Site to report dangerous drivers
 

While it seems that CloseCalls website may be down, there is a site that is a "Find by Plate Number" type that does have a section to report dangerous drivers. At least there can be some record and narrative if needed in the future.

https://findbyplate.com/US/GA/QBI8442/add-report/

I think the best place to report dangerous drivers is to your local police dept.

Yes and no. If someone's being a menace to other road users, by all means report them. But just don't be surprised if nothing happens. Like the old saying goes, there's never a cop around when you need one. Just the other evening someone was running a quad 4-wheeler (bigger than a standard 4-wheeler, like a car but open and smaller) up & down the street in front of our house at probably 50 MPH. Of course they were long gone and probably parked by the time the sheriff's deputy showed up. I don't blame the police, they're often understaffed and dealing with higher priority calls, and driving complaints are low-priority. So yeah, if they happen to be in the area and catch them, good. But I don't expect miracles. And often even if they find the offending vehicle but they're not driving recklessly when the police see them, there's little they can do.

There’s an A&S forum for that.

I agree with each of your points. I should add that, if possible, having the motorist's license plate number can help. At least once (that I can recall), an officer took that info from me and went to the motorist's home to have a chat about the rules of the road. But, yeah, in a busier city, and/or a different police officer, perhaps nothing would've come of it.

What do you hope to accomplish by “reporting” dangerous drivers to a website such as this?

Too often, dangerous drivers are let off with inadequate penalties because it's their first time in court.

By reporting dangerous drivers, a record will exist of their dangerous activities. Should one of those drivers end up in court, their record would establish that the dangerous driver has a documented history of driving dangerously. This can lead to stiffer penalties, since the record will show a pattern of behavior, and it (hopefully) prevents a dangerous driver from being given leniency.

get a bicycle mounted vid recorder. easier to provide actual evidence if something occurs.

This is true. It's also true that having a centralized database would be nice (the closecalldatabase used to do this). On at least one occasion, law enforcement was given multiple recorded incidences of a single car doing close passes and harrassing cyclists, after the driver claimed his actions were accidental and it was the first time.... I think the actual case I read about was in Britian.

The Cycliq website is nice, but I don't know if they are willing to allow anyone to upload videos, or only Cycliq users.

LOL, vigilante justice. No court considers random unverified unaccountable uncontested one sided reports from a random website and I'm infinitely happy they don't. Would you even want them to consider that as evidence of something? You haven't thought that through and the OBVIOUS abuse this could cause.
You'll get as much response as calling the number on the back of a work truck to tell them their driver cut you off. You know who calls those? People that mainly got frustrated and did not like what you did and think they can "get you" and want to do nothing else in the next few minutes but report you risking their own driving talking on the phone in traffic and spending valuable brain cycles reliving how frustrated they are. It has NOTHING to do with actual danger and legality. Do you know what those report me numbers actually do? Save the driver and the their companies insurance from getting involved in a road rage indecent by giving the other person a perceived useful outlet of frustration instead of further escalation. Think about that.

The "record" will establish that there have been unsubstantiated report(s) (made perhaps anonymously) to a website or over the phone that may leave it up to anybody/everybody to make up their own definition of "dangerous activities." As can be seen elsewhere on BF some cyclists have a very low tolerance for motorists anywhere in their vicinity and seem to consider most, if not all, motorists as dangerous and seem to report all kinds of issues with "dangerous" motorists quite frequently to BF.

I will leave it to the BF legal scholars, (licensed, would-be or otherwise) to give an opinion if a "record" of alleged "dangerous behavior" gathered by such a non governmental call-in hotline/website would carry any weight at all in a court for determining a defendent's guilt for a specific violation/crime or could be used when determining a penalty, especially for a defendant who is in court for the first time.

My untrained legal opinion is that such alleged "evidence" of previous "dangerous activities" based on such so-called reports would be found irrelevant in any court.

Unfortunately I don't think entries on a website like that would be admissible in court. A competent attorney or anyone able to represent themselves competently would be able to get it thrown out, mainly because all the entries on that website are just allegations and not proven. All the entries, if no video is available, are just one person's word against another's, and there's no way to prevent someone from harassing someone else by creating false entries using their vehicle & tag information. Even with video, it can be hard to prove that the defendant was the one driving. All the judge will go on is the defendant's driving record as held by the state anyway.

Glad I'm not the only one who has noticed that.

Calm down. It's not my website, and I'm not the one advocating for it. Someone asked the question "why does this exist?" and I gave the reason why. Why are you so defensive?

I think the idea that you're missing here is that the people who logged the events can be contacted, and then they could give sworn statements about their encounters with a given driver. I agree it's probably a long shot to actually work, but like I said earlier, it's not my site, not my organization, and not my problem.

I really don't think any court is going to go through that trouble, unless maybe if it's a dangerous driving resulting in death case. If it's a simple moving violation, say violating the 3 ft. passing rule, they're not going to bother.

Violating the 3-foot (or 4-foot in some states)law does not usually warrant a court date on its own. That's a ticketable offense, and a court date would only result if the ticket went unpaid or if the driver were sanctimonious enough to try and fight it in court. Neither of those things are very likely to happen, but then again, the police writing tickets to enforce the safe passing of cyclists is even less likely to happen.

And yes, the "reporting" site exists for when a driver has done something serious, i.e. caused injury to someone and/or killed someone, and is already facing a court date. The idea is that these organizations spend some time monitoring court cases so they are aware of when someone from their database is in court for something major. Then, the reporting group alerts the prosecutor(s) to the information they have. In an ideal world, the prosecution would be motivated to do the right thing and make sure justice is served against the dangerous driver, but like we already agreed, there's practically no chance of that happening in reality.

Well, yes, we already covered that above. Why are you so angry about this? We already pointed out that for the database of bad drivers to mean anything in court, someone would have to contact the individuals who logged their events to have them give sworn statements. None of that seems likely to happen, though, and I already said exactly that in an earlier post. Did you not bother to read the thread before responding? I think if you read a little more carefully, it would help you understand what's already been discussed and maybe you would be a little less angry. Calm down.

ha ha ha, now that's creative comedy! kudos.

I didn't think I was, it was a simply a counterpoint... Call 1800-555-1212 and complain user u235 is hostile and defensive and does not agree with you. The irony :)

I think the reality of this "idea" exists only in the imagination of wishful thinkers and nobody plans on doing any such "alerting" activity based on this pseudo-vigilante database.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Like I said earlier, I don't think these "databases" are really helpful in any practical way.

I don't think the poster was being "defensive." I think he was just pointing out the absurdity of your claim - as have several other posters.

I do NOT think it "unfortunate" that anonymous, unsubstantiated reports of "dangerous activity" gathered by a private, for profit, web site is inadmissible in court. I am glad that such likely tainted and biased so-called "evidence" is not considered at all in any legal proceeding.

I didn't make any claims. I answered someone's question; they asked "why does this exist" and I basically recited the organization's mission statement. I was not saying I support their mission, nor was I saying that no one should support them. I was simply pointing out things as they are.