Safety, not tickets, should be focus of policing
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 1998-09-09
The reality of modern policing is doing more with less, says community safety expert Grant Smith, and he suggests a shift away from traffic tickets as a means of measuring police officers' efficiency, to criteria that take into account their effectiveness in reducing crime and improving traffic safety.
Smith is a safety program director with Transport Canada who is currently on secondment with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "Policing is changing through the philosophy of community policing and the realities of reduced resourcing," he told a recent international conference on traffic safety. This means that both police and the communities they work with need to focus more sharply.
For the police, that means less emphasis on tickets and enforcement and more on the kind of work that can really reduce crash rates. For the community, it means becoming better informed about what counts in road safety, he argues.
Community groups, says Smith, are often not well informed about traffic safety risks and have a tendency to direct their efforts towards traffic management (parking laws, traffic calming, etc.) rather than the issues that count most in saving lives. Police can help communities focus on the most important issues by providing information, and by assisting in program development.
"Researchers have spent the last 25 years defining and refining characteristics of impaired drivers, non-seat belt wearers and high risk drivers. Very little effort, however, has been made to assemble this information into an overall business plan that would instruct communities on the most critical risks to their safety on the roads, Smith points out."
The trend towards community-focused efforts is widespread throughout North America. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration operates a Web site designed to help communities build their programs. The site provides "one-stop shopping" for communities that are looking for help in setting up programs. It also has a "best practices" page which describes programs already working successfully, and NHTSA has a panel of experts who will help out states that want to promote community safety programs.
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