By Sarah Hunter-Argyle
Lothian and Borders Police admit that a recent drink driving campaign doesn’t tell us whether there are fewer drink drivers on the road.
A few years ago they stopped recording negative test results during drink driving campaigns which means they don’t know if the percentage of drink drivers has gone up or down.
Operations Inspector with the Road Policing Branch, Jillian Kerr, told Dunedin Napier News: “You can’t really tell what it is that has brought the figure down… and one of my bugbears personally is that a couple of years ago ACPOS [Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland] decided that we wouldn’t record negative breath tests, we’d only record positive. So yes we’ve got less but is that because we’ve breath tested less?”
A recent four week campaign run over the festive period caught 93 drink drivers, which seemed to be an improvement on last year’s figures when 120 people were arrested over the same period.
Kerr said: “It would be better to say we’ve tested more and we’ve caught less, you can’t really tell if drink driving is down if you don’t know. I would imagine we did test more because of the amount of officers we had out but we can’t say that because we don’t know.”
