London Police steps up its game, banning photographers from Knightsbridge

News

8 Jul

Tensions in London are starting to rise again since Arab season has started. But this time London Police is penalizing spectating photographers as well.

Oh dear god, things are really escalating in London. After police said that they'll be handing out fines for any driver that's performing anti-social behavior like revving, hard acceleration, etc. Now they are taking on car enthusiast photographers traveling to London just to go carspotting, aka car-spotters.That is what happend to some CJ friends of us, I'll let them tell you the story as it went:

So we were sitting on the busy crossing between Knightsbridge and Sloane Street, so we could see cars coming from both ways. We’ve been sitting there for 4 days and we’ve had no issue with cops. But yesterday night round 1 o’clock some cops stopped us and asked to come to them where they asked what we were doing.So we say: “we’re here for carspotting”. And that’s when things went wrong. They did their story saying because we’re taking pictures of exclusive cars, we encourage them to come here more often and start revving and making a lot of noise and blablabla. So then they gave us an instant 48 hour ban for the whole Knightsbridge area which is actually a massive area lol.The only way we’d be able to cross the area again was as if we didn’t have our cameras with us. Otherwise they told us we’d get arrested.After we read the paper, it would mean we’d have to pay a 100 £ fine which I think is ridiculous and also quite a lot. We travel to London to enjoy our hobby and than we get sent off for something out of our control.Cops in London these days are so salty. Just as he was talking to us, a 458 gently took of at the light (nothing spectacular in terms of sound but you know that they’re no Prius) and just like that they wrote the license plate down.

It seems a bit harsh in our opinion that they're just given an instant ban without any warning. I can understand that revving supercars can be a nuisance for residents who live there are different ways of getting rid of the problem. Arabs and the spotters who travel from all over the world to come to London are part of the economy. And as Ward wrote, UK residents might need every pound they can get.