WA’s top traffic cop Commander Mike Bell haunted by telling families their loved ones died in crashes

Mike Bell can vividly recall the times he’s had to tell families that a loved one had been killed on the roads. In his early 20s Commander Bell — now the State’s top traffic cop — was handed the unenviable task for the very first time and the reaction will live him forever. “It’s a really uncomfortable feeling, because, you know, you’re not part of the family. You’ve just shattered this man’s life,” he said of telling a Bunbury father that his son had died. “The thing that stuck out to me most was what I would describe as a guttural scream from the mum (when she was told). “It just stuck with me. What do you say to somebody that’s just lost their son, just lost a family member. It’s harrowing. So they stick with you.” In a wide-ranging interview with The West Australian, Cdr Bell said he feels, now more than ever, the desperate need to speak more bluntly about WA’s soaring road toll. After 11 lives were lost in a week, including seven in a horrific weekend from last Friday to Sunday, the State’s toll stands at 177. Each death was “soul-crushing” for the man charged with policing WA’s 18,000km of roads and he concedes that the sad reality is he had spent the week constantly checking-in — in expectation of another life lost. With three weeks left in 2024, Cdr Bell says his greatest fear is a Christmas door knock and the delivery of yet more cataclysmic news. But with an average of nearly four deaths a week on WA roads this year, it seems dreadfully inevitable. New statistics provided to The West by the Road Safety Commissions shows exactly where this year’s record rate of deaths are taking place — including how a rise in the number of crashes claiming multiple lives is heaping more misery on more families. The police district with the highest road toll this year to date, the Wheatbelt, has almost double the number of fatalities than last year. After 15 deaths on the region’s roads in 2023, there have already been 29 this year. There have been 21 deaths on South West roads, up from 16 last year, while the Mid West and Gascoyne has jumped from 7 to 12. In the metropolitan region, 15 people have died on the roads in Armadale, while the Cannington district has seen deaths rise from four in 2023 to 13. Cannington’s toll includes the deaths of three men, two aged 22 and the other 34, who were killed when their car crashed into the rear wall of a home on Orrong Road last month. And that was just one of a rising number of crashes that have claimed the lives of multiple people this year. In 2023 nine crashes resulted in 19 lives lost. This year 11 have been responsible for 27 deaths. “Some of those scenes have been brutal, even for me, as a seasoned police officer, just brutal,” Cdr Bell said. A sharp rise in motorcyclists being killed — including four last weekend — as well as a rise in pedestrians killed in crashes — such as Brenda Walker who died after being hit by a car in King’s Park — were also contributing to this year’s horror toll. Cdr Bell, believes the rise in many of these metrics is down to a shift in driver behaviour, stemming from a cultural change towards instant gratification. “Driving behaviour has changed. I think that is, in my personal opinion, and I don’t have any science to back this up. I just think it’s life you know — we go to Google, we get an answer instantly. We go to Netflix, watch a movie instantly,” he said. “Everything is instant in this life and that’s just crept into driving behaviours “There’s less courtesy out there today, people are in a rush to get where they’re going, and they’ll just zip in and out traffic and cut people off. “I just think that’s crept into it a bit but that’s just my gut instinct. The instant society we live in, the disposable society we live in, and it’s just crept into driving behaviours.” But that cultural shift is just part of the problem. Speaking this week at the launch of a new anti-drink-driving campaign targeting young men, Road Safety Commissioner Adrian Warner told reporters he believed change is required everywhere. “We (at the commission) have to accept the reality that doing the same things we’ve always done — when you look at the statistics as tending to plateau and flatten out — it isn’t going to work, so we need to do things differently,” he said. “But we need people to address their own behaviour, and that means more people doing a lot of little changes to their own behaviour. “We’re not perfect. We’re not asking for perfection, but we do want people to be more mindful and to make small changes.” It’s those changes Cdr Bell hopes more drivers start to make. Most importantly to save lives, but selfishly, so he won’t have tell another family about a dead loved one or face another devastating crash scene. Like the last crash he dealt with, in which a young girl was killed in the Wheatbelt. “We’re at the crash scene. We’re trying to save the child’s life. Mum’s injured. It’s just chaos, and you just get overwhelmed with all this information coming in. I just wish I could insert people into that emotion,” he said.. “It’s just all consuming, particularly when you’re there giving first aid, as I was on my last one, after trying to save this young child who unfortunately passed, and then having to take the mum and the father into the mortuary at this country location and show them the body of their daughter. “It’s just that raw emotion that I think people, if you can only experience it, you go ... ‘I don’t want to be part of this.’ “I just wish I could take some people on that journey with me.”