The Daily Mail today highlights the decline in traffic offences detected by police alongside the growth in offences detected by speed camera. This is something that has long been of concern to the Safe Speed road safety campaign. We first highlighted the issue in 2002.
The statistics are published annually, some considerable time in arrears. The latest copy was 2005 figures, published by the new Justice Ministry on 31st October 2007. Previous copies were published by The Home Office.
Paul Smith, founder of SafeSpeed.org.uk, said: "Leaving roads policing to cameras was a terrible idea. Speed cameras only detect speed above a speed limit - which isn't necessarily a cause of danger - but our skilled traffic police can detect and prevent all sorts of risky behaviour."
"There has been a three-way decline in traffic policing, Firstly the number of dedicated traffic police has declined. Secondly the officers that we do have are less available and usually spend more time timed up with paperwork than they do on patrol. Thirdly, and perhaps more controversially, the training and the tasking of the few officers who out on patrol is less effective than it used to be. Targets have taken responsibility and discretion away from front line officers who are less able to use their excellent judgements to focus their efforts on the riskiest offenders.
"Everyone knows that effective traffic policing is important to road safety. We need more officers and even more importantly we need to use the ones we have much more efficiently - we need them out on patrol, not sat behind their desks.
"The overall road safety results show that leaving roads policing to cameras was a deadly mistake. We've slipped to 20th in Europe for rate of improvement; road deaths haven't show a proper fall for well over a decade and annual hospitalisations of road crash victims are rising significantly.
"We need to scrap the failed speed camera policy urgently and police the roads properly to get British road safety back on track."
The Daily Mail today highlights the decline in traffic offences detected by police alongside the growth in offences detected by speed camera. This is something that has long been of concern to the Safe Speed road safety campaign.
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