 Is there anything we can do about traffic to keep it down quiet over here while we speak? First of all, thank you all for being here. We very much appreciate it. We want to outline that traffic safety, as well as safe neighborhoods, is a top priority for the mayor, the safety department, and the Denver Police Department. Denver Public Works works tirelessly to engineer our streets and provide enhancements to help us increase traffic safety. Working with Vision Zero, we know there are several reasons for fatal accidents on our roadways. Many of these are avoidable. We have listed the top five reasons, speeding, distracted driving, aggressive driving, as well as impaired driving, and believe it or not, in this day and age, people still not wearing seatbelts. In 2019, we've had 54 people lose their life on our roadways. This is completely unacceptable. In order to reach our goal of zero traffic deaths, we need to ensure that not only the engineering side of traffic safety is addressed, but also the education and the enforcement side of traffic safety. So today, I announce that on September 8th, we have added an additional nine officers to our Traffic Operations Bureau. The vast majority of these officers will work on education and enforcement of these hazardous traffic violations in the areas where the data is telling us that the serious bodily injury accidents as well as the fatal accidents are occurring in our cities. Why are we here at this intersection? We're here because the data tells us that Colfax, in particular West Colfax, has had a significant increase in SPI and fatal accidents. Spear Boulevard as well. So using data, using the maps, time of day, day of week, that is how the vast majority of these newly assigned officers will spend their time educating and enforcing safety violations. Additionally, we have deployed three of these nine officers to engage in commercial motor vehicle inspections. With the growing population in Denver, with the increase in construction, we have large vehicles that must adhere to the safety checks in order to keep our communities safe. Many of these vehicles avoid the highways and then they're pushed out into our neighborhoods, ensuring that they adhere to all of the safety regulations is an important way that we will keep our community safe. With that, at this time I want to introduce Lieutenant Rob Rock, who will talk more about this comprehensive strategy of the education, enforcement and engineering all tied into Vision Zero. Rob, good morning. The Denver Police Department has been part of the Vision Zero Initiative since 2016 and really at the heart of Vision Zero is bringing together state and local agencies, community groups and community organizations such as Walk Denver, Bicycle Colorado to help inform our decision making and planning around traffic safety. As the Chief addressed earlier, we look at the three E's of traffic safety, engineering, education and enforcement. Every agency across the world deals with these three pillars of traffic safety and we have to determine what is the right balance. Traffic engineers are about the business of creating the safest traffic system that they can possibly make for the greatest number of people. The education portion comes in because there are rules of the road, there are regulations, there are laws that govern how people use the roadways and not everyone knows those laws. Not everyone understands how to negotiate the traffic system and so our focus is to help folks. One of those examples is the most recent scooter regulations. So we are in an advisements and education period with scooters right now where we're telling people where they can and cannot operate these. So that's one example. And then lastly is enforcement. Sometimes some people willfully disregard the traffic system as designed and the regulations that are involved. And that's where enforcement comes in. And as we look at the top five causal factors, we're still having a problem with drinking and driving even in the age of ride shares. We're still having a problem with people wearing seatbelts. About two-thirds of our fatal crashes this year that could have used a seatbelt didn't and that's just a statistic that we can't believe in 2019. So with all of these groups joining together, one of the things that came out of Vision Zero is our rapid response. Immediately after a fatal traffic crash within a couple of weeks, a multi-disciplinary team goes out and does an assessment, a limited road safety assessment where we look at environmental factors that may have contributed to the crashes and we try to determine any safety strategies that could be applied as well as any enforcement issues that might be an issue. That team has gone out on practically every fatal crash that has occurred this year and is currently compiling that data so that we will have a good understanding of how to address this problem moving forward. The outcome of one of those rapid responses is what you see along Colfax Avenue. We began to see a proliferation of fatal crashes on West Colfax and so immediately variable message boards were put in place. Educational efforts were undertaken and enforcement efforts all along the corridor were undertaken. When these three are in balance, education, engineering and enforcement, when they're balanced perfectly, then we get a safe traffic system but we cannot overemphasize the fact that we need every person in the Denver community and the surrounding communities that commute to Denver to help us. One of the things that can help us is distracted driving. People need to put down their phones. People need to concentrate on operating the dangerous machine that they are sitting behind the wheel of. I think in today's world we've failed to recognize that cars are dangerous machines, that we have to operate appropriately and keeping an eye out for bicyclists and pedestrians and people on scooters. These are critical issues that we need everybody, everybody's help. We're all in this together. Everyone's trying to get somewhere and we want to make sure that everyone gets there safely. And so as part of Vision Zero we have started initiatives with education and enforcement and engineering that I think are going to show market improvements in the future and with the addition of the nine new officers, we will be able to meet those obligations within the community for enforcement. Thank you. Questions? Yes, as I said, all three of these safety pillars have to be in balance. You can't engineer, educate or enforce your way out of this situation. They all have to cooperate together. Yes, sir. We're looking for everything from looking at the brakes. Brake systems on commercial motor vehicles are crucial. As we saw with the I-70 crash that occurred outside of the jurisdiction, we're looking at overweight violations. Anytime a commercial motor vehicle is significantly overweight, not only is it more dangerous, it takes it longer to come to a stop, but it's also a severe impact on the environment. And also the last thing is drivers looking at their logs ensuring that they're getting enough rest, ensuring that they're not being overworked. Those are major factors that our commercial motor vehicle inspectors are going to be looking at. You ask why, really? This is an allocation of officers that have recently graduated the police academy and the field training program. This is something they just graduated a week ago, and it was important that we use the officers that are new to backfill those positions in the neighborhoods to ensure that we're not taking officers out of the 78 neighborhoods in Denver in order to do this work. We were strategic in designing this after the officers have hit the streets completing the training process. I'm sorry, did you say how long before we would see? Well, typically we're riding around 35 to 3800 tickets every 28 days, and so I'm sure that we would find some violations within an hour. Sure, every year at the beginning of the year we identify some top locations, and so many of those top locations are depicted on this graphic over here. Several of them are right in the downtown area, in addition to just north of here and to the east of here. We compile data not just of fatal and serious injury crashes, we use those in addition to looking at number of crashes because if we have a high incidence of crashes in a particular location, then that could ultimately lead to an SBI or a fatal crash in the future, and so our goal is to prevent those, and that's why we do a long-range plan, and then as this map depicts the last three months of data that we look at, we're constantly revising that, and so many of those areas are in a state of flux. Initially, if everyone was here a couple years ago, you remember we had a problem along Federal Boulevard, and we addressed that problem, and we have not had the significant number of fatal crashes along Federal this year as we did a couple years ago. All of a sudden Colfax became a hotspot for us, and so we began to address that, and I can tell you at this point in the year, we have practically brought that to a halt along Colfax, and so that's a good thing, and there are many areas where we're focusing on, but the highways are also an area where in the past we've seen a large number of commercial motor vehicle crashes that have been horrific. Oftentimes, they're followed by these large truck fires, and so those are things that we have officers out on the highway that are trying to address those as well. It depends. We have a wide variety of tools at our disposal. If it warrants, we'll send a group of officers. If it warrants one or two, then that's what will happen, but we evaluate that case by case as part of the precision policing model. So we have a continuous feedback loop through neighborhood groups, through meetings, through the partners that Rob talked about with Vision Zero, and that's why we're here today. That's why we're asking your help. We're pointing to the top five reasons for fatal accidents, and if you look at each and every one of those, those are completely preventable. These fatal accidents are avoidable if we see what the issues are, see what the problems are, and together start to come up with these solutions. We want to share what the top five causal factors are, as well as where these officers are conducting their enforcement. If by you all spreading the message to our motoring public, to our folks that operate on our roadways, that this is where they're taking place, and folks slow down in these areas, folks adhere to the recommendations, and we don't have to write tickets, then that's a good thing for everybody. This is completely about traffic safety, and that's our focus. We are resourcing the Traffic Operations Bureau in order to enhance traffic safety. It's part of our strategic plan. We want to make sure that anybody and everybody can get from point A to point B safely, whether that's in a vehicle, on a bicycle, on foot, or on a scooter. That is our goal, and we want to make sure that we are resourcing this unit appropriately in order to accomplish that goal. That's all part of the data, and that's part of the enforcement strategy. It's not only sharing where these occur, but it is also time of day, day of week, making sure that we're matching the resources where the greatest problem is. Absolutely. We look for every opportunity to educate all aspects of traffic safety, whether that's pedestrian, scooter, bicycle, or people that operate motor vehicles, and we do that through various different methods, the variable message boards, the fixed message boards, and you all getting word of mouth out there, your viewers, your readers, letting the people in public know what they can do to help assist us keeping our streets and neighborhoods safe. So thank you all for being here. We very much appreciate it. Have a safe weekend.