Nine police officers mounted on their motorcycles and a cacophony of midday Friday traffic accompanied Denver Police Department Chief Paul Pazen as he announced the hiring of the officers to combat an uptick in traffic deaths.
Pazen and Lt. Robert Rock, who leads the department’s traffic operations, announced the hiring of the nine officers — all recent graduates of the Denver Police Academy — as part of a larger initiative to enforce traffic safety. Pazen pointed to a graphic that listed the five most common causes of fatal accidents in Denver: speeding, aggressive driving, impaired driving, distracted driving, speeding and not wearing seat belts.
“It’s extremely frustrating. All of these are avoidable and preventable,” Pazen said during Friday’s news conference. “All of us deserve to get from Point A to Point B safely.”
West Colfax Avenue and Speer Boulevard, where police held the news conference, have seen the most significant increases in traffic accidents and deaths in the city, Pazen said. A heat map provided by the department showed that downtown and Capitol Hill have the highest density of crashes.
Denver has had 54 traffic deaths in 2019, according to Denver Police Department data. Beyond hiring more officers, the department is emphasizing a three-pronged approached: engineering, education and enforcement
“Every agency across the world deals with these three pillars of traffic safety,” Rock said. “Traffic engineers are about the business of creating the safest traffic system they can possibly make for the greatest number of people.”
In terms of education, the department will publicize new and existing laws through platforms such as message boards, Rock said. For enforcement, officers will increase safety checks of motor vehicles while looking for weight limits and brake checks to avoid accidents such as April’s Interstate 70 crash that killed four.
The new cops will hit the streets immediately.
This story was updated at 4:53 p.m., Sept. 13 to provide the correct number of deaths on Denver’s streets in 2019.
