Road safety in the 21st century : intelligence driven traffic law enforcement

Abstract

Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 12 - 15 July 2004 "Getting recognition for the importance of transport", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. It has been accepted in Police Forces and law enforcement agencies that intelligence driven criminal investigations is the way ahead in the 21st century. The same rationale must be applied to traffic law enforcement and road safety strategy implementation. Road safety practitioners at all levels must be provided with the information required to tactically and strategically deploy the resources available to them in order to ensure appropriate and effective road safety outcomes. This applies particularly to road safety based traffic law enforcement. This paper examines and recommends the establishment of centralised traffic intelligence units. The establishment of these units focused on the provision of traffic related intelligence to appropriate managers and operational personnel, by means of effective and efficient processes and methodology, would provide the opportunity to maximise the use of traffic and road safety resources within any road safety management structure. The role of these units would be to collect, analyse and effectively disseminate the information required by all levels of road safety management and operations for the efficient management of traffic law enforcement and road safety resources. These units would also allow the community to be fully informed on the legitimacy of the traffic enforcement outputs as being in line with the published project policies of reducing the incidence and severity of road crashes across the Province.