Yikes. Not to single-out City of Phoenix; but we can objectively say that City of Phoenix is doing an bad job at pro-active traffic enforcement.
Phoenix drunken driving deaths soared last year
Fatalities in drunken-driving accidents within Phoenix city limits doubled in 2023 over the prior year and accounted for over a third of all crash deaths recorded in Phoenix….
Phoenix Police in June outlined a different approach to traffic law enforcement, conceding that its Phoenix Traffic Unit – established in 1920 with one motorcycle rider – took an especially hard hit amid a decline in filled positions department-wide.
It said the total number of Traffic Unit officers declined from about 130 in the early years of this century. In all, there are 54 Traffic Unit positions, but only 34 are filled, the report said. (emphasis added)
Tracing the unit’s history, the report states that while motor officers in the early 2000s had to investigate collisions and enforce traffic laws, “to ease call burden on Patrol, the Traffic Unit adopted a model primarily consisting of collision investigations around 2015.”
That role shifted again in April 2022, the report said, after several studies across the country “showed traffic enforcement, or a proactive approach to road safety, was more effective than the reactive approach of investigating collisions.”
..
It’s clearly the duty of the (any) police department to investigate traffic collisions — they show up, manage the scene, investigate, talk to witnesses, take statements, document with a report, issue citations or refer criminal charges as applicable. This is important stuff, and it absorbs an enormous amount of police resources.
How enormous? In 2023 the Phoenix police dept investigated and filed reports on almost twenty-five thousand traffic crashes, note that this excludes freeways, which are the jurisdiction of DPS [1].
The City of Phoenix puts out a dataset[2] on how many traffic citations are issued by PPD. It’s one line per person, it only lists whether or the most serious citation was civil or criminal, and not the specific infraction. The vast majority of criminal would be DUI, but could include things like reckless driving
In 2023, drivers were contacted by PPD 25,494 times that ended in some sort of traffic citation.
Unfortunately the database doesn’t reveal specific types of citations, however, number pulled from a 2023 report to Phoenix Public Safety Committee[3] revealed that in 2022 there were 17,451 speeding tickets issued (and remember, this excludes freeways, which is DPS, not PPD).
Is that a lot?
That would average almost 50 per day. 50 citations a day in a city of, what, 1.6million? Sure we can exclude children (below 16, anyway) and the small fraction of adults who don’t drive, but the over 1 million who do, make many trips per day by car, plus a net inflow from surrounding towns… means that the chances of anyone getting a speeding ticket in Phoenix are infinitesimally small.
It’s, of course, not only (lack of) enforcement… but clearly something has gone wrong since around 2014, the final AZ figures for 2023 were recently released, here is a breakdown of traffic deaths and injuries by person type.
VMT went up over the 2014-2023 period, mostly due to population growth, by about 20%; yet motorist deaths (people driving or in motor vehicles) went up 68%. And this is all the while motor vehicles themselves have become dramatically safer (for their occupants). Pedestrian traffic deaths, of course, are up even more proportionately. [4]
[1] per the ADOT database as of June 2024, the exact figure was 24,882.
SELECT count(*)
FROM ( 2023_incident AS i )
LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVNcic ON i.OfficerNcic = LOVNcic.ID
WHERE LOVNcic.name =’Phoenix’
[2] City of Phoenix Traffic Citation Dataset
[3] Cameras may return in city traffic safety blitz Oct 3, 2023 Ahwatukee Foothills News. “The data show, however, that the 15,346 citations issued for speeding just through August already surpassed the 15,098 issued in 2021 and are closing in on the total 17,451 speeding tickets issued last year. On the other hand, drunk driving arrests appear to be declining from the 2021 total of 3,091. Last year, DUI arrests totaled 2,626 (2022)”
[4] ADOT Annual Crash Facts; total VMT went from 62.6B to 75.4B over the period 2014 to 2023. Motorist deaths 590 to 992 over same period.
Here’s an older article on the topic, looking back to ~ 2017; it focused on Tucson but looked at some broader trends.
Enforcement drops, crashes proliferate, people die
