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Mobile Application For Road Safety Enforcement

By General Posts

Known as the Public Eye Enforcement Programme (PEEP), the mobile application will empower anyone with a smart phone to record road traffic violations and forward to the Authority for the prosecution of offenders.

by ghanamma from https://www.ghanamma.com/

NRSA To Introduce Mobile Application For Road Safety Enforcement

The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) is developing a mobile application to improve road safety across the country.

Known as the Public Eye Enforcement Programme (PEEP), the mobile application will empower anyone with a smart phone to record road traffic violations and forward to the Authority for the prosecution of offenders.

The Board Chairman of the NRSA, Jeremaine Nkrumah, made this known when he led a team of officials from the Authority to commend the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Henry Quartey, for his leadership and determination in championing road safety in the region.

Their visit was also to recognise the minister for his productive collaboration with stakeholders in managing the operations of motorcycles and tricycles on major roads as well as bringing some sanity to the Madina Zongo Junction within the La Nkwatanang Madina Municipality. A citation was presented to the Regional Minister.

PEEP mobile application

Touching on the mobile application, Mr Nkrumah said it would be piloted in the Greater Accra, Eastern and the Ashanti regions immediately after the new legislative Instrument, drafted by the Authority is approved by Parliament.

“We are currently developing a website and mobile application and we are going to take advantage of the constitution aspect of citizens’ arrests and empower anybody who owns a mobile device to be able to record,” Mr Nkrumah noted.

He added that the sender of a video which led to prosecution would be rewarded.

“If a person sends in a video and the video leads to prosecution, the mobile number of the sender if registered with the mobile money, will get a percentage of the fine,” he said.

Mr Nkrumah explained that statistics have shown an increase in the number of vehicles registered as compared to expansion works on roads across the country.

“What is scary in statistics is that for a country of 9,200 square miles and road network of 78,000 square kilometres, roads do not expand as rapidly as the number of vehicles added onto the industry every day,” he said.

He added that 16,000 new vehicles were registered every month, accounting for over 500 vehicles every day into the system.

Tricycle directive

For his part, Mr Quartey thanked the Authority for the recognition and appealed to the officials to support the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council (GA-RCC) to revisit the implementation of restrictions on tricycles on the Tema highway.

“We had a meeting with the Police Regional Command and we want to revisit the directive. We believe three months’ moratorium is enough.

So I crave your indulgence to avail yourself as quickly as possible for us to move into action, possibly we can do this after the Easter festivities. The RCC has donated a pickup truck and two motorbikes to the Greater Accra Police Command to be used to patrol the stretch of the motorway,” he added

He, however, appealed to corporate bodies and stakeholders to support the activities of the RCC in ensuring safety in the region.

“Operation Clean Your Frontage is also in play. We have had four months of sensitisation, which is enough moratorium. After the Easter holidays, all assemblies in the Greater Accra Region will go into full force to ensure the implementation of the Operation Clean Your Frontage by-law,” he added.

National Roadway Safety Strategy Announced

By General Posts

Thursday afternoon, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced a new national road safety campaign. The plan, known as the “National Roadway Safety Strategy,” comes in response to increased year over year fatalities on our nation’s roadways. In 2020, an estimated 38,680 people died as a result of a motor vehicle crash. Of those, approximately 9% were motorcyclists’ fatalities.

What is most alarming about the increase in fatalities, is that the total number of miles traveled on our roads decreased during the pandemic. Americans traveled 13.2% less miles in 2020 than we did in 2019, but we saw a 7.2% increase in deaths.

The preliminary numbers for the first 6 months of 2021 are also troublesome. From January through the end of June 2021 an estimated 20,160 people died in crashes. That is the largest number of projected deaths in that time frame since 2006.

To combat this trend the plan outlines five key objectives:

  • Safer People: Encourage safe, responsible behavior by people who use our roads and create conditions that prioritize their ability to reach their destination unharmed.
  • Safer Roads: Design roadway environments to mitigate human mistakes and account for injury tolerances, to encourage safer behaviors, and to facilitate safe travel by the most users.
  • Safer Vehicles: Expand the availability of vehicle systems and features that help to prevent crashes and minimize the impact of crashes on both occupants and non-occupants.
  • Safer Speeds: Promote safer speeds in all roadway environments through a combination of thoughtful, context-appropriate roadway design, targeted education, and outreach campaigns, and enforcement.
  • Post-Crash Care: Enhance the survivability of crashes through expedient access to emergency medical care, while creating a safe working environment for vital first responders and preventing secondary crashes through robust traffic incident management practices.

The recently passed infrastructure bill has components and funding to help achieve some of these goals. For example, $14 billion in new funding was specifically allocated for road safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also announced plans this week to increase the data it collects on crashes. The agency wants to boost the number of crashes investigated and add additional studies that examine crashes involving medium-duty trucks, pedestrians, and workers who are hit on the road.

We at the Motorcycle Riders Foundation are encouraged to see that the U.S. Department of Transportation is taking a complete view of traffic safety, incorporating multiple factors to make our roadways safer. We also remain committed to the theory of crash avoidance, as a crash that doesn’t happen is always safer than one that does.

To get more detail and read the 41 page report click here.

About Motorcycle Riders Foundation: The Motorcycle Riders Foundation (MRF) provides leadership at the federal level for states’ motorcyclists’ rights organizations as well as motorcycle clubs and individual riders.
See website at: http://mrf.org/

‘It’s about freedom’: Local lawmaker trying again on motorcycle helmet law repeal

By General Posts

by Austin Huguelet / Gannett from https://www.therolladailynews.com

A local lawmaker still wants to let some Missouri motorcyclists ditch their helmets.

Sen. Eric Burlison, R-Battlefield, almost had it last year. After pitching the idea as a win for individual freedom, he got it attached to a larger transportation bill that passed both houses. But Gov. Mike Parson couldn’t stomach another part of the bill and vetoed it.

This year, Burlison thinks he’s got a decent shot to pass the idea as its own bill. Parson, a Republican, supported similar stand-alone bills as a legislator, so Burlison’s main focus is on getting it through the legislature again.

“We’ll see how much time (Senate leaders) give it on the floor,” he said Friday, “but over time, we’ve made so many compromises on this, so I hope people will take that into consideration.”

Those compromises, Burlison said, include a requirement for those going without helmets to have qualifying health insurance. The exemption from the state’s helmet rule would also only apply to riders ages 18 and up.

Those provisions will likely never be enough for opposing lawmakers who say the plan will lead to more deadly accidents. They have a point.

National Highway Transportation Safety Agency research indicates helmets saved more than 1,800 lives in 2016, and that if all motorcyclists would have worn helmets that year, 802 more people could have been saved.

On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention make its position clear: “The single most effective way for states to save lives and save money is a universal helmet law.”

They also point out that riders wouldn’t have to prove insurance coverage unless they were pulled over by law enforcement and worry the cost of accidents will ultimately take a toll on Medicaid.

But Burlison sees the entire issue differently.

“At the end of the day, it’s about individual responsibility and individual freedom,” he said. “I want my neighbor to stay safe and healthy, but it’s not my business to force those decisions upon my neighbor.”

He added that many supporters of his change are retired veterans who deserve to make their own choices.

“These are big boys and big girls that have fought and risked their lives for the country,” he said. “The least we can do is let them be free while they’re here.”

In previous interviews, Burlison has also pushed back on the troubling statistics his opponents cite. He pointed out that after Michigan repealed its law in 2012, researchers found no difference between death rates in the 12 months before and after the move.

They noted a 14 percent increase in head injuries, however.

After leaders of motorcyclist groups spoke in favor of Burlison’s bill in a Senate committee hearing in January, a long list of representatives from health care organizations testified against it.

Burlison’s bill nevertheless passed out of committee Jan. 30. It now awaits debate before the full chamber.

The legislation is Senate Bill 590.

Motorcycle Clubs and the One Percenter

By General Posts

It’s no secret that Americans love outlaws, from the legends and lore of rebellious (and illegal) acts by the Founding Fathers, to the bushwhacking and bank-robbing capers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to the “bad boy” music of Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and Dr. Dre.

American culture and mass media have led inexorably to characters that embody this bad-boy attitude – a recent example being Jax, the heartthrob outlaw biker star of the TV show “Sons of Anarchy”. Western society has a long established canon from which we “learn” about society from fictional dramas. And the more we watch shows like “Sons of Anarchy,” the more a news story will seem to fit our mental construct of “how those people are.” The same is true of popular TV crime dramas’ portrayal of American minorities’ involvement in violent crime. And it seems that every time outlaw motorcycle clubs are portrayed in the news, it’s because of something terrible, such as the deadly events in Waco, Texas. Add to this the fact that the outlaw biker narrative has been largely controlled over time, not by members of the culture, but by outsiders and the misconceptions grow.

The term 1%er was first used in print in the pages of Life Magazine during the 1960’s. The article was a contrived response to an AMA rally in Hollister CA, after encouraging certain individuals to get drunk and ride through town the media then reported on ‘drunken’ motorcycle clubs giving rise to the popular misconception of bikers and also the movie The Wild One. The American Motorcycle Association stated that 99% of the people at their events were God fearing and family oriented. The other 1% were hard riding, hard partying, non mainstream type people. Thus the term 1%er found its place in popular vernacular.

Motorcycle clubs were historically born of a love of the machine, racing, riding and from military service. Gangs began for various reasons as well, but largely as a form of protection for outsiders or ethnic immigrants residing in inner cities. Their social structure is overwhelmingly democratic from the local to the international levels. Officers are democratically elected and hold office so long as they meet the memberships’ needs.

In contrast, Motorcycle Gangs can be seen as more autocratic than democratic, where leaders emerge more for their charismatic leadership and illicit earning abilities than for their abilities to run organisations. Motorcycle clubs are organised hierarchically, with strictly defined chains of command and lines of communication. MCs elect secretaries whose jobs are to maintain meeting minutes, keep track of committees and chairs, and see that old business is complete and new business is on the agenda. Treasurers also are elected officials and they attend to fiduciary responsibilities such as collecting membership dues, paying clubhouse expenses and financial planning for the future. Both secretaries and treasurers are required to produce written documents for the membership to review and approve during each meeting.

It’s not easy becoming a patch-holder. Many have compared “prospecting” – the process of earning full membership – to that of military basic training, where the individual is broken down in order to be reformed into a part of a collective: To think not of one’s self but of others, and to understand that one’s actions or inactions impact the team and the organisation. But prospecting takes months and sometime a year or more (5 years for one MC). Prospecting is physically, emotionally, and intellectually demanding and not everyone can do it. A significant amount of social status is conferred upon those with the steel to make it. Perhaps this is the only obvious similarity between MCs and gangs.

MC is generally reserved for those clubs that are mutually recognised by other MC or outlaw motorcycle clubs. This is indicated by a motorcyclist wearing an MC patch, or a three piece patch called colours, on the back of their jacket or riding vest. Outlaw or 1%er can mean merely that the club is not chartered under the auspices of the AMA, implying a radical rejection of authority and embracing of the “biker” lifestyle as defined and popularised since the 1950s and represented by such media as Easyriders magazine, the work of painter David Mann and others. In many contexts the terms overlap with the usual meaning of “outlaw” because some of these clubs, or some of their members, are recognised rightly or wrongly by law enforcement agencies as taking part in organised crime.

That sense of brotherhood was on display at a funeral for a patch-holder slain at Waco. Members of the Hells Angels, Bandidos, Mongols, Vagos and more than 50 other motorcycle clubs come together in peace to mourn the passing of a man who touched the lives of so many in his community. To them, he was much more than a biker or a patch-holder — he was their Brother, with all the familial love, respect, and honour that that word conveys. Possibly such a gathering has never happened before. This convergence of contrasting MCs was no media stunt. There were no media in the funeral that day (although there was one white, unmarked van, out of which came uniformed men clad in body armour and armed with assault rifles).

Perhaps the singularly most important distinction between outlaw motorcycle clubs and gangs is evidenced through philanthropy. Many motorcycle clubs are closely intertwined with charity work: MC family members are or have been affected by the maladies the charities seek to eradicate, and members of the local community are in legitimate and immediate need. MCs support a wide variety of local, national, and international charities that seek to end disease, poverty and hunger, but especially supported are disabled veterans organisations. Charity is to members of motorcycle clubs as petrol and oil are to their machines. For some, it’s a major reason why they join and stay in MCs.

Clubs have been observed providing 24/7 security at battered women’s shelters, holding motorcycling events such as Poker Runs to raise money for local families whose homes were destroyed by fire or natural disasters, or to help families stricken by some other tragic event get on their feet. If a member of the community is in legitimate need, and the MCs are able to help, they almost always do. Even if it’s just “Passing the Hat,” where patch-holders literally pass around a baseball cap into which members place what cash they can spare. This might not seem like much, but to a family in desperate need of short-term assistance, this can mean the difference between having electricity and water and going without.

The above puts perspective on the recent statement that certain US law enforcement officials and organisations have labeled outlaw motorcycle clubs as a domestic terrorist threat, something is that is obviously more concerning since many of these clubs are made up of veterans who have fought bravely in recent wars for their country.

Prosecutors drop all charges in deadly Waco biker shootout

By General Posts

Prosecutors drop all charges in deadly Waco biker shootout case that left nine dead, 20 injured and 177 arrested

  • Nine bikers from rival gangs died and 20 were wounded in the deadly shootout when rival Cossacks and Bandidos clashed inside and outside Twin Peaks, Waco
  • The deadly shooting happend outside a Twin Peaks in Waco on May 17, 2015
  • Police took away 12 long guns, 133 handguns and found 44 shell casings
  • Some 177 were arrested and 155 charged engaging in organized criminal activity
  • Police officers monitoring the group also fired on the bikers, killing at least two
  • Prosecutors announced today that no one will be convicted for the shootout

No one will be convicted for the 2015 shootout between rival biker gangs in Waco restaurant parking lot that left nine people dead and at least 20 injured, prosecutors in Texas said Tuesday.

In a statement announcing all charges will be dropped in the deadliest biker shooting in U.S. history, McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson said any further effort to prosecute the case would be a ‘waste of time, effort and resources.’

‘In my opinion, had this action been taken in a timely manner, it would have, and should have, resulted in numerous convictions and prison sentences against many of those who participated in the Twin Peaks brawl,’ Johnson said.

‘Over the next three years the prior district attorney failed to take that action, for reasons that I do not know to this day.’

The shooting outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco on May 17, 2015, involved rival biker gangs, the Bandidos and Cossacks, and occurred as bikers from various groups were gathering to talk over matters of concern.

Fights and gunfire broke out. Waco police officers monitoring the gathering also fired on the bikers, killing at least two.

Surveillance footage showed many bikers running from the scene and ducking for cover after gunshots rang out.

A smaller number could be seen pointing and firing weapons, slinging a chain or participating in fistfights.

Law enforcement officers recovered dozens of firearms, knives and other weapons from the restaurant and adjacent parking lot, many of which officers organized indiscriminately into piles on the pavement and in the back of a police vehicle, dash-cam video showed.

Law enforcement officials took the extraordinary step of arresting 177 bikers after the shooting, then charged 155 of them with engaging in organized criminal activity. Many were held on a $1 million bond.

Former District Attorney Abel Reyna ultimately dropped charges against all but 24 and re-indicted them on riot charges. Those were the cases that came to an end Tuesday.

Only one case was prosecuted in court and that ended in a mistrial.

More than 100 bikers have filed civil rights lawsuits alleging McLennan County, the city and others violated the plaintiffs’ civil rights by arresting them without probable cause after the shooting,

‘It’s a travesty that so many people were rounded up and then investigated, instead of vice versa,’ Mark Snodgrass, president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, said Tuesday. ‘A lot of these people’s lives were put on hold for four years.’

In a statement, Reyna said he disagrees ‘with the overall result as well as several statements and accusations within Mr. Johnson’s press release; however, it is solely his decision on how to proceed with any case in the District Attorney’s Office.’

Texas Man Charged with Unlawful Carry Solely for Being a Bandido

By General Posts

The MPP has heavily reported on the recent trend of individuals being arrested for possession of handguns merely for membership in a motorcycle club. This includes individuals with no criminal records and License To Carry holder’s. The MPP has even issued a travel warning to motorcyclists traveling through Texas.

One such case against a member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club (Ashley Becker) in Lubbock, TX continues with a refiling of charges for Unlawful Carry for mere membership in the club, which authorities label a criminal street gang.

Law enforcement and prosecutors should dismiss all such cases in the name of justice because they rely on an unconstitutional application of statute which ignores the basic principle of personal guilt.

Texas Penal Code 46.02, the statute prohibiting gang members from carrying weapons, is being misapplied to individuals simply for being members of motorcycle clubs. Take Ashley Becker, who was originally charged with Unlawful Carry and suspicion of possessing a controlled substance in Lubbock, Texas in 2018. The weapon wasn’t illegal, and no crime was committed. He was arrested under 46.02 for being a Bandido in possession of an otherwise legal weapon. The alleged controlled substance, after being tested multiple times, turned out to be inconclusive.

While prosecutors make no admission that they misapplied statute 46.02, they filed a motion to dismiss. The motion reads, “The interest of justice cannot be served through further proceedings in this matter.”

Although the 2018 indictment was dismissed without prejudice, on February 9, 2019 charges were refilled against Becker on the Unlawful Carry charges. The affidavit identifies Becker’s membership in the Bandidos as the only probable cause for arrest.

Authorities persist despite absurd, unconstitutional interpretation of law.

Despite the fact that their interpretation of statute is unconstitutional and in violation of established state and federal rules of evidence, law enforcement and prosecutors persist in wasting public resources targeting individuals like Becker for participating in Constitutionally protected expression and association. This absurd interpretation of 46.02 would mean that carrying a weapon is unlawful for any individual that is a member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, with no other evidence, even with a License to Carry.

“If this seems outrageous, your instincts are correct. The MPP, after conducting cursory research on 46.02, has identified precedent, Ex Parte Flores 483 SW 3d 632 (2015), that clearly articulates how law enforcement is currently misinterpreting and misapplying Texas statute in violation of the basic rules of evidence and the US Constitution.”

“Law Enforcement and prosecutors should immediately cease and desist misapplying Texas statute. Applying Texas Penal Code 46.02 to members of clubs with no criminal records, and even LTC’s, would chill 1st Amendment Association and ignore the doctrine of personal guilt, “a cornerstone of American Jurisprudence.”

In the name of justice, prosecutors in Lubbock should again file a motion to dismiss all charges against Becker, this time with prejudice. Furthermore, prosecutors and law enforcement in El Paso, Dallas, and across the state of Texas should follow suite.

http://www.motorcycleprofilingproject.com

After motorcycle clubs, who’s next?
Everyone should ask themselves, “After motorcycle clubs, who’s next?” Every large identifiable group has individuals that have committed crimes. Should your civil liberties be taken based on the actions of other individuals you associate with even if you had no involvement in criminal activity?

The blatant attempt to disarm the entire community regardless of an individual’s personal involvement in criminal activity will not stop with motorcycle clubs if authorities are successful. Every American should be deeply concerned about this assault on basic civil liberties. Unpopular speech, including unpopular association, is the most important speech to protect. Or so long has held the Supreme Court.