Police Communications and Public Affairs Officer, Inspector Rodney Inniss, says road policing will be significantly improved when police are freed up from attending to minor accidents.
Inniss spent close to two hours recently as a guest on Voice of Barbados’ radio talk show Brasstacks speaking to the public about the new road traffic accident investigation policy which comes into effect on September 15.
He assured the public that the police will still be out on the highways and byways searching for people driving around with guns in their vehicles, speeding and even bag snatchers on bicycles.
He said: “You see these driving offences; you see what is happening on the road network? A lot of attention will now have to be paid on road policing. All those bicycle people, those little small, no lights, you know, we get bicycle persons snatching bags and what not. You get motorcyclists, you see them, you complain, they complain on all of our highways and byways. I am saying, and the policy is saying, when we take away the man hours, where we do fender benders, and we spend (time) doing that, and we take them and allow police officers to better patrol our streets, our highways and byways, the speeding at night, all over the service stations and wherever there’s a stretch of road, let’s move the speeding.
“We’ll be able to handle some manpower towards those areas. We’ll be able to, where people are driving about with firearms at night, I am sure with effective, more effective patrol, because we do have effective patrols now, but we will have the opportunity to have better patrols out there by day and by night. Because you know what, that is 70 000 man hours that were spent dealing with fender benders that our partners, the insurance companies, will look after.”
He added that the Police Service would also have “the wherewithal to upgrade the number of police we have on the streets to do road policing and help prevent a lot of what’s happening now.”
And while Inniss reinforced that under the new policy insurance companies would be the first responders to the scene he assured the public that the police would intervene in order to maintain law and order if there is any aggression at the accident scene.
“We are not totally hands off on everything. Part of our responsibility is to maintain law and order and peace … We will respond to quell the conflict in terms of conflict resolution or something like that to make sure that things don’t go further downhill. But the insurance will still deal with the initial report of the fender bender,” he said.
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