Moore Police seeking to curb crosswalk incidents, raise driver awareness

A rise in the number of incidents involving drivers and pedestrians at crosswalks is catching the eye of law enforcement across the Oklahoma City metro.

On Wednesday, News 9 spoke with Moore Police Department Chief Todd Gibson about how his department is working to make crosswalks safer.

Q: How did your department go about identifying some of the dangers that are lurking within these crosswalks?

A: We are constantly responding, not constantly, but we respond to about 15 to 20 auto-pedestrian accidents a year, and unfortunately, many of those occur while a citizen or a pedestrian is trying to cross the street.One of our supervisors actually had just responded to a pedestrian-motor vehicle accident and said "Hey, we've got to bring about awareness for this." So that prompted us to be more proactive in engaging our community in traffic safety.

Q: Your department issued eight tickets, eight warnings within the first hour of conducting this enforcement operation. What were some of the most alarming things caught on camera?

A: One of the things that's important to point out is we work off the three E's. We want to look at the "engineering" of the crosswalk, we want to "educate" the public and the community, which we appreciate your help in doing that, but then "enforcement" is going to be a component of that. When we did the enforcement, what we saw was that we had a police officer in uniform wearing a full traffic vest who was nearly run over two or three times. If a police officer and a full traffic vest are nearly getting run over, it really brings to light what, maybe, a child crossing to [go to] school is having to deal with.

Q: Were you able to identify some of the root causes of why this is occurring?

A: Some of the root causes are just lack of attention, but also lack of knowledge. We want to give grace to [those in] our community, who maybe they just don't know, because crosswalks are something that are complex and they're at different places that you might not even realize that they're at it. But near a school or an intersection, there's going to be a crosswalk, and so some people in the motoring public might not actually realize that the pedestrian has the right of way while they're in the crosswalk. We just want to educate our community and bring engagement to our community and awareness about that so that we can prevent some of those auto-pedestrian accidents.

Q: What are some of the most common mistakes that you're seeing?

A: If it's not inattentive driving, some of the mistakes are "I'm in a hurry, and I don't want to wait on this person to cross the road." When you're on a busy thoroughfare, and maybe you're running late to work, you have an appointment that you're going to, maybe you don't want to stop. The reality is, if you don't stop, when a vehicle and a person collide, the outcome is not good.

This particular situation is not just isolated to Moore, it's happening all across the state. We often hear about these auto-pedestrian accidents, but it seems sort of surprising to know that it's close to happening in a crosswalk.