POLICE AND PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF THE SERIOUSNESS OF TRAFFIC OFFENCES

As part of a study of unlawful driving behaviour, a sample of the general driving public and a sample of traffic police officers rated the seriousness of twenty-six traffic offences on an 11-point scale. While there was close agreement between police and public in their relative rankings of seriousness, their absolute ratings gave a rather different picture. For the most serious offences the two groups largely agreed in their average ratings, but for most of the relatively minor offences the public gave higher ratings than the police. Several possible explanations of the findings were examined. They were partly accounted for by differences in age and gender between the two samples, but even after that it seemed that membership of the police or the public still influenced respondents' perceptions of offence seriousness.