Hi Sgt. Nick!
Hope you’re well. First of all, thank you for all the community outreach you do. We look forward to the ride alongs and all the well written creative FB posts. Great job!! Would it be possible to have more frequent periodic police presence at the stop signs around Old Town? Notice way too many people not stopping at all. Also have seen pedestrians that nearly get hit. It’s alarming. I know y’all can’t be everywhere at once, but I’ve noticed that when police vehicles are stationed near stop signs, drivers usually (not all the time) stop. Since this sounds like a request, maybe you can also report on the frequency of near misses and/or accidents that have been reported this year. In any case, it’s a pretty serious issue and it would be good to have heightened awareness. Take care out there!
With Best Regards,
Stephanie
Hi Stephanie,
Thank you so much for your email. I really appreciate your kind words. As I’ve written about in the past, we have a really strong team of officers and professional staff that are part of our social media team. We work really hard at putting out content and engaging with the community. It is nice to hear that our efforts are appreciated. I will pass that on to our social media team members.
I can certainly appreciate your concerns about the safety of our streets. I agree, it is very alarming to see people completely disregarding stop signs, or blatantly violating other rules of the road. You are exactly right, we can’t be everywhere at once, but we do dedicate a number of resources to traffic enforcement, education, and messaging. If you, or anyone in the community, have specific concerns about locations or times of day when they see violations occurring, you can always call us to request we do some extra traffic enforcement or increase visibility in areas. Time and calls permitting, we’ll do our best to be in that area. As far as pedestrian safety, we did a campaign a few months ago called “Stop. Look. Wave.” This campaign encouraged both drivers and pedestrians to take a few extra seconds to ensure that our crosswalks are safe. Officer Montgomery, who was recently selected to join our traffic bureau, is very familiar with this campaign and has helped with enforcing crosswalk violations.
The Seal Beach Police Department was graciously awarded grant money from the California Office of Traffic Safety. We use this money to help deploy extra officers to conduct directed traffic enforcement. We also do saturation patrols for intoxicated drivers. Part of this money also goes to training and equipment for traffic related complaints. We will do our best to continue our traffic enforcement efforts in Old Town and in all neighborhoods of Seal Beach.
Stephanie, since you asked about our traffic collision statistics, I reached out to our Records Bureau Supervisor Dan Fortney. We do not collect data on “near miss” collisions, but we do have statistics for traffic collision in Seal Beach. From Jan. 1 to Nov. 30, 2020, we’ve responded to 162 traffic collisions in Seal Beach. About 66 % of them were non-injury collisions (injury collisions include complaint of pain). The majority of these collisions occur at the intersection of Seal Beach Boulevard and Westminster Avenue, Seal Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, and Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street. We take this data and direct our enforcement efforts to these areas. Several academic studies have revealed that high visibility traffic enforcement results in fewer traffic collisions (if you are interested in reading these studies, please email me). Thanks a lot, Stephanie, for asking about this important topic. Seal Beach, please continue to drive safely, never drink and drive, and slow down. And keep your questions coming! Email me at askacop@sealbeachca.gov.
