The incident the week before last involving Berbice lawyer, Mr Ryan Crawford, and a policeman generated a plethora of comment on the limits of police powers to stop and search, and considerably less on Mr Crawford’s uncivil behaviour. From the public’s point of view, of course, random stopping and searching by the police to inspect documents, whether or not it has a legal basis, has achieved nothing in terms of any improvement in observance of the traffic laws. In fact, far from serving any discernible purpose – the occasional discovery of illegal weapons dealt with in our Friday editorial notwithstanding ‒ it is perceived by many people as an introductory route to the infamous ‘raise’.
The last series of Traffic Chiefs made no impact on the disorder on our roads whatsoever, and it remains to be seen what the recent appointee will achieve. All the ancillary issues such as signage aside, the bottom line of the problem is enforcement of the laws, which is at best fitful and at worst non-existent. It is true that periodically the Traffic Department will hold campaigns directed primarily at this or that offence, particularly where the minibuses are concerned, but once the period of the campaign has ended then everything reverts to the status quo ante; there is simply no consistency.
No doubt during a campaign, the traffic police are told that a certain average number of charges have to be brought, but one suspects that at the end of it, everything slides back to what it was before. Certainly the average road user witnesses the commission of any number of traffic offences every day, and we have even invented special Guyanese ones, such as ‘undertaking’, which is not to be confused with funeral parlour work. The minibus drivers are expert undertakers, and it is possible on wider roads for a responsible driver to be observing the speed limit and yet be overtaken on one side by a vehicle and undertaken on the other by another one at the same time.
Up until recently citizens were told that the Guyana Police Force was seriously under strength, the implication being that there simply were not enough officers to put on the roads to do traffic work. However, since the present government came into office, we have been informed that major recruitment drives are underway, the aim being to bring the police up to strength. That said, there seems to be no change where management of our roads is concerned; the police are sparse in daylight hours, and with some exceptions, next to invisible after dark. Given the scale of the breach of traffic regulations, in the first instance there needs to be a substantial increase in the police presence on our roads.
And it is not just drivers who commit offences; everyone, from motor-cyclists to cyclists to pedestrians believes that the streets belong to them and that everyone else should give way. There is simply no courtesy displayed beyond the boundary of anyone’s front door. Restoring good manners on our roads, however, depends first of all on having police officers around who enforce the law. However, sometimes a road user sees the police themselves in one of their own vehicles breaking the regulations, and while this may not be common, it is not as infrequent as it should be. How can the police enforce the law if they too are in default?
Furthermore, not only are the police not on the streets enforcing the traffic laws, but they are not in the schools either, training the younger generation how to cross the road, and explaining that cars cannot stop immediately however fast a driver responds in terms of mashing his brakes. Parents, of course, are irresponsible sending young children out onto busy highways to buy an item at a local shop; they too sometimes do not appear to apprehend the danger that vehicles represent, particularly those driven at high speed as so many are here. It is also well known that children below a certain age cannot gauge the speed of a vehicle; that is a skill which is not acquired until they are older, and parents need to be constantly reminded of this.
The populace is convinced that the primary reason for the disorder on the roadways is the culture of corruption which pervades the traffic police in particular. In fact, rightly or wrongly the popular view is that for many police, the initial training for corrupt acts comes from their experiences in the Traffic Department. This is a small society, and there is always some citizen who will point out an officer driving a car which it is alleged they couldn’t afford on their salary; or identify a minibus which belongs to an officer, earns money for them and is not made subject to the traffic code if caught in breach of a regulation.
Our roads are busier than they ever were; in the last ten years we have had a huge influx of cars, and with advent of the oil economy there will be still more. Our roads were never really designed with heavy traffic in mind, and more than ever they will have to be managed carefully (in the case of the capital by the City Council as well as by the police. Sheriff Street is now being widened, it is true, but it is only one thoroughfare, and the outlook for the city centre will be more congestion, impatience and discourtesy than at present). Children and young people are killed routinely on the highways of the West Coast, Corentyne and elsewhere, but as said earlier, the police have shown themselves incapable of tackling the speeding, sometimes fuelled by alcohol consumption, which is the underlying cause.
Citizens wait to see what measures, if any, are going to be implemented in the traffic section to deal with corruption, and whether any realistic programme of extended duration is to be introduced to address the traffic chaos.
