Earlier today, a friend sent me a link I knew I had to turn into a quick blog post - an article published August 5th in the Santa Monica Next titled “SMPD Stats Show Shocking Drop in Traffic Enforcement”.
The piece shares traffic stop and crash data obtained from the City Manager’s office. It shows a large, sustained decline in the number of citations written by the Santa Monica Police Department (SMPD) starting with the onset of the COVID pandemic, and continuing through today.
Visualizing the Data
While tabular views can be useful, they can obscure the magnitude of meaningful trend changes. So I spent a bit of time this evening building a visualization of the traffic citation data in ggplot, in hopes of better conveying the absolute collapse in traffic enforcement we’ve seen across the city.
The decline in enforcement comes despite the roads getting more dangerous: trends of most crash and injury statistics have been pointed upwards over the last five years.
I’d like to think this isn’t a malicious act by the SMPD - that they are not willfully neglecting their responsibility to enforce traffic laws and keep our streets safe for pedestrians, bikers, and drivers. But this new data makes me… skeptical.
