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Drink drivers ignore warnings BY ERIN TASKER
ERIN.T@THEGUARDIAN.CO.NZ
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Rural people are continuing to kill themselves on rural roads by drinking and driving despite repeated warnings, Ashburton’s top cop says. Ashburton police senior sergeant Scott Banfield said despite repeated messages and campaigns from police, rural people were still dying on rural roads because they weren’t following simple road rules. Too many people were still drinkdriving, not wearing their seatbelts, and driving too fast, he said. “We’ve had three fatalities in around the last year that I can say, sadly, that the deceased has contributed to their own demise through alcohol intake and driving a motor vehicle,” Mr Banfield said. The deaths – all in rural areas - were all
unnecessary and had left families, and communities, reeling. “Getting caught by the police for drinking driving is nothing; killing themselves or a member of the public, or their own family, is what people should be thinking about,” Mr Banfield said. Any crash where drink-driving was involved, could easily be avoided by the person who had been drinking choosing not to get behind the wheel. If you’re going to drink, you need to make other arrangements to get home; do not drive, Mr Banfield said. Too often the victims were rural people, driving on rural roads; often roads they knew well. But it wasn’t just one area of society, or one particular age bracket, that was continuing to break the rules. Mr Banfield said of the three fatalities
where alcohol was believed to have been a factor locally in the past year or so, the victims had been a range of ages. Fatalities from road crashes were referred to the coroner, and police investigated on behalf of the coroner. They looked into everything from the car to the road and surrounding environment, and the driver and where they’d been and what they’d been doing before a crash. Too often, those investigations pointed to alcohol having played a part and Mr Banfield said there was no excuse. “If you make the decision to drink, then the next best decision is not to drive,” he said. He said in years gone by police had run campaigns about rural people dying on rural roads, but it was still happening, and it needed to stop.
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