Collaborative Approach Needed To Reduce Road Crashes – ACP Grant

KINGSTON — Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Novelette Grant, has made a call for a collaborative and multi-sector approach to reducing road fatalities and motor vehicle accidents.

“We have…to include a really multi-agency approach to a national problem if we are to really achieve the targets and goals that we have set for ourselves as a nation to reduce accidents, and more so, fatalities on our roads,” she stated.

“It makes no sense for us to seek to work as a single entity when the problems are too numerous and too complex for any single institution or single individual to tackle them successfully,” ACP Grant added, while addressing a graduation ceremony on Friday September 16 at the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) Staff College in Twickeham Park, St. Catherine, for 42 road safety officers, who participated in a training programme.

The six-week course, conducted by experts from the Institute of Police Technology in the United States, equipped participants with the skills and techniques to better investigate and analyse motor vehicle collisions. Trainees were drawn from the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Transport and Works, Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) and Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).

ACP Grant urged the participants to use the skills learnt to improve safety on the roads, noting that the costs of road accidents are “very great” for the country.

“The cost in human capital is incalculable to our society when we lose people. There are other costs, economic and social costs involved in these accidents. The training programme done over the last six weeks should assist us greatly …at the policy level, and at the operational level, to improve how road usage happens,” she stated.

Noting that the capacity and competence of the course participants would have been greatly improved through the training, she said that they should now seek to network and share knowledge, to ensure that the “kind of data that we collect on accidents and road usage is of the best and highest quality that will, in turn, inform the decision-makers to deliver the policies and strategies required.”

Director of the Road Safety Unit in the Ministry of Transport and Works, Kenute Hare, reported that the course was critical for Jamaica to close the gaps in the analysis of the collision process, including ascertaining the speed the vehicle was travelling and whether or not seatbelts were being worn at the time of the crash.

“We are extremely grateful for the intelligence provided. We learned a lot of things and are more empowered to analyse and investigate collisions. We are able to calculate the amount of energy dissipated to deform the vehicle, thus, we are able to calculate the speed. We are in possession of a very critical piece of crash investigation device, the crash deformation jig", he informed.

By Garfield L. Angus, JIS Reporter