Franklin McKnight
Even the tragic deaths of five people on the roads have not changed the behaviour of public passenger vehicles on St Ann roads. Yes, the police operations have been stepped up everywhere across the parish. But that hasn’t changed anything.It’s long past the time when police should get out of their mental and operational rut and stop behaving as victims or people who can’t control what’s happening to them.
Police in St Ann, as is the case all over the country, continue their excessive addiction to speed traps. They are everywhere, at the usual spots, and the bus and taxi operators know all the locations and have their flashing lights signal that also is joined by other motorists. Superintendent of police in charge of St Ann, Wayne Cameron told reporters two weeks ago that bus operators whose actions he labelled “outrageous” have now added hand signals to the flashing lights.That makes them better able to escape police speed traps and spot checks and the few occasional traffic light cop-monitors.
That should be enough already – on top of eveything else — to tell the police they have one solution: mobile patrols. That’s what they haven’t developed or tried over the years and it’s the solution staring police in the face. A motorist can’t with certainity use any signal to tell another where a patrol is if it’s on the move. It may be going at 60 KP/H or 40 KP/H or it may have turned onto a minor road and be re-entering at anytime. Or the patrol may just have turned around and gone in the opposite direction. How could you predict? You couldn’t. The patrol might have even stopped at a traffic light carrying out observations there, ready to move in the next two minutes.
Why is it so difficult for the police to see that even if they meet their own goals of a number of prosecutions for speeding, the real speedsters are not being caught.
COMMON AND DANGEROUS
And why have the police up to now not decided to take on and crush the latest common and dangerous violation on the roads.Every right hand turn lane between Mamee Bay and Runaway Bay, on the North Coast Highway has now been turned into an overtaking lane. Every one of them is used by buses and taxis to overtake; thus the buses and taxis rarely ever slow down or come to a stop at the traffic lighs or wait in line behind other motorists. They just sail by, dangerously and spit at the law. Fixed police positions for speeding have never meant anything to this violation. Now it has become commonplace and, as has happened with all the other violations that now are routine and “accepted” some private motorists start to copy the behaviour and others yet, upset at following the rules and being shafted, learn quickly.The police operations in traffic are moribund. They change nothing.
