How AI Is Improving Road Safety In Sartell And St. Cloud

SARTELL (WJON News) -- Area law enforcement agencies are teaming up with the state to make roads safer. The Sartell and St. Cloud Police Departments are partnering with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and the Minnesota State Patrol in a groundbreaking road safety initiative program to provide officers with real-time AI-driven data to direct patrol and visibility efforts to help reduce crashes.

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How will the program work?

Mike Hanson with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Office of Traffic Safety says the program will combine historical crash data with real-time AI-driven data to build a new model of crash analytics:

“This is going to help us understand ahead of time, is our hope, the factors that take place that lead to a crash so that we can implement a countermeasure that will prevent that crash from happening in the first place.”

(Photo: Alex Svejkovsky, WJON)

Hanson says the data already exists, so they don’t have to put in any infrastructure, and they are excited about the possibilities of the program. Sartell’s Public Safety Director Brandon Silgjord says anything that can help reduce crashes is a good thing:

“If we can get certain geographic areas pinned down in the St. Cloud Metro region, there’ll be this partnership between both local and state agencies to try to do a little more directed patrol strategies and efforts in that area to create visibility and try to prevent those crashes from ever even happening.”

Why did they choose the Sartell/St. Cloud area to launch the program?

Hanson says they chose the Sartell/St. Cloud area for several reasons:

“It is a geographically diverse area, there’s multiple counties involved in it, you have a large urban area but you also have a lot of rural areas and so the harder we can test this model the more we’re going to learn and the more we’re going to be able to fine tune and to develop it so that we can roll it out to other regions of the state.”

Hanson says in addition to Sartell and St. Cloud, they will be working with the Stearns, Benton, and Sherburne County Sheriff’s Offices on the program. The pilot program is expected to go live on Memorial Day.

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