Roads Policing Unit head hails 2024 a year of road safety successes

As 2024 ends, Head of Essex Police’s Roads Policing Unit (RPU) looks back at some of the policing activities carried out by his officers to identify and target those involved in the criminal use of our roads and to reduce killed and seriously injured collisions.

Throughout the year, my officers have been dedicated to keeping roads in Essex safe for everyone, keeping traffic moving and carrying out enforcement activities to target dangerous drivers who put other drivers and vulnerable road users at risk.
We patrol all the county’s roads, whether they are the strategic road networks or the lesser used, more rural roads, because no matter what the location or the speed limit, each one has an important role to play within our communities and their daily lives. It’s our job to ensure that each one is safe to be used and they’re not used by those offenders who think that they can move about Essex undetected, because they can’t.
We work closely with partners and other teams from across the force to tackle a variety of unlawful road-related offences, including the Safer Essex Roads Partnership, local councils, Highways England and Motor Insurers Bureau, because they share our ambition to make roads safe for everyone and have an important stake in this vital work.

Operational activities target areas identified through public and partners’ concerns and evaluation of available data, to support Vision Zero - our ambition to have no more roads deaths in Essex by 2040 or sooner. Between April and December, RPU held 28 Vision Zero days focussing on the Fatal Four offences - speeding, non-wearing of seatbelts, using your mobile phone whilst driving and drink or drug drivers. All four offences are illegal and recognised as contributing factors in killed and seriously injured collisions and we want to educate the public about the associated risks.

To increase road safety and improve driving standards, our collision prosecution team review incidents of poor and dangerous driving and take the most appropriate action. Throughout 2024, the team have reviewed cases that includes 214 files created to be presented at court.

As an alternative to a court hearing, 122 drivers acknowledged that their driving standard fell below requirements on an occasion, and accepted conditional offers where they had their driving licences endorsed with points and fined, according to sentencing guidelines.

But education is also a consideration in many cases and 642 drivers who acknowledged that their driving fell below the standards expected were offered and attended a driving course.

Throughout December, RPU took part in the national Christmas drink drive campaign. In the first weekend of December 2024, 30 drivers were arrested in the 3-day period between 6 and 8 December - 15 drink drivers, 13 drug drivers and 2 motorists for failing to provide a specimen. This builds on the 889 arrests Roads Policing Unit officers have made between January and the end of November to uphold the law and keep you safe. Of those arrests, 239 were for drink driving, 467 for drug driving and a further 47 arrests for drivers who failed to provide a specimen.

By highlighting this work, we aim to educate the public that there are safer alternatives to drink or drug driving because taking such a risk when you’re over the legal limit could result in a court appearance leading to disqualification, and added complications such as losing your job because you can no longer drive. Or it could be worse and end in a fatality.

Between September to November 2024, RPU officers have also worked with MIB to take uninsured vehicles off our road across the county including Thurrock, Southend, Castle Point, Epping Forest, and Chelmsford districts. In that time, the partnership team held 12 events resulting in 159 uninsured vehicles being seized, the highest number of seizures being cars, followed by vans, motorbikes and HGVs. Fifty percent of uninsured drivers were between 25 and 50 years old, 26% under 25 years old and 22% between 51 and 70 years old.

These days of action also resulted in 8 arrests and over 300 traffic reports being issued for a variety of offences including driving without due care, vehicles being unroadworthy or poor and dangerous driving.

In fact, a total of 3,089 uninsured vehicles were seized in the first nine months of 2024 as part of Operation Scalis, a multi-agency approach to deny criminal use of our roads by focussing on tackling unsafe vehicles, because they are some of the most dangerous on our roads.

But we couldn’t do all of this without the help of our colleagues such as the Roads Policing Prosecutions team. Their important work builds on the success of my officers’ arrests, and they assist in evidence gathering or taking a leading role in prosecuting cases held at traffic court hearings each month.
Their professionalism, legal knowledge and attention to detail means that offenders are rightly brought to justice.

Between January and November, Roads Policing Prosecutions successfully processed:

• 12,401 single justice procedure cases laid to court;
• 455 careless collision offences were laid to court.

And we are also grateful to our Speed Enforcement Officers who are specially trained police staff who monitor speeding offences across the county and engage with our communities who raise concerns about the effect of speeding in their area – they often work with Community Speedwatch to great effect and help pupils at schools to challenge drivers speeding in the vicinity of their schools as part of Schoolwatch.
I’d encourage everyone to work with us, get involved and play their part in keeping our roads safe: it’s the right thing to do.

Help us reduce road collisions and casualties in Essex and make our roads even safer. Report instances of poor and dangerous driving through Safer Essex Roads Partnership's Extra Eyes initiative.

More than ever, irresponsible, dangerous and illegal road behaviour is being recorded by road users. Through Extra Eyes this footage can be sent to, and reviewed by, an investigator within Road Policing at Essex Police.

Find out how by visiting Safer Essex Roads Partnership website.

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