A student made off from the police officer who’d knocked on his car window to ask about his lack of insurance as he’d been stabbed weeks earlier and feared for his safety.

An officer driving an unmarked car went to stop Brendon Shamu as the 23-year-old was parking his Vauxhall Insignia on Pegasus Road, Oxford, on December 5.

Rather than get out the car, the university student forced the constable to leap out the way as he pulled across the road and mounted the kerb before speeding away.

The police officer, who could be seen in footage taken from his car’s dashboard camera hacking at Shamu’s window with a baton, was unable to catch up with the Vauxhall – despite pedestrians pointing out where the car had gone.

Prosecutor Alice Aubrey-Fletcher told Oxford Crown Court the Insignia was later spotted on Grenoble Road by a second officer. That constable saw Shamu throw something out of the car window, which the driver later claimed was a phone. The Vauxhall eventually stopped.

Interviewed by the police, Shamu said he’d been stabbed several weeks before and had been worried for his safety.

He accepted the driving was dangerous but claimed that, had the officers been in his shoes, it wouldn’t have been ‘so irrational’. He had jettisoned a phone as he ‘thought he wasn’t allowed to have more than one phone’.

The Vauxhall driver’s insurance had run out days before he was stopped.

After hearing that Shamu was now a university student and helped look after his partner’s disabled brother, Recorder John Gallagher spared him an immediate prison sentence.

He praised the defendant for having the ‘guts to fess up’ to his crimes - but added that the student had come ‘pretty close’ to being sent to prison.

Shamu, of Pegasus Road, Oxford, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to dangerous driving, failing to stop for an officer, driving without insurance and possession of cannabis. He had two convictions for four offences.

Sentencing him to eight months’ imprisonment suspended for two years, Recorder Gallagher said: “This court is quite prepared to send people to prison for dangerous driving.

“You’ve only got to ask the man who appeared before me earlier this morning on a charge of dangerous driving, who is in prison serving a sentence for precisely that. His driving was worse than yours, I accept. That is probably what saved you.

“Dangerous driving is exactly what it says on the label; it’s dangerous. And it is the dangerous driving of a vehicle which, quite frankly, is every bit as much a weapon as what we think of as weapons.”

Shamu was ordered to do up to 41 sessions with the probation service, pay £100 costs and was banned from driving for a year. He must pass an extended retest before he gets back behind the wheel.

The judge warned him: “Temptation may come along; your mates, any mate. It’s alright for them, it’s not alright for you. You’ve got to say to yourself and, indeed, to them: ‘I can’t afford to do this’.”

Richard Davies, mitigating, said his client had been stabbed ‘a month or so’ before the chase. “It perhaps explains to a certain extent his reaction.”

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