TAMPA, Fla. — Whether you are behind the wheel or a passenger, road rage is an issue everyone experiences.
ABC Action News spent 15 minutes in a Tampa parking lot and captured drivers losing their patience and sounding off about what sets them off on Florida roads.
“A woman wouldn't let me in. I'm coming in anyway. And she just kept coming, and then she pulled up beside me cursing me out,” said one driver ABC Action News anchor Paul LaGrone spoke with.
LaGrone also asked drivers, “What is the trigger? What is the thing that causes the road rage?”
“People who don’t know how to drive,” explained one driver.
Earlier this month, there was a deadly case of road rage in Polk County. Sheriff Grady Judd said in a press conference that a Davenport man was accused of fatally shooting a man on the off-ramp to I-4 after the two engaged in a road rage confrontation. That man has since been arrested.
“And now we have a horrible set of circumstances where this man at 58, a truck driver. And this man at 58, a truck driver. Their lives are, his is ended, and his is now an absolute disaster,” said Sheriff Judd during an October 18th press conference.
So, is road rage a problem in the Sunshine State? ABC Action News looked at data from the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.
We found that since 2016, there have been 431 cases of road rage involving guns. These incidents resulted in 49 deaths and 142 injuries.
But since the pandemic, road rage cases involving guns have consistently gone down year to year.
In 2019, there were 72 cases. That number dropped to 48 in 2020 during Covid. That number dropped again to just over 30 cases in both 2021 and 2022. And so far this year, there are just 20 cases of road rage involving guns.
But there is road rage every day, and it is virtually impossible to document all cases. Especially the confrontations that don’t wind up with someone getting shot or arrested.
“It's extremely hard to actually say whether or not it's going up or down, based on the fact that most of the road rage incidents, like crime in general, are not recorded,” explained Dr. Alex del Carmen, from the criminology department at Tarleton State University in Fort Worth, Texas.
LaGrone asked del Carmen, “Are there people who are just sort of normal people that something snaps, and they kind of lose it, and it escalates into road rage?”
“I will say to you that one of the things that we have seen is that there is no pattern on the type of individual or the vehicle that they drive or the location of the city versus a highway as to where these incidents happen. Now, statistically speaking, you're more likely to experience road rage incidents when there's more traffic,” said del Carmen.
Sheriff Grady Judd said the bottom line on road rage is it's a dead-end street.
“So, when you are involved in road rage, this is how it can end up,” said Sheriff Judd. “No good outcome occurs whether you tail cars, fight in the street, or one or both of you end up shot and killed.”
If you want to see exactly how many road rage incidents are happening in your area, click hereto view the interactive map.
