The Royal Gendarmerie often finds itself faced with a certain number of legal shortcomings during traffic checks, in particular those linked to the insufficiency of the sanctions provided for by the highway code to punish offenders.
In this context, Colonel Ali Benayza declared on the occasion of the academic day organized by the Public Ministry, under the theme “National Road Safety Strategy”, that “the sanction linked to the non-respect and the hit-and-run of the place of a traffic accident does not achieve the desired goal, in particular when the offense is associated with another or with a crime at the time of the fact. The penalty applied to each driver who ignored the order to stop, was set by the officers responsible for examining traffic violations at 1,200 to 2,000 dirhams, according to article 181 of the highway code. .
The Royal Gendarmerie proposes, according to Colonel Benayza, that “stricter disciplinary measures should be taken against the perpetrators of this type of offence”. He supported his statements by detailing that during the year 2022, 5,577 offenses between this non-compliance and the hit and run had been recorded as well as 11 traffic accidents at the level of the checkpoints of the Royal Gendarmerie. , during which gendarmes were more or less seriously injured.
The Royal Gendarmerie also proposes the inclusion of various types of cars in the requirements of article 185 of the highway code, which imposes on vehicles for the collective transport of people to have usable fire extinguishers. Colonel Benayza indicated that the risk of fire is not limited to oil tankers or vehicles whose total weight exceeds 3.5 tons and which are intended for the transport of goods, or the transport of passengers.
The Judicial Police of the Royal Gendarmerie also encounters difficulties with regard to the application of the requirements of the articles relating to the automatic and technical control of traffic offenses under the influence of narcotics. The aforementioned official indicated that the rapporteur finds it difficult to comply with the requirements contained in articles 213, 214 and 215, because the enforcement centers do not have a device to detect the consumption of narcotic substances or prohibited drugs during the driving.
These centers are sometimes located in remote areas, or which requires a lot of effort to get to it, hence the difficulty in carrying out this process. The Colonel further pointed out that there were other offenses which should be included in an explicit text of the Highway Code, with the attribution of a specific symbol (absence of tribal warning triangle, reflective vest, traction triangle, the absence of a spare wheel, so-called drifting driving, etc.).
The number of vehicle-related traffic accidents in 2021 reached a total of 544, and the number increased to 586 in 2022. The number of traffic offenses issued by the Royal Gendarmerie last year s amounted to 2,108,217, an increase of 12.70%. The number of vehicles dropped off at checkpoints reached 35,607, an increase of 12.76%. Light vehicles accounted for 83.11% of recorded violations, followed by trucks with 10.10% and motorcycles with 5.08%.
The number of traffic accidents on the roads under the control of the Royal Gendarmerie reached 30,548, causing 2,335 deaths and 53,319 injuries, including 3,886 seriously injured. 31% of traffic accidents occurred outside urban perimeters on unclassified roads, 25% on national roads, 23% on regional roads. The Royal Gendarmerie withdrew 215,118 driving licenses, an increase of 32.15%.
Moreover, it appears that the number of cases of bus companies that transport passengers and goods do not comply with the conditions related to the operating conditions of the drivers. Monitoring of driving and rest time discs resulted in the detection of 55,767 faulty devices, an increase of 36.68%. Trucks accounted for the lion’s share of offenses (95.7%) related to the monitoring of the driving and rest time measurement disc, since 53,478 offenses were recorded for this purpose, compared to 2,289 offenses recorded for the against public passenger transport buses.