LISTEN: Behind the AP investigation into crossing guard safety, death

Ron Nixon, director of local investigative reporting: I am the person that’s listed for the tips that come to AP. And so every day I get a ton of mail from like prisons and people who suspect that they’ve been abducted by aliens and all of those things. And so, 99.99% of them never check out. But earlier this year I got a postcard that was postmarked in San Francisco that talked about the dangers of crossing guards. Just as I was about to throw it out, I saw a couple of things that were interesting. And so I just Googled them and I was like, oh wow, OK, this might be something.

PANJWANI: I’m Haya Panjwani. On this episode of The Story Behind the AP Story, we hear from Ron Nixon and investigations intern Dasia Garner. The three of us, along with investigations data reporter Aaron Kessler, looked into the dangers crossing guards face on the job, as well as why that data isn’t tracked and why some drivers aren’t charged for entering crossing guards, sometimes fatally.

NIXON: When you get a tip like this, right, the first thing is to find out, is this viable? Like, is this actually true? And so once I did a little Googling to find out that yes, this is a thing. But you also do reporting to figure out, like, OK, how much of a problem is this? And unfortunately for us, there is no government entity, either state, federal, local, that catalogs this. And so what took so long is we had to build our own database of people who are crossing guards who were injured or killed on the job. And it’s a monumental task because you cannot just ask the police for a report. And then just the scale of it meant that we probably couldn’t do it all on our own. So we partnered with Cox Media Group, which has like eight TV stations around the country. And that’s helped with the reporting and and the record gathering.

PANJWANI: Dasia Garner joined the AP this summer through the Ida B. Wells Society Investigative Reporting Internship. She goes to school at North Carolina A&T State University.

Dasia Garner, AP reporter: The data is underreported. We had to really find what how many people were hurt, how many people were killed on the job of duty. So we spent time doing the spreadsheet and collecting all of these reports of crossing guards being injured, but we ran into a lot of complications because a lot of them did not have their names, a lot of them did not have follow-ups of you know if the drivers were charged, if the drivers were even cited, arrested or anything. So it made the investigation a little bigger because we just wanted to talk about hey like this is an important issue that these crossing guards are being injured and they’re they potentially die on the on the line of duty protecting these kids but the biggest thing is that these drivers are not held accountable.

PANJWANI: A database compiled by the AP and Cox Media Group shows that at least 230 school crossing guards across 37 states and Washington, D.C., were struck by vehicles on the job over the last decade. Nearly three dozen were killed. The data compiled from incident and accident reports requested from nearly 200 police departments most likely represents only a portion of guards injured and killed nationwide.

GARNER: After speaking to a lot of the crossing guards, they all are passionate people. You can tell their goal is to protect these kids, they love the kids and so to see their face light up when they talk about you know connecting with the kids seeing them every morning and them just building relationships with the kids but then once you talk about who is protecting them you can see their face kind of darken a little bit because the issue is these crossing guards do not feel protected they don’t feel as if their voices are being heard they feel as if they’re doing just an auxiliary service that some police officers just don’t want to do.

PANJWANI: Drivers who hit crossing guards rarely face criminal charges, even if the injuries to crossing guards result in death. Of the 183 incidents involving crossing guards, where an outcome by police could be determined, nearly half resulted in traffic citations. About a quarter of the drivers weren’t ticketed at all, while a quarter faced criminal charges by police. Police said each case has to be looked at individually, and not every accident warrants charges.

GARNER: A lot of the solutions that crossing guards were bringing up is No. 1, having those body cams. They said that body cams will help because when you’re out there, it’s so hard to catch these license plates if they have people that are just not listening to them. Like they could say, hey, you know, this is on bodycam and give it back to the police officers so they can go ahead and ticket them, because that’s the hardest thing. Tracking these drivers down after they’ve been disobedient, just kind of disregarded what the crossing guards are saying. They’re also saying that they want more police presence out here. They don’t feel as if these drivers are being held accountable because there’s not a lot of police presence out there.

PANJWANI: The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes survey data for on-the-job injuries and deaths across most industries. But school crossing guards are included in a job category with road construction flaggers, and the agency doesn’t publish a fatality rate for it. The AP calculated its own fatality rates for nearly 200 job classifications, with at least 10,000 workers and 10 deaths in 2023. Crossing guards and flaggers were in the top fifth for death rates on the job, on par with power line installers and air transportation workers. Just two states have made a serious effort to track crossing guard safety: New Jersey and Massachusetts.

GARNER: Along our reporting process, we looked into one state, New Jersey, who actually has an initiative who focuses on school crossing guard injuries and fatalities. They have an inspection that they do periodically throughout the years to actually go to these different school zones and check to see if these school crossing guards are safe when they’re crossing the kids. And if they’re not, if they see some violations, they’ll go ahead and take higher measures to make sure that the roads can be a little bit more safer and that these school crossing guards are able to actually work where they are kind of positioned. But I think the first step, which I feel that that, you know, helps us is knowing that there is a state that is tracking the data so they can see how big the issue is.

PANJWANI Ultimately, crossing guards say they would like to see drivers treat crossing guard safety as seriously as the safety of the children that they protect.

PANJWANI: This has been the story behind the AP Story. I’m your host, Haya Panjwani. Special thanks to director of the local investigative reporting program, Ron Nixon, and intern Dasia Gardner for contributing to this episode. Myself and investigative data reporter Aaron Kessler also contributed to the story. Executive producer for the show is Ron Vample. For more on this story about crossing guards, as well as other episodes of the story behind the AP Story, visit AP News’ YouTube channel or visit APNews.com.