Village traffic citations fall 35%
By Deborah Balshem

The number of traffic citations issued in the Village of Pinecrest was down by 35 percent in January, as compared to December 1998.

Although monthly incident reports vary in number to some degree, the unusually large decrease seemed inconsistent in a municipality where residents have insisted on greater speeding and accident control.

The large gap was the result of several factors, according to Police Chief Bruce Davis. He said the primary reason was that two patrol officers were out in January on Workman's Compensation.

The absence of just one officer can have a dramatic effect on the numbers. For example, if just one officer works a four-day, eight-hour shift and writes only one ticket an hour, the result is 128 tickets a month.

"The numbers suffer when we're short on people, especially patrol people or the 'worker bees' if you will," Davis said. "Plus, those two officers came off the day shifts, where, obviously, they write a lot more tickets than on the midnight shift."

Records show that Pinecrest officers issued 376 traffic citations in December 1998, as opposed to just 242 in January, 1999.

Although Davis could not comment on either officer's medical conditions because of confidentiality requirements, he did note that one officer is back to work (although working in-house on paperwork) and the other officer's condition is still uncertain.

In addition, two other patrol officers were being utilized as Field Training Officers (FTO) during January. The FTOs train newly graduated police academy officers and spend a bulk of their time writing reports, critiquing the new officers and teaching them the ropes.

"We obviously choose our best and highest producing officers to train our new officers. So in any department you'll find that the trainer's production falls off significantly during that time," Davis said. "In the time it takes a trainer to write a dozen tickets, a trainee will write one or two."

The FTOs also are taken off their regular schedule and rotated throughout all three shifts in an attempt to familiarize the new officers with a variety of people and cases. The training period lasts approximately 12 weeks and the two FTOs are expected to be back to their normal schedules in the beginning of April.

Also in January, the portable Randy speed tracking device was down for a couple of weeks, so officers did less targeted enforcement than normal.

"Furthermore, a lot of when and where we write tickets has to do with complaints we get regarding particular locations, so the numbers are always going to vary," Davis said. "We try not to write random tickets. Unless there is a flagrant violation, we try to focus in on areas where residents have complained about excessive speeding and accident problems."

Davis did say that the continued search to fill four vacant positions within the department might soon come to an end. Ten candidates already have been interviewed and Davis expects several more to go before another oral board in the near future.

However, now that the department has been up and running for a while, Davis stressed that he is being much more selective in choosing new employees. Although, the department is actively working on the background checks of about six prospects, Davis said many people get knocked out during the investigation portion of the process.

"In the beginning, when we were first starting up, our No. 1 priority was to get cops out on the streets. We were not as thorough in background checking as we are now," Davis said. "Unfortunately, in the past, we didn't find out some things about officers that probably would have disqualified them now."

Davis said the department is putting more effort, more time and more money into doing background investigations, and is now twice as thorough. If a potential candidate has had any problems, such as a bad driving record or disciplinary actions against him, Davis "simply will not hire that officer."

"We won't hire anyone we have any questions about. We're being very particular," he said. "The quality of officers that we've hired has significantly gone up in the past six months to a year."

Davis expects to have all four positions filled within the next couple of months and says the numbers of tickets won't stay low forever.

"I'm not concerned. We have no quotas in this department," Davis said. "Our officers deal with traffic problems through a combination of warning and tickets. And we leave it up to their discretion."

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