By Sarah Wallace

POLL: PAPS and SGI tackle drinking and driving

Jul 29, 2013 | 7:01 AM

As the city reels from the deaths of Brandy Lepine and Taylor Litwin, who were allegedly killed by an intoxicated driver, the Prince Albert Police Service (PAPS) is working hard to curb that behaviour and make the streets safer.

Over the last year, there has been an increase in drinking and driving cases in the city, and in 2012 reports for impaired driving went up from 105 in 2011 to 129.

Prince Albert’s Police Chief Troy Cooper says over the last year, due to the increase in numbers, officers have also had an increase in training relating to dealing with drunk drivers. It’s also a highlighted area for officers in addition to increasing targetted enforcement.

“We’ve seen some success by simply being out there with [drunk driving] as more of a priority for our service. We’ve noticed that our criminal charges and convictions have been increasing this year,” Cooper said.

Cooper said the increase in training includes “learning how to identify symptoms of impairment so you can utilize those observations in court later on, the training that does take a lot of time and resources is the training required to run the breathalyzer equipment, etcetera.”

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“For us just to have officers on the street doesn’t help us a lot if we don’t have trained equipment operators as well,” Cooper continued.

Alcohol-related offenses in Prince Albert rose over the past year despite a reported drop in overall crime rates, according to statistics released by PAPS in February.

Cooper said the police have seen an increase in charges laid but that doesn’t necessarily reflect an increase in the amount of people driving around drunk.

Because the police have made cracking down on drunk drivers a priority and have practiced targeted enforcement, the numbers have increased.

“Since last year we have about a 39 per cent increase in arrests for impaired driving, year to date. On a positive [note] is the fact that our publicly reported impaired drivers are down. I would hope from those stats we could suggest that less people are driving impaired but the ones that are driving impaired are more likely to be caught by police,” Cooper said.

The RID program, or Report Impaired Drivers, has allowed the police to have more open discussions with the community.

“It drew attention to the fact that … impaired driving is not an acceptable behavior in our community, it’s not something that we think of as being acceptable. In our community especially we’ve had some horrifying incidents that really brought that to light and underlined the need for legislative changes and underlined the need for more enforcement and underlined that need for that discussion to take place among the target group itself, that it’s not something that’s acceptable,” Cooper explained.

The most common age for impaired driving is 20-24 years-old, the average age is around 30 but that’s because a bulk of the offenders are 25-29 years-old and 30-34 years-old.

So far this year, there’s been a 28 per cent decrease in reporting drunk drivers by the public.

“There’s lots of factors of course that would impact [those numbers] including we had a very bad spring so there’d be less people out and about driving, which would have slowed that down, that probably is one of the reasons why less people reported driving impaired,” Cooper said.

“Targeted enforcement is something that’s supported by SGI as well. They want the police officers to be out there enforcing the laws relating to impaired driving because it’s no secret that impaired driving is responsible for a great deal of the accidents and injuries that occur on the roadways, so SGI has a vested interest in participating with us on that,” he said.

He said taking part in SGI’s operation blitzes is a benefit to the community and is a reminder to the residents that if they were to take a chance and drive drunk they run a great risk of being found and punished.

“In addition to the way the community looks at people who do that sort of activity now, it’s like smoking. Years ago it was acceptable to smoke in a restaurant or smoke in a public place and it’s community pressure that made that something that no one will do anymore,” said Cooper.

“It wasn’t legislative changes it was simply sort of an understood value in our community that we don’t smoke in public anymore, the same thing needs to happen with impaired driving, it has to be socially unacceptable.”

Cooper along with other members of the community and Community Mobilization are working on an alcohol strategy to continue efforts to minimize and eventually stop drinking and driving in the community.

“We looked at our community needs. One of them is obviously is the need to address impaired driving and that’s just one of the number of related alcohol events that will be dealt with through our community regional alcohol strategy,” Cooper explained.

They will also be tackling issues such as chronic alcoholism, binge drinking and youth access to alcohol.

“What we’ve done now is the Community Mobilization has been the platform to work on the alcohol strategy and we’ve been able to utilize the health employee [from Parkland Health] whose a trained a professional facilitator. So what she’s doing is bringing the groups together, all the interested and invested stakeholders, social stakeholders and we’re going to be meeting again shortly to start putting some flesh on the framework … so that we can at the end of the project have a direction for each one of us who has an interest in responsible alcohol sale and consumption,” Cooper finished.

PAPS have a real role in the project and the role is enforcement, and Cooper says they’ve seen the interest of police in the numbers that have come back.

SGI on drinking and driving

According to SGI’s Kim Hambleton, manager of communications, in 2012 alone there were 3,173 Criminal Code convictions in Saskatchewan for impaired driving, which includes impaired driving while along and convictions for impaired driving causing death or injury.

In 2012, there were 37 fatalities in Saskatchewan due to collisions involving alcohol and about 350 injuries.

“Impaired driving has always been one of our key traffic safety focuses. We’re partners in the RID program … where people are encouraged to call 911 if they see someone they believed to be driving impaired,” Hambleton explained.

SGI sponsors a number of safe ride programs, for example offering free bus service in communities for New Year’s.

“One of our newer initiatives, which has been really popular, is that we launched a Safe Ride app that’s free to download for smart phones, where customers can check the app, it will give them bus schedules, the nearest bus stop, all the numbers of the taxi companies or designated driver services in their communities, as well as allows them to contact a designated driver from their own contact list,” Hambleton said.

swallace@panow.com

On Twitter: @sarahthesquid