Eyes on the Road: Totalline and crimebusters team up

VAUGHAN, Ont. — The way RCMP Sgt. Rob Ruiters tells it, the trucking community is divided into two groups: the pros and the cons.

The pros, he says, are the professionals — drivers, dispatchers and other self-respecting members of the transportation chain who would never think about committing a crime in the course of duty. The cons, he adds, are the crooks — the cargo thieves, hijackers and the very few complicit members of the trucking business who cooperate with them. And these guys cost our economy billions of dollars.

Ruiters has been working for years with various members of the transportation industry to get the pros to help drive the cons off the road.

This week, he announced that he was teaming up with Vaughan, Ont.-based Totalline Transport’s colorful founder and CEO Uwe Petroschke to give his crime-stopping efforts even more teeth.

Totalline’s Petroschke and Rob Ruiters of the
RCMP put their heads together to stop cargo theft.

Petroschke, who already has a reputation as an innovative fellow determined to improve the image of the trucking industry, now wants to improve its safety quotient.

On Tues. Oct. 30, at a Husky Truckstop near Toronto and with Ruiters at his side, Petroschke unveiled a fleetwide Crimestoppers awareness program.

Surrounded by local press, members of Crimestoppers and various curious onlookers, Petroschke showed off a factory-fresh 53-ft Utility trailer decorated with Crimestoppers logo and phone number (1-800-222-TIPS) on the sides as well as in smaller letters on the rear cargo doors.

The trailer will go into active interprovincial service and work as a national awareness builder designed to help keep our transportation system secure.

While he won’t be outfitting his whole fleet with the giant logos, Petroschke will be putting the contact information on the rear trailer doors across the fleet as well as on other printed corporate materials.

“With the rapid growth of the [trucking] industry,” he said, “Totalline recognizes the increasing risks associated with the criminal element targeting the transportation system and supports law enforcement to reduce these risks and make transportation more secure.”

Crimestoppers is a civilian non-profit organization that rewards people who supply the police with information about a crime if the information leads to an arrest. The names of the informants are kept anonymous so the culprits or suspects have no way of knowing who called in the tips.

Ruiters said Totalline’s Crimestoppers signs will not only alert people to watch for trucking-related crime but also just serve to raise awareness for any types of criminal activity.

Primarily, though, he says he knows that “if anybody knows what’s going on out there on our roads, it’s truckers. This is just a way to encourage them to report anything they see that’s suspicious.