She says...

Press, 3 April 1980, Page 9

She says...

Who wears seat-belts? Not too many people around Christchurch, from what I’ve seen in casual road-side counts. Enforcement? It seems just another of our many unenforced - regulations, like signalling, following too closely, noisy exhausts, and others. If you don’t drink, speed or overpark you seem pretty safe. It’s all too easy to blame the traffic officers for this state of affairs, but I don’t think it would be either fair or correct. Quite simply, it seems quite plain there just aren’t enough of them. Not enough money for an often unpleasant and invariably unpopular job? I don’t know. But I do know that once the court work, the inquiries, the paper-work and the shifts are all done, there aren’t many men left on patrol on our many kilometres of streets.. . > - • - Thanks to the behaviour of our country’s lunatic fringe, it is now necessary for officers to travel two to a car for much of the time, for fear of assaults. One might well ask why assaults on police and traffic officers don’t carry, vastly heavier penalties than are now imposed. I

think heavy financial penalties, even paid off over several years under supervision, should be an essential part of the punishment. I believe much more use of restitution provisions should be made for crimes against property, too. A car-converter who does $4OOO worth of damage should have to pay it back, even if it takes 10 years. Why should the community pay? But back to the traffic officers: I think it’s time that the number of officers on the road was increased. I know that enforcement is only one of the three “E’s” of road safety (enforcement, engineering, education), but it is one that, at least in some areas, is becoming neglected. — Barbara Petre