We're all grateful for the good and important work done by Central Florida police officers. But there are officers who fall short of what the public want and expect from law enforcement officials. Sometimes these officers do far more harm than good.

A recent Orlando Sentinel investigation shows that from 2006 to 2010, 118 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents with Florida police vehicles.

In a sample of 32 accidents that resulted in 33 fatalities, "officers were at least partially to blame," the paper found after analyzing five years of crash data. In 10 of those accidents, the Florida officers were solely to blame for the fatal crashes.

One woman who spoke to the newspaper remembered her brother's death.

He was just 17 years old and riding his bicycle when a Pensacola officer tried to pull him over. The boy kept riding, however.

As the officer followed him in the patrol car, he shot the teen with a Taser. When the boy fell to the ground, the police cruiser ran over him and dragged him along the ground more than 20 feet.

The teen died. The officer was not charged or even ticketed.

"If any one of us had done it, we'd be in prison," the boy's said.

Then there was the case of a Greenacres cop who struck and killed an elderly woman. He was going 80 miles per hour in a 45-mph zone. Charges against him were dropped last summer.

In Jacksonville, a police officer was driving 98 mph in a 40-mph zone when his vehicle ran into an 86-year-old man, killing him. The officer was later sentenced to a year of probation.

A Miami police officer sped through a neighborhood back in 2009 without his lights or siren on. He ran a stop sign and collided with a woman's Nissan Altima, slamming her vehicle through a fence and into a house. The 23-year-old mother was killed.

The officer was not charged or ticketed.

As we can see, sometimes the criminal justice system is simply unwilling or unable to dispense justice for the families of car accident victims. Sometimes those families decide to pursue justice in wrongful death litigation that can force the guilty to pay compensation for the damage and grief they've caused.

Source: Orlando Sentinel: "Collision with the law, Day 2: Cop crashes leave devastated families," Rene Stutzman and Scott Powers, Feb. 12, 2012