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Police involved in 5,000 crashes in six years
Dec 28 2006
By Alex Adams
ROAD safety charity Safespeed has called for a review of driver training after shock figures showed Thames Valley Police officers were involved in nearly 5,000 crashes in the past six years.
The Reading Chronicle has learned that force vehicles crashed 4,973 times between 2001 and March 31 this year.
In these accidents, six members of the public died, 30 were seriously injured and 250 received slight injuries.
But the officers involved did not emerged unscathed either, two have been seriously injured, and 236 officers slightly hurt over the same period.
But Thames Valley road safety standards compare favourably with other forces because last year alone six people were killed in accidents involving Sussex police cars and another five involving Metropolitan Police vehicles.
Between 2000 and 2004, a total of 126 people nationwide were killed in accidents involving police cars.
The statistics, obtained by The Chronicle under the Freedom of Information Act, show that since 2002 police in the Reading area were involved in 102 accidents - but that involved only nine people with slight injuries.
And Safespeed believe the figures underline the need for police forces to send all drivers on a rigorous central training course - of the type that ran at Hendon until 1990.
Safespeed founder Paul Smith said: "The Thames Valley Police figures are quite high, but it is a large police force.
"Nationally, driver training standards have become progressively more decentralised, shorter and less rigorous.
"We should be calling for a return to the previous training standards, which were the highest in the world.
"The Metropolitan Police set up the Metropolitan Driver Training School in Hendon, which accumulated 150,000 man years' worth of experience in about 60 years.
"They built up a tremendous pool of best-training advice, and it spawned the Institute of Advanced Motorists and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents."
Thames Valley spokesman James Clements said: "These figures include every type of incident for the whole of the Thames Valley where a police car has been damaged, including incidents where the car was switched off and parked at the side of a road.
"They show a steady reduction in the number of incidents from 1,127 in 2001-02 to 991 in the last financial year.
"These figures include damage to all vehicles from roads policing vehicles to vans, unmarked cars and corporately marked cars. We have to accept that damage will sometimes occur and the number of incidents remains within tolerable limits."
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