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Just over a month or so ago, the police embarked on a zero-tolerance blitz to reduce traffic crime, especially speeding.

The police promised to "flood the streets … from the East End to the West end … and everywhere in between" to achieve the stated aim of "changing motorists' culture of behaviour on island's roads."

Well the flood has dried up; the police are to be found nowhere in between; the culture of behaviour has prevailed. The blitz has fizzled. And zero has been accomplished.

It's really too bad. At first, the effort seemed to be paying off. Within the first day after the announcement, traffic on our roads moved noticeably slower.

A number of observers were reporting on the various radio talk shows that the announcement and subsequent police presence had had a sobering effect on traffic behaviour. I certainly noticed people actually stopping at stop signs and leaving safe distances between vehicles.

But now it's just like it used to be. All that has been accomplished is the reinforcement that, like all the crackdowns before, this one was just a flash in the pan.

The police said they would be highly visible on the roads for the "foreseeable future". Well, the foresight must have degenerated into short sight because the high police visibility has dwindled almost to invisibility.

While there was a blitz for a few days, the crackdown wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The crackdown selectively ignored one of the most prevalent traffic crimes - noise. I don't recall a single case where a noisy cycle has resulted in prosecution.

Bike owners have got progressively bolder - from tampering with mufflers, to installing experimental mufflers, to removing mufflers altogether. There are now quite a number of four-stroke bikes on our roads sporting 'straight-through' exhaust pipes. There are even more two-stroke bikes with 'performance' mufflers that make one's ears cringe.

This is clearly illegal behaviour, yet it seems to have been skipped over in the crackdown. The ills of selective law enforcement, so recently addressed by our leaders, apply to traffic crime: If laws are cherry-picked for enforcement then citizens are encouraged to scoff at all the laws.

If the police and the leaders who direct them wish to change the culture of behaviour, they need to operate the way other culture influences do - steadily and relentlessly.

The on-again, off-again approach of this and virtually all the previous blitz schemes not only doesn't work, it is counter productive. It teaches us that we only need to wait out each blitz, then we can proceed with scofflaw business-as-usual.

Instead of threatening to collar speeders at 35kph but then not prosecuting under 50kph - a policy guaranteed to foster disrespect for the law and those who enforce it - the police should make only the threats they intend to keep.

Better still, make no threats; just do the job of enforcing traffic laws - all of them, all the time.[[In-content Ad]]

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