Notwithstanding the scarecrows on the front lawn of the middle school this week, the scariest thing about Newtown is its traffic. As numerous photos of traffic accidents in our pages attest, traffic accidents routinely injure and occasionally kill people in Newtown. Most all of the problems a town like Newtown faces, from increasing taxes and crowded schools to expensive housing and disappearing open space, pale in comparison to the violence of the motor vehicle accidents that occur with such disappointing regularity on our roads. It is one thing to lose patience and faith and quite another to lose one’s health or even life itself.

Unfortunately, the damage done to lives on Newtown’s roads isn’t always purely accidental. Many of the “accidents” are really the result of negligence on the part of drivers who go too fast and take too many chances with their own lives and those of innocent others. Collectively, we can make Newtown’s highways a little less scary by improving our own driving habits, but for those aggressive motorists we have all encountered, who seem to flaunt their recklessness with pride and seek to assert their right-of-way through intimidation, there is no appealing to the collective conscience. For them, it becomes a police matter.

Earlier this month, the Newtown Police Commission adopted a traffic safety and enforcement strategy. A key component of that plan is the creation of a special police traffic enforcement unit that will enhance the department’s regular patrol operations and extend the efforts of a tri-town traffic enforcement initiative begun last spring in cooperation with the towns of Bethel and Redding. As a statement of strategic goals and objectives, the Police Department’s new plan hits all the right notes: aiming extra enforcement efforts at both the most hazardous areas and the most hazardous vehicles and drivers; enlisting the support of citizens and neighborhoods; cooperating with regional and state law enforcement agencies; improving evaluation and analysis of traffic hazards and the department’s own performance in addressing those hazards.

Moving the department’s strategic plans from the paper to the streets, however, will have to wait until next spring. The proposed traffic enforcement unit depends on a level of staffing that the Newtown Police Department won’t achieve for several months. Currently, the department’s patrol unit has only about 75 percent of its authorized complement. The combination of a high job turnover rate and extensive training of new recruits before they go on patrol has left the department short-handed and unable to immediately implement its own strategy.

Though we would prefer to have this new initiative in place for this winter, we wholeheartedly support this new traffic safety plan and eagerly await the deployment of the new traffic enforcement unit next spring.