SPEED KILLS
By Spanner
Merseyside Police to Install Road Safety Marksmen
In a bid to reduce the dangers of speeding motorists across the Merseyside region, Liverpool Police have unveiled plans for a pilot scheme using trained marksmen to assassinate drivers who break the speed limit. Critics of the scheme have immediately branded it as “overly stringent.”
Liverpool, UK – In answer to several unresponsive campaigns by road safety officers, Merseyside Metropolitan has drawn up plans for a new “zero tolerance” approach to the escalating road speeds around the inner city and surrounding areas. The city of Bootle has been selected to host the pilot scheme, which will see strategically placed police marksmen installed along the length of the dockside roads.
Chief Inspector Harvey Oswald laid out the technicalities of the new system at yesterday’s unveiling:
“Our specially trained marksmen will initially be installed in crow’s nest style hideouts along Derby Road and Stanley Road at staggered intervals, allowing them coverage from the docks to the beginning of the pedestrian area of the shopping zone. Each officer will be equipped with a high-velocity sniper rifle with specially built spotting scopes that incorporate speed monitoring cameras. When a vehicle is registered travelling over the designated speed limit of 30 MPH, the marksmen are authorized to shoot the driver in the back of the head.”
Critics of the system, including members of the RAC and AA recovery services, have already spoken out against the scheme, insisting that such measures have yet to be proven effective in other cities across the world. PR manager for the RAC, Arthur Wilkes-Booth, had this to say.
“We have seen similar tactics used in other countries, none of which have conclusively proven that assassinating the driver of a speeding vehicle promotes any form of long term solution to speeding motorists. In LA, drive-by shootings have actually proven the opposite to be true, whereby the combination of firing guns while driving statistically increases the speed of passing vehicles.”
Chief Inspector Oswald was quick to disassociate his department from the failed schemes and reduce criticisms Merseyside Road Safety received after the failure of other traffic calming methods trialled over the past couple of years.
“Despite some sensationalist reports of prams and cyclists being blown up, results from our speed-activated land mine trials were very positive, and provided us the solid foundations upon which we have designed the current system. In retrospect, we agree with some reports regarding the A.P.D.A. Units (Automatic Poison Dart Administration Units) which suggested that removing the human element can lead to logistical difficulties, such as the unfortunate case where an Indian wedding party was mistakenly registered as a speeding lorry and the darts were automatically dispensed into the crowd.
“It is completely unreasonable to compare the Speed Sniper system to drive-by shootings in LA, however, as our weapons will not be used on their automatic settings until preliminary results have been fully analyzed.”
An advertising campaign has been launched in tandem with the Speed Snipers concept to inform drivers about the new system in operation. The posters will show a driver slumped over the wheel of his car with a bullet hole in his head as smiling pedestrians cross safely in front of his stationary vehicle. A slogan underneath reads “We only need to shoot one of you as a deterrent to the rest. If you don’t want to be that one, please don’t speed.”
The Speed Sniper pilot system is scheduled to become operational by the end of the month.