Roads policing has a crucial and unique contribution to make to casualty reduction. Thankfully, most people will rarely, if ever, experience the trauma involved in attending a serious or fatal road traffic collision - something that police forces across the country have to deal with everyday. The police continue to make a vital contribution to road casualty reduction through enforcement of the law; education, training and publicity (ETP); and providing advice to councils on engineering programmes. Underpinning this is the STATS 19 data collected by officers at collision scenes. Adopting the National Intelligence Model and linking to neighbourhood policing teams offer further opportunities to contribute to road casualty reduction.
Themes
The Audit Commission national report draws on good practice across the country and highlights areas for possible improvement for police forces:
- Roads policing is often well coordinated with council road safety efforts, but there is scope for improved joint working and involving wider agencies such as fire and rescue, and the health service. Within the police, neighbourhood policing teams have the opportunity to coordinate activity with other front line workers and crime and disorder reduction partnership activity, in addressing anti-social use of the roads and responding to community concerns.
- Performance information can demonstrate the distinct contribution that the police makes to reducing road casualties.
- As the principal source of collision information for targeting casualty reduction activity across agencies, high--quality STATS 19 data is imperative. Accurate data saves lives. Sharing postcode data is a real opportunity to strengthen this contribution. Forces can apply lessons from Audit Commission work on crime statistics in addressing issues around collision data quality.
Improvement questions will help address the issues in your force or unit.
The way forward
The national report contains four challenges for the police, to:
- Collaborate with partners (led by the council) to:
- share intelligence about local road safety problems
- pool funding, skills and other resources
- coordinate publicity
- Provide councils with data on the postcode of residence of road accident casualties and drivers/riders and to use this data to target casualty reduction activities more effectively
- Re-emphasise to officers the importance of accurate and complete road casualty statistics. As part of police data quality improvements, ensure that data become available to local authorities within two months of any accident.
- Identify and publish management information that demonstrates the police's distinctive contribution to enforcing road traffic law – the purpose being so that the service can review its activities, where they are targeted and who they are targeted at, and ultimately make the service more effective.
Improvement questions
Police officers, civilian staff and police authority members should use these questions to:
- review how casualty reduction work is managed
- generate proposals for managing it better
The questions do not cover technical aspects of road safety. The Audit Commission report Changing lanes contains case studies and other material to stimulate this discussion.
Note: The questions below have no relation to any audit work by the Audit Commission.
The force's strategy and priorities
- Do your force's corporate strategies and policies give enough priority to road casualty reduction? Do they link back to all aspects of the national roads policing strategy?
- Who champions road safety within the force and within the police authority? Do you support them sufficiently with information and briefings? Do they help build links with potential partners outside the force?
- Does your force have the right balance between the main activities that contribute to safer roads, including:
- automatic number plate recognition work
- attending community events
- and so on
- How much resource does your force devote to roads casualty reduction - either through enforcement or through education and publicity? How does that compare with elsewhere?
- Do you publish information (including numerical information) that demonstrates to stakeholders and the public:
- how good driving (and biking and so on) is being promoted?
- how road traffic law is being enforced?
Targeting and effectiveness
- How is the National Intelligence Model being used to target road casualty reduction activity? Are the data and intelligence underlying this fully fit for purpose? How could you identify better:
- the most dangerous geographic areas?
- specific offences of greatest concern?
- high-risk groups of road users?
- What is known about road safety risks to particular demographic or socio-economic groups (for example children in deprived areas)? Are there diversity issues: for example, are people from ethnic minorities, or with sensory or physical disabilities at greater risk? What is your force doing about these issues?
- How is the task and coordinate system used to highlight risks to safety on the roads?
- Do the systems for analysing and reporting road accident data give you the kinds of summary that you need?
- What information is collected on resources going into casualty reduction work and on the outcomes you achieve? Does the force learn effectively from what has worked well in the past? Are partners such as the council aware of successes and failures?
Collecting data on road traffic accidents and casualties (STATS19)
- How are officers kept aware of the importance of completing STATS19 forms accurately and fully? (Including desk officers as well as those who attend collisions.) Do they get feedback on how the forms are being used? Or compliments for the time spent completing them?
- How could the accuracy of location data entered onto STATS19 be improved? - Cross-checks and further enquiries at a later stage are a poor use of time.
- How could you boost the number of forms which have completed information on where the driver and, ideally, the casualties live? Better data on this would show whether casualties who are local are driving through the area, enabling campaigns to be better targeted.
- When are STATS19 data made available to local authorities? Is this in a reasonable time, say within two months of any accident?
Activities within the force…
- Are officers kept up to date on relevant road safety issues: for example, are officers who are patrolling deprived areas (where child accident rates are often high) briefed on recently published findings?
- Are you promoting safer behaviour on the roads:
- in public areas of police buildings?
- at promotional events in the community?
- on the force's own website?
Who are you targeting there, and is the material attractive to them?
- Does the force act as any good employer, ensuring as a minimum that all employees who travel in the course of their duty are aware of road safety issues?
…and with other organisations
- It's important that local councils and other non-police organisations understand your approach to reducing road casualties. Have you got good documentation so you can explain the force's priorities and programmes?
- Are there any groups that you are trying to influence who might be better reached by non-police agencies (such as youth workers, neighbourhood wardens, housing)?
- Which local organisations have an interest in reducing road casualties? Could you support them better, for example, with more resources, information, contacts or funding?