Unpacking the Causes of Increased Insurance Rates

There are a lot of reasons that insurance rates have gone up in recent years; however, a couple are particularly related to law enforcement vehicles. Stan Deese, Director of Risk Management Services for Georgia Municipal Association (GMA), explains that the frequency of auto accidents in general has skyrocketed since the post-COVID-19 pandemic return to work. “People seem to be driving more aggressively,” he says, noting that this is true for all drivers and that accident rates have never been this high. This naturally translates into more accidents involving law enforcement vehicles. The current tort environment doesn’t help, either. “When you couple increasing accidents with the higher cost of settling third-party bodily injury claims and repairing vehicles owned by the city, the actual dollar cost of each accident is more expensive now,” Deese adds.

Cities and counties alike are reporting increased costs where law enforcement vehicles are concerned. “Both of their number one losses are motor vehicle-related,” says Dan Beck, Director at LGRMS. “The group with the most opportunity for improvement is law enforcement, which makes up half of all of the losses,” Beck says, noting that law enforcement-related motor vehicle claims within ACCG’s & GMA’s insurance pools total roughly $10 million per year.

Indeed, there are likely thousands of accidents involving law enforcement vehicles every year in Georgia. Metro Atlanta was hit especially hard with a rate increase of 189 percent over the last four years, Deese says. “If the program can reduce the frequency of accidents through a better training platform, even 10 percent would be a huge dollar savings for our cities, and it could save someone’s life,” Deese explains. “Something needs to happen because it has just gotten out of control.”

Ashley Abercrombie is the Director of Property & Casualty Programs for ACCG, which manages the insurance pools for counties in Georgia. “Many of these accidents are preventable,” she says.

Narrative Driving – Driving to Understand What the Roadway is Saying

With safety and fiscal responsibility in mind, Griffin Attaberry, Public Safety Risk Consultant at LGRMS, set out to research and develop the LEADERS program. The idea was to revamp a system that historically relied on driving simulators and replace it with a more hands-on training approach. To make the pivot, he looked to outside sources such as private industry and public safety entities in other areas to find out more about their successes with the practice of narrative driving (also known as commentative driving).

Never heard of narrative driving? It’s more intuitive than you might think. In fact, many drivers do it to some extent already when they mutter aloud about road conditions or the missteps of other drivers. “Narrative driving is verbalizing what you are seeing while you are driving. You are actively engaged in hazard recognition,” Attaberry explains, adding that people can think of it as active listening married to active driving. This active state is vital, he says, because, “In public safety, on their day off, they still drive. So it’s easy to become complacent in their driving because they do it on and off duty.”

To kick off the program, LGRMS conducted two pilot training sessions with the Henry County Police Department (HCPD) and the Griffin Police Department (GPD). Officers are taught to constantly evaluate and verbalize key things like road conditions, current speed, speed limit, curves ahead, and traffic light status. They even say out loud actions like “mirror check” and “shoulder check” when they do them. According to Attaberry, an example is, “I’m approaching an intersection, the light is red, I’m slowing down, checking my mirrors,” or, “I’m approaching a stale green light [that is when the light is already green when first approached], the speed limit is 35, my speed is 30, the light is going to stay green, continuing through the intersection.” Narrative driving also helps officers to better process outside factors, such as pedestrians, people not wearing seatbelts, and even spot potential crimes in progress.

Narrative driving is not just for emergency situations. “We would like drivers to do this when they are driving normally without lights and sirens,” Attaberry explains. “If we can get them to make this second nature, then when they do have to respond with lights and sirens, it is going to help them recognize hazards sooner and avoid being in a collision.”

In the pilot sessions, officers underwent four hours of training. Roughly three hours of that is in the classroom with an instructor who details the “how-tos” of narrative driving, as well as a portion on due regard related to Georgia law. After that is complete, each student spends time with an instructor who evaluates them on their hazard recognition and narrative driving skills. This is done in one of two 2024 Ford Expeditions purchased by LGRMS for the benefit of the GMA and ACCG insurance pools. “We’ve equipped them with the aftermarket crash avoidance technology and driver improvement telematic systems,” Attaberry says. “The goal is for our membership to take this training and have them integrate it into their driving culture in their department local government to reduce preventable accidents.”