Tis the season for festive R.I.D.E. campaigns, now that West Region OPP have made their annual pledge to tackle impaired driving and other unsafe behaviours in the London region.
On provincial roads, 1,000 people have been killed in impaired driving crashes over the past 15 years. Half of those people killed were not the ones who were drinking.
“Those numbers are unacceptable,” said John Cain, chief superintendent of West Region OPP.
“We are working this festive season to take as many impaired operators of the road.”
Officers are catching drivers who are impaired, speeding, distracted, or not wearing a seatbelt with a variety of tools showcased at Friday’s launch at the St. Thomas Municipal Airport. That includes an OPP airplane used throughout the province and three cruisers equipped with a $5000 device that can tag vehicles with GPS-tracking darts.
The latter is a year-long pilot project, specific to West Region.
“If we believe that vehicle might flee from us, we can deploy that tag to stick to the vehicle and then we can disengage and track it through our communication centre in London,” said Shawn Kivell, a traffic sergeant with the London highway safety division.
Introduced during the May long weekend this year, Kivell said the equipment has already proved helpful in tracking a suspicious truck towing a large trailer.
“I was able to deploy the tag on the back of the trailer, and we tried tracking the vehicle down. And I think the driver realized there was a lot of police officers showing up wherever he went, so he actually parked the trailer in the back of an apartment complex in Kitchener.”
Kivell learned the contents of the trailer were stolen goods from a break and enter and police were able to return the stolen property to a homeowner.
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Police also have eyes in the sky; an aviation services pilot and observer were also on hand for Friday’s launch. Recently, pilot Stephan Chambers says there’s been a shift towards using the plane for monitoring commercial vehicles.
“Commerical vehicles cause quite an impact on the traffic flow whenever they have collisions or whenever they have wheel offs,” he explained. The plane has been effective in helping OPP lay charges against commercial vehicle drivers.
London police will also hit city streets, with the launch of their own R.I.D.E program Friday night. They’re encouraging people to drink responsibly through their “Don’t be a Grinch” social media campaign.
Each weekend, with funding assistance from MADD, city police will target random locations each weekend up until New Year’s Eve. Last year, between November and December, officers laid more than 50 impaired driving-related charges.
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