WATCH: Minnesota Police Car Lose Control & Crash Into Another Car During Emergency Backup Call
A Spring Lake Police Officer lost control of their vehicle while responding to an emergency backup call.
Minnesota Department of Transportation cameras caught footage of the incident, as well as footage from the dash cam, has been shared. In the dashcam footage, it shows that the incident took place on July 7th, 2022. However, the video popped up on YouTube on August 17th, 2022.
The YouTube page MN Safety used Google Earth to convert feet per second to miles per hour to figure out how fast the police car was going. They timed how quickly the car moved from one intersection to the other. They got an estimate that the squad car was going 106 - 108 miles per hour. However, it's important to keep in mind that was the speed while they going the fastest on that stretch of road.
As you continue to watch the video, you can see the squad car start to lose control as they are trying to turn left and move around the cars that were in the lane. They then used a significant amount of breaking over an extended distance for the turn. The narrator of the video is estimating that the speed of the squad car was under 35mph at the impact of the collision.
There was another video put in the footage from a witness of the accident. The narrator said they did a good job of communicating and had one person filming, while the other called 911.
It doesn't look like anyone was injured, which is good. What a scary situation to be a part of. According to the description of the video:
The incident occurred July 6, 2022, as a Spring Lake Park Police officer was responding to an "officer needs help call" in nearby Blaine, Minnesota. There were no injuries related to the crash and the Blaine officer needing emergency backup was also uninjured in the related incident. This video is exclusively obtained by MN Safety to promote transparency in government and encourage safe driving practices, including emergency vehicle operations (EVO.) A thank you to the Spring Lake Park and Blaine Police departments for responding to our open records requests and providing excellent transparency as we examined the events leading up to the crash.