Year after year, vehicle-related fatalities are a leading cause of line-of-duty deaths among law enforcement officers. In May, the Eastern Transportation Coalition hosted a conference in Linthicum Heights, Maryland, aimed at ways to prevent deaths on the nation’s roadways.
This article appeared in the July/August issue of OFFICER Magazine. Click Here to subscribe to OFFICER Magazine.
National Policing Institute Program Manager Brett Cowell and Retired Snohomish County, Washington, Undersheriff Rob Beidler spoke about the statistics, risk factors and possible solutions to one of law enforcement’s biggest problems on the second day of “A Unified Approach to Driving Change on the Roadway,” which focused partially on how to prevent the deaths of public safety workers.
In 2018, the Department of Justice, under the VALOR Officer Safety & Wellness Initiative, funded the National Law Enforcement Roadway Safety Program, which officially launched in 2020 to provide no-cost training, technical assistance and resources to local, state and tribal law enforcement agencies across the country.
“We saw way too many officers that are being hurt and killed through very preventable officer-involved collisions and struck-by incidents,” says Cowell. “The program was created to mitigate the risks on the roadways and to drive down the preventable deaths that were happening in the law enforcement community.”
The three courses in the program, which is federally funded and at no cost to agencies, include an Executive Workshop, which is a 4-hour course for executive and mid-level supervisors; a Patrol Course, which is an 8-hour course on best practices and tactics to improve officer safety on the road; and a Train-the-Trainer Course, which is an 8-hour course for agency trainers, following attendance of the patrol course.
“Unfortunately, the line of duty death data we have shows that in this profession, a lot of our officers and frontline personnel don’t get it,” says Cowell. “Our challenge is how do we affect this culture change? How do we get the young officers to understand these risks and take the appropriate measures to mitigate them? Our program is all about trying to equip and train agencies.”
In 2015 Beidler attended a similar conference focused on roadway safety and viewed himself as being safety conscious. “I spent all day sitting in an audience, and at the end of that day, I realized I could do better. I was impacted. It made a difference,” he says, adding it was then that he decided to launch an initiative at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, which had 800 employees at the time. “In 2015 we had 11 critical injuries including a death and a double amputation. From 2016 to 2019 we had one.”
He says that the initiative focused on policy, procedure, data and the outright begging and pleading to the department’s officers. “It was everything from discipline to calling peoples’ wives saying: ‘Can you please get him to wear his seatbelt.’ Litigation plummeted, injuries plummeted, costs plummeted. Somehow, someway, it all worked.”
Nationally, from 2008 to 2022 there have been 809 line of duty deaths that have occurred on roadways. “It’s the most dangerous thing we do,” says Beidler. During the same time period, there were 587 collisions recorded. From 2012 to 2017, approximately 34,700 emergency responders were injured in transportation incidents. That equates to 5,783 injuries per year or 111 injuries per week.
Beidler says that three risk factors for officer-involved crashes include distractions, fatigue and speed. He added that the risk factors for struck-by incidents include the five Ds, which pertain to civilian drivers, include drunk, drugged, drowsy, distracted and dumb.
He encouraged those in attendance to take a look at their departments and ask themselves the tough questions. “Do you really train? Do you?” he asked the audience. “Do you equip your people? Do you fund it? Do you do all the things we can do to make scenes safer?”
To find out more about the National Law Enforcement Roadway Safety Program, visit officer.com/53066615
This article appeared in the July/August issue of OFFICER Magazine.
