Keeping Police Officers Safe on the Road

John E. Shanks Over the years, traffic fatalities for officers have been the highest, so over the last 13 years traffic fatality leads all other types of law enforcement line-of-duty deaths, typically by as much as 20 percent more than gunfire or other causes, which would be training accidents and things of that nature. If there's one thing a police officer does every single day, it's traffic. If you think about it, people drive to and from work; a police officer drives to work and then drives all day at work. So just by the nature of their job, they're on the road eight, ten, sometimes 12 hours a day, so they're constantly on the road. A lot of their job also takes them outside of the car. And so that puts them in harm's way, because a lot of their work is in the street: on the highways, in parking lots and constantly around vehicles and things of that nature. Tactically, over the years, law enforcement wants to be stealth. Police officer it's 50/50; sometimes they want to be seen, sometimes they don't. And because they are working in high threat, I mean in people-shooting-at-them type environments and traffic where they're helping an accident victim or people alongside of the road,and so it changes, and it's hard to change clothes in the middle of your shift when you're on the side of the road. So visibility is a big issue, it's a concern for law enforcement. There's been a lot of great strides in better lighting, better visibility, reflective tapes on the cars and things of that nature. And then recently with the implementation of federal guidelines for high visibility fabric and things that officers wear on the side of the road.

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