ColinOldnCranky wrote:Undertow wrote:I was purposefully including all traffic problems in my criteria, as they should all be treated equally...
Is that so? You have implied earlier that they should treat whole classes of issues LESS equally but that all VEHICLE related instances should be treated equally.
[/quote]
I did not imply that, you inferred it.
ColinOldnCranky wrote:Undertow wrote:I would like you to be correct on this point, however it doesn't seem to be the case. Cops do get to choose.
Sorry, careless choice of words on my part. They do not get to choose carte blanche not investigate, say, burglaries, out of control parties, family assaults,etc. Thatis policy and priority set from on high and varies from time to time acording to the demands of society/politicians/changing trends.
Undertow wrote:Cops do get to choose, this is evident by the number of complaints seen on this and other forums about the police not following up on there complaints.
And this is my point. They will work on some matters and dismiss others, for the simple reason that there are only 168 hours in the week and considerably less in a working week. And if they experience too many less than worthy complaints from a group then the outcome is likely to be that they will spend less time looking at the merits of that group of compalint. We can affect how un-equally we are treated.
I'm not saying other issues should be ignored so more resourced can be spent on vehicle related issues. I'm saying that as a whole vehicle related issues have the greatest impact on our society and therefore the police should take this into account when allocating their resources.
Here is what I have found so far on the cost of traffic issues.
"In this paper, we obtain detailed data on road traffic crash (RTC) casualties, by severity, for each of the eight state and territory jurisdictions for Australia and use these to estimate and compare the economic impact of RTCs across these regions. We show that the annual cost of RTCs in Australia, in 2003, was approximately Dollars 17 b, which is approximately 2.3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)."
source:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16797462" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Also "The total recurrent expenditure on police services around Australia in 2009–10 was approximately $8.5b"
source:
https://aic.gov.au/en/publications/curr ... urces.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Surely if we as a society are spending over twice as much per year to clean up road traffic crashes as we are spending on police in total you would have to agree that the police either aren't treating traffic issues seriously enough, or they are grossly underfunded.