Law Enforcement Traffic Safety Summit Panel Offers Practical Tactics for Administrators

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By Catherine Dorrough

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, in coordination with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, hosted the Law Enforcement Traffic Safety Summit in Washington, D.C. on July 28.

The one-day summit aimed to create greater awareness of the dangers officers face on the roadways and to promote a stronger culture of safety within law enforcement agencies across the country.

One panel discussion homed in on tactics commanders can implement to build and maintain successful safety strategies for law enforcement officers and other first responders who work along the nation’s roadways. The panel was comprised of a trio of law enforcement professionals: retired sheriff John Whetsel, chairman of the National Sheriff Association’s Traffic Safety Committee; retired chief Daniel Sharp, a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Traffic Safety Committee; and undersheriff Robert Beidler, who works for the National Policing Institute’s National Law Enforcement Roadway Safety Program (NLERSP).

Moderator Tim Burrows, a retired sergeant with the Toronto Police Service and current law enforcement liaison program manager for the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), guided the discussion around the essential elements of successful safety strategies.

‘COMMUNICATING RELENTLESSLY’

Panelists all spoke to the necessity of communicating often, and in a variety of ways, to create and maintain a culture of safety.

Sharp pointed to the five tenets of Below 100, calling them “critical.” (The five tenets are: 1. Wear your belt. 2. Wear your vest. 3. Watch your speed. 4. WIN – What’s Important Now? 5. Remember: Complacency Kills.) His agency posted those tenets not only in the building at their main station, but also on the gates out of the parking lot to remind officers to abide by them.

After a while, he cautioned, those types of reminders can become white noise to officers who see them every day. For that reason, his executive officer was tasked with making sure the messaging was refreshed. They would talk to officers specifically about what was important to them. Generally, that was family. The conversations would center around the importance of getting home to them every day.

Additionally, Beidler advised commanders to cast a broad net. “Some people need to see data. Some people need to feel emotion. Some people need to be led by example,” he said. “So, you use the stories and you use the training. You do it through email. You do it through computer screens that pop up and have a message; message boards; posters; stickers on their doors, on their cars, on their windows. Your executive leadership team, whatever that looks like, whether civilian or law enforcement, they should never have a meeting where it’s not talked about…  Your middle managers, your FTOs, your EVOC instructors and your trainers – they’re the tip of the spear. Without them, you have almost nothing. They need to be communicating relentlessly.”

“Understand that there are two weapons being used out there,” added Whetsel. He emphasized that while a firearm may be used once in 20 years, officers get behind the wheel of a 4,000-pound weapon every day.

“In addition to the regular training that we would provide, we would also require our deputies to go to an annual recertification program. It was a week-long training program,” he said. “They had to requalify with their firearm, and they had to requalify with their automobile. We began that the first year that I was sheriff, and they had to requalify by the end of the year.

“On Jan. 1, we had two deputies that did not believe me. We went out a little after midnight and picked up their vehicles. The next morning, they both called that their vehicles had been stolen. That was the last time we had to do that… They began acknowledging that their vehicle was a second weapon. It requires safety procedures just like the handling of a firearm.”

UTILIZING TELEMATICS

“I believe telematics is the most underutilized piece of technology as it relates to safety in our entire industry,” said Beidler. “It’s been in the fleet industry for decades. It’s just GPS and diagnostics of everything your car does every second of the day. Speed, location, excessive braking, acceleration, idle time, seatbelt use, you name it.”

Not long ago, telematics didn’t work for law enforcement, he said. However, a couple of suppliers came to the forefront to make it conducive to police work. “If you’re using a technology that says you’re speeding, well, in a police car you actually have to speed…. You do get in pursuits. So, the system got smarter and smarter until what it is today. For example, it will turn off some of those readings when your overheads or lights are on.”

He cautioned, however, that although he could put the technology into police vehicles, that didn’t necessarily mean it was going to be used. He had to negotiate its use with four unions.

“You don’t do it all at once. You start with the low-hanging fruit. You say, this will send your entire chain of command and dispatch an email if you have an airbag deployment.” The technology would also notify the shop if there was something wrong with the car. The union representatives “loved” those features, he said.

He also committed to only using the data if someone made a complaint. Four out of five times, he said, it got the officer out of trouble.

“The first time we used it, there was a complaint. Somebody had been arrested [and was] on their way to jail. [They] said, ‘The deputy pulled over on the side of the road and assaulted me and then took me and booked me in jail.’ The complaint came to us; we looked; the deputy never went below 70 miles per hour. I doubt that they could crawl through their caging to beat somebody up in the back of their car. Nobody’s Spider-Man like that.”

He said the agency also utilized the telematics data to calculate monthly driver scores on seatbelt use, idle time, excessive braking, and excessive acceleration. “We cut down idle time one hour a shift, and it paid for the system. $90,000 per year,” he said. No discipline was attached to the scores, only rewards.

The unions added the telematics terms to their labor agreements as an extra level of protection, to safeguard against future administrators trying to use the system to surveil officers in other ways.

MOVING THE NEEDLE

While safety is a much-talked-about value, Whetsel said it hasn’t resulted in a reduction in police fatalities. “In the last 40 years, we’ve not seen a movement. We should be down. 38 years ago, we had the same number we had in 2021,” he said.

He argued that there should be greater penalties for impaired driving, such as treating an impaired driving death as murder, instituting mandatory sentencing minimums, and seizing the vehicles of impaired drivers.

“We don’t do policies that we should do, because we don’t want to make people mad or hurt feelings,” added Beidler. “We don’t put our money where our mouth is when it comes to equipment and technology.”

He asserted that if safety is truly an agency’s number-one value, promotions should come with safety tests.

“Decide to make your people safer,” he said. “Decide to get them home. And you can.”