DUSK IS FALLING in Manchester city centre and normally WPC Joanne Braithwaite would stop the car in front of us like a shot.

It is a clear night and the street is well lit but for some reason this driver has his fog lamp on, a luminous red beacon which is deeply irritating for the motorists behind him.

Usually the hapless driver would be pulled over, cautioned and probably asked to produce his documents. Not tonight, though. Tonight WPC Braithwaite, a traffic officer for Greater Manchester Police, is tackling robbery and won’t waste time on such trifling matters.

With her colleague, Tom Fletcher, she has just dealt with a nasty mugging in Hulme in which a woman walking home from work had her handbag wrenched from her arm by a youth racing past on a bicycle.

They are now being called to Longsight, where two youths have been disturbed burgling a flat. Minor traffic offences can wait.

This will come as music to the ears of the average British motorist.

At the end of last year, Mike Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, pulled 200 officers off traffic duties to focus on the “higher priority” of street crime, burglary and antisocial behaviour — and received hundreds of letters from the public applauding his common sense. Since April Manchester street crime has fallen by more than 18 per cent. “Hallelulah!” you hear the motoring groups chorus.

Nationally, over the past year relations between the police and the motoring public have become strained if not downright hostile. Some motorists are in a state of near insurrection over the record numbers of tickets being dished out for minor speeding offences. The talk in pubs across the country is increasingly not of Iraq or the Hutton inquiry but that millions of “decent” people are being arrested for exceeding the limit, often by only a few miles per hour.

Newspaper letters pages brim with indignation on the matter, and the internet offers page after page of (illegal) sprays and devices designed to “beat the speed cameras”.

One vigilante group, Motorists Against Detection (MAD), has taken to chainsawing and torching the canary-yellow boxes, leaving more than 700 of them as charred husks at the side of the road. A device on the M11 near Woodford, Essex, which caught 2,000 speeding drivers in 24 hours was destroyed when someone deliberately reversed a lorry into it.

Driving north on the M40 in Oxfordshire, the heart of law-abiding Middle England, you see how bad matters have become. A home-made sign by the side of the motorway features a picture of a speed camera with a red line through it and the words: “It’s your licence. Protect your future”. A sticker in the back of a family Volvo ambling along in the middle lane displays the speed-camera logo and the words: “Fleecing, not Policing”.

In fact, studies prove that about 80 per cent of citizens support moves to reduce speeding. Their beef is that there is now a disproportionate emphasis on speeding drivers. The police have given up tackling serious crime, they say, because it’s easier to pick the wallets of taxed and insured motorists.

On the face of it at least, they have a point. Between 1996 and 2001 the number of speeding offences more than trebled, from 313,000 to 1.1 million, raising nearly £50 million in fines.