Teams honoured for keeping Wiltshire's roads safe in 2023
It follows a campaign to reduce fatalities and injury on our roads
The various teams working to keep us safe on Wiltshire's roads have been praised by the county's High Sheriff.
Wiltshire High Sheriff Pradeep Bhardwaj attended the Force headquarters in Devizes on his penultimate day in office to hand awards to the Roads Policing Unit, Serious Collision Investigation Team, Forensic Collision Investigation Unit, Speed Enforcement Team and Specials Road Safety Unit.
“Today is to celebrate the hard work that each one of you does," he said, adding: “I’d like to personally thank each one of you for all the good things you do day in and day out.”
The certificates were in recognition of each unit's work on the roads, including targeting driving offences and speeders to investigatory and forensic work when a collision has occurred.
How each team contributed to making our roads safer
Through their combined efforts, there was a 25 per cent reduction in the number of serious and fatal collisions last year.
This was through a road safety campaign introduced last summer in response to a high number of fatal and serious injury collisions.
The Roads Policing Unit (RPU) introduced Project Zero as part of that campaign, which continues to take place every Wednesday and sees specific locations in the county inundated with RPU officers targeting the ‘Fatal Five’ offences.
RPU is supported by the Specials Road Safety Unit, made of volunteers, while the Serious Collision Investigation Team heads up the investigation of all serious injury and fatal road traffic collisions.
Their work, often in circumstances of extreme distress, saw 38% of collisions attended in 2023 either charged or with a case being built as a potential prosecution case.
The Forensic Collision Investigation Unit provides the forensic response to all serious injury and fatal collisions gathering evidence by various scientific techniques to reconstruct the collision. Their work is critical to cases being taken to court.
The Speed Enforcement Team, as well as their daily work around the county, assists RPU with Project Zero days of action. On average last year they dealt with 686 speeding drivers a month.
The High Sheriff added: “All five of the teams have worked together to help reduce serious and fatal collisions in Wiltshire by 25 per cent in the last year.
“We all agree that one serious or fatal collision is one too many and we cannot count how many lives these teams have saved.”
The awards ceremony was also attended by Chief Constable Catherine Roper.
She said: “These teams work incredibly hard to make sure we’re safe on our roads.
“The success of the road safety campaign last year is testament to the incredible amount of work that they do and continue to do to ensure that the public is as safe as possible on our roads.
“It is right that they are recognised for their outstanding work.”