Deputy Chief Constable Tim Madgwick, Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan and members of the Pannal Community Speed Watch group were in Pannal this morning (2 November 2016)
Pannal is the first location in North Yorkshire to be operational with a Community Speed Watch group, since the decision was taken earlier this year to roll out the scheme across North Yorkshire.The main purpose of Community Speed Watch is to deter speeding, educate drivers and encourage more care on local roads.
Since becoming operational, the Pannal group has achieved some encouraging results and the village has seen a significant decrease in the number of speeding offences recorded.
Local residents raised concerns to North Yorkshire Police who then undertook some traffic to look at the scale of the problem. From that decided that an appropriate course of action was to set up a community speed watch. Other options are available, such as deploying traffic offices in the area or the speed safety camera.
For the community scheme to be run, a minimum of 6 local residents come together to receive some basic training. They are equipped with a radar type speed gun measures vehicle speed. In vehicles over the speed limit have their registration manually recorded and given to the police.
The police have a number of courses of action, but for the first two offences it involves writing to the registered owner of the vehicle. If a third offence is recorded then there will be a home visit from the North Yorkshire Police.
Early results are showing that speeding has reduced from around 7% to 1% of vehicles.
