It is very easy for police in BC to figure out who is prohibited from driving, as they have many different ways to determine this.
As soon as you are issued a driving prohibition, it is uploaded into several different police computers.
If a police officer issues the driving prohibition to you, it gets added right away to the Canadian Police Information Centre, known as CPIC. If it is issued to you by ICBC, the prohibition is already reflected on your driving record and your driving record gets automatically updated onto CPIC by ICBC.
This means that the various police computer systems, will all show that you are a prohibited driver.
How they track prohibited drivers
The information about you as a prohibited driver isn’t just connected to your identity, or to your driver’s license number, it’s also connected to your insurance documents. So, any vehicles that are registered in your name, or are associated with you, are also going to reflect that connection to a prohibited driver.
ICBC recently made it a rule to require people to list the other drivers of their vehicles on their insurance at the time they renew it.
Not only did this make it easier for ICBC to calculate how much money people would owe on their insurance just based on the risk associated with the various people driving that vehicle, but it also makes it easy for ICBC to identify who is likely to be driving any particular vehicle.
People will often get caught driving while prohibited while driving vehicles belonging to another person.
But there are also other ways police can tell.
Other ways to spot prohibited drivers
Police have automatic license plate readers, and the beginning of everyday information is downloaded into the license reader system, about prohibited drivers.
Prohibited driver information also includes people who are associated with prohibited drivers. This includes people who live at similar addresses, or who have information that is shared or connected somehow to ICBC’s system.
So, it also makes it very easy for police to catch you, because as they’re driving around their vehicles are literally scanning every license plate they pass, looking for a hit on a prohibited driver and then pulling that person over to investigate whether or not they’re prohibited.
Beyond that, there are also pretty basic tools police use to determine whether or not you’re prohibited. Police in Canada has broad discretion to conduct traffic stops, for the purposes of checking, whether or not somebody has a valid driver’s license.
This means that the police can pull you over just to see if you have a license, or insurance, and whether or not you’re prohibited.
Police will often look for clues that tell them that somebody might be a prohibited driver. For example, we have seen many cases where police officers pull somebody over because they looked at the officer for a suspiciously long time while driving by them.
Another clue is if a person is driving a vehicle but they don’t match the description of the person to who the vehicle is registered to.
Police will also look through the manner in which you’re driving to try and determine if you could be prohibited. They will park outside liquor stores or restaurants, or even just at the side of the road monitoring traffic to look for people who appear to be reluctant to start driving.
People who get into their cars and don’t start them right away, people who avoid the vehicle for a little bit, or behave suspiciously.
These things also make the police believe you should be investigated to determine whether you have a license.
And finally, they can also just look at your driving behaviour itself. Even if there’s nothing about what the police see as far as your manner of operating the vehicle, police may pull you over because you’re driving in a way that makes it look like you’re trying to avoid the police.
Often, we see this in cases where people drive past a police car and then quickly pull over and park and exit. In those circumstances, many investigations done by police find that the person is in fact prohibited from driving.
So, if you are prohibited from driving, the best way to not get caught is to not drive.
The police have many methods, both overt and covert, to determine whether or not you are a prohibited driver and you can expect that all of those methods are being employed at all times.
The likelihood of getting away with driving while prohibited is slim, police are trained to be on the lookout for prohibited drivers, and as we’ve discussed in other blog posts, driving while prohibited cases are very easy for the Crown to prove.
However, if you find yourself facing driving while prohibited charges after being caught by police, don’t hesitate to give us a call.