Police roll out surveillance centre to check road carnage

The Ghana Police Service has rolled out a surveillance centre to check road carnage across the country with a call on drivers to be disciplined.
   Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Mr Francis Aboagye-Nyarko, Director-General of the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service, advised the drivers during a media interaction in Accra on Wednesday.
    He asked the drivers to comply with traffic regulations so as not to
fall foul of the law as their activities would be captured on the surveillance centre.
    He said 250 drivers were being prosecuted for violating road traffic regulations within the past two weeks.
    The number includes 31 drivers arrested on Tuesday at the Under Bridge Intersection on the Spintex Road and 40 for similar offences at Dawhenya, and Tema, among others, who were fined GHC960.00 each.
   DCOP Aboagye-Nyarko said the arrest and prosecution followed the deployment of motor traffic and accident monitoring and surveillance Centre by the MTTD.
   He explained that the surveillance was a programme under the new Police Administration to make sure indiscipline on the roads were reduced.
   The system, which captures road networks throughout the country, would help the MTTD to monitor the level of indiscipline on the roads by clearing the miscreants who had decided not to comply with road regulations.
   The Director-General said immediately an offence was detected and the jurisdiction was notified, the offender would be arrested and prosecuted.
   Superintendent of Police, Dr Samuel Sasu Mensah, Director of MTTD, said the ongoing monitoring system was on major roads and intersections in all the 18 police regions.
   The system’s cameras give live feed to the MTTD and any infractions seen would be sent to the DVLA for details of the vehicle owners.
   Chief Inspector Joseph Zanu, General Supervisor of the System, said it had special cameras with security features, which captured infractions as soon as they were made, explaining that there were agents at key points who would take snapshots and videos of cars as evidence.
    The Police Administration has set up a new state-of-the-art Traffic Monitoring and Surveillance Centre at the National Headquarters to monitor traffic situations in the country.
   The centre, which is managed by the MTTD, conducts traffic monitoring and surveillance throughout the country with the help of special CCTV cameras called Intelligence Video Surveillance (IVS), which are installed at the various intersections, vital installations and highways across the country.
    These IVSs are fitted with special features for capturing and recording traffic incidents.
   The cameras are manned by agents who seat behind the consoles and look out for road traffic offences such as unauthorised parking, dangerous driving, soliciting for passengers or alighting passengers at unauthorised places and the disregard for road markings among others. 
   An agent, on seeing these offences being committed, would take a short video and a snapshot of the vehicle involved in the offence.
    Particulars of the vehicle such as the registration number, colour and make of the vehicle are noted.
    Also, the agents take note of the time, date and location of the offence and forward the information to the Drivers and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) for further checks.
    These checks produce the owner, vehicle chassis number, telephone number and address of the owner.
    Once these are obtained, the offender or owner of the vehicle would be called to the Police Station within the jurisdiction of the offence for prosecution.
GNA