Police "Travesty" Shot at Mourners Misplaced
Candor Trust

Any youth becoming roadkill is a tragedy and not the "travesty" that Southern Police, operating under NZ's flawed speed and alcohol paradigm are claiming. Youth aren't dying at much higher rates than other Nations youth do, due to inherent inferiority or wilful infractions. They meet these inevitable fates due to NZs failed experimental road safety program, and a marked absence of any real legal risk for a broad range of traffic sins.

The real travesty is that instead of ensuring those at greatest risk are of a sensible age to drive, and competent in skills before gaining licences, they receive 1000 renditions of 6 utterly quaint words of advice; "NO TO SPEED AND DRINK DRIVING". Words having such lame penalty backups as to warrant their own Tui billboard. Atop this sparse preparation and continual refresher blitz there is no education about the main youth toll causes of drugs, distraction and bravado. With 6 words of advice Kiwi kids are released onto unsafe mouldy roads in U.N. criticised death traps.

Candor suggests that establishment of a 10 Million set up fund for a non Governmental Stop DUI Taskforce (DUIT) to address drink and drug driving is the only way to slash a prehistoric 200M burden of cost and pain, given State failure to act on evidence. As per the successful New York model, a small competent team that isn't institutionalised to stupid road safety myths, and that is capable of seeing beyond the rapid revenue rut would quickly slash impaired driving crashes, saving 60-100 lives per year if New Yorks model of success was replicated.

The root problem that screams for a Commission of Inquiry is failure to cancel Ministry of Transports touched experiment "to refine and develop a resource allocation model for road safety", which project (early marked as high risk) puts all bets on speed, alcohol and restraint quotas - in a frustrated quest for related life savings. And creates funding dependencies related to lack of success ie more drink drivers caught equals more Police dollars..

First in 1995 the Crash Analysis System was modified so that crashes regardless of cause would almost all be streamed into speed or drink classes. Legal accountability was removed from the Director of LTNZ and today internal MoT e-mails just moan "we can try to believe it works".

If it isn't clear to the protaganists by now that cheap chatter to teens about the completely incomprehensible concept of death, and constant nagging unsupported by menacing penalties for theorised prime causes is no winner, then it is time that the NRSC and it's Police servants had their heads read.. The authoritative studies all show meagre advertising impacts of NZTA style publicity, and that NZ ticket campaigns only increase related trauma. The World Bank say experience from the Southern Hemisphere shows that the current Enforcement model does not work - yet NZ persists.

So there can be no confidence in NZTA (arisen from LTNZ ex LTSA), MoT and Police front liners to manage impaired driving or general safety and security of NZ citizens on roads given long standing performance failures. Lately ever more consistently and loudly, albeit errantly, blamed on drivers "not getting the message". A fundamental re-orientaton is urgent and that message is one the key non performing agencies must register.

The Independent (Impaired Driving) Taskforce Candor advocates would consist of researchers and regional co-ordinators, providing current policy advice, education and training for the community and involved professionals eg Prosecutors, Parole officers, Police. Core unit standards could be established or resources promoted such as http://www.courtsanddwi.org/module2.html & the prosecutors manual provided by the NHTSA as a web resource.

The DUI steering group would be endowed with responsibilities for co-ordinating a drug and alcohol based approach stepping far out side the catch, fine, forget model promoted by the National Road Safety Committee (NRSC), and the NRSC would devolve the strategic planning role as capability for data collection, analysis and strategising develops. It would render DUI out of the question.

Funding would come from the touted 0.5 social drinker fines when an infringement rather than criminal limit is introduced, or from proceeds of auctions of vehicles which we'd suggest be forfeited on offences where the BAC is over 0.1. This one initiative and tv publicity about the new consequence took New York Cities drink drive deaths from 30% to under 6% of the toll - bringing it to a 94 year low. A success that's been maintained.

The new Independent Taskforce would have discretion to spend on local adult education, such as alternative local tv adverts to the shock horror ones (which only work for a limited audience), and other obvious initiatives eg placement of coin breathalysers in pubs.

The Taskforce would foster commitment, and coordination among all parties interested in impaired driving; road police (training), judicial education, driver licensing (DUI knowledge tested), treatment providers, health sector (brief interventions), advocacy groups, the media, schools (sow road safety value), & academia (inform). The capacity gaps in such areas which should be working knowledgeably with common goals are huge.

Other major roles for the proposed evidence driven taskforce would be;

A) Collect drug/alcohol driving trend data from a broad range of sources particularly saliva or blood tests of culpable drivers and provide it to the community, and analyse data and research to help set reduction targets and define priority actions
B) Establish an impaired driver database to facilitate close monitoring of the countries most dangerous offenders - and to enable evaluation of program performance.
C) Monitor for the maintenance of an apt level of risk targeting with Random and Mobile Breath Tests. Be consulted about random and mobile drug impairment testing in areas with related crash problems.

Until road safety is put in competent hands, prised from those responsible for five years of unmitigated failure that has mounted ever since Minister King gave permission to Police for the Resource Allocation Quota experiment (to base road safety on a large ticketing increase), it will indeed remain a tragic travesty.

Meanwhile NZ Police may keep on blaming policy victims, such as the latest group of youngsters to meet their death, under NZs culture of incompetent road safety delivery. This unjustified judgmentalism does not go unnoticed by stakeholders. Obviously Police consider the drivers knew much much better than to die or kill after all the graphic ads and chose to fatally lose control.

It is high time Police reversed tack and honorably acknowledged their failed methodologies, and realised countries in which journey survival is a granted don't make enforcement and dumbed down rule based education the safety kingpins. Because that doesn't work - and victim blaming can't fix it. Police need to admit they bit off too much and share the safety cake. Supporting the establishment of a Non Governmental DUI task force is
their only move to break free of a closed fatally dysfunctional system. Don't they wish to vacate their shame spot in the Global safety community?

ends

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