Every day, about 20 Florida police cars crash into something: another vehicle, a person, a utility pole. Every year, reports the Orlando Sentinel, those crashes kill 20 people, hurt 2,400 others and cause $25 million in property damage. The Sentinel analyzed five years of Florida vehicle-crash data — 1.6 million crashes — to determine how often law-enforcement officers crash in department vehicles and how often they’re at fault.
About 7,400 crashes a year involve cops. In one of every four, they’re at least partially to blame, and they eldom are ticketed. Average drivers receive citations if they are at fault in crashes 64 percent of the time; officers are cited less than 11 percent of the time. “We’re in the public-safety business [ ] we need to get a handle on it and have an understanding of what’s causing these crashes,” said Paul Sireci, president of the Florida Police Chiefs Association and chief of the Tampa International Airport Police Department.