As murder charges are filed in most recent in a string of car crash tragedies, traffic safety director speaks out

[MUSIC PLAYING] CATHY WURZER: And right now, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty is announcing charges against the woman who plowed a car into a group of people in downtown Minneapolis, killing a 16-year-old girl and injuring five others. In just the last few minutes, we've learned that 22-year-old Latalia Anjolie Margalli has been charged with second-degree murder and five counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon.

Just yesterday, Moriarty's office announced new charges against Derrick John Thompson, who, last year, sped through a red light in Minneapolis, smashing into a car, killing five young women. You pair those two incidents along with the drunk driving crash at the Park Tavern, and you have a string of worrisome tragedies involving cars that turn into lethal objects.

Mary Moriarty has said she's seen an increasing number of driving tragedies in recent months. We wanted to put these incidents into some context. So joining us right now is the director of the Office of Traffic Safety, Mike Hanson. Mike, thanks for joining us.

MIKE HANSON: Hey, thanks, Cathy. I'm glad to be here today. And thanks for having me on.

CATHY WURZER: We were kind of combing through some data here in the newsroom before you and I got on the air here. And the number of criminal vehicular operation and homicide charges statewide, we were looking at all that. Last year, the total was 888 charges. At this point, this year, we're at 743. So if we keep on our current average pace, gosh, we're on track to have well over 900. What does that number tell you? What do you think might be going on?

MIKE HANSON: We have a lot of work to do in the traffic safety world. That's the first and foremost part of it. And the fact that we're on the wrong side of the traffic safety trajectory, that's what really concerns me. Until 2020, we were really moving in a much more positive direction when it came to those serious injuries and fatal crashes that we were seeing out there. But we've reversed that trend. And as we're talking right now, we are 12%, 13% ahead of where we were at this time last year in overall fatalities.

And particularly when we look at impaired and unbelted, those are very concerning areas for us because we're not making the kind of progress that we need to in order to save Minnesota lives and to keep everybody safe as we're using our roads. So there are some very concerning things on our horizon right now.

CATHY WURZER: You mentioned impaired driving. Of course, the charges against Steven Bailey for that Park Tavern crash dealt with criminal vehicular homicide while under the influence of alcohol, and we were looking through charges there.

Last year, there were 13 charges for deadly drunk driving crashes, this year, at nine. Gosh, nationally, about 32% of all traffic crashes with deaths involve drunk or impaired drivers. Gosh, there's so many education, public safety announcements out there about don't drive while you're impaired. Why aren't those messages being heard, do you think?

MIKE HANSON: Well, and that's a real mixed-- it's a great question. And the answer is kind of a mixed bag, because you're exactly right. And I've said this before. There's no excuse for anybody to wind up in the back seat of a squad car, an ambulance or, heaven forbid, a hearse, because they made that fateful decision to get behind the wheel when they're impaired. There are just too many options out there.

And it is a matter of personal responsibility not to put ourselves in that position, where you have to ask yourself, should I be driving? Because if you're asking yourself that, it's already too late. And so, we have to find new ways of messaging and connecting with all drivers. But again, it comes down to everybody taking responsibility for their own actions before and after they go out for the evening or whatever the circumstance happens to be, and having a plan so that they don't find themselves in that position, behind the wheel when they shouldn't be.

When an arrest takes place, it's already too late. The system has broken down and it's failed because it's allowed somebody to make that decision. So we have to find more and more effective ways to communicate that to all drivers across the state.

CATHY WURZER: Do you think that these are just isolated incidences, or are we seeing a trend here where folks are maybe, obviously, as you say, not thinking before they drink or get high, or they're mad about something, and the car ends up being like the lethal weapon, as I mentioned in the introduction? Is there something about mindsets that need to change, I guess?

MIKE HANSON: I think you're on to something there. Certainly, I think the mindset has changed over the last five or six or seven years. While we can certainly look at current events and call those the most recent standout things, but I think back over my career in traffic safety, which is almost 40 years, every year, every other year, there's events just like this that take innocent lives in a completely preventable and a completely needless way.

And so, we have to kind of get back to knitting our society back together, where we all understand that we share the roads. And our driving and our transportation system, it relies on cooperation and everybody following a set of rules of the road. And when we do that, we can all get safely from point A to point B. And we don't have to worry about our kids when they're out there or anybody else that we care for.

Because even though we're talking about really huge numbers, every one of those numbers represents an individual and a family that is now torn apart, and coworkers that lose valued co-workers, and our friends and our relatives. It's all people that we should know and love. And yet we're taking their lives in a completely preventable way.

CATHY WURZER: I think you and I talked-- I don't remember-- I think it was probably right as the pandemic started or pretty close to maybe the first few months in. And everyone was noticing how, A, the roads were pretty empty, right, because of the lockdowns.

But folks who were on the road were just going incredibly fast, just using it as their own personal raceway in a sense. You mentioned this maybe at the beginning of our conversation in terms of some of that might still be kind of a holdover from the pandemic. What does the state patrol have to do to try to curb some of the speeding and reckless driving?

MIKE HANSON: Yeah, again, this is a great point and a great conversation to have, because you're right. When the pandemic and the lockdown and all that stuff that took place, more lane space was available to use and abuse. And people were taking out frustrations on the road, which is the exact wrong thing to do. The problem that we're seeing today is those high-risk driving behaviors, specifically those really high speeds, we haven't gotten those back under control.

And the troopers, the sheriff's deputies, and the police officers out there that are dedicated to keeping our roads safe, they're encountering driving behaviors that they've never seen before. It's not unusual for some of these officers, troopers, and deputies to be out there and encounter one, two, or even three over 100-mile-an-hour violations in a single shift.

And until we get that genie put back in the bottle-- because speed is the one thing that overrides everything else in a crash because of the energy that it brings. And that energy is what directly determines the outcome of that crash. More energy, more injury, more death.

And we have to figure out how we can get back to understanding that that speed limit is there for a reason. And traffic flows best when it flows at or around the same speed. It's those really high, egregious ones, or somebody's driving extremely slow, that really do cause those problems.

CATHY WURZER: See, this is such a big problem. I'm just listening to you, and I'm wondering, is there a way to bring in other state agencies to address what apparently is a pretty big societal problem?

MIKE HANSON: And that is a great way to talk about our Toward Zero Deaths Program. TZD has been around since 2003. And since TZD was founded, right through about 2022, TZD, which is a cooperative effort between the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Health, it brings all of these stakeholders together that can and do impact our transportation system and transportation system safety in ways to try and address the behavioral and the infrastructure issues that result in preventable crashes from happening.

And so, since TZD was founded through 2022, we had knocked our fatality rate down by over a third. Now, we've given back some of those gains over the past several years. And we need to regain that momentum, so that we can start driving those numbers down. And we're not going to stop until we reach that ultimate goal of zero, because there is no reason the traffic crashes have to happen. They are not inevitable. Every one of them is preventable.

CATHY WURZER: Final question here for you, Mike-- and I don't know if you've got something in the pipeline-- anything social media wise to reach folks? Any new PSAs? Any new effort you think you want to-- that you have already planned to roll out here the fall, into next year at all?

MIKE HANSON: We have a number of things that we're rolling out right along that exact line of strategy that you just outlined there. We can't enforce our way out of all the problems that we have on our roads right now. If you talk to any cop out there, they will tell you that in a heartbeat.

What we have to get back to is voluntary compliance. And at DPS, we're very focused on encouraging good, safe, smart driving habits. And we do that through all kinds of different media and outreach efforts.

So through public education, through public engagement, and through public outreach, we can change people's minds about what they do behind the wheel. It's real easy to get behind the wheel of the car and feel like you're anonymous, and you can do what you want, but you have to remember that you're sharing the roads with every other Minnesotan, who's trying to safely get from point A to point B.

And so we do that through our messaging. And it's social media. It's regular media. It's talking with hosts, just like you, who are good enough to have us on to talk about our message. And so, really, we're not leaving any stone unturned when it comes to our traffic safety messaging. And so, we're ramping that up. We've put a lot of resources toward that, and we're going to continue to do that.

CATHY WURZER: All right. Mike, thank you so much.

MIKE HANSON: Thank you, Cathy. It's always great to talk with you, and we really appreciate the time with you and your audience.

CATHY WURZER: Likewise. Thanks, and good luck. Mike Hanson is the Director of the Office of Traffic Safety.