No licence to misbehave

There are enough reasons to decriminalise these offences.

According to Attorney General Faris Al Rawi, the State will reduce a backlog, estimated at about 100,000. The system already has between 126,000 to 140,000 cases a year passing through the magistracy.

At the same time, the magistracy has very limited pool of resources at its disposal.

“We have 48 sitting magistrates, 38 of whom sit in the criminal courts, nine judges sitting in the criminal High Court and a total of 30 judges at the level of the High Court, and 11 justices of appeal,” he said in Parliament as the legislation moved to the House of Representatives.

Only six per cent of the people who are charged on a yearly basis are in fact given a verdict by the court. The other 94 per cent, the Attorney General said, are the subject of charges that go into the backlog.

The administering of traffic offences including the use of attorneys, issuing of warrants and hearing of cases, Al-Rawi said, takes up hundreds of thousands of man hours that could be better used elsewhere. Fines for traffic offences collected between 2010 to 2015 were $250 million. But the overall expenditure on the system for the past seven years has been about $7 billion.

It is true, however, that the law has a symbolic function. And it can be said that the State is sending the wrong signal. Instead of seeming to dilute the gravity of road offences, it should be doing the opposite. And every offence, no matter how seemingly trivial or procedural, adds up.

But this is not the case if the system of law and order is so overburdened as to be paralyzed. If these cases end up getting stuck for years, if they delay other more grave cases and divert resources from them, then the effect is an undermining of the system of law and order generally. That is not good for anyone.

Further, as stated by Al Rawi, the most serious of road offences will remain criminal. This means, there will be adequate protections in place to defer the worst kind of conduct.

What’s more, having a better streamlined system, involving the use of points, which can be administered by a wider pool of personnel will result in more efficient policing of wrong-doing.

It may well be that the system of violations will actually be more effective than a system of offences in the long-run as the State’s capacity to handle these could increase over time.

Of course, all of this is contingent on adequate resources being given to police officers to manage traffic. The Attorney General noted this country is still using the breathalyser while other countries have long moved on to devices that can also read levels of drug intoxication beyond booze.

Disconcertingly, while the State has figures for traffic offences across the country there were two notable omissions in the Attorney General’s presentation in Parliament.

It is not clear why figures for San Fernando and Tobago were not available, but we feel these figures are very important and should be included in any debate on national road safety initiatives.

For now, we welcome this new legislation and urge citizens to remember that once implemented, it will not be a licence to misbehave.

In fact, it may well be the opposite.