frustrating. But while we may perceive that we can now do more ‘on the go’, others also know that we can be reached anytime, anywhere. An opportunity thus becomes an expectation, and it may no longer be possible or acceptable to be out of reach, even when driving. In a society increasingly characterised by transient and temporary relationships (Giddens, 2002), continued efforts are required to maintain our status and our connections, and to preserve our identities as (for example) good parent, good friend, or good employee as Chapter 3 showed. This may mean that we reach for our mobile more frequently and become more fearful of the consequences of being seen to ignore the incoming needs of others. Being a ‘good driver’ may seem compatible

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with phone use (it is, after all, legal in some forms) and does not challenge our law-abiding identity (Wells & Wills, 2009). Ironically, given its proven effects on standards of driving, the use of a mobile phone while driving may feel like it provides an antidote to feelings of loss of control brought on by the riskiness of a runaway world (Giddens, 2002). Using a mobile phone while driving may therefore be seen as a strategy for managing the stresses and pressures of an accelerated and increasingly insecure life. The risks posed by nonengagement, and unavailability, may well seem more real and more pressing than the more abstract danger of a collision or prosecution. After all, the more a driver uses their phone while driving and is neither prosecuted nor crashes, the more likely they are to believe that they are invincible (as Stafford & Warr have described, 1993). Those that we do see prosecuted or involved in collisions as a result of their phone use may, similarly, be viewed as (demonstrably) inferior in their ability to multitask, reinforcing our own sense of superiority. Exacerbating this issue is the fact road harm, when it does occur, is largely tolerated. Despite (or perhaps because of ) its frequency, death and injury caused by people in vehicles is accepted as a fact of life. The benefits of personal mobility are weighed up against the (statistically, mercifully, rare) instances of harm—and productivity, efficiency and independence routinely win out. Resistance to any law prohibiting handsfree use has been couched not only in terms of the ‘unenforceability’ of a law, but it’s potential damage to the economy through curtailing opportunities to work as we drive (Wells et al., 2021). Rather than prohibition, we see a reliance on responsibility and responsibilisation whereby individuals decide for themselves what they think they are capable of doing (Hunt, 2003). Unfortunately, then, not only are decisions about distraction being taken by individuals who over-estimate their own abilities (Overton et al., 2015) and are unaware of their limitations (Horrey et al., 2008), but those decisions are made in contexts where there is a wealth of ‘expertise’ to choose from (Beck, 1992; Wells, 2011). Drivers can opt to be guided by the law, by manufacturers, by education campaigns, by each other, and by their own daily experiments in risk (see Chapter 4), within a context that urges them to choose the option that allows them to be

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as efficient and as accessible as possible. In such a context, advice to avoid doing something perfectly legal and instead cut ourselves off, to put our phones out of reach or even ‘just’ to turn them off, may well lack persuasive appeal, particularly to a driver who has only yet experienced warnings about distraction as a false positive.

Distraction, Driving and the Law-Abiding Offender Of relevance to this specific challenge, but also to wider roads policing, is the narrative that drivers present in relation to themselves as drivers and their (offending) behaviour on the roads. Despite high levels of offending against road traffic law, the road network is a context where law-breaking individuals do not consider themselves ‘real criminals’ and instead appear able to maintain a notion of themselves as law-abiding (Orr et al., 2013). Techniques of neutralisation (Sykes & Matza, 1957) and rationalisation are routinely employed by drivers as a way of protecting that law-abiding identity. These techniques include efforts to position themselves relative to others that are seen to be worse than them, for example, to ‘real criminals’ who are often described as more criminal, having committed crimes that required more intent and that were more immoral (Harré & Sibley 2007; Orr et al., 2013; Savigar, 2019) and which are therefore more worthy of police attention. As presented in Chapter 5, this is seen in the driver efforts to insist that the police should be diverting their attention towards looking for murderers, burglars, and rapists who are deserving of police attention—not problematising the innocent motorist. Indeed, these deflection tactics emphasise how supportive the citizen is of policing—when it is directed at the correct targets. Other strategies include denying the harm caused by the behaviour, whereby drivers emphasise that for the behaviour to be considered problematic, it would need to actually harm somebody. Legislation that is both designed to be preventative and is mala prohibita in its origins provides drivers with an opportunity to resist any unsettling implications of criminality by focusing on the lack of a victim. Rather, drivers may actually consider themselves the victim of an unjustified, inappropriate

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or unnecessary focus on the behaviour of the law-abiding, hardworking (etc.) driver (Delaney et al., 2005; Wells, 2016) which is simultaneously allowing ‘real criminals’ to seemingly evade police attention. Such laws are relatively common in contexts like road traffic legislation and may well struggle to capture the hearts and minds of those they target, partially explaining the high rates of offending. Other offenders, who perhaps accept the problematic nature of their behaviour, may present it as an out-of-character lapse, maintaining that they are otherwise lawabiding. Alternatively, they may maintain that the offending action was essential to achieve a greater good for another person, such as a child or employer. These neutralisations may help to explain why drivers consider themselves law-abiding individuals despite breaking traffic laws. Combined with their own sense of superior skill this also helps to explain why drivers see the actions of other road users as problematic but resist such implications when it comes to their own (Wells et al., 2021). This, and other strategies used by drivers, may also explain support for the use of education courses as an alternative to prosecution only for some types of offender, such as first time offenders, those committing marginal offences, and offenders ‘like me’ (Savigar-Shaw et al., 2022). As Chapter 5 showed, drivers are not alone in holding these views of themselves as ‘different’ to the usual suspects: officers, too, reserved special treatment for offending drivers partly as a tactic for negotiating tricky encounters, but partly through a belief that they were, indeed, a special case. This manifests in the way that some officers marketed courses to drivers primarily as a one-time offer, a chance to avoid a penalty, in ways that are unlikely to challenge the way in which drivers deploy identity as a form of resistance to implications of dangerousness.

Distraction, Driving, and the Problem of Instrumentalism The availability of courses as a diversion from prosecution for millions of drivers each year (UKROEd, n.d.) is further evidence of the different treatment reserved for offending motorists. While in this specific case,

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the offer of a course has been deemed inappropriate for those caught using their mobile phone while driving, this research has demonstrated that education can be effective in changing attitudes and intended behaviours. Despite this, current practice related to mobile phone use while driving relies on an enforcement-centred, deterrence-based approach to generating compliance which requires drivers to weigh up the risks of being caught rather than the risks of causing the harm that motivated the law in the first place. This instrumental approach relies on the presence of motivated police officers (or, more recently, of AI cameras) and of generating a perception that the risk of detection, prosecution and punishment is high. Problematically, this has been accompanied by a reduction in funding allocated to dedicated and trained roads policing resource (PACTS, 2020), meaning that the risk of detection and prosecution is likely reducing at a time that it is most needed—something drivers have not failed to notice (AA, 2018). Furthermore, these enforcement opportunities also foreground the issue of handheld use as ‘the’ distraction problem and do nothing to prevent drivers from choosing handsfree use as the legal, but dangerous, alternative in future. As this research has shown, in some instances, these encounters actually contribute to the handsfree distraction problem (see Chapter 6). There are, however, alternative processes through which individuals may come to comply with the law (or to choose safety, when the two concepts are not, as in this case, in alignment). Instrumental compliance and deterrence-based approaches rely on a weighing up of pros and cons of an action, whereas a normative approach sees individuals make the right choice for the right reason. As such, and when a sense of appropriate behaviour comes from within the person, rather than from external influences (police officers, cameras, etc.), the compulsion to make the safer choice is ever-present, whether or not anyone (or anything) is looking. As we have explored in Chapter 6, this more sustainable, realistic, and economic alternative sees individuals comply because of belief in the moral rightness of action, which may be focused on either a) the law and our perceptions of its appropriateness to guide behaviour, b) the police and our perceptions of their appropriateness to guide behaviour,

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and/or c) specific behaviours and their general moral appropriateness (Jackson et al., 2012). Interactions with authority, represented in our context by the police in most circumstances, are therefore a crucial opportunity to generate normative compliance in those that have not been deterred. They are opportunities to inform driver perceptions of the appropriateness of roads policing as a specific policing function, and of the law with which they work. In this specific context, these conversations are also essential as opportunities to stress that other actions that are not governed by the law are still nonetheless to be resisted. This is particularly the case given the absence of an opportunity to refer drivers for other educational inputs (as is largely the case currently). Officers can use the encounter to explain the reality of cognitive distractions in ways that simply prosecuting them would not offer. As the use of cameras to perform the detection role increases, it will be necessary to explore how education advising against handsfree can be built into the experience of being detected using your phone handheld via AI. Otherwise, we might assume that the instrumentally motivated, ‘better than average’, twenty-first-century driver will simply choose to be distracted in legal ways in future. Beyond the specific context of distraction, education as a route to normative commitment to safe driving will continue to be needed to ensure that offenders do not simply choose to creatively circumvent the capabilities of human and technological enforcement agents (Wells, 2015). As this research has shown, where police interactions with the public are undertaken in ways that are procedurally just (demonstrating fairness, treating people with respect and neutrality as well as offering opportunities to voice) they can increase legitimacy even when unpleasant outcomes (such as fines and points) are necessary. Given that roads policing generates such large numbers of these encounters with people otherwise unused to receiving police attention, the enforcement of road traffic law is a crucial context in which education can be delivered, the law explained and legitimacy strengthened. As such, investment in roads policing should go hand in hand with unapologetic delivery of this crucial policing activity—one which has such a central role in preventing death and injury on our roads.

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Index

A

Acceleration 60, 64, 67, 71, 74, 93 Actuarial 79–83, 85, 87, 98 Addiction 24 Alternative to prosecution 10–15, 43–45, 72, 120, 125, 133, 153 Attention 5, 6, 10, 26, 34, 36, 67, 90, 91, 93, 106, 109–111, 113, 115, 116, 127, 128, 152, 153, 155 Attitudes 5, 9, 12–15, 28, 29, 41, 95, 126, 141, 154

B

Barreto 31, 36

Careless driving 34 Children 6, 24, 66, 117 Cognitive distraction 95, 149, 155 Comparative optimism 89 Compliance 4, 5, 16, 24, 30, 35, 37–45, 63, 119, 125–127, 129, 134, 140, 141, 149, 154, 155 Construction and Use 30, 32, 33, 148 Contributory factor 36 Crash Course 10, 12–15, 66, 70, 73, 83, 84, 89, 91, 95, 97, 112, 129, 130, 132, 135–138, 141 Crash risk 25, 26, 45, 95, 149 Crash-risk optimism 111 Criminology 1

C

Calculation 79, 81, 93

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Savigar-Shaw and H. Wells, Policing Distracted Driving, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43658-1

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162

Index

D

G

Demonopolisation of expertise 80, 86, 99 Deterrence 8, 38, 39, 43, 127, 154 Displacement 28, 29, 141 Diversion from prosecution 2, 39, 81, 132, 153 Driver 2–17, 23–30, 33, 35–37, 41, 43–45, 55, 61–63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 80–96, 98–100, 106, 107, 109–120, 125, 127–131, 133–136, 138–142, 147–155 Drugs 4, 110, 113

Good driver 16, 73, 74, 88, 150 Governmentality 86

E

Education 1, 2, 8–10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 24, 41–45, 63, 71, 72, 81, 91, 92, 120, 125, 133, 136, 140–142, 147, 151, 153–155 Employee 11, 13, 15, 16, 58, 67, 70, 72–74, 117, 150 Employer 10, 11, 69–71, 153 Endorsement 70, 111 Enforcement 1, 8, 10, 15–17, 36, 37, 41, 44, 108–110, 115, 117, 119, 140, 147–150, 154, 155 Expert 37, 83–87, 92, 97–99 Expertise 58, 83–87, 89, 92, 95, 97, 99, 151

F

Fairness 16, 125–136, 140, 141, 155 Fear appeal 42 Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) 60, 65

H

Handheld 2, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 23, 25–32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43–45, 66, 72, 80, 89, 94, 95, 99, 100, 113, 114, 118, 135, 137, 138, 141, 148, 149, 154, 155 Handsfree 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 24–29, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 65, 67, 70, 72, 74, 83, 90, 94–96, 98–100, 114, 116, 118, 134, 135, 138–142, 148, 149, 151, 154, 155 Hard-working 58, 118, 120 Harm 1, 10, 16, 25, 82, 83, 85, 88, 92, 93, 97, 98, 106, 107, 111, 114, 116–119, 135, 151, 152, 154 Hurried 55, 58

I

Identity 6, 16, 57, 65–67, 74, 105, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 128, 133, 147, 151–153 Illusion of control 27, 111 Inconsiderate driving 34 Infotainment 5, 6, 98 Insecurity 68, 74, 80 Instrumental compliance 38–40, 43, 44, 127, 154 Interactive communication function 30, 31, 33

Index

Invisible risk 96

K

KSIs 3

L

Law 3–5, 8, 10, 14, 16, 17, 24, 30, 31, 33, 35–41, 45, 63, 67, 71, 72, 83, 92–95, 99, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112–116, 119, 120, 125–129, 133, 135, 138, 140–142, 148–152, 154, 155 Law-abiding 5, 16, 39, 41, 67, 74, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 129, 133, 135, 141, 151–153 Legislation 4, 8, 9, 11, 15, 24, 30–37, 39, 40, 45, 92–94, 98, 148, 150, 152, 153 Legitimacy 5, 16, 40, 41, 92, 108, 125–130, 134, 136, 137, 141, 148, 155

M

Mala prohibita 92, 115, 119, 136, 152 Manufactured risk 82 Mobile phone 1, 2, 4, 6–17, 23–37, 39, 41, 43–45, 55, 59, 61, 62, 64–69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 80, 83, 87, 89, 90, 93–96, 98, 99, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116–118, 125, 137–140, 147–151, 154 Morality 40, 41, 108, 115

163

N

Neutralisation 67, 106, 107, 116, 118–120, 152, 153 Normative compliance 16, 40, 41, 44, 136, 140, 141, 155

O

Offence 2–4, 11, 12, 14, 30, 32, 34–39, 44, 62, 67, 68, 73, 81, 89, 92, 93, 97, 98, 105, 108–118, 120, 127, 128, 132–134, 136, 140, 148, 153 Officer numbers 3, 70 Ontological insecurity 56, 74

P

Parent 16, 65, 66, 74, 91, 117, 150 Points/penalty points 4, 5, 11, 27, 30, 31, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 60, 62, 63, 72, 73, 81, 90, 93, 112, 114, 126, 132–134, 138, 141, 155 Police 3–5, 7, 9–12, 14, 16, 24, 35–41, 44, 62, 72, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 107–111, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120, 125–133, 135–137, 141, 147, 150, 152–155 Police encounters 142 Policing 1–6, 9, 10, 12–17, 24, 32, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 100, 107–110, 115, 127–137, 141, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155 Policy 71, 72 Probability 79, 80

164

Index

Procedural justice 125–127, 129, 133, 137, 141, 142 Productivity 59, 61, 63, 67, 71, 72, 151 Psychology 1 R

Rationalisation 62, 106, 111, 119, 152 Reaction times 25 Real criminals 105, 109, 119, 152, 153 Respectable 105, 106, 120 Responsibilisation 151 Risk 5, 6, 16, 29, 30, 38, 39, 45, 66, 68, 70, 73, 79–87, 89, 90, 92–94, 96–99, 106, 107, 110, 111, 117–119, 138, 140, 147 Risk calculation 16, 79 Risk society 80, 82, 93, 94, 99 Road 1–5, 8, 11–16, 24, 25, 28, 31–35, 39, 40, 42–45, 55, 61, 62, 66, 67, 70–72, 75, 79, 80, 82–87, 89–92, 97, 98, 100, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112, 114, 119, 127, 129, 131, 134, 137, 139–142, 148, 151–153, 155 Road death 2–4, 98, 147, 149 Road Traffic Act 1988 30, 33, 34, 148 Runaway world 56, 74, 151

92, 98, 127, 134, 137, 140, 141, 148, 149, 154 Section 41D 30, 33, 148 Self-enhancement bias 90, 92, 98, 111 Self-regulation 40 Selling courses 133 Situation awareness 27 Smart watch 6, 33 Social construction 81, 85, 98 Sociology 1

T

Techniques of neutralisation 106, 152 Technology/technological devices 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 23, 33, 38, 39, 45, 56, 58, 59, 65, 67, 68, 70, 82, 93, 98, 148 Text 8, 13, 23, 31, 32, 62, 65, 99, 118

U

Uncertainty 55–59, 68, 80

V

Victim 5, 106, 109, 119, 127, 152 Voice 23, 84, 92, 97, 126, 128, 134, 136, 155

S

Safety 1, 2, 4, 8, 13, 16, 24–30, 37, 42, 44, 45, 63, 70, 72, 84–86,

W

Wasted time 59, 60, 63