By Trudy Simpson, Staff ReporterTHE 'ZERO tolerance' stance by the police to drunk driving is reeling from the reduction in the number of breathalyser machines - 12 - to work with.
Deputy Supt. Byron Powell said yesterday that 21 of the 35 breathalyser machines in the island were at the Bureau of Standards to be repaired. This is despite 22 having been repaired by the bureau in October.
The police had another two, he said, but they were defective, leaving only 12 breathalyser machines to serve 15 stations. The breathalyser machines, the Intoxyliser and the SD2s (Handel), are used to breath-test the amount of alcohol a person has consumed.
DSP Powell remains confident though that the police, with the 12 instruments they have, can effectively carry through a campaign, started this week, against drunk driving.
The campaign will run until January 31, 2003, and the police will be looking out for behaviour such as speeding or "shaky driving", which suggests that motorists are drunk.
If convicted of drunken driving, a motorist could pay a $5,000 fine or lose his/her driver's licence for a year, said DSP Powell of the Jamaica Constabulary's reform and modernisation programme, which is responsible for the traffic management project.
Issues of insufficient patrol personnel, patrol vehicles and equipment, made for lively debate at yesterday's meeting of the National Road Safety Council at The Courtleigh Hotel and Suites in New Kingston.
Council members called for stronger law enforcement and public education, as DSP Powell, who lamented the large areas that few patrol cars had to cover, and Dr. Lucien Jones, chairman of the council, reeled off statistics which showed that the number of accidents and persons killed have climbed past last year's figures.
So far, there have been 340 accidents resulting in 376 deaths while in 2001, there were 309 accidents with 347 deaths.
These figures have reversed what had been a downward trend, hitting a low of 295 in 1999, Dr. Jones said. According to DSP Powell, there have been 31 more accidents so far in 2002 than in 2001 and 29 more people have died.
Dr. Marion Bullock-Ducasse and Dr. Collette Cunningham-Myrie of the Health Ministry, and Dr. Paula Fletcher, executive director of the National Road Safety Council, argued that success should not be judged on how many traffic tickets were issued but how many lives are saved.
She, Dr. Jones and other members, said the police needed to enforce and improve ticketing and other systems and must place more emphasis on enforcing various traffic laws.
"I think we have lost focus as far as education and enforcement are concerned," Dr. Jones said. "It is very clear that unless we recapture the focus on enforcement and move that in tandem with public education we, as a nation, will go into the 400 region which is absolute madness." He lamented Wednesday's accident in Toll Gate, Clarendon, which caused four deaths and 11 injuries.
The National Road Safety Council is planning a three-year $5.4 million public education campaign to teach pedestrian safety, to change the behaviour of road users and to target young male drivers, who, data show, are more often than not at the wheel when accidents occur and many of whom die during accidents. A World Health Organisation Report states that for adult men 15 to 44 years old, road traffic accidents are the biggest cause of ill health and premature death worldwide.
Police and the National Road Safety Council figures show that in the last 10 years, 3,674 people, among them 1,212 pedestrians, have died in road traffic accidents. So too, have 354 children in the last eight years, 46 up to December 8, 2002.
