Queensland Police are undertaking a hard crackdown on road safety under Operation Tango Anaconda, which will run for four months. 

“We’re 18 over as far as our lives lost to where we were last year, and last year was our worst year at 278 since 2012,” Chief Superintendent of Regional Support Command Ray Rohweder told Neil Breen.

“These are people who have lost their lives and the effects to their families, I know this personally, are absolutely lifelong.”

As part of the operation, 726 vehicles were pulled over on the Bruce Highway near the Glass House Mountains on Tuesday night, finding 13 people positive for drugs.

Mr Rohweder said illicit drugs are frequently featuring in the state’s worst traffic crashes.

He added the operation is mostly running on two theories: general and targeted deterrence.

“A general deterrence, whereby we just randomly test a whole range of people and that relies on the ‘anywhere, anytime’ message.

“Targeted deterrence [is] where we, through observations, intelligence community information, … we target specific people.”

Both of these theories lead to a specific deterrence to engaging in unlawful behaviour, relating to punishments and even public humiliation.

The operation will run from March 1 to June 30, focusing on high visibility random drug testing.

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Image: Queensland Police Service