Brian Rudman: Keystone Cops in motorway fiasco

COMMENT

Talk about Keystone Cops. Monday morning's four-hour gridlock on Auckland's motorway system could have been cleared in half the time if Auckland City police's crack crash investigation team had been willing to borrow a $100,000 stereoscopic camera from their North Shore colleagues.

But unit head Sandy Beckett refused, explaining later that "it's in its infancy stage and not available to my district". Also, he told my colleague Mathew Dearnaley, he was "not convinced it is going to produce reliable and accurate enough data".

So instead, North Shore-based motorway patrol officers, trained in the new investigation tools, who turned up to help at the crash site, were put to work using Auckland's old-fashioned theodolite-based measuring equipment. There's a claim they even had the fancy camera in their car boot. But when I tried to confirm that yesterday, I found the police at Auckland, North Shore and National headquarters all struck dumb about the fiasco.

Wait, I was told, until after Auckland and North Shore police sit down today with state highway managers, Transit New Zealand, for a debrief. It promises to be a torrid occasion.

As well it should. For Sergeant Beckett seems totally out of step with everyone from Police Commissioner Rob Robinson down.

Despite what he says, the fancy equipment was there for his use, and has been for at least two years.

As for being in its infancy and inaccurate, that's just not true. Police forces throughout the world have been using it for years.

Closer to home, North Shore police have used it to gather evidence with no challenges from the courts over its accuracy.

The advantage of the new camera is that it greatly reduces the time needed to prepare a site plan of an accident, thus speeding up the reopening of blocked highways. The system is called photogrammetry, which is a big word for the science of recreating, with the aid of digital photography and computer software, accurate-scale, three-dimensional models of a crash scene.

Back in the office it is easy to measure the damage to cars, map skid marks and calculate distances with great accuracy. As well, animated films can be prepared as evidence in court.

The purchase of the camera by Transit, on behalf of the cash-strapped police, coincided with a Transit-sponsored visit of American accident guru John O'Laughlin, a leading advocate of aggressive clearing of motorways after an accident in order to avoid further crashes downstream and to shorten the inconvenience for others.

Mr O'Laughlin, a former police fatal crash investigator in Seattle, spent two weeks studying after-crash procedures on our roads in October 2001 and reported back in January 2002. His advice was if we acted smarter, road closures could be shortened and traffic flowing again much faster.

He noted an Auckland motorway crash that took an hour to clear which he reckoned should have taken just 10 minutes. This, without reducing the quality of investigations being conducted.

He called for better inter-agency communications, which now happens, and better leadership and training for on-scene teams. In an earlier report he had called on police "to send only their very best to investigations blocking major roadways".

Here and abroad, he noted, the biggest obstacle to the quick clearance of crash sites was the need to collect evidence for possible legal proceedings. That's where photogrammetry comes in.

After that visit, police headquarters brought him back in 2002 to give staff more training in his methods.

In November 2002, Police, Transit, Fire Service and Ambulance New Zealand signed a protocol for highway incident management that proclaimed an "open roads philosophy", which began "whenever a highway or lane is closed or partially closed by a crash or incident, the Police and/or Transit will have a prime focus of opening the roadway" urgently.

Despite Monday's fiasco, that remains the goal of these organisations. North Shore police have taken it so seriously that they have been sending both operators and trainers of the photogrammetry system to Germany for training.

Any Aucklander caught up in Monday's unnecessarily prolonged chaos will surely agree with North Shore Mayor George Wood's view that "this is just not acceptable in the country's largest city".