Closing the Enforcement Gap

Tonight's investigation addresses Southwest Florida's busiest road... and the agency tasked with enforcement on it. When you drive Interstate 75 in Southwest Florida, how often do you see a Florida Highway Patrol Trooper? The answers among drivers will likely vary. But where you see troopers (or don't see them) will not vary.

Our story is the culmination of a six month investigation that we just happen to stumble upon this Summer. It began as a simple inquiry into tickets written by Florida Highway patrol troopers. We wanted to know where they we're writing tickets for accidents on the interstate. The idea is we could map out where these accident tickets where being written and we could show you where the accident prone areas are.

As we combed over the tickets (roughly a few thousand) trends started emerging. We found specific mile markers where troopers wrote dozens of tickets for crashes. We also found extremes: mile markers where trooper hardly wrote tickets. And mile markers where trooper's hands we're likely cramping as they signed off on thousands of citations. (that's a joke)

When mapped out it became clear there are areas that are crash corridors... areas where you're most likely to get a ticket... and areas where you seldom will see a trooper. But we didn't have the complete picture. We had just a 10 week snapshot of the interstate in Lee County. So we expanded our investigation, analyzing 6 months of tickets written in Collier, Lee, and Charlotte county. That works out to a little over 20,000 interstate tickets... all counted and tabulated by hand.

The end result: We have the clearest picture a reporter has ever had on enforcement and crashes on the interstate in Southwest Florida. It's also the clearest picture FHP has had on where they are spending their time... and they are making changes.

As a reporter and a resident of Southwest Florida I know how overwhelmed our Interstate is. It's my hope this investigation will help FHP and perhaps other local agencies in curbing the crash corridors that have developed.