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Statistics Canada says that drunk driving charges have been cut in half over 20 years, but MADD Canada says the reason for that is because police are laying fewer charges due to cracks in Canada’s laws.
The StatsCan figures, which were gathered at MADD’s request, show that there were 117,514 people charged in 1986 for operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol level of 0.08, compared to 57, 147 in 2006.
Anti-drunk driving advocates say that police are discouraged by the piles of paperwork involved and the legal challenges in convicting an impaired driver and therefore, are laying less charges.
Margaret Miller the national president of MADD Canada told CTV Newsnet Friday that she didn’t think the figures actually represented a significant drop in drinking and driving.
“I am not putting too much stock in the Statistics Canada figures simply because they aren’t taking into account the impaired people being charged at the .05 to the .07 level,” she said, noting that those levels are taken care of at the provincial level.
She said the police has been doing a very good job of getting drivers off the road using provincially-run suspended sentences for those with blood-alcohol levels between 0.05 to 0.07.
But she said those suspended sentences are way up and should be counted in StatsCan’s figures.
Most experts have said there has been a dramatic turn in attitudes about drinking and driving, resulting in fewer people doing so.
“People are tired and sick to death of opening their newspapers every day and seeing another death caused but drunk driving,” she said.
Police love to lie and say that all accidents are mostly speed related, to justify their fat cow cash grabs, especially in Alberta and in Ontario now too.. they lump all of their homemade statistics as the accidents, deaths realted all to speeding.. not in reality to drunk driver, bad drivers, road rage, poor roads, bad snow cleaing.. http://postedat.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/a-blatant-tax-on-the-motorist-speed-cameras/
This is also still simply not acceptable. There is a direct link between DRIVING and collisions. The MORE you drive, the more likely you are to be involved in a collision and the more likely you are to get seriously hurt . So the police will now give tickets to all drivers .
The police TRAFFIC program brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars but the police, city runs the program as revenue neutral. Profits are put back into more supposedly good traffic safety initiatives, but mainly into the police empire building, so it really IS NOT THE CITIZENS GOOD WELFARE THEY FIRSTLY DO ALL CARE ABOUT.
Now in 2008, according to police statistics, there were 3,019 injury accidents in Calgary and 38 traffic fatalities.
And why is it also no one will answer the question? How many people are now are actually injured due to speeding over how many persons now are injured due to drunk drivers? 15 percent are injured due to speeding? and 45 percent due to drunk drivers? so how much resources are proportional giving by the police overall to catching drunk drivers over the car speeders? proportionally?
The intersection cameras are being applauded by Alberta Health Services because “there is no doubt that collisions impact our health services,” said Nancy Staniland, manager of Injury Prevention & Control Services for Alberta Health.
“This is not only an obvious cash grab but they are putting our safety at risk to increase their revenues. For it is a known fact that the City of Calgary had shortened the amount of time lights stay at yellow when they brought in red light cameras. In many cases you have no choice but to floor it to beat a red light. But now your choice will be between speeding up to avoid going through a red light or getting rear ended. If you get rear ended there’s a good chance you get end up with whiplash. Really makes you wonder just how far those in power will go to rob us.”
“As Alberta grows, drivers are causing more problems, he said: “A lot of people are impatient, there’s road rage like never before, an increase of vehicles on our roadways, With booming populations, there’s an increase in collisions.” wow those are smart observations, such as traffic tickets are good cash cows too,
and what all the people who speed are guilty of road rage? or is there a separate ticket being issued to road ragers? just as there is to drunk drivers?
“This is simply not acceptable. There is a direct link between speed and collisions. The faster you drive, the more likely you are to be involved in a collision and the more likely you are to get seriously hurt,” said Staff Sgt. Brett Marklund of the traffic section.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Speed+green+cameras+start+today+Calgary/1451154/story.html
“In my perfect world, we are out of work. We’re not going to 80 or 90 injury collisions a year. We’re not investigating 30 or 40 fatalities a year, I’m not seeing thousands of (cases of) impaired driving a year. What we’re seeing is people driving safely and my guys writing zero tickets,”said Marklund.
A lot of our intersection crashes are related to speed. There’s in-deed a problem here at some locations, and now we can address both,” said acting Sgt. Aubrey Zalaski of Edmonton’s specialized traffic unit. The police can get promoted for getting more cash, giving out more tickets too.. self serving or really serving the public interest?
AND WHERE DO IN REALTY THE POLICE OFFICERS GET ALL OF THEIR COMMON SENSE STATISTICS? SUPPORTED BY THE FIGMENTS OF ONE’S IMAGINATION AND THE NEED TO JUSTIFY THEIR JOBS.. CAN I SEE THEIR DETAIL SUPPORT STATISTICS, POLICE TRAFFIC TICKETS REPORTS IN PRINT? NO? AND WHY NOT?
So why are Calgary drivers such chronic lead-foots? or is the question why is it the Calgary city fathers are so money hungry? The police services are implementing the speed cameras as a way of adding to their coffers..
In busy Toronto, police say Drunk driving and careless turning are the main culprits for serious accidents in intersections and red light cameras are not used because of the fear of public backlash..
‘Speed on green’ cameras linked to rear-end crashes. Arizona cities, one of the first cities to bring in such technology says the cameras decrease speeding and dangerous collisions, but can increase the number of rear-end crashes. But of course the money hungry police of Calgary had denied this.
ANOTHER CASH GRAB.. The Calgary Parking Authority is expanding its hold on the inner city by starting to charge for parking on more than 20 blocks of the Beltline.
CALGARY AND EDMONTON POLICE ISSUE MORE TRAFFIC TICKETS OVER ANY OTHER CITIES IN CANADA AND FOR DECADES NOW TOO!
Anyone who thinks the cops here are being honest, serving the public is a fool..
Here is what I found amazing and worth while examining now in much more detail.. insurance companies in Canada do not mind gouging Canadian consumers in their greed to make more profits.. and we all know that accumulating speeding , traffic infractions, will cause your car insurance costs to go up significantly… and yet here is what I find surprising, neither the insurance companies, the provincial government, nor the federal government, the police have real, valid detailed statistics on the causes of traffic accidents: such as how many were caused my alcoholic drivers, how many were caused by speeding, how many were caused by poor road conditions, lousy snow clearing as well, etc not even in Ontario, Alberta, Quebec, BC as well.. …. so what do the insurance companies do with all the extra money they collect, certainly they of all persons should have firstly the best statistics on traffic accidents now in the first place, or how do they determine their rates??? Even Canada’s police chiefs have to rely on accident statistics from other countries, such as Australia, Great Britain, the US..
” A blatant tax on the motorist” said Cllr. Peter Greenhalgh, in charge of highways, transport and strategic planning in the town, he added
“Isn’t it better to have a road that is designed to be safe from the start, rather than sticking a camera there to catch people who may or may not be driving dangerously? We treat road safety very, very seriously but we pay about £400,000 a year to the road safety partnership – money which goes straight into the Government’s pockets.
Almost half of motorists do not think speed cameras improve road safety according to new survey results from whatcar.com.
For fatal accidents the most frequently reported contributory factor was loss of control, which was involved in 35 per cent of road deaths. Failure to look properly was the most frequently reported contributory factor and was involved in 32 per cent of all injury accidents. Five of the six most frequently reported contributory factors were some kind of driver or rider error or reaction.
The money hungry Conservatives in Alberta, the Calgary and the Edmonton Police forces and the Liberals in Ontario they can all learn from this
A study of the figures in the British Medical Journal showed a gap between police and hospital data showed a wide divergence in these figures said one of the authors of the article, Mike Gill, professor of public health at Surrey University. The Police are known to lie, and they try to please their political bosses , to get a raise by generating revenue from traffic tickets.
The survey of the Canadian vital statistics database, made up of information from death certificates, shows that 97,964 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents during the past quarter-century. However, the annual number of deaths dropped 52 per cent to 2,875 in 2004 from 5,933 in 1979.
Nearly three-quarters of those killed in these accidents were male, and motorists at either end of the age spectrum had higher-than-average death rates.
Pedestrians accounted for 12 per cent of motor vehicle deaths, followed by motorcyclists and drivers of all-terrain and other off-road vehicles.
Elderly pedestrians were also found to be more than three times likelier than the general population to be killed in motor vehicle accidents. The study does not explain why.
Rural roads proved particularly treacherous for drivers. Sixty-two per cent of fatal collisions in 2004 took place in rural areas.
Yukon had the highest death rate at 16.4 deaths per 100,000 people. Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario were the only two provinces and territories reporting a death rate lower than the national average of nine for every 100,000 people.
The study notes that while death rates have fallen, the ubiquitous use of cell phones and BlackBerrys while driving pose a danger to drivers.
http://postedat.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/a-36-per-cent-increase/
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