It’s no surprise that highway law enforcement varies from state to state. Likewise law enforcement’s response over the course of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic hasn’t been uniform, at least based on what’s taken place in Georgia and Minnesota.
Jeremy Vickery is the commanding officer for Georgia’s Motor Carrier Compliance Division of the Department of Public Safety, the agency that oversees the state’s inspection activities. Back in early August, when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration held its Truck Safety Summit, Vickery was joined by Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Executive Director Collin Mooney and a captain from Minnesota.
Vickery noted, as the virus began spreading, Georgia limited inspection activities to post-crash inspections and traffic enforcement. Many of “our guys were asked to patrol beaches and state parks,” Vickery said, and to assist “other agencies as the requests came in. Security for our COVID test sites,” for instance.
The state did only 700 inspections in April, Vickery noted. That’s “90 percent fewer inspections than usual.”
In Minnesota, “We had a really rough start,” said State Patrol Captain Jon Olsen. Unlike Georgia, “We did try to keep an enforcement presence up.” Yet from March 23 through the end of April, Olsen said, the truck-involved fatality rate got “out of hand.”
There were only around 270 total crashes involving a commercial vehicle statewide, versus 500 in comparable time periods in prior years. “But unfortunately we had nine people die as opposed to only three in 2019,” Olsen added.
Vickery found similar results in Georgia. “Crashes are more likely to go down when guys are on the road doing inspections,” he concluded. “When I pulled them off the road” as COVID took hold, “crashes increased.”
