Right now, the Tucson Police Department’s traffic unit is writing a plan to study and try to prevent more people walking on our streets from being hit and killed.
By the end of this January, TPD had investigated 10 deadly pedestrian crashes. At the end of January 2023, only two pedestrians had died in cases like this.
KGUN9 went to the department’s central station downtown to talk to an investigator about the patterns she is seeing. Lt. Lauren Pettey has looked at the factors in many of these deadly crashes.
She said, in most cases, after a driver hit someone, that person is not running away. “More often than not,” Pettey said, “the drivers are cooperating with the investigation and we have noticed that they tend to be actually driving the speed limit.”
Pettey added that in these cases, the driver followed traffic laws, and officers ultimately learned the pedestrian was at fault for crossing either in the wrong place or the wrong time. “If we have other factors,” she said, “for example: speeding or a DUI going on, that’s completely different case and we treat that differently.”