An advertising campaign from a Kent law firm aimed at helping speeding motorists to dodge offences has been attacked as “irresponsible” by the Kent & Medway Safety Camera Partnership.
Solicitors My Brief has outraged road safety campaigners by running a press advert in the form of a comic book cartoon strip. In it, a motorist is 'flashed' by a fixed roadside safety camera and when he receives a summons he turns to Chatham-based My Brief.
A solicitor is then seen reassuring the relieved driver of "the best possible outcome" especially if "legal loopholes" can be exploited. In the last frame, the beaming motorist is shown outside law courts thanking the solicitor for "an excellent result".
The advert has been slammed by Katherine Barrett, Communications Officer at the Kent & Medway Safety Camera Partnership.
She said: "I was shocked when I first saw it. By adopting a cartoon strip approach it trivialises the issue of speeding and road safety. By suggesting that legal loopholes can be exploited to help motorists who are genuinely guilty of speeding to 'get away with it' is also rather distasteful.
"This simplistic approach to road safety ignores the fact that speeding is a major contributor to accidents and personal injuries and deaths on the roads of Kent and Medway. The advert also portrays the driver as an innocent party when in fact he has broken the law by driving too fast.
"While speed is not always the only factor in a serious or fatal crash, investigations and studies have established that it is a major contributory factor in at least a third of all road crashes."
Around 30,000 speeding tickets were issued to motorists across Kent and Medway in 2009 but, despite this, Katherine says drivers are slowing down: "While we’re still issuing tickets, the message is getting through to people and the number of speeding tickets we’re processing is falling every year."
Through a combination of educating drivers and encouraging them to slow down, effective publicity campaigns, and enforcement, the Partnership has seen a 63% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured across all its yellow fixed safety camera sites and safety camera van sites since the cameras were introduced.
Katherine said: "That’s 324 casualties that have been prevented. This is excellent news but irresponsible adverts like this one only serve to undermine our attempts to encourage motorists that excessive speed is a killer. I would urge the company behind the campaign to reconsider promoting their services in this way."