The Kia driver was going too fast and braked too late – but did the police officer also ignore the stop sign?
- A police officer and a Kia driver collided at a Wisconsin intersection earlier this year.
- Both drivers appear uninjured, but the crash highlights stop sign misjudgment by both.
- The incident underscores how even minor lapses in focus can lead to major consequences.
As traffic control devices go, stop signs are about as simple as they get. Rather than have to decipher how to merge, what danger to watch out for, or who to yield to, they offer clear, unquestionable direction. In this story and the concurrent video, a police officer and a Kia Forte driver both ignore that simple direction.
The crash happened back in August, but the video is only surfacing now. It happened on the corner of Mather St. and Gray St. in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Video from the Primerica Education and Training center shows the moment when things go wrong.
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As it begins, we see a police officer casually roll through the stop line of the intersection. As they gently accelerate, a woman in a Kia barrels up to the same intersection, fails to stop, and hits the brakes way too late to avoid smashing into the police car. We can hear the tires skid but the collision happens anyway. The police SUV spins around, the Forte is crumpled, but it appears that both drivers are okay.
No doubt, the Kia driver made a huge error in judgment here. They clearly approached too fast, didn’t pay attention to the stop sign, and things could’ve ended up far worse. At the same time, the police officer also gets some blame. Not only does it appear as though they didn’t stop at the stop sign, but they also weren’t driving defensively. Either they didn’t see the Kia because they didn’t look or they assumed that it would stop. To be clear, this is a four-way stop even if the video doesn’t show that.
Now, it’s worth saying that there’s a small chance that, before this video begins, the officer did come to a complete stop. If that’s the case, then he did so well before the stop sign and stop line. That’s important because Wisconsin law requires drivers to “stop the vehicle immediately before crossing such line.” Would this be different if the cop was on his way to an emergency? Probably. Was he? It doesn’t seem like it.