Police to address toll

POLICE Commissioner Ian Stewart on changes planned to address the needless carnage on Queensland roads:

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POLICE Commissioner Ian Stewart on changes planned to address the needless carnage on Queensland roads:

The tragedy is that we have lost 15 more lives than at this time last year.

There doesn't seem to be any effort we can put in that is impacting on reckless behaviour, often where people are killed because of the inattention of others.

People are needlessly losing their lives on our roads.

Our recent Q-Blitz 2, which we've just completed, is a way of the Queensland Police Service upping its enforcement regime to try and send a clear message that people who break the law on the roads, anywhere anytime, can expect a police officer to be waiting.

But it's getting to a stage that despite the efforts and the number of tickets and infringements that were detected in this last month with the extra staffing we focussed on the road safety issue, it still seems to be that too many people are taking no notice of the road laws.

So that means the Queensland Police Service has to rethink our strategies and that's exactly what we're doing.

I'm not going to telegraph what our changes will be, but they're coming and people need to know no-one needs to get a ticket on our roads and many of the accidents that we have are avoidable.

I'd ask people to think about that into the future, particularly as our enforcement strategies ramp up and perhaps change in an innovative way.

So we'll see what happens over the next few months.

We have run two major operations that were no notice operations.

Often we tell the public in advance that we are going to run specific operations but in these last two occasions with Q-Blitz we haven't told the public that we were going to do it until about half way through and even then we're finding that we're still getting a very significant rate of offending against the road rules.

It seems we have to change our strategies but that will mean more pain for the person on the road who wants to break the law.