The police aren't doing their job on traffic safety

In 1992 Parliament disestablished the Ministry of Transport's Traffic Safety Service and gave the job of traffic enforcement to police. It kindof worked for a while, but now police aren't doing it:

A nationwide police operation to cut down on high-risk driving and road deaths has missed its target, an OIA reveals.

Most police districts missed most of their targets most of the time, reports released under the OIA about Operation Deterrence that ran for six months till December 2021 show.

Some key measures were worse than before the operation began.

"The results for Op Deterrence were not what we had hoped for," the director of the National Road Policing Centre, Superintendent Steve Greally, told RNZ.

They blame the pandemic of course, but this is fundamentally a question of what the police choose to prioritise and what they don't. And while the police clearly don't see traffic enforcement as "real crime" worthy of their attention, the fact is that it saves lives. Under-enforcement kills ten people a year in Auckland alone. If extended proportionately over the whole country, then that implies an annual cost of under-enforcement equal to half our annual murder rate. Which is clearly more important than this bullshit.

At the moment we fund police $330 million a year for road safety. That's 15% of the police budget for work they do not do (and which is being spent on other things, contrary to their appropriation). Since they clearly don't want to do the job, we should take it off them, and bring back traffic cops instead.