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Justice Project South Africa (JPSA) is somewhat concerned that an apparently false impression has been created with respect to the Easter 2014 road deaths, by claiming that there has been a dramatic reduction in road deaths over last year.
 
Last year, the Easter weekend ran from 29 March to 1 April 2013 and the preliminary statistics were released on 8 April 2013.  That’s 7 days after the end of the period.  This year, Easter ran from 18 to 21 April and the preliminary statistics were released on 23 April, 2 days after the end of the period.
 
Despite moves being afoot to transform the collation of road fatality statistics by involving other entities like Stats SA and the CSIR, these statistics are still derived from the SAPS culpable homicide crime statistics registry and unfortunately, SAPS is not famed for its speedy capture of cases.
 
If we wait another couple of days and again query the SAPS database on 28 April, it is undoubtable that the reported 193 road deaths will climb significantly – after some of the less efficient SAPS stations enter their culpable homicide cases onto the SAPS registry.
 
We therefore believe that it is premature of the Minister of Transport to be claiming a significant “decline” in road deaths over the 2013 Easter period – which in turn creates the somewhat false impression that the situation is improving dramatically.  We are, quite simply, not comparing apples with apples.
 
It must also be borne in mind that preliminary statistics derived from the SAPS database only take into account the immediate fatalities that occur at crash scenes.  The United Nations statistical record-keeping protocol dictates that injuries from road crashes should be monitored for a further 30 days after the crash, to take into account those who die from their injuries later, in hospital.
 
The RTMC has not published a comprehensive finalised annual road traffic report since August 2011 – which effectively dealt with statistics from March 2010 to March 2011.  We are therefore thrashing around in the dark when it comes to statistics since there is no recent point of reference available.  This also makes it very difficult to evaluate whether South Africa is making any progress whatsoever with respect to halving its road deaths during the United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011 to 2020.
 
We are not trying to demean any of the efforts by law enforcement authorities and road safety practitioners this Easter period or at any other time.  We are merely pointing out that when we evaluate the outcomes of those efforts we should be honest with ourselves and avoid claiming victory based on incomparable and/or non-existent statistics.  To do anything else simply misleads everyone and leads to undeserved back-patting.