Ohio highway patrol travels new roads for public safety

The Ohio Department of Public Safety and its State Highway Patrol are concerned with more than how fast cars and trucks are traveling on the state’s freeways and limitedaccess roadways, and we’re all better for it.

Training emergency medical technicians to safely follow law enforcement into potentially dangerous active-shooter “warm zones” to seek out and aid bleeding victims is one example of the patrol and public-safety department going beyond expectations under Director John Born.

Other initiatives include training 55,000 state employees on workplace violence reduction and mitigation, partnering with Ohio State University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to develop driver simulator systems to help test new drivers for operator’s licenses before taking them out on the road and working with Ohio schools to review and improve building safety plans.

The patrol has had success increasing drug and weapons seizures by purposely looking “beyond the stop,” as Born puts it, and training troopers to “slow down and talk to people.” By learning to be more observant, engaging motorists during traffic stops and collaborating with federal and local drug task forces, troopers have seized more than $ 421 million in drugs and contraband, including record amounts of heroin as well as cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl.

This strategy has helped to disrupt the drug supply line coming into Ohio by driving up the risk and driving up the cost of doing illegal drug business in the state, Born says. But the long-term solution is in helping to keep the 80 percent of Ohioans who don’t use illegal drugs from starting.

One tactic the department uses toward that objective is hiring 80 college interns a year to help spread the message of prevention. Another program, “Five minutes for life,” uses highway patrol troopers and Ohio National Guard members to encourage high-school athletes to avoid addictive drugs and share that message with others.

Most of these efforts haven’t been front-page news, and that’s exactly the intent.

Born likes to tell Rotary and Kiwanis clubs in presentations across the state that the department is after “Page 5 stories — tragedies that are prevented, stopping the shooter from showing up at the school.”

Born has been with the state highway patrol for 31 years and marks five years this month as state public-safety director. Before that, he was the highway patrol colonel for two years.

As the administration of Gov. John Kasich winds down, Born contends the past eight years have been the safest on Ohio’s roads, with fatalities averaging three a day. Arrests of those charged with being impaired by alcohol are down, but charges of driving while under the influence of drugs — both legal and illegal — are up. The highway patrol’s drug arrests are up 194 percent since Kasich took office in 2011 and weapons arrests have increased 192 percent.

It is appropriate that Born is not satisfied that the department has done enough, though. He noted in a recent Dispatch editorial board meeting, “You have to be perfect in the world of safety and security.”

Born is laying down a gauntlet for Ohio’s next governor: Any publicsafety records set since 2011 should be broken by the next administration.

That’s a challenge we endorse.