Spain | Local/public authority

The Local Police Force of Daganzo (10,000 inhabitants), in the province of Madrid, focuses its work on citizen safety and the regulation and organisation of traffic. It comprises 14 police officers.

Through the objectives set forth below, we undertake to reduce considerably accident rates on roads under our responsibility and instil in the town inhabitants respect for the rules and the other users of the roads. During 2005, 1.74% of the town’s vehicles were involved in some form of traffic accident, and the aim is to halve this figure through the following actions:

1. We will give road education courses at the two municipal schools, and to other schools requesting these courses, to second- and third-year primary students, as well as annual talks to secondary school students. Some 140 children will take part in the talks every year. This figure will increase annually. The main theme of these talks will be road safety in the field of driving.
   
   
   • We will develop road education programmes for adults, since this is one of the groups with a higher risk of accidents. The courses will be given in adult education centres. Information on these programmes will be disseminated through the press and the Internet.
   • We will teach young children in summer camps about road education and will implement programmes to encourage closer contact with the local police force, reaching some 200 children between the ages of three and fourteen every year.
   • We will create, together with the council, the Children’s Traffic Park, to be headed by the local police force. It will be the only park in the region, to be used by school children in the municipality, as well as other groups that establish agreements with the Daganzo Town Council.
   • We will promote learning through ongoing courses on legislation and professional retraining, including road safety and traffic courses for all of our police officers and two road education instructors.
     
2. We will organise campaigns to promote the use of approved child restraint mechanisms in vehicles among the municipality’s younger schoolchildren. These will be carried out in particular as children go into school and, during the first week of the campaign, there will be no penalties, but those who commit violations will be given a guide explaining the types of system that should be placed in vehicles, depending on the age and height of the children. We plan to distribute approximately 400 manuals per campaign.
   
   
   • We will carry out alcohol testing in the months leading up to and during summer, selecting random areas to surprise drivers, with a total of more than 500 tests per year. These will be made public, in order to provide advance warning and avoid this type of abnormal behaviour among drivers.
   • We will place one or two camouflaged radars in unmarked police vehicles in agreement with the Madrid Traffic Headquarters, which will make these available for two periods annually over three months. The Daganzo municipality is crossed by two major roads, which intersect in the municipality, which is why the speed of vehicles is high. Nevertheless, the start of the campaigns will be announced through the media, as the objective is to prevent rather than punish.
     
3. All of the local police force activities and interventions relating to road safety will be published in the municipal newspaper, which has a potential readership of 10,000, in the magazine entitled LA COMARCA, distributed in various neighbouring towns and with a potential readership of 33,000, and in the Tuesday edition of EL DIARIO DE ALCALÁ, published in Alcalá de Henares, with more than 200,000 potential readers.
   
   
4. We will make a special impact, through the presence of police officers covering the entrances and exits of four school areas, forbidding the transit of vehicles with dangerous and heavy goods during the specific time periods. Each area will be patrolled by two police officers.