 Lakeland Public Television presents Currents with host Ray Gildow, sponsored by Niswa Tax Service, offering tax preparation for individuals and businesses across from the City Hall in Niswa and on the web at niswatax.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents. Today we're gonna be giving you safety tips that might help save your life, might help save my life. Talking with Neil Dickinson, who is the regional public information officer for the Minnesota State Patrol in the northeast sector of Minnesota, which covers a very large area from Duluth down to Brainerd. And welcome to the program Neil. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. Hopefully we can talk about some things today that can help save some lives, maybe change some attitudes about things. And I know, maybe you could just talk a little bit about yourself, what your background is and how you got into what you're doing. Sure, again I'm the public information officer for the Minnesota State Patrol in the northeast region. So I have three districts with the State Patrol. I'm based out of the Duluth District. I also cover the Brainerd District and the Virginia District. So again, I've all northeast part of Minnesota. And my main job with the State Patrol is to have media relations and get out stories or do presentations in anything that incorporates traffic safety. So again, I work closely with the media and if we have attempt to locates for instance, we have the media help us try to find maybe a vehicle that we're looking for or a person we might be looking for. So I work very well with the media, I believe, and I really enjoy the position. I think the thing that interests me about talking with you is that the number one, the large number of people being killed continually on our American highways and our death rates are going up again in Minnesota for the first time in some time. And the headline in the paper this week was there's a potential of 42,000 deer being killed by Minnesota drivers this year. Last year, I think there was close to, I believe around 190 people killed in those car collisions between deer. And so there's just, it's just dangerous place to be on our highways. And it really doesn't need to be this dangerous. I think if more people would follow the laws. And I can appreciate in your position how these laws are pretty sophisticated or changing all the time. So I let the public know that I told you you bring notes because I know some of the things we talk about, you can't possibly have all this memorized. But it's just amazes me that if you look at a highway with a 55 mile an hour speed limit, people are going 62. They bump that speed limit up to 60 and they're going 65, 67. You bump it up to 70 and they're going 75. And it's like we are responsible. The highway patrol can't be responsible for controlling all those things. We have to take control of that. We being older people, younger people, middle-aged people, it's a matter of life and death. And we have to really start doing something about this. It is, it's all, and our goal is towards zero death. We don't want anybody to die on our roadways in, you know, across the nation, especially here in Minnesota where we live. And it comes down to the majority of the crashes come down to driver error. Contributing factors in why people are getting hurt today is speeding, distracted driving, driving under the influence and not wearing a seatbelt. Those combinations are what I've seen on the road in my 19 years as being a state trooper. I also did crash reconstruction for 13 years. So I got called out to go investigate the serious injury and fatality crashes. So I've seen firsthand what happens when errors are made from drivers out on the road. And we could be driving and obeying all the laws, but we have to be aware of the other people that are behind the wheel of other cars making mistakes. You know, you talked about the car-deer crashes that we're seeing and that's avoiding our distractions inside the car. We have to be able to recognize something that's gonna possibly run out in front of us or another vehicle coming out in our lane of traffic. For instance, we have to be able to react to that situation and avoid, you know, a crash. So, you know, one of our biggest campaigns now is eliminate the distractions inside of our vehicles. You know, with the cell phone use that we have today. Indistracted driving is not just being on a cell phone and texting. It's anything inside of a car that's gonna take your attention away from driving, putting on makeup, for instance, while you're driving, changing radio station, you know, talking to the passengers, eating while we're driving as well is also what we're seeing out there as drivers that are doing inside of that vehicle. So, we're trying to get that message out to all the drivers to eliminate all those distractions as much as you can and pay attention a hundred percent of the time while you're driving. And it's gonna help you avoid being in a crash. It's gonna also help somebody else from getting injured. I had an opportunity to be fishing with, I'm a fishing guide in the summer, a California State Patrolman from Sacramento. And he was telling me that they do a lot of research on swift speed. And he said the average person driving a car down the highway doesn't really comprehend how many feet they're covering when they're going 80 miles an hour. And he said their studies show that that break-off is around 70-some miles an hour when you can still control things, but when you get up into that little higher range, you really just lose control. It's almost like you're on ice even though it's in the middle of the summer. And they're seeing the same things we're seeing more and more people killed by speed. And they're seeing, I don't know how it is in Minnesota now, but they've lost a lot of police officers pulling people over, trying to take care of the issue and then getting hit because someone's been distracted, didn't even see them and killed the officer. That's an issue I know for highway workers as well as patrol people. What are we looking at for a number of deaths in this state? Do you have any idea off the top of your head? As far as patrol people getting killed? Patrol, I don't have that. I know, I just pulled up some stats just recently on the number of state trooper vehicles that have been hit. We average anywhere from the mid-20s up to 30 of squad cars that have either had a traffic stop or a crash scene per year in the state of Minnesota that have been hit. I've been hit twice in my career and it can be very scary. The highways, the freeways are a very dangerous place for anybody to be. You know, and it all comes down to being distracted again and we have a Minnesota moveover law. We had a trooper that was killed down in Southern Minnesota years ago from a truck driver, semi-truck driver that we believe fell asleep. The trooper was on a traffic stop and that person drifted over, hit the squad car and hit the trooper. So we have a, it's called a TED FOSS moveover law in Minnesota and basically what that law says is anytime that a driver sees flashing lights and that's either a law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, fire, tow trucks and even construction vehicles, any type of flashing lights that, let's say for instance, are on the right shoulder and there's a two-lane road going the same direction. The Minnesota law says that that driver, if that lane is open on the left side, has to merge over in that left lane and keep that right lane open. If you cannot keep that right lane open, if traffic is that heavy, our recommendation in the law says is please slow down and move over as far enough as you can to the left side and give us some room to work on that right shoulder, for instance. So that's our Minnesota moveover law and I know we've had some extra enforcement campaigns that we've recently been doing and we're looking for drivers that are failing to do that. And again, that's gonna keep us safe out on the roads and keep everybody else safe. So if you see flashing lights, please, please, please slow down, move over to that left lane, especially with the winter season coming up here when the roads get covered in snow and there's ice on that road, please slow down because if you see flashing lights ahead of you, there might be a crash, there might be a lane merge, or you don't know exactly what's going on up there. So if you see those flashing lights, please slow down and be aware. There's two areas I've always really felt concerned about for patrol people and that's one of them. And the other one, and I have never completely understood this change, but when you pull someone over, you have to walk up to them, they have to stay in the car. And I've always thought that was almost more dangerous than when in the old days, we used to have to get out of the car and walk back. What was the rationale for that? Yeah, I know with us, with the State Patrol, our training is, is we want everybody to stay in their vehicle. So if you see flashing lights behind you and you're getting pulled over for a traffic violation or traffic stop, please pull over as far enough as you can off of the road, put your car in park, please, and then have, or we can see your hands. What's very dangerous for law enforcement is if we can't see somebody's hands inside that vehicle. Our recommendation is please put your hands up or we can see them. The officer is gonna approach your vehicle. We're doing a lot more passenger side approaches because especially on a freeway or a busy highway, that driver side area is very, very dangerous for us to walk up and I guess conduct business on the road and talk to the driver. We're gonna ask some simple questions. For instance, on where you're going, we're gonna ask for your driver's license, we're gonna ask for proof of insurance. And then we're just gonna just talk to the driver and find out what's going on there. And we're trained to look for impairment, for instance, on anybody that we stop. We're looking for any signs maybe of a distraction or if that person's impaired. And that's one of our main reasons too on traffic safety and what we're looking for is to get impaired drivers off of the road and our main goal is to keep everybody safe. And so we're gonna be probably coming up on the passenger side and we're gonna ask you for that information. Typically what we'll end up doing now is we're gonna go back to our patrol vehicle, we're gonna run the driver's license. We already ran the license plate information so we're gonna have the information already on the registered owner of the vehicle if it's a Minnesota license plate. So we're gonna go back and make sure that that driver is valid and if there's any warrants or anything else for that driver. And then we're gonna approach again either with a warning on a typical traffic stop or a citation. And again, we're there to educate the motoring public on maybe a possible violation or anything else that we've seen and what made us stop that vehicle in the first place. I have a relative who drives a semi and he said you can't believe what you're seeing when you're in a semi, including people changing clothes, a driver changing clothes and like you said, putting on makeup, reading, you know. You touched on this a little bit but you said there are five major reasons that people get in a crash. Could you just kind of review those? Yeah, infatality crashes in the state of Minnesota, Department of Public Safety compiles all these, the records from all the crash reports that come in statewide from law enforcement agencies. And on our fatality crashes, the number one reason why people are dying is speeding. And this of course is the investigation from the law enforcement departments fail into yield. Let's say at an intersection, somebody maybe went through a stop sign or a red light for instance. And then number three is driver inattention. You know, again with your cell phones, anything else that's in that vehicle. And I really think that that's a lot higher because that's under reported because it's tough for us in law enforcement to prove that somebody was distracted and caused that crash unless they admit to us or with a serious injury or fatality crash and we're gonna do an investigations, we're gonna grab or we're gonna try to obtain the cell phone from the person, the driver and we're gonna look into that phone, maybe try to obtain cell phone records either with owner's consent or possible search warrant. And we're going to obtain those records. And again, we're investigating on why this crash happened. So we're gonna look at, see if they were on their phone, if they were texting, if they, anything else that may be inside of that vehicle. Number four on the fatal crashes is chemical impairment. Driving on the influence and that's not just alcohol, we're seeing a lot of other possible medication, illegal drugs that are in a person's system. OPRI or AIDS or whatever. Yeah, we're starting to see a lot more of the, I guess driving on the influence without alcohol. But then you start mixing that with alcohol can be a very dangerous situation. So a lot of the officers today now, I know I'm one of the instructors with standardized fields of variety tests for law enforcement with the state patrol and with the new law enforcement officers that are coming on. And that's one thing that we're really, really touching on and trying to teach the new law enforcement officers is if you don't sense or smell alcohol or with a preliminary breath test, there's nothing that comes up on it. That doesn't mean that they're good to go. It could be prescription medications. So we're training our officers now to look for that other type of impairment and what's gonna happen from there if the officer feels that after the standardized field sobriety tests that are given to the driver, if they feel that they're under the influence, they're gonna be arrested at that point. And they're either gonna be taken back to the county jail given an opportunity to give a breath test if the officer senses alcohol. If they think there's something else that's possibly another impairment, we're gonna ask for a blood or urine sample from that person as well. And now with that, we're required now to get a warrant if we're gonna ask that person for a blood draw. We're required now to obtain a warrant. Wow, that's a lot of paperwork. It's quite the process now to process the driving under the influence. Yeah, but that's our main mission, especially with the state patrols. We wanna take those people off of the road before they hurt themselves or someone else. It's amazing how many times a year you'll see someone who was in a bad traffic accident who really doesn't even have a license anymore, but they've just been out there illegally driving. Right. What should a person do if you run across road rage? That, our recommendation is to call 911. I know a lot of people think that 911 is for emergencies only, and definitely that's what it's set up for, but I always remind people and ask and try to educate people that if you see somebody, for instance, that's going over the center in Fogline, and they're just driving erratically or very dangerous, please call that in. Call 911, either you're gonna get the state patrol dispatch or you're gonna get your local sheriff or police and report that, and what the dispatcher's gonna do is ask you to stay on that line for us, especially, and then update the dispatchers. The dispatcher's gonna put that out. Let's say the state patrol gets that call. The county sheriff's department and the local city officers also monitor us. We monitor them. We work together as a team out there, and we're gonna do our best, even though it's the state patrol, county, or city, we're gonna do our best to get that car stopped, and we're gonna investigate that driver and make sure that they're not impaired, or if they're impaired, we're gonna take the next step and at least get them off of the road. One of the things I read was, don't look at them. Don't stare at them. Try to get out of their way. Right. But don't get back into a tit for tat, kind of. Yeah, we're talking about road rage. If that happened to me in my personal car just a couple weeks ago. Really? Yeah, and it's where a person came up and they were right on my bumper and what I tell people to do is, if it comes a very dangerous situation, go to the right shoulder, let them go by, which I did. I let the car go by, I pulled back into the lane, they started to slow down in front of me. Really? So what I do is get a license plate and I called 911 and reported it and we got that vehicle stopped. Really? Yeah. It's not worth it, and I always tell people, you don't know who that other driver is, who you're dealing with. Right. It's not worth it. If that happens, please call 911 and we'll do our best to get that car stopped. Give the dispatcher updated information on your road that you're on, your location. If that car continues to, I guess, have road rage with you is keep that dispatcher updated and one of us will do our best to get that car stopped. That's becoming more common. Unfortunately, it's becoming more common. People are in such a hurry to get to the stop site and sit there just a couple cars ahead of you but it's really becoming very common. Let's just talk a little bit about the zipper concept of coming into the freeway from my side road. I know a lot of people are still a little confused about how to do that. Right. On a zipper merge, for instance, Minnesota Department of Transportation, we see a lot of the zipper merges that a construction zone, for instance, where it's down to one lane and it's the same concept when you're coming in off of a ramp. Let's say you're going up to a construction zone, for instance, and it's two lanes and it's going to go to merge to one. Let's say it's going to merge that left lane. We want everybody to use both lanes when you're coming up to that merge, especially when traffic's very heavy and can be congested because it's going to eliminate the backup and that's when we're getting our crashes, maybe it's around a curve or up on a hill where people don't see that threat in front of them and then we're going to get some rear end crashes, for instance, but recommendation and MnDOT recommends this as well as use both lanes and there's a designated merge area, usually right at the sign where it says to merge and please take turns in that merge and I know sometimes that doesn't happen and that's where the road rage incidences happen. We've gotten calls in the past where somebody will, for instance, on that scenario, someone's going to block that right lane and then our argument will take place right on the road and we've had physical altercations. I personally have dealt with and I personally haven't dealt with it, but I know there's been some instances where somebody's pulled out a gun, for instance, when it comes to the highway. Right on the highway, yeah, so it can be very dangerous. So if that happens, again, call 911 and report that and we're going to do our best to get that car stop that's possibly doing this, but please, you go up to that merge, designated merge lane and take turns in there. I guess Minnesota nice is what we call it and if that happens, it's going to help everything. The traffic's going to flow a lot better and it's going to just be more of a positive outcome. Do you know what our highway death toll is right now, roughly? It is, I just pulled the stats this morning on that and this was from two days ago. We're currently at 276 fatalities in the state of Minnesota and we're pretty much right on pace of last year's 278 fatalities this time last year and that's not good numbers for us at all for the state of Minnesota, again, we're trying to reduce those numbers, but last year we had 411 deaths in the state of Minnesota and that was the highest fatality count since 2010. So our numbers are going the other way, even though cars are safer, we're trying to get that message out of the distracted driving, don't drive under the influence, wear your seat belt. It's hard to believe anybody would not wear a seat belt. Our compliance rate in the state of Minnesota is about 92%, which is good, but that 8% that is not wearing their seat belts, we have extra enforcement that we're looking for that, we're trained to look and see if we can see that seat belt that's not on. We can legally stop a car now if we see somebody in that vehicle has not seat belted in. So everybody, even in a back seat, has to be legally strapped in. Everybody has to be legally strapped in, especially when we talk about children in the car, they have to be in the proper car seats, booster seats, and that's big. I have zero tolerance when I see children in a car that aren't buckled or buckled properly, that can be a very dangerous situation for young children. But seat belts, when I did crash reconstruction and then when I investigated crashes, the majority of the fatality, serious injury crashes that I've gone to in Northern Minnesota is the one car rollover crashes. Really? Where somebody's not wearing their seat belt. And think about when a car rolls over, the object's inside of a car, another human being inside of that car, when it starts to rotate, very dangerous situation. The seat belts are designed to keep occupants in that vehicle, in where they're sitting, and your chance has increased tremendously if you're wearing a seat belt and you're involved in any type of crash. So that's one of our priorities in not wearing your seat belt is a top contributing factor in why people are dying today. Well, there's two seasons coming up that are pretty dangerous for all the Minnesotans. One is the deer crossing the highways and the other is winter driving. Could you talk a little bit maybe first about how to drive in the deer season? Yes, our motorcycle fatalities, serious injuries have gone up as well in the state of Minnesota. Very dangerous. I've responded to quite a few in my career of motorcycles hitting deer. And majority of those are when it gets dark out or right at dusk or dawn. Be aware, look to your left and right and be aware that deer, especially this time of year, we're gonna start seeing a lot more of them. They're starting to get more active out in the woods. Wear your seat belt. We've had them where they've come into the car through the windshields. We've seen cars roll over, trying to avoid maybe an animal on the road. Our recommendations if there's an animal in the road and you're at high speeds, at highway speeds is try to slow down. But make sure you're steering, yeah, make sure your steering isn't gonna cause you to roll over. And think about that type of situation. If you lose control, you might possibly go in the other lane and have a head-on crash. You might roll your car in the ditch type of thing, but our recommendation is just slow down as hard as you can. And you gotta be aware of somebody that's behind you as well. So very dangerous. So watch out, look at the horizon. Expand your vision when you're driving and look for those. And especially in northern Minnesota, we're seeing a lot of the deer right now coming out and trying to cross the road or running. They're estimating about 42,000 deer will be hit this year. They won't all be serious collisions, obviously. And then last year, I think, like I said, there was close to 200 people killed in those collisions. And some of them were motorcycles. Motorcycles, absolutely. And talking about motorcycle safety, the state law for anybody that's over 18 is we don't have a helmet line in Minnesota, but I've seen it where helmets have saved lives. Please wear a helmet. I know the law says you don't have to, but you have to have eye protection on as well. And then dress for the occasion. Have the thicker clothing in case you happen to, you know, go down on the highway. At least you have some sort of protection if that happens. And what sort of tips would you give the viewers about driving in the wintertime? Wintertime, very, very dangerous situation. Number one, please slow down. When the weather gets, when it turns, and a lot of times, you know, you can see that glare on the road. Yeah, it doesn't seem very slippery. It's probably ice or the black ice type of situation. So slow down, wear your seatbelt. And one thing I really wanna talk and hit on is have good tires on your vehicle. I've seen numerous cars that have, below the minimum, tread depth on those vehicles. And that definitely is causing people to lose control. So, you know, I know it's expensive sometime to order some new tires, but it could save your life on someone else's as well. So invest in a good set of winter tires. How many of our, do you know, percentage of our accidents are caused by teens versus adults? I don't have the numbers, but just the inexperience, you know, of a teenage driver, especially when the winter comes, it's different type of driving slowing down. And we gotta remember the speed limit might be, let's say on the freeway, 70 miles an hour. If it's slippery out there, it's snow and hard visibility is down. That speed limit isn't 70 anymore. Yeah, it's drive with due care is what basically the statute says. So you can be issued a citation for traveling over the speed limit or failing to drive with due care, even if you're under that postage speed limit. So good common sense and have those headlights on if there's any type of precipitation during the daytime. They need to be on then, right? Physically turn those on because the rear taillights might not be active. And it's not what you see it's being seen, especially when the visibility gets down with fog or rain, snow, anything else that's gonna reduce the visibility. So the number one thing coming out of this discussion really is slow down. I mean, so many of our deaths and accidents are caused by high speeds. I had a personal incident happen here about two months ago where a white suburban was coming down a county road and he started coming over the line and I looked at him and I thought, well he must just have lost his attention or something. He kept coming straight at me. I had to hit the ditch, the shoulder and I was going 55 and I pulled over. He went by me. He was texting or reading his phone. He never saw me. I watched him in the rear view mirror and he went into the ditch and then realized and I don't think he ever saw me unless he looked in the rear view mirror and saw me. And again, the stats are at 55 miles an hour before somebody looks up. Average Texas, maybe three to five seconds. That's the length of a football field before somebody looks up. So that's a great distance that's covered. Yeah, very dangerous situation. So wear your seatbelt, slow down, avoid your distractions, don't drive under the influence of alcohol. Be aware of other drivers. Like I said, we could be the safest driver in the world but it all takes us to somebody else to make a mistake and something bad could happen. Good information deal. We've run out of time, unfortunately. Is there a website that people can go to if they want to look up laws from Minnesota High? Yeah, the website I use is dps.mn.gov. It's got great information on it, it has stats, it has recommendations on winter driving. Any campaign that we have with State Patrol, Department of Public Safety, updated laws. I know a lot of times we don't have, especially as adult drivers, there's no way for us to get updated on laws. So that's up to us to actually be educated and know the new laws that are coming out. And again, everybody just, we want everybody to drive safe and we're trying that toward zero death as our goal and we're really trying. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jeff. Very good information. Hopefully this is something that will help all of us be safe around the highways. You've been watching Lakeland Currents where we're talking about what you're talking about. I'm Ray Gouldow, so long until next time.