A thought provoking interview with one of Victorias top police officers. Note the change in attitude towards policing road issues, his dislike of the term “accident” and yes, Noel is a keen cyclist.
Saturday Age April 29 2006

Encounter – Driving the issue home: Ian Munro speaks to Noel Ashby

Motorists need to change their attitude towards speed if we are to reduce the death toll, says the man in charge of policing the state’s roads.

Policing takes its practitioners to dark places. It confronts them with the awful consequences of human conduct, the intended as well as the unforeseen – the outcomes of sometimes malicious, sometimes stupid and sometimes just plain unlucky behaviour. And still, after all that, it has the capacity to surprise. Eight years with the homicide squad investigating about 60 murder cases did not entirely prepare Assistant Commissioner Noel Ashby for the realisation that the everyday tragedy of road fatalities can be even more sweeping in its effects.

“The striking feature that stays with me is that most homicides, while they have a significant amount of public focus and are clearly tragic in every way, have a really profound difference with road trauma,” Ashby says. “That is because, those people that kill (on the road) often kill the person that’s closest to them. “It is often someone they love deeply, and had no intent or desire to hurt in anyway. And suddenly they carry this massive emotional scar. For often the simplest, smallest of reasons, they have killed someone, and it’s worse when they kill numbers of them.

“The ongoing trauma for that person is immense and the family implications, well, profound does not overstate it. “At least with homicide you often see a reason. It’s a breakdown in a relationship quite often, and there is a reason, no matter how poor, how reviling the reason may be, there is a reason. With road trauma there is no reason. There’s no intent to do anything, and that’s a really significant emotional difference.”

Ashby took charge of Victoria Police’s traffic section late last year and began changing the way traffic policing operates. It is as though he has begun a battle for the hearts and minds of the state’s motorists, reflected this week in the decision to reveal the 2593 approved sites where mobile speed cameras may be deployed. That decision was greeted with much scepticism by sections of the media and the public, for whom the newly rigorous use of speed cameras is commonly seen as a revenue-gathering exercise for the State Government. Police Minister Tim Holding seemed to anticipate as much when he said he wanted to shift the road safety debate away from issues such as the location of speed cameras and on to what can be done to slow down traffic.

Look back to the time the state’s road toll was three times what it is now, and from a much smaller motoring population, Ashby says, and the circuit-breaker was the introduction of the compulsory wearing of seatbelts. That was accompanied by a similar debate about individual rights and government intrusion. Had the death toll from that time grown in line with the growth in the number of those licensed to drive, the toll would be more than 2000 dead each year, five to six times what
it is now.

Other factors that pushed the toll down were the introduction of booze buses, the Traffic Accident Commission graphic road safety advertisements and the beginnings of the speed camera program in the late 1980s. “Each of those initiatives had significant social debate, quite significant, and I think we forget that with the passage of time,” Ashby says.

“Now we are at the stage where people regard not driving with your seatbelt as generally stupid. And drink-driving is no longer merely a social offence, which it was. We are going through a similar debate now. “The threads of the debate are probably the same. People did not think they would be injured without a seatbelt, or a significantly increased risk if they drink-drive. That’s the same as now, but there is absolutely no doubt on all the evidence that speed is the major cause of road trauma.

“We are asking society to make a cultural shift in terms of their attitude to speeding. People can have the debate and say it’s about revenue raising, but what we can do is to simply be open about what we are doing.” It is a shift in thinking he remembers from his own youth when, as a teenage, growing up in East Brighton, the airwaves hummed with opinions about compulsory seatbelt laws. Since joining the police in the mid-1970s, Ashby has seen first-hand the road toll and the changes in behaviour it has brought. Even his recreation takes place on the road: with a group of mates he cycles about 150 kilometres per week through the eastern suburbs and out towards Yarra Glen.

Among the changes Ashby has overseen since late last year is using multiple booze buses in a co-ordinated deployment for a specific region of Melbourne instead of sending individual buses to several regions. The “wolf pack” deployment has lifted strike rates for detecting drink-drivers from one in 225 drivers tested to high as one in 56. Last weekend, it was one in 84.

“We spoke (last) December of using booze buses a bit differently. Instead of having one set up at say Broadmeadows, another one at Dandenong and another one at Footscray, let’s use them collectively and in high-risk locations,” Ashby says.

“We have done that three times now. We set up a booze bus on the Eastern Freeway; it’s a bit hit-and-miss if we don’t support it with other activity round it. “We know there’s a number of people are going to go through other routes… we will now look at the option of taking that strategy of massed booze buses into regional areas. “Now, the last operation last week, we publicised it, we told people we were going to do it, and we still got a strike rate of one in 84, which was miles above the one in 225 that we are used to.

“We have also said we are going to take that program out to regional Victoria – perhaps we will have the scope with the seven booze buses which we have – which will soon have the capacity to test for drugs as well – to be able to target Ballarat and Bendigo a single night.” The other shift in deployment of booze buses is the use of police intelligence to identify target areas. A noticeable rise in the number of drink drivers detected by routine police patrols may will be followed by a concentrated booze bus program for the area.

“It’s similar to what’s happening with the drug bus, which has a strike rate of one in 40 or 46 drivers tested,” Ashby says. “People are staggered by that, but the principle behind that is to send the drug bus to high-risk locations where we know rave parties are, where we know nightclub strips are, because we don’t want people using drugs and driving. “It’s a better use of our resources, and more significantly addresses the main causal factors of road trauma. There’s no doubt the four causes of road trauma are alcohol and drugs, speed, (unworn)seatbelts, and to an extent, and it’s not an enforcement issue, it’s more an educational factor, fatigue.”

As part of the new overt traffic policing strategy, there will be a much-diminished reliance on unmarked patrol cars, and a corresponding increase in marked cars, including highway patrol pursuit cars. Traffic research indicates that even the brief appearance of a police vehicle can create a moderating effect on driver behaviour for up to 20 kilometres. High visibility cars then, police reason, are likely to significantly improve driving. But technology, in the form of moving-mode radar, which is taking the place of hand-held radar guns,means police in marked cars will be able to detect the speed of an approaching vehicle before the driver can recognise the marked car as a police vehicle.

This is true even for the bright yellow, highly marked highway cars. Ashby says moving-mode radars can identify the speed of an approaching car from several hundred metres away. Technology in another form holds the key to the next major improvement in reducing the road toll.

This is the introduction of electronic stability control systems, now available in a small number of vehicle models, and which hold the promise of keeping cars on the road in defiance of driver error. The TAC calls it “building in safety” for cars. But for many drivers, electronic control systems that can brake individual wheels to prevent sliding or road run-offs remain an untapped resource. The TAC, Victoria Police and car-makers as well as the State Coroner focussed on electronic control systems at a seminar this month, and see it as a key improvement to safety.

The hurdle is to have the systems introduced into fleet vehicles as standard fittings. In that way they will penetrate the second-hand market within several years and be widespread across the general population within a decade. Ashby compares the spread of stability control systems to the introduction of airbags: “Remember the discussion about airbags? Now you can’t buy a car without at least one airbag, and we are moving to all-round airbags,” he says. That does not change his basic message, however, that reducing speed is the most central element to reducing the number of accidents. Next month police will unveil another initiative by launching a road policing strategy. Among the proposals is the development of community-police committees to initiate feedback about local safety issues.

The idea is that the policing of roads in metropolitan centres will throw up different issues from regional Victoria, and that policing should adapt accordingly. “I don’t want to prescribe who will be on the consultative groups, but obviously local government would have an interest -every time we do this, like our community safety panels, we get significant interest from the public,” Ashby says. The new openness evident this week is an attempt to focus attention on speed again:
Police might well be saying: ‘you know where the cameras are. You will be told when the booze buses are targeting your area: Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

The time is right for a shift in strategy, Ashby says. “It seemed the debate was starting to drive the issues rather than the issues driving the debate,” he says. “There was a very strong focus on revenue-raising and that wasn’t good for road safety, because you look at those stats and you’re talking about peoples lives.”

If there was one other change he could make, maybe it would be to do away with the word “accident” as an explanation for what happens when lives are swept away. “People don’t see the horror of road trauma, and how frightening it can be for the ordinary person who is there one minute, and gone in the most dreadful way the next. “It has such a significant impact on families in searching for a reason, and the reason is simple: someone’s done something to kill someone. “That’s why using the term ‘accident’ is bad – it’s not just an accident, it’s usually caused by speed, alcohol, (lack of a) seatbelt, fatigue or some combination of those.

“The scale of the trauma, it keeps coming. It’s always there. In homicide we get something in the way of 55 or 70 homicides in Victoria each year, and you look at the scale of the road toll and it’s significantly above that. “I can’t think of any other form of death that occurs in society that society would tolerate in these numbers.”

MILESTONES NOEL ASHBY:
1975 – Graduates from Victoria Police Academy.
1981 – Joins homicide squad as a detective constable.
1986 – Marries Dianne. They have a son and daughter.
1988 – Joins accident investigation section at Brunswick as senior sergeant.
1990 – Graduates from Monash University in arts/public administration.
1996 – Becomes detective superintendent in charge of homicide, missing persons, armed robbery, child exploitation, rape and prison squads.
2005 – Appointed Assistant Commissioner (Traffic) having earlier achieved AC rank in charge of Region 5 – south-east Melbourne.

Interest:
A keen cyclist, he rides about 150 kilometres a week through the eastern suburbs and out towards Yarra Glen.

Links:
www.operationcountdown.com.au/pages/links.htm
www.monash.edu.au/muarc/
www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/physed/traffic/

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