Eagan Police Officer Luke Nelson looks for violations from bus window during the Busted by the Bus operation. (Photo Provided by Eagan Police Department)

Busted by the Bus

          In Eagan, Minn., the local police department has taken a similar approach to school bus safety. But while their initiative also involves school buses, they leave the children out of it.

          “Busted by the Bus is an initiative to get people or drivers to pay closer attention to the big yellow school bus driving down the road,” said Eagan Officer Aaron Machtemes. “And the way we do that is we put cops on the bus — there’s no children and we’re not making fake stops — but we let the public know that the cops are going to be on the bus looking for distracted driving behavior. Our goal in doing this is having people associate a school bus with a cop car. And when people see a school bus and think there may be cops on there, they are on their best behavior.”

          The Eagan Police Department has seen success from the campaign, which Machtemes credits to the media involvement spurring public awareness.

          “You can get cops on a school bus, you can get all the police squad cars positioned in the area, but the true affect happened on social media and the community conversations,” said Machtemes.

          The campaign doesn’t use a school bus full of children because the main goal is just spreading awareness.

          “We wouldn’t want to actually use kids as some type of bait or something like that where we are going to be artificially putting out a stop arm, hoping that people run it,” said Machtemes. “We just want people to pay attention around the buses.”

          And the idea seems to work. During the first campaign in April 2019, officers conducted 131 traffic stops. The department ran another campaign at the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year, which resulted in 152 traffic stops. All of these traffic stops occurred during a five-hour period.

          Because of the success, the Eagan Police Department plans to do another campaign at the start of the 2020-2021 school year.

          “We could make a thousand traffic stops and really we’re only hitting a thousand drivers and educating them,” said Machtemes. “Whereas, if we can get the word out there, we can hit hundreds or thousands … It’s very worthwhile, but really it’s not the operation itself that the success hinges on, it’s more the ability to tell the story of what this operation is to the public.”

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