Prevent
Prevention of road trauma through partnerships is a cornerstone of our approach to road safety. This involves leveraging our knowledge and experience to foster collaboration with our road safety partners and the broader community.
Embracing a structured and consistent methodology, the Neighbourhood Policing Framework guides how police engage with their communities.
We will use the framework’s Community Issues Register and Community Sentiment Survey to understand the community’s road safety related issues and risks to determine preventative approaches.
Under this framework, every member assumes the responsibility to actively engage with the community, adopting a problem-solving approach to address road safety issues.
Through Road Policing Command’s Road Safety Education Hub, we will provide additional resources, informed by academic partnerships, to assist our frontline members to interact with road users more effectively. This includes identifying opportunities to provide consent-based referrals to relevant support services for road users seeking assistance for long term behavioural change.
Our commitment extends beyond enforcement, emphasising a proactive and community-centric approach to create lasting impacts on road safety.
What does prevention look like?
- Working with the community through our Neighbourhood Policing Framework to understand local road safety issues and to identify opportunities to reduce risk and prevent offending.
- Collaborating with our road safety partners to identify where improvements to road safety infrastructure will reduce risk across the road network, engagement related to major road policing operations and identifying opportunities for legislative reform to prevent road trauma.
- Taking a restorative approach to refer road users identified as at-risk to support services that assist them in removing some of the factors that may be contributing to their offending. These may include drug and alcohol counselling and/or culturally appropriate referrals for those in our community that need support to obtain, renew or re-instate licences.
- Proactively targeting recidivist high risk road users to address their ongoing offending through our offender management processes.
- Maintaining strong relationships with jurisdictional partners and academic institutions to explore new road safety initiatives while understanding the behaviours and motivations that contribute to road user behaviour.
- Access to evidence-based resources and emerging research, hosted by the Road Safety Education Hub, to support continuous improvement in workforce practices.
Enforce
Enforcement is a crucial and impactful mechanism for promoting safe road user behaviour and adherence to road rules.
We will police all forms of non-compliance to instigate behavioural change and enforce when appropriate, in addition to continuing a sustained effort to detect and prosecute high-risk offenders.
Historical road trauma data indicates that approximately two thirds of all road trauma is caused by single acts of non-compliance, such as low-range speeding, any form of distraction, seatbelt non-compliance and failure to obey traffic control signs.8
While media often focuses on high-risk and high-harm behaviours, it is habitual non-compliance, committed by a significant proportion of road users, that multiplies the risk of a serious collision. We will place a renewed focus on this type of non-compliance with the objective of influencing the road user’s behaviour in the long term.
Our commitment involves enhancing enforcement efforts through intelligence-led, evidence-based approaches and leveraging new technology. This strategic approach will ensure that our resources are directed to the areas where the greatest impact can be delivered, reinforcing our mission to create a safer road environment.
What does enforcement look like?
- Increasing enforcement against single acts of non-compliance.
- Achieving our target numbers of annual roadside drug and breath tests.
- Prioritising enforcement on rural roads to reduce complacency and increase the perception of detection.
- Supporting the expansion of automated enforcement via road safety speed, red light and distracted driver and seatbelt cameras.
- Proactively targeting recidivist high risk road users utilising our offender management principles to reduce ongoing harm to themselves and other road users.
Deter
Experts have identified deterrence as our best source of defence in changing road user behaviour.
There are two forms of deterrence: general and specific.
General deterrence is the extent to which people are deterred from doing an action, not because they have been caught, but because they believe they may be caught and the consequences of being caught are undesirable.
Key to this approach is:
- Maintaining a highly visible police presence. The presence of police patrolling high risk areas such as shopping strips, major arterial roads and school zones and conducting vehicle intercepts in marked and unmarked patrol cars serves as a visible deterrent, signalling that traffic laws are actively enforced anytime, anywhere.
- Conducting frequent preliminary testing sites (PTS). Drug and alcohol enforcement contributes to general deterrence as hundreds of drivers can be tested while thousands of road users see the PTS and are deterred from offending. This creates a ‘halo effect’ of deterrence.
- Increasing the perception that enforcement is probable. This involves the use of unmarked patrol cars in conjunction with a highly visible police presence to ensure that road users believe that they cannot easily avoid detection by seeing police before they are caught.
- Delivering consistent community messaging. Developing an evidence-based engagement strategy to guide our communications with the public about road safety issues. Distributed through various media channels, including languages other than English, to inform the community about the risks of unsafe driving while emphasising the likelihood of detection and subsequent legal ramifications.
- Consistently imposing penalties. Ensuring penalties for traffic offences are consistently applied and are of sufficient severity to dissuade potential offenders.
- Using community engagement opportunities. Engaging the community in road safety initiatives creates a shared responsibility for ensuring safer roads, fostering a culture that prioritises safe driving over convenience or timeliness. Key messaging will be designed to be translated into various languages and include an Easy English version to ensure all members of the community have equal access to road safety information.
- Enhancing opportunities for media. The media can be proactively engaged to provide broader awareness of enforcement activities, leading to an increased perception of being caught.
- Adopting new and emerging technological measures. Implementing technologies such as road safety cameras and other automated enforcement systems contributes to a continuous monitoring system, reinforcing the idea that unlawful behaviours are likely to be detected.
- Reviewing and revising policy and legislation. Developing and influencing policy and legislation to address road safety risks and promote responsible driving behaviour.
General deterrence: The halo effect
Regardless of the outcome, your intercept has a significant influence on:
- drivers
- passengers
- everyone they tell
- anyone else who witnesses it.
Police are enforcing against all forms of non-compliance.
The general deterrence halo effect
Specific deterrence is the extent to which a person is deterred from doing a certain action because they have been caught and penalised for that behaviour.
Specific deterrence typically involves the following elements:
- Penalties. Imposing specific penalties, such as fines, demerit points and licence suspensions, on individuals who violate traffic laws. The severity of the penalty is intended to discourage the offender from repeating the behaviour.
- Legal consequences. Ensuring that individuals face legal consequences, such as court appearances and potential criminal charges, in response to more serious or repeated offences.
- Rehabilitation. Providing consent-based referral services to address underlying issues and promote behaviour change.
- Recidivist high risk road users. We will proactively manage known high risk road users in line with our Offender Management Principles.
- Vehicle impounds. Impounding the vehicles of repeat offenders or those involved in serious offences can serve as a powerful disincentive to further offending.
In essence, specific deterrence aims to create a personal disincentive for the individual offender, using targeted consequences to discourage them from engaging in future risky or unlawful behaviours on the road.
Intentional high risk drivers and riders will be a particular focus for specific deterrence.
Engage
Road safety is a shared responsibility. Victoria Police is committed to building and maintaining strong partnerships across the community, government, and businesses.
To achieve this, we will:
- Connect with partners to respond to local issues.
- Collaborate with partners to enhance crime prevention and reduce harm.
- Invest in and grow strategic partnerships, nationally and internationally.
Using the Neighbourhood Policing Framework will ensure local police address road safety concerns in collaboration with their community, tailored to local needs.
Tailored communication tools for frontline police will highlight that each interaction with the community provides an opportunity to actively reinforce the benefits of safe road user behaviour.
How will we engage?
- Through direct engagement. By involving the community in road safety initiatives and fostering a sense of shared responsibility in adhering to traffic laws, collectively we will contribute to a culture where safe driving is considered normal behaviour. We also acknowledge that we need to develop inclusive messaging for our culturally and language diverse communities to ensure we connect with everyone.
- Training and equipping our workforce by providing ready access to road safety education material relevant for our frontline. Members will be provided with communication tools to inform conversations with road users, treating every interaction as an opportunity to reiterate road safety messaging and influence behaviour.
- Reinforcing road safety messaging. In conjunction with our road safety partners, we will ensure that road safety messaging is consistent and relatable to all road users to increase general deterrence.
- Strengthening relationships with local councils and road safety committees to identify and remedy road infrastructure hazards.
Enhance
Our approach to road safety will be enhanced through our commitment to refining our current procedures and developing new capabilities to address emerging challenges, supporting our organisation to deliver its road safety objectives.
A key focus will be the continuous improvement of our existing processes through technological advancements and new methods to detect offending.
How will we enhance our approach to road safety?
- Equipment and information. By increasing the efficiency of our members in the field with state-of-the-art equipment and enhancing our intelligence analysis, so that we are in the right place at the right time.
- Innovation. Continually exploring innovative approaches to ensure that our efforts in prevention, deterrence, enforcement, and engagement are not only effective but also efficient and co-ordinated. This includes setting a clear vision and periodically evaluating the growth of programs (such as Roadside Drug Testing) against their outcomes aimed at delivering increased public safety.
- Refreshing and replacing assets. Introduction of next generation preliminary breath testing devices that will enable us to map our enforcement efforts and accurately record every interaction with road users. When combined with other intelligence, this information will assist in improving the tasking and coordination of frontline units.
- Intelligence and data use. Improved reporting and monitoring of related road safety data through the Organisational Performance Hub creating accountability and visibility of road safety operations.
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