The current live call list of a force somewhere in England (It’s not the Met, City or BTP but that’s all I know).
Police Scotland, at least in my experience, have a very positive public perception (at least if you’re on the “right” side of the law 
).
I’d guess that helps towards things like negative press…
Surely with the govt announcement the intervention of the old bill interrogating normal life is moot.
Get stopped say going to (insert supermarket) to buy anything they sell, regardless of what you are doing. End of. Invite them to go with you.
I’d love the idea of being asked for insurance etc. I’ve carried this since I started driving, as you could see it annoyed the old bill when they stopped you and asked for it and gave it to them. Although once I lied got a 7 day wonder and went to my local nick that night. It threw them as it wasn’t their nick that gave it and it was at most 1½ hours old.
My mates never caught on and always ended up having to go
I think in 99.9% of cases “I’m going to Tesco to do my weekly shop” is going to get a “thank you very much, have a nice day”.
Not seen one of those in about a decade, I doubt most front offices would be able to even deal with a producer these days.
If you can actually find a local cop shop that is (a) open & (b) has a front office! I think ours is open to the public once a week but limited hrs!
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So what does happen if you don’t have your insurance certificate on you?
Seems a bit silly as they can find out from the PNC in about 5 seconds if the vehicle is insured.
Our heroic Guardian of the Public Good will beat you up and claim you were black or working class.
Or had an Easter Egg with intent to supply.
Don’t have an insurance certificate as such. If you do it online, you don’t get certificate, it’s available should you need.
As @tmmorris says, police can check via PNC very quickly.
This is why the police do what they do on the roads, and why it’s important.
Off Topic
Motor Insurance Bureau don’t update their systems immediately (it can take several days to go on the system) and certain insurers don’t share their data at all so will never show as insured on PNC.
In those situations if you don’t have proof of insurance) realistically most people will be able to show it electronically) you will be reported for no insurance and your car will be seized.
You will then need to produce your documents within 7 days to prove that you were insured at the time you were stopped and to get the vehicle back (If you weren’t insured at the time you will need to get insurance to get the car back) and you will still be liable for towing or storage costs. (About £120 to be towed and £20 a day for storage off the top of my head).
Really…
Seize car is first option if you don’t carry it on you and they can’t find it.
From the fly on the wall TV shows I’ve seen, they exhaust every option before seizing the car. Apparently, that includes phoning the insurance company direct to confirm that a policy is outstanding.
In those cases, how do you get around the sneaky drivers who buy insurance, print the certificate, then cancel the insurance?
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ANPR will ping the car as having no insurance, the driver will whip out his insurance certificate and say ‘no officer, I’m insured - see here’, and the police will ring the insurer direct, who will either say ‘oh yes, sorry, he’s insured but we’ve not put it on the system’, or ‘no, the DD was cancelled on X date, we wrote to him on Y date telling him to pay up or else, and on Z date we cancelled the insurance’.
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They only tend to work office hours, if they are open then yes you would do that before seizing, (if it seems practicable then following them home so that they can show you it is also an option) but outside office hours if it’s not on the system and they don’t have proof then it gets seized.
As Angus said if the Insurer is open you would give them a ring and see what they have to say, if it’s not you would take a copy of what they have presented make enquiries the next day and if they are lying go round to their home address/invite them in and report them. (Depending on the Force they may well get done for Obstruct Police too).
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Back on the actual topic (my fault) is anyone else getting really annoyed with the Press. It almost feels like they are hoping the death count goes up for headlines.
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I’ve been annoyed with them since day 1.
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I’m annoyed because, on the whole, they just aren’t holding the government to account. We’re handling this terribly, but it’s all fine because good old Boris is out of hospital.
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Sending political correspondents to the press conferences instead of health and science correspondents, is making this about the politics (and there is politics in this), and not about the health and science of it.
Personally I’m in despair about the way were handling this - everything from preparation and PHE, the obvious ineptitude of large swathes of the cabinet, the press, the police, to the Facebook Stasi who have appeared so readily.
We make Belarus look sophisticated…
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Difficult to pin 'em down - lead time for PPE (mainly China) is at least 4 weeks, not counting their own lock-down in places - & the USA doing a modern (but paid for) style of piracy to get ownership of a load. Testing - sourcing kits, chemicals, testing the accuracy? Vaccine - dream on - not for several months. If it was just one country needed all this, easy to find fault. Not so easy when the whole world is trying to buy ICU ventilators, etc.
Policy & actions - might be a different matter. Timescale of advance knowledge? That said, it didn’t help with the Chinese seemingly delaying notification of a potential pandemic, & castigating the whistle-blower doctor (who subsequently died of course). More recent news suggests that there was another Chinese specialist (virologist) in Wuhan, a lady (Shi Zhengli - look her up) who sequenced the DNA profile in about 3 days, but was allegedly censored by the local government to stop the release of the primary information. This was end of Dec 2019 / first few days of Jan 2020.
This has been driving me nuts, can’t we please have someone who knows what they are talking about rather than having a group of Political Correspondents asking repeatedly when the lockdown (that they were insistent was put in place too late 3 weeks ago) is going to end.
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