Crashes involving police vehicles are costly and deadly
By Brittany Wallman
Sun-Sentinel
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Rain was pelting Sistrunk Boulevard when Fort Lauderdale Police Officer Jason Maldonado drove toward a felony call. He wasn’t speeding, he told investigators later, but suddenly the squad car spun out of control, roared across the median, careened through oncoming lanes and smashed into the side of a building.
He was reprimanded by his bosses. The November 2007 crash totaled his patrol car, damaged private property and could have been prevented, they determined.
Maldonado’s was but one of hundreds of police cruiser crashes that occur needlessly on South Florida roads, according to the law enforcement agencies that reviewed the accidents.
A Sun Sentinel examination of collisions in six law enforcement agencies in Broward and Palm Beach counties from 2007 through mid-2008 found more than 2,000 accidents involving public vehicles. In roughly one in four of those collisions, supervisors declared the employee at fault and said the accident never should have happened.
Officers were disciplined in many of the accidents for crashing unnecessarily and risking life, limb and the taxpayers’ purse. At least one officer was fired.
Some of these accidents have been deadly. In just the past two months, a Hollywood officer crashed into a palm tree and died, and a sheriff’s deputy in Palm Beach County smashed into a van, killing the driver. In the past 2 1/2 years, at least three officers, five pedestrians and a civilian driver have been killed in Broward and Palm Beach counties in accidents involving police officers.
State and local laws give police officers leeway to speed, blow stop signs and run through intersections when responding to calls. But the laws and policies require officers to balance a quick response time against the public’s safety, said former Davie Police Officer Mitch Frank, an associate professor in charge of driving curriculum at the Broward Police Academy.
Deputies and officers are trained in emergency driving, but Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Deputy Eric Davis said that doesn’t prevent crashes.
“The best drivers in the world are NASCAR drivers. And every race you see crashes,” said Davis. “Those are professionals. It’s inevitable.”
That’s “ludicrous,” said police driving expert Capt. Travis Yates of the Tulsa police force. “We would never go into any other type of law enforcement activity ... and say about a fourth of the time I’m going to make a mistake here. It’s a culture that has become inbred in our profession.”
Traffic accidents are the No. 1 cause of injury and death to police officers, Yates said. Yet he said police departments foster a culture of nonchalance about it.
Tod Burke, a criminal justice professor at Radford University, in Radford, Va., and a former Maryland police officer, said officers can be distracted by radios, phones and laptop computers in their cars, or suffer “tunnel vision” on the way to a heated call. Training is the key, he and Yates said, to bring the number of crashes down.
“We’re talking about the things that are preventable,” Burke said. “And if something is preventable, then let’s prevent it.”
On-duty cruiser crashes are investigated internally, and officers typically are not ticketed if they’re at fault. Instead they face internal discipline, like counseling slips, suspension and even termination.
Officers were cleared in hundreds of crashes in Broward and Palm Beach counties that were deemed unavoidable and part of the job by the law enforcement supervisors reviewing them. And many of the crashes were minor, such as an officer’s not paying attention while backing up a patrol car.
The driving habits of police officers remain a sore point in the community.
Hundreds of readers complained about speeding officers when the Sun Sentinel reported in August that Fort Lauderdale uses satellite technology to monitor its officers’ speed. It’s the only South Florida agency to do so. Drivers across the region complained that squad cars whiz by or run red lights at intersections when the officers don’t appear to be headed to emergencies.
Local officials said discipline and training are used to keep police drivers in line.
“Since all of our people are human beings, it’s possible for them to make mistakes,” Broward Sheriff’s Office spokesman Jim Leljedal, said. “But we try to minimize it. And if people see deputies driving poorly, every car has a number on it. They can call us.”
Copyright 2008 Sun-Sentinel