MULTIPLYING OFFENCES.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 August 1932, Page 6

MULTIPLYING OFFENCES.

It will bo generally agreed that Mr. W. H. Woodward, S.M., took an entirely proper stand in refusing to convict a number of motorists who had been unable to produce their licenses when halted by inspectors and had not been afforded a later opportunity to prove their possession of the necessary documents. The law provides that a person driving a motor vehicle must be able to produce his license on the demand of an authorised officer, but even the most zealous observer of the law may transgress through simple forgetfulness, and in most districts —certainly in Taranaki —it is customary to give the merely forgetful man a second chance. In the case of those who were before him at Lower Hutt the magistrate ascertained that the inspectors had not offered the usual leniency, and he acted as any man of sound commonsense would act in dismissing the charges as trivial. He also enunciated a profound truth when he declared that the law “is not made for the purpose of multiplying offences.” The aim of the laws for the licensing and control of transport is neither more nor less than to ensure to the utmost extent the public safety. No law is passed, in order to create offences—to give people, as it were, an opportunity to commit offences and then be haled before the courts—and Mr. Woodward has done a public service in emphasising the point. There are, no doubt, many inspectors in the Dominion, in connection with traffic control and the hundred and one activities that hre subject to inspection, who realise that their first business is, nob to catch “criminals,” but rather to advise and help those with whom they come officially in contact. But inspectors are so numerous that some of them may be tempted to try to justify their positions by mere officibusness and to measure their success by the frequency of the prosecutions they initiate. A thorough review of the business of inspection as carried out under both Government and local body control would be very timely. In the Dominion’s chief cities traffic inspection seems to have been developed to inordinate dimensions and to offer a very fair field for economy.