Traffic wardens have not been brought into the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service, despite a change in the country’s Traffic Law more than a year ago which allowed the service to hire them.
Works and Infrastructure Minister Arden McLean first proposed creating the position of traffic warden in 2005 to handle ticketing and traffic management; allowing RCIPS officers to spend more time detecting and investigating crime.
Mr. McLean said at the time the amendment to the Traffic Law passed (Caymanian Compass, 28 March, 2006) that it was a waste of the country’s resources to have police directing traffic.
Traffic wardens are civilians who receive some police training. They are not fully certified police officers and are not allowed to carry weapons. A warden might respond to the scene of a serious car wreck and route drivers around the area, for instance.
In January, Police Commissioner Stuart Kernohan said RCIPS was still researching the use of traffic wardens.
Before the Legislative Assembly last month Mr. Kernohan noted that many police services around the world are actually moving away from the use of traffic wardens and more toward the use of community support officers.
However, according to one of his highest-ranking assistants, the RCIPS still hopes to bring in traffic wardens at some point.
‘We believe they will be of great value, particularly in the area where we get most of our tourism and where we get congestion,’ Acting Deputy Police Commissioner John Jones said. ‘We’ve not moved away from it. It’s my understanding…we would like to employ traffic wardens.’
Mr. Jones said the problem is one of funding.
‘There (are) a lot of ambitious projects that we’ve got with the Marine Unit, the (police) helicopter and…financially, we can’t get everything we want.’
Recent police crime and traffic statistics may not make a strong case for hiring traffic wardens.
Since the amendment allowing the traffic wardens was passed in early 2006, serious crime has plummeted in the Cayman Islands to 26 per cent in 2006, according to RCIPS stats. It dropped another 14 per cent in the first three months of this year.
The number of vehicle accidents on island roads sharply increased last year. However, accidents dropped by about five per cent in the first quarter of this year.
For the first three months of 2007, the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service issued nearly 1,500 citations for speeding. That works out to more than 16 tickets per day. It’s also a 71 per cent jump in speeding tickets when compared to the first three months of 2006.
Drunken driving citations also went up by about ten percent from the first quarter of this year when compared to the first quarter of ’06.
In addition to the increased enforcement, police have also brought in three mobile trailers to monitor and record driver’s speeds. One of the devices is used each day in West Bay, George Town and the Eastern Districts.
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