Did you know that motor police have 1/10th the fatality rate of civilian riders?
NHTSA highway fatalities database allows searching for "special use" vehicles, ie. police, and also for "vehicle type" including motorcycles. Narrow the search to those and you'll have the number of motor police fatalities per year. The Federal Highway Administration website has reports for the number of registered vehicles in the U.S. There is a separate catagory for government owned vehicles including government owned motorcycles. Voila! Now we have numbers that can be compared with civilian motorcycle fatalities, about 70 per hundred thousand for civilians, about 7 per hundred thousand for motor police. Adjustments for moving time, miles, traffic density, etc. and the difference might be even larger.
Studying crashes has been done to death. There's nothing more to learn from that. Why not figure out how motor police achieve their safety record and find ways to persuade and support civilians to get in the same zone. Having the skills of an average motor police rider is realistic, especially if there is a fun way to get there...
On the bayareariders forum there are motorpolice participants, including an instructor named silversys. I said to him it would be cool if civilians could participate in police riding competitions. A few civilians in the conversation started begging and pleading. The upshot, silversys is organizing a civilian/motorpolice competition in Livermore CA next May (He's calling it Beat the Heat. I would call it Cops and Robbers).
It seems to me this represents an opportunity for motorcycle instructors, both police and civilian. Persuade the local motor police instructors, who seem to organize most of the rodeos, to open competitions to civilians. Then the instructor community offers, not safety lessons (yawn), but coaching to be competitive in motor police competitions. (If it got popular the teaching model might need to change from lessons to a riding club format with practice days.)
Win or lose, competing against police riders sounds like FUN!