The Dorset and Devon & Cornwall Police "Alliance" misstates road safety performance AGAIN!

1 Dec 2020:

https://www.dorset.police.uk/news-information/article/11397

Police Constable Heidi Moxam, of the Alliance Roads Policing team, said: "Over my 25 years’ service with the roads policing team, I have witnessed horrific devastation to families and their loved ones involved in collisions caused by drink and drug drivers.

"Having to break the news to loved ones that a family member is never coming home is one of the worst parts of my role, but sadly it happens all too often.

"Over the past decade we’ve significantly reduced the number of people killed and seriously injured on our roads and we are passionate about ensuring we continue this downward trend."  

Yet again yet more utter nonsense from the "Alliance", who recently totally buried complaints about the lies released in 2019.

Here follows an honest, competent, unbiased assessment. Why can none of our highly paid road safety "experts" in Dorset and Devon & Cornwall produce such a simple report, communicate it to everyone, and make sure any statements made are consistent with it? If they can't even do that, how on earth can they be trusted with the difficult business of road safety?

The verified STATS19 data (since 2010) is available here:

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/cb7ae6f0-4be6-4935-9277-47e5ce24a11f/road-safety-data

It is easy to write a small program to combine accident and casualty data to pick out any subset of information required. I am happy to share this with anyone who is interested. The KSI data for Dorset looks like this:

It is reasonable to make the following observations:

1. The data is volatile. No conclusions can be drawn from the value at any particular year. At the least, 3 years should be averaged for any comparison to be made.

2. Compared to the first 3 years, the "worst" 3 from 2014 were 10% higher

3. The last 3 are 8.5% lower than the 1st 3, NOT 20% or 30%. And considering that in the decades before "no excuse" the national trend was 20-40% down per decade, this smaller fall, as the police have turned their attention to money making, is disappointing but not surprising.

4. If there is any change of direction downwards in the last decade, it started in about 2016. Of all the multitude of reasons this may have happened, it is clearly complete nonsense to say that it was entirely due to "no excuse" which started in 2010. Certainly when that was mostly making money misrepresented as road safety, and a constant stream of misinformation such as the latest from Heidi Moxam pretending that the great work of the police is reducing casualty.

5. Comparing just the 2012 count to the 2018 count (as the 2019 statement from Mr Underhill, Mr Vaughan and Mr Leisk did) is simply an abuse of the volatility to fabricate a reduction that is totally misleading, and to just bury the resulting complaint and carry on misrepresenting is the most appalling conduct, a terrible insult to those killed and injured on the roads and likely to be a factor in many more.

6. With almost a non-existent police presence and so many other factors, it is ludicrous to say that any reductions that occur are purely the achievement of the police. Over this period, far more likely and significant factors include: Increased proportion of vehicles on the roads with new safety technology, ABS, AEB, and goodness knows how much money spent on making the roads "safer". The police would also tell us that "driver education" and reducing speed limits (both of which have reached ridiculous proportions over the last decade) should reduce road casualty, but of course those of us with some engineering and mathematical understanding know better.

7. It is clear (considering the remarkable quantity of misrepresentations I have documented) that ANY simple numerical data and the interpretation of it by Dorset and D&C police simply cannot be trusted. They have already used false figures to fabricate success and even left those lies on view after they were found out!. The STATS19 data comes from the Police. It would not be out of character for them to be fiddling even these numbers downwards.

The road death figures are harder to "get wrong", and there is no sign of any fall there:

8. The police are certainly busy with "road safety" but not with anything that reduces road casualty. In the UK, £100,000,000 and 2000 person years of productivity are wasted every year achieving no identifiable casualty reduction benefit. I've written this many times and it shocks me every time I am reminded about it. This makes it quite unlikely that the reduction achievements we hear so often could be anywhere near realistic.

9. It is completely clear that the police are obsessed with "speeding" (which these days can mean crawling at less than 40 on a perfectly good dual carriageway) and have little interest in reducing casualty from such serious matters as drink driving, no money to be made: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-8884117/Police-year-conducted-lowest-number-roadside-breath-tests-2002.html

I would have thought Police Constable Heidi Moxam would know better, or perhaps she is just brainwashed by the management and PCCs of Dorset and Devon & Cornwall Police. If she would really like to not break so much bad news, the answer is obvious. The police have demonstrated beyond all doubt that they cannot do safety. We need a total restructure, with road safety driven by a competent and independent authority not distracted by money. This authority must scrutinise and direct police activities to those which are most effective at reducing casualty. It's really simple, apart from the major problem that the police need to be totally cleaned up too.

Just a reminder also that as well as PCC Martyn Underhill, Alison Hernandez, PCC for Devon and Cornwall, the APCC Lead for Road safety, has now made it completely clear that she is fully protecting this incompetence, corruption, waste and danger and therefore personally responsible for poor police performance likely to be resulting in higher death and serious injury counts than if she was doing her job properly.

Ian Belchamber