By Anonymous
Copyright caymannewsservice
Heartbroken writes: At a meeting of the National Roads Safety Committee on 10 April 2025, Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Gent noted the high number of road deaths in the Cayman Islands, which is approximately twelve per 100,000 — four times that of the UK. According to the minutes of the meeting, Dr Gent also noted that being caught driving while drunk in the UK is stigmatising, whereas in Cayman, there is a sense of ‘being unlucky’ when you’re caught.
That seems to be a fair assessment. I think it’s worth saying at this point that efforts to curb drinking and driving in the Cayman Islands have always felt more than a little lacklustre, and many of us have a sneaking feeling that the reason for this is that some MPs and local big shots don’t want to put a damper on their own weekend escapades.
This didn’t just start with a notorious rendezvous with a certain excavator; this has been the state of affairs for decades. Does the drinker’s excuse of ‘I can drive perfectly well after two or three (or four or five or six) drinks’ extend to at least some of Cayman’s politicians, past and present?
I think so, and it’s hard to express just how pathetic those lumps of human excrement are — good ol’ boys looking for fun or girls or votes, and not really caring that their example — the little nod and a wink that it’s really OK to drink and drive, regardless of any laws, which obviously don’t apply to them — may result in someone’s death. They’re ‘real men’, after all, so they can ‘handle their drink’.
I realise that last bit seems sexist. So for the record, women drive drunk, and women kill people while driving drunk. It’s equally deplorable.
But back to the point…
In the UK in the 1960s, drinking and driving, a major cause of road deaths, was commonplace. Since then, attitudes to and acceptance of drunk drivers have completely changed. To achieve this, three things were required: a change in legislation, a series of hard-hitting campaign ads, and reliable enforcement. Of the three, the first is the easy bit, and without the other two, really not that useful.
In the UK, effective ad campaigns, particularly the ‘Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives’ ads that ran from 1987 to 1997, changed attitudes. See the ads below.
In 1979, nearly two-thirds of young male drivers in the UK admitted to drinking and driving on a weekly basis. By the end of 2014, a survey by the UK charity Think! found that 91% agreed that drinking and driving was unacceptable, and 92% said they would feel ashamed if they were caught drinking and driving.
It’s not in the survey, but I imagine that British politicians would feel doubly ashamed, at least if they had any self-respect. And they would probably not get re-elected.
Road deaths in the UK due to drunk driving fell from 1,640 in 1967 to 230 deaths in 2012. That’s in a population of around 70 million. The reason for the huge drop is ascribed to a combination of road safety campaigning and better enforcement.
By way of contrast, here in Cayman, the National Road Safety Committee’s 2024 campaign politely asked everyone to drive better. The predictably useless ‘Take the Pledge’ initiative (How much did that cost?) was so bad that its webpage (https://www.gov.ky/roadsafety/pledge) and all references to it on the CIG website appear to have been erased.
Its failure is official. According to the minutes of an NRSC meeting on 13 February, the Department of Communications has produced an impact assessment report on the 2024 campaign to measure its success. “In a nutshell, they saw a significant increase in road safety awareness among the public, however no change in behaviour,” the minutes say.
The first part of that last sentence seems a bit optimistic to me, a way of softening the reality of the last part, an outcome that surprised absolutely no one except for the NRSC members, perhaps not even them.
The “bold new message” of this year’s campaign (see here) looks equally wishy-washy and doomed to failure. I feel like crying looking at that webpage. We, the taxpayers, are paying for that incipid effort, and the tragedy of lives lost will continue amidst all the self-satisfied, mutually-admiring back-slapping.
More lives of mothers, fathers, siblings and friends will be ripped apart because the people who created or approved those ads live in a parallel universe where change happens because of weak graphics and flaccid messaging that no one takes any notice of, and the committee that is supposed to encourage road safety is too busy forming strategies and making ‘action’ lists to actually do anything useful.
In the absence of any effective official campaign, I suggest we start one. How about #pedosdrivedrunk or #caymanbloodonyourhands (feel free to make suggestions below) and attach it to all correspondence with all politicians and all senior civil servants.
And if you see any of the above group (or anyone at all, for that matter) getting behind the wheel after they’ve had a few, tap on their window and tell them that they are f***ing pr***s. Because the only way to change the general attitude is to make anyone who is thinking of drinking and driving feel like a pathetic piece of sh*t, which they are.
And complicit in manslaughter by way of complacency.
When it comes to enforcement, there was a huge step backwards with the inability of the RCIPS to breath test or take a blood sample from Dwayne Seymour after his two unfortunate journeys home from ‘the office’, when he was jumped first by a CUC light pole and then by an excavator.
Like everyone else, I totally believe that Seymour had not been drinking, that he had really and truly been working late, and that someone, possibly the excavator, had been trying to kill him. It’s totally plausible. Nevertheless, he’s finding it strangely hard to shake the rumours that he got off because he’s a big shot.
And let’s not forget Wayne Panton’s role in the first incident. As premier at the time, he turned up at the scene, perhaps in an effort to support his minister and save his doomed PACT government. Many feel, rightly or wrongly, that his presence in addition to Seymour’s may have influenced the police officers at the scene to not insist on a breath test.
This is unfortunate. Even if Seymour was stone-cold sober (which he totally and utterly plausibly was), because many suspect that he wasn’t, the actions of these two men have added weight to the idea that drinking and driving is cool if you can get away with it.
#caymanbloodonyourhands
Suggestion: If you get into an accident and you haven’t been drinking, demand a breath test to diffuse any possible rumours that might appear down the road.
The RCIPS now has to claw back (or earn for the first time) the confidence of the people of the Cayman Islands that everyone is equal under the law. Also, they must convince us that they take the whole drinking and driving issue seriously. I know that last sentence might depress those conscientious officers who do take it seriously, but the feeling out here is that not all RCIPS officers share their professionalism.
As with UK law, RCIPS officers cannot randomly demand breath tests, but they can require that a driver submit to one if he/she suspects that the driver has been drinking and has committed any kind of traffic offence (which should scoop up a fair few drivers), or if they end up in a road collision. See the Penal Code, section 84.
They must do this far more frequently. The fact is, we could make the penalty for manslaughter by a drunk driver life in prison without parole, but if the driver, under the delusion of intoxication, feels sure he/she is not a danger to anyone, it won’t make a difference.
We could make the penalty for driving while over the limit decades in jail and a king’s ransom in fines, but if the driver thinks he has almost no chance of getting caught, it won’t make a difference.
The only things that will truly make a difference are a huge increase in the likelihood of getting caught and a change in society’s attitude. And that starts with everyone making it known that people who drink and drive are losers, especially politicians and ex-politicians. #pedosdrivedrunk #caymanbloodonyourhands
It shouldn’t be that hard. If the people in charge of road safety want to actually improve the situation instead of making a big show of trying to do this with daft campaigns and pointless committee meetings, they can copy the templates set by the UK and other countries that have successfully tackled the problem of drinking and driving.
In the meantime, I and countless others on these islands remain heartbroken — and angry — at the continued senseless deaths on Cayman’s roads.
