Manatee County Sheriff’s deputies are stepping up patrols across 33 high-crash locations this year, funded by a $78,000 state grant — a modest price tag next to the human cost of a problem that’s landed the county among Florida’s worst 25 for serious and fatal pedestrian and bicycle crashes.

The high-visibility enforcement campaign, now in its seventh year, will run through May 2027. This year’s list of targeted areas includes 26th Avenue West in Bradenton, part of a broader effort that Sgt. Mike Makai said is built on actual crash history rather than guesswork.

“What it is, is targeted enforcement of areas of the county, 33 of them, to be exact, where there’s been a high number of serious bodily injury crashes and fatal crashes,” Makai said.

The numbers explain why. Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles data shows Manatee County has already logged more than 3,000 crashes this year, including 140 involving pedestrians and 115 involving bicyclists. It’s a straightforward law-and-order response to a straightforward problem: drivers who ignore posted limits and traffic controls in known danger zones.

For residents like Sarah Burdick, who lives near 5th Street West and 26th Avenue West, the numbers aren’t abstract. She said drivers routinely treat her neighborhood street like a racetrack, and with children waiting for the school bus nearby each morning, the stakes feel immediate.

“They’re using this as like a drag strip,” Burdick said. “And there are also a lot of people are just in a hurry and they just run right through.”

What’s arguably more frustrating than the speeding drivers is the silence Burdick says she’s gotten from the very agency now touting its enforcement numbers. She and her neighbors reported the intersection to the sheriff’s office months ago and, by her account, never got so much as an email back. For a public safety campaign built on responsiveness to crash data, a resident’s direct complaint about a dangerous intersection going unanswered is the kind of basic accountability gap that undercuts the effort’s credibility before the first patrol car even shows up.

Advocacy groups, predictably, are using the moment to push for something bigger than enforcement. Danny Williams of the Sarasota Mobility Alliance argued that patrols alone won’t fix the problem and called for redesigning roads so that lower speeds feel more natural to drivers — narrower turns, fewer high-speed slip lanes, and other infrastructure changes.

That’s a fair engineering point, but it’s also a call for the kind of expensive, years-long capital projects that tend to balloon in cost and timeline once government contractors get involved, with no guarantee they outperform simple, targeted policing in the meantime. Burdick, for her part, seemed content with a more modest ask: consistent, visible enforcement that reminds drivers someone is watching.

“If you do that a few times randomly, doesn’t take much out of your time to do that, then thank you for that memo,” Burdick said. “But they’ll have a visual reminder that you are there.”

Whether $78,000 in grant funding and periodic patrols will move the needle on Manatee’s crash numbers remains to be seen. But it’s a far cheaper and faster fix than the road-redesign wish list now being floated alongside it — and residents who’ve been ignored by their own sheriff’s office might reasonably wonder which approach they can actually count on.

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