Numerous roads policing-related teams at Wiltshire Police have been honoured for reducing the number of major crashes across the county.
On his penultimate day in office, the High Sheriff Pradeep Bhardwaj attended the force’s headquarters in Devizes yesterday (4 April) to hand out certificates.
Awards were handed to the Roads Policing Unit, Serious Collision Investigation Team, Forensic Collision Investigation Unit, Speed Enforcement Team and Specials Road Safety Unit.
The awards were in recognition of the units’ work on the county’s roads, from targeting driving offences and speeders to investigatory and forensic work when a collision has occurred.
He said: “Today is to celebrate the hard work that each one of you does. I’d like to personally thank each one of you for all the good things you do day in and day out.”
The awards also paid tribute to the force-wide road safety campaign which was introduced last summer following a high number of fatal and serious injury collisions.
The five teams worked together on the campaign which resulted in a 25 per cent reduction in the number of serious and fatal collisions last year.
As part of the campaign, the Roads Policing Unit (RPU) introduced Project Zero, which continues to take place every Wednesday and sees specific locations in the county inundated with RPU officers targeting the ‘Fatal Five’ offences.
RPU is supported by the Specials Road Safety Unit, a volunteer unit which involves officers giving up their free time to aid their work.
The Serious Collision Investigation Team heads up the investigation of all serious injury and fatal road traffic collisions. Their professionalism and hard work, often in extremely distressing circumstances, saw 38 per cent of collisions attended in 2023 either charged or with a case being built as a potential prosecution case.
The Forensic Collision Investigation Unit provides the forensic response to all serious injury and fatal collisions gathering evidence by various scientific techniques to reconstruct the collision. Their tireless work at scenes, no matter the time of day or weather, is key to the success of many cases bought to court.
The Speed Enforcement Team, as well as their daily work around the county, assists RPU with Project Zero days of action. On average last year they dealt with 686 speeding drivers a month.
The High Sheriff added: “All five of the teams have worked together to help reduce serious and fatal collisions in Wiltshire by 25 per cent in the last year.
“We all agree that one serious or fatal collision is one too many and we cannot count how many lives these teams have saved.”
The awards ceremony was also attended by Chief Constable Catherine Roper.
She said: “These teams work incredibly hard to make sure we’re safe on our roads.
“The success of the road safety campaign last year is testament to the incredible amount of work that they do and continue to do to ensure that the public is as safe as possible on our roads.
“It is right that they are recognised for their outstanding work.”
