The Irish police force, styling itself An Garda Siochana (Guardians Of The Peace, a sick joke apparently), have begun issuing press releases relating to road deaths for the past year.
Irish national media groups, to wit The Irish Times, Independent Newspapers and RTE, have been publishing these police figures without criticism or question.
The police are claiming that road death figures for 2010 represent the lowest level of annualised road fatalities since records began.
There are several reasons why the police should be challenged on this reading of the situation.
(1) The police collect and collate road death figures themselves without any independent oversight. These figures cannot be trusted. There are inconsistencies from year to year, including in some years a failure to match all reported fatalities with names and addresses. In various years anyone dropping dead of a heart attack at the side of the road would be included in the figures. In other years such deaths are randomly excluded. The police have been previously caught falsifying the Deaths In Garda Custody statistics and were subject to an investigation on this matter by no less a figure than the United Nations Special Rapporteur On Human Rights. Lovely, lovely people. Their compilation of crime statistics generally is arrantly fictional. It is unlikely that Irish police officers will be any more honest when compiling road death figures than they have been with the other "statistics" they disseminate.
(2) Several heavy falls of snow paralysed most of Ireland's road network for the final six weeks of the year. Since the network was paralysed, road use fell to almost negligible levels during this period. For half of November and all of December there were tens of millions fewer road journeys than normal. This fact alone would be sufficient to account for the reduced number of road deaths in Ireland for 2010.
(4) While the year 2010 ended with the road network paralysed by snow fall, most people have forgotten that the year began in much the same way. During January of 2010 we had an unprecedented freeze up on the roads which again kept traffic at levels far below normal. This too will have resulted in fewer road fatalities. And it had absolutely nothing to do with our thug police force. Whatever else the dishonorable scum of the Garda Siochana are claiming, they're surely not yet claiming to control the weather.
(4) Several hundred thousand foreign nationals left Ireland last year due to the recession. The departure of several hundred thousand foreign nationals from Ireland resulted in tens of millions fewer road journeys than in the previous comparable time frame. The reduced road journeys meant fewer accidents and fewer deaths. This fact alone would be sufficient to account for the reduced number of road deaths in Ireland for 2010.
(5) Police officers have been harassing, intimidating, assaulting, and inducing heart attacks in motorists at the side of the road for no net gain to the community. Bear in mind the broader law abiding community wouldn't have agreed to this sort of police thuggery even if it had brought about improvements in road safety. But it hasn't. The reduction in road deaths has occurred for other reasons. The police should not be allowed to use the fall in the number road deaths to justify their incipient brutality, casual disregard for the rule of law, and endemic venal corruption.
(6) I recognise that the road death figures are somewhat lower than usual. Even if you ignore what I have pointed out regarding factors like police falsification of the figures, the inclement weather keeping motorists off the road for one eighth of the year, and the falling foreign national population resulting in tens of millions fewer journeys, even if you ignore these factors, I would humbly ask you to note that in spite of the fall in the overall road death figures, there has actually been a significant rise in several subcategories among those same figures. In the past year we have had the largest ever number of fatalities in a single incident collision when a bunch of kids coming from a party wiped themselves out along with another couple of citizens who were unlucky enough to meet them. These sort of accidents involving young tearaways continue to proliferate in spite of the intense harassment of law abiding citizens during daylight and evening hours by thug police officers who are always nowhere to be seen when the drugged up teens and hard man twenty somethings are out on their midnight death runs.
(7) Even those of you who still reject my analysis and insist on defending the arrant violence and crass incompetence of our individually, invidiously, and institutionally corrupt police force, might do well to consider the following. During Mussolini's fascist rule in Italy, for the first time ever the trains ran on time and Mafia activity came to a halt. Most of us agree it wasn't worth it.
