Editorial | Tie traffic tickets to TRN

ACCORDING TO the police, they have more than 30,000 warrants for the arrest of motorists who have not paid traffic fines and failed to turn up in court to dispute the tickets.

Roughly, these warrants account for three per cent of the traffic tickets issued since the slate was wiped clean of most outstanding offences in an amnesty that ended 22 months ago.

And having executed nearly 5,800 warrants last year, a figure equivalent to around 18 per cent of the amount currently outstanding, the police now want to at least double the rate at which they arrest motorists for unpaid traffic tickets. That would mean over 10,000 arrests in 2025.

They hope to achieve this, according to Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Gary McKenzie, the head of the constabulary’s Public Safety and Traffic Enforcement Branch (PSTEB), by establishing a special unit of the PSTEB to serve the warrants.

This newspaper appreciates that intention of the constabulary and ACP McKenzie in the context of Jamaica’s serious traffic crashes, and the social and economic costs thereof. But that seems hardly to be the most efficient use of limited police manpower, and is unlikely to provide a good return on investment. In other words, we are not sanguine that this approach will prove the most effective deterrence or ensuring compliance with the traffic.

The loopholes, it appears, are just too large. That is why we prefer ACP McKenzie’s other suggestion of making it difficult for motorists with outstanding traffic tickets to undertake regulatory transactions with respect to motor vehicles, once the proscriptions do not unduly infringe on constitutionally guaranteed rights. People with outstanding tickets should have to settle them first, including settling their obligations at traffic courts, before being allowed to renew their driver’s licences or complete vehicle registration or insurance.

As ACP McKenzie put it: “We expect that when people go to renew their (drivers) licences, ITA (Island Traffic Authority, the regulator) would help us, through TAJ (Tax Administration Jamaica), to say to these persons, ‘OK, you have these warrants outstanding and you need to clear them before we can allow you to drive.’”

That is not only technically possible, but ought to be relatively easy to achieve.

Already, anyone seeking to transact certain kinds of business with the government, including registering their motor vehicles and paying the fees to acquire certificates of fitness for these vehicles, have to possess a unique, government-issued, tax registration number (TRN).

That TRN is tied not only to vehicle ownership, but is also a unique marker for the payment of income and property taxes and certain statutory contributions, including the National Housing Trust. It should, therefore, be just a matter of adding another field to an individual’s vehicle ownership and driver’s licence profiles to capture if she or he was ticketed, and if the ticket was paid or is overdue.

These capabilities, we presume, were anticipated with the police’s introduction of the electronic ticketing system two years ago, leading to the limited amnesty on old fines. Or they ought to have been.

Indeed, the complaints were that the old, paper-based ticketing system was too cumbersome, difficult to manage, and open to corruption. There was no real-time updating of information and, sometimes, no updating at all. Often, people claimed they paid traffic ticket fines at tax offices, but that their payments were not reconciled with police data. Similar claims were made when fines were paid after court hearings.

These problems should now be eliminated with the electronic arrangement. The next step should be the flagging of a driver’s or vehicle owner’s ticket history every time a transaction related to the person’s driver’s licence, or the status of a vehicle, is being done.

This, it seems to this newspaper, is both an easier approach to enforcement, with great dividends as a deterrent.

Although traffic fatalities decreased 14 per cent last year and the 364 deaths were the lowest in seven years, motor vehicle crashes (with fatalities of around 13 per 100,000) remain a major concern for Jamaica’s policymakers. Over three in 10 of the people who die in crashes are younger than 30, and up to 75 per cent are below 65.

These deaths cost the country billions of dollars in lost labour productivity, plus in the cost of the treatment of people injured in crashes.

While last year’s decline in road deaths fuelled optimism, the start of 2025, with more than one fatality per day, has tempered that hopefulness.

But for recent increased fines for violation of the road code and an aggressive ticketing system, Dr Lucien Jones, the vice-chairman of the National Road Safety Council, seemingly conceded to an “absence of any other targeted, concentrated and effective intervention” to deal with the problems on the roads.

These may have contributed to the lower fatalities in 2024. Tying enforcement to the vehicle transactions is likely to have even better outcomes.