Western Cape has the highest percentage of drunk driving arrests in South Africa.
|||The Western Cape has the highest percentage of drunk driving arrests in South Africa - and has been the capital for such busts for the past four years.
But authorities say this does not mean Western Cape residents are the drunkest drivers on South Africa’s roads - rather, the Western Cape’s roads are the most strictly policed.
The most recent crime statistics show that the Western Cape has consistently had the highest percentage of drunk driver arrests, from 2008/09 all the way through to 2011/12.
Over the past four years the figure stood at 242 (2009), 292 (2010), 330 (2011) and 331 (2012) arrests per 100 000 people. In each of these years, the Western Cape’s bust rate is more than double the national average.
But authorities say active drivers make up far less than the whole population so these percentages ought to be far higher once all non-drivers in the population are extracted from the equation, .
NUMBER OF REPORTED CASES RISING
Equally, the number of reported cases has been rising every year - 6853 in 2004/5, 8114 in 2005/06, 9583 in 2006/07, 11 616 in 2007/08, 12 741 in 2008/09, 15 644 in 2009/10, 17 244 in 2010/11 and 17 534 in 2011/12.
The Western Cape’s arrest numbers are closely matched by those of Gauteng - but Gauteng has a population of about 12 million, against the Western Cape’s approximately six million.
The Cape Town’s mayoral committee member for safety and security, JP Smith, said the statistics were evidence of a trend entirely different from what many would automatically assume: instead of proving that the Western Cape was a province of drunk drivers, he said it proved that policing of drunk driving was more thorough in Cape Town than anywhere else in the country. The figures, he explained, were culled from “police-initiated statistics”. This meant they were not a reflection of crime levels but of policing levels.
“Lower figures mean lower policing.”
“These figures are an indicator of our level of focus on this problem,” he said. “Similarly, the lower figures do not mean an absence of the problem, but an absence of focus on the problem.”
Smith said his interpretation could be proved by the fact that while drunk driving arrests were the highest in the province, the road fatality figure continued to drop faster than anywhere else in South Africa.
Transport MEC Robin Carlisle said his department was trying to verify the police’s figures, but he decried the recent rise in drunk driving arrests - especially since the suspension of the Name and Shame campaign.
Carlisle, national justice minister Jeff Radebe and various officials are in negotiations to ensure that the Name and Shame campaign is reinstated.
“It’s just one weapon in our arsenal to make our roads safer.”
South Africans Against Drunk Drivers and the Automobile Association have called for the campaign’s re-instatement.
AA spokesman Gary Ronald said: “The Name and Shame campaign does have an influence on behaviour change. Other countries that have implemented it have seen similar reductions - so we would support the continuation of this campaign. We hope this will be resolved very quickly.”
The campaign’s list of names is made up of recently convicted drivers sentenced in Western Cape criminal courts. Their names have been handed over to the provincial transport department for capture on the electronic eNatis database. - Cape Argus