Mark Shields | Jamaica reduced murders – road deaths can be reduced too

In the wake of the recent tragedy on the Font Hill main road, Vic-Chairman of National Road Safety Council Lucien Jones is right to warn that 2026 will bring more “avoidable tragedy” unless Jamaica moves quickly to implement the demerit point system and the wider sanctions regime under the amended Road Traffic Act.

His warning echoes what he has said several times in recent weeks: without decisive intervention, the road toll will continue to claim children, parents, and productive citizens – often in seconds.

LESSON FROM CRIME REDUCTION

Over the past two years, Jamaica has demonstrated that sustained, intelligence-led, partnership-driven action can reduce death and harm at scale. Murders fell significantly during 2024 and 2025, and early 2025 showed major reductions compared with the year before, reflecting a deliberate strategy – not luck.

The Jamaica Constabulary Force has earned credit for this progress, and I want to publicly commend Commissioner Dr Kevin Blake and his leadership team for the discipline, operational focus, and multiagency coordination that made those reductions possible and for continuing that momentum into 2026.

That success matters for road safety because it proves a simple point: when Jamaica treats a threat to life as a national priority, applies data to tactics, and aligns enforcement with policy, lives are saved. Road deaths deserve the same national seriousness.

APPLY SAME ‘HOTSPOT’ THINKING

The same intelligence-led approach used in policing can be applied to traffic fatalities and serious injuries:

• Identify crash hotspots (where deaths and serious collisions repeatedly occur).

• Identify high-risk behaviours (speeding, red-light running, dangerous overtaking, failure to keep left, non-use of seatbelts).

• Align enforcement and engineering to those risks (high-certainty enforcement, road markings, barriers and ‘street furniture’ to prevent lethal manoeuvres, junction redesign, and lighting).

• Monitor results and adjust – relentlessly.

This cannot be reduced to blaming ‘lawless taxi and bus drivers’. Yes, there are chronic problems in public-transport behaviour. But the truth is broader and more uncomfortable: there is a free-for-all across all categories of motorists.

Red-light running is a classic example- common, deliberate, and often brazen. Many drivers now behave as if rules are optional because they have concluded – correctly – that they are unlikely to be caught.

MISSING TOOL: ELECTRONIC ENFORCEMENT

Here is where Jamaica has a glaring gap. After years of debate and delay, the revised road safety framework still did not deliver what modern road safety systems rely on: electronic enforcement at scale – speed cameras and red-light cameras integrated with automated ticketing and demerit points.

This matters because manual policing cannot deliver what road safety requires most: certainty of detection. Drivers change behaviour when the risk of being caught is high, consistent, and impersonal.

International results are remarkably consistent.

• In France, national automated enforcement and broader speed-management reforms have been associated with large, sustained reductions in fatalities, and one analysis estimated that speed cameras prevented thousands of deaths over several years.

• In New York City, a rigorous study examining the roll-out of thousands of speed cameras found substantial reductions in collisions and injuries close to camera sites, compounding over time.

• In Chicago, analysis cited by the US Federal Highway Administration reports about a 12% reduction in fatal and injury crashes,and a 15% reduction in fatality and severe injury crashes at treated locations.

These are among the most proven, scalable interventions available to any country facing persistent speeding and signal violations.

HOW FAR BEHIND WE ARE

Jamaica’s population is about 2.84 million. Yet Jamaica recorded hundreds of road deaths last year – 373 by widely reported figures – placing us at an extremely high per-capita toll.

Now compare Jamaica with several countries of broadly similar population size that have sustained road-safety strategies and widespread automated enforcement:

• Ireland (population about 5.40 million) recorded 174 road deaths in 2024.

• Norway (population about 5.57 million) recorded 87 road deaths in 2024.

• New Zealand (population about 5.29 million) recorded 289 road deaths in 2024 (provisional).

Even allowing for differences in geography, vehicle mix, and infrastructure, the contrast is stark: some countries are operating at a fraction of Jamaica’s per-capita road death rate. The difference is not ‘better drivers’. It is systems-engineering, enforcement technology, policy follow-through, and consequences that are swift and certain.

ROAD DESIGN AND DISCIPLINE

Jamaica also needs to fix preventable risk on the roadway itself. Across the island we see

• Ignoring basic rules: Drive on left. Pass on right.

• Dangerous overtaking – especially around right-turn filter lanes.

• Inadequate road markings and signage in high-risk corridors.

• Lack of physical measures (‘street furniture’) that prevent lethal manoeuvres in known danger zones.

• Weak seatbelt compliance, particularly in the back seat, where people wrongly assume they are safe.

This is exactly why Dr Jones’ ‘safe systems’ framing matters: safe speeds, safe roads, safe vehicles, safe users, and rapid post-crash care. But safe systems require leadership that can force coordination across ministries and agencies.

ROAD SAFETY TSAR

We need a Road Safety Tsar – an empowered national lead, backed by Cabinet-level authority, to coordinate the Ministry of Transport, the police, road agencies, local authorities, and the health system. That leader should be tasked to deliver, within clear deadlines

1. Electronic enforcement at scale (speed and red-light cameras, automated processing).

2. Full demerit point implementation, tied to swift licence consequences for repeat offenders.

3. Hotspot operations driven by crash data (the ‘intelligence-led’ model applied to collisions).

4. Engineering fixes at known blackspots (barriers, markings, junction design, lighting).

5. Ticketing integrity – clearing backlogs and ensuring that penalties are real.

6. Public education, but paired with certainty of sanction (education without enforcement becomes noise).

Road deaths are predictable outcome of behaviour plus weak deterrence plus neglected road engineering. If we apply the same partnership approach, intelligence-led targeting, and leadership accountability that helped drive down murders, we can reduce the number of families destroyed by road trauma.

The question is not whether Jamaica can do it. The question is whether we will finally choose to.

Mark Shields is former deputy commissioner of police, Jamaica Constabulary Force and managing director of Shields Crime & Security Ltd. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.