Police are stepping up their game to effect more prosecutions from road accidents.
Concerned about what he calls the “mash up and buy back mentality”, which sees people getting into accidents and the insurance paying for damages, Inspector Roland Stanford said too many cases went lagging because people were not coming forward to give evidence.
“What we intend to do is to have more prosecutions coming out of accidents. But, again, we depend on the ones who would have witnessed to assist us with statements. But even if we don’t have those statements, we will still proceed,” Stanford warned.
The inspector said safety was everyone’s business, and he appealed to pedestrians and motorists alike to take care when using the island’s roads.
He lamented he was seeing too much carelessness and recklessness on the streets.
Barbados Road Safety Association president Sharmane Roland-Bowen said the laws needed to be enforced because people were committing offences and “not feeling it”, because insurance kicked in.
“If you go out there and you break the traffic law, and you get into an accident, you should be punished,” Roland-Bowen said, as she encouraged people to come forward and help bring offenders to justice.
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