And they think it's only the hoons........

[color=darkred:bdda87a1ec][b:bdda87a1ec]Police in 691 car crashes [/b:bdda87a1ec][/color:bdda87a1ec]
06 March 2006
By JO MCKENZIE-MCLEAN and SEAN SCANLON

Police were involved in nearly 700 car crashes a year even after introducing a major driver training initiative in 2004 to reduce accidents. Figures released to The Press under the Official Information Act show 691 police vehicles were involved in crashes in the year ending October. Police were found to have caused 354 of those accidents (51 per cent). The police crash repair bill, including any third-party repairs, topped $1.21 million.

For the same period the previous year police were involved in 735 crashes and caused more than 380 of those accidents, or 52 per cent. Inspector John Kelly, of police national headquarters, said that the public should keep in mind the extremely high number of driving hours of police vehicles, the nature of police driving which was often under pressure, and that a large percentage of the repairs would involve minor damage.
"Of course, I am not comfortable with any level of risk to either the police drivers or the public," he said.

The Professional Police Driver Programme was introduced in late 2004, and was designed to address safety concerns and to better manage police driving. About 56% of police drivers have been put through the programme, he said. Staff were assessed on their driving ability, attitude, risk management, decision-making and driving record and, depending on the outcome of the assessment, officers were assigned a gold, silver or bronze classification, he said.

Extra training and upskilling was offered, and drivers who had been involved in a crash were given further training. Figures for Canterbury show 74 police cars were involved in crashes for the year to October, of which 44 were found to be the fault of police officers. Canterbury road policing manager, Inspector Derek Erasmus, said police crashes were inevitable.
"Under our policy we are able to do stationary blocks and depending on what the offending driving is doing, damage results to our vehicles. If we compare results with other high fleet users such as taxi companies, we compare very favourably with the number of crashes we have." Most crashes in Canterbury were very minor, he said. "I would, of course, rather we don't have any but the reality of the job means we do have crashes, particularly when offenders are intent on ramming us."

About 75% of Canterbury drivers had been through the driving programme and all staff should have gone through the programme by October, Erasmus said. Canterbury is the biggest police district in the country and had the second highest number of police crashes in the country. Auckland City had the highest number ? 110, 67 of which were caused by police, in the year ending October. Superintendent Bill Harrison, of the Commissioner's Support Group, said on average police cars drove 186,440km before being involved in a crash for which police were responsible

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Actually, since you mention it....I was watching a big NZ traffic police/Hoon thing on men and motors on sunday.

There main subject case was the this las who got his girlfirend and a friend killed tragically whilst going to a popular meeting place for burnouts and illegal drag races.

It wasn't the race that casued the accident tho, on the way there, they missed there turn, did a U-turn in the road.......whilst a truck was coming!!! That's just stupidity, not the fact he was a hoon. But my point is they were blaming the culture for the accident tha would have been caused if he was driving a normal car and missed his turn. Some people are just dumb.

Still not excusing it tho, it's still dangerous, but worth noting anyway, the way some of these stats are compiled. A form of spin ultimately.

You make spin sound like a bad thing, Stevey! Seriously, I know what you mean about twisting things to make them sound worse or better than they are. Human trait, that.