Stats:The word "crime" has a number of meanings. In the context of Home Office Stats, "crimes" are the generally more serious offences for which the returns to the Home Office include reported, recorded and detected offences. Around here at least, these stats are known as "pre-court" stats., afaik because court results do not effect them. There has been a bit of a growth in offences being treated as statistical crimes where the reporting and recording are only going to happen if there's a detection (drug dealing being probably the most obvious example.) Most summary offences, including traffic stuff, is not"crime" in that way, even though they are criminal offences. (I have no interest in an argument over semantics.)
Proceedings for summary offences are recorded but in much less detail - convictions, cautions, written warnings, tickets. These are "post-court" stats, even if nobody goes to court. These are really just a measure of police activity, since they give no picture of the level of offending.
Criminal recordsA fixed penalty notice can most certainly result in a record - the most obvious case being where the offence is endorsable. In those cases, any ticket is provisional, pending the production of the driving licence and if the driver is in totting-up territory, the provisional FPN will not be confirmed and it will be business as usual at court.
Convictions for summary offences such as pavement cycling have only ever been recorded locally. The deciding factor as to whether anybody gets a nationally recorded criminal record has always been the taking of their fingerprints, which only used to be done for "fingerprintable" offences. For many years, this was the only certain way of matching somebody with their record. More recently, and after my day, fingerprints and DNA were taken following any arrest (including somebody arrested under the "general arrest condition" ) and retained, even if there were no proceedings. There have been restrictions made on that but I am not up-to-date.
Getting a ticketAnybody getting any sort of fixed penalty notice should check to see what offence is alleged. I see that there is a general assumption that the tickets which triggered this thread were for offences under the Highways Act 1835 (driving a carriage on a footpath alongside a road ...) Te paved area between the buildings where the posse is pictured is not such a footpath. On the other hand, it looks as though it is necessary to cross one to reach that area. When we had something similar before, I unsuccessfully tried to find what it was that made it OK to drive across a footway. It's too late at night now to dig out the relevant bit of the HC but for motor vehicles it says something along the lines that this is OK to gain legitimate access to property. For whatever reason, there is no such exception for cyclists crossing a footway. In any event, that paved area doesn't belong to the cyclists and if the owners treat cyclists as trespassers or if there is anything else of that nature, then since cyclists crossing the footway might not be legally gaining access by crossing the footway I'm not sure of the legal position. This is one of the reasons why I was hoping the CDF would take a bit more interest in something that is becoming pretty regular.
(NB I retired in 1997, so a lot of water etc. The most obvious change since then has been the replacement of the quill pen with the abacus.
Some of the detail may have changed, but I think the main points remain the same.)
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PS Tickets for wellow line parking etc, and the London Congestion Charge are civil penalties, nothing to do with what I've posted above. Traffic wardens, who used to be police employees have been replaced by Civil Enforcement Officers emplyed by the relevant council.