RCMP from Surrey and other Fraser Valley detachments are cracking down on aggressive drivers by targeting five high crash locations in a traffic blitz starting Wednesday.
About forty officers will conduct the large-scale, continuous operation in which they are watching for speeding, aggressive drivers, and prohibited drivers as well as stolen and uninsured vehicles.
Const. Dave Babineau spoke to CTV British Columbia's Maria Weisgarber.
"We're trying to cut down on the number people who are unnecessarily dying on our roads," he said. "(And) we're trying to catch those people who shouldn't be driving."
Police are starting with five hotspots today, including the intersection at 104th Avenue and 152nd Street, but will be targeting various other locations determined by traffic statistics.
"We define hotspots as high-crash locations, problem locations," Const. Babineau said. "We determine those locations through data that we've gathered in the past, where serious injury crashes have happened, along with fatalities."
Members of Integrated Road Safety Units and various municipal traffic divisions will work with an automatic licence plate recognition system in video cameras mounted in police vehicles.
The camera captures images of up to 3,000 licence plates per hour and checks the plate numbers against a database of stolen or uninsured vehicles.
Police say they are not targeting Surrey for any particular reason, but various locations will be targeted in the coming months.
"All summer, some of them we'll be advertising, some we won't, so you won't know where we're going to be or when we're going to be there," Const. Babineau said.
"So the best advice I can give to the public is to drive appropriately at all times, and you'll have no worries of meeting one of our officers and maybe getting a ticket."
Last month, police began targeting high-risk intersections in an undercover operation using officers disguised as workers or pedestrians. Surrey RCMP said the program, which continues through May, is proving successful.
