On the road to ruin: the demise of traffic policing

I found this outstanding article published last year in London. It discusses how little traffic policing there is these days and how active traffic policing not only improves traffic safety, but also gets criminals off the streets.

Britain’s highways – and that includes London’s – are among the most lawless places in the country. It’s five o’clock on a Thursday evening and constables Charlie Ives and Phil Jones, based at Chadwell Heath Traffic Garage, are responding to an emergency call about a vehicle stranded dangerously in the middle of a dual carriageway road.

Their vehicle, like other traffic cars, is equipped with an Automatic Number Plate Recognition camera (ANPR) linked to an on-board database, which can identify vehicles of interest to the police for a variety of reasons – no insurance, no licence, connections with firearms or wanted by other forces, to name just a few. When any such vehicle comes to the system’s attention, an audible warning sounds and a brief on-screen explanation of why the target vehicle might be of interest.

As Charlie and Phil race down the A406, the warning is tripped repeatedly as the system detects up one suspect vehicle after another. They can’t deal with them because safety is, obviously, their priority and the stranded vehicle is putting everyone on the road at serious risk. But later, they’ll be able to set about offenders with a vengeance.

. . .

Twenty five years or so ago, the Met’s Traffic Division boasted 1,250 officers, all bar a dozen of whom were out on the roads on patrol duties. Today, the Division’s strength stands at 672 officers, of whom just 353 constables are out patrolling, the rest being involved in a variety of other duties.

If you think this has nothing to do with Florida, then see that in 1939 the Legislature authorized 60 officers to make up a brand new agency called the Florida Highway Patrol.

Sixty officers isn’t very many and now we have almost 1,800 officers, but think about this:

• The Census in 1940 said that Florida had about 1.9 million people. Divided by 60, there was one patrolman for every 3,166 citizens.
• The Census in 2000 said that Florida had 15.9 million people. Divided by 1800, there is one patrolman for every 8,833 people.

So you can see that, strictly on a per capita basis, highway safety has taken a back seat.

Then there is a The Orlando Sentinel article that was published in January of this year titled “Florida Highway Patrol Has Almost 200 Vacancies.”

Only two troopers were patrolling 2,010-square-mile Polk County — an area about the size of Delaware — when the early-morning accidents occurred in heavy fog, killing five people. Both had been working crashes off the interstate, including the trooper assigned to serve as “lookout” for visibility problems because of a nearby brush fire and a fog warning.

but a St. Pete Time article from 2001 called The Lost Patrol quotes people that say that bad management is the problem, not a lack of manpower.

“I can tell you right now, it’s embarrassing how few troopers are on the highways,” said retired Col. Bobby Burkett, who used to direct the agency.

“If a person gets stopped by the patrol, I tell them they ought to get the officer to sign a piece of paper and they ought to keep it as an autograph, it’s so rare.”

For years, the brass at the highway patrol blamed every failing on a manpower shortage.

It became a mantra: We need 500 more troopers; we lose many of our officers to higher-paying agencies; our troopers are so busy they can only run from crash to crash.

In fact, the patrol has mismanaged its manpower. It doesn’t have a shortage of troopers, it has a crisis of leadership.

The London article goes on to mention that the people understand the situation:

And it’s not as if the public don’t care what’s happening out there. In the 2004 British Crime Survey, respondents were asked what sort of anti-social behaviour gave them most cause concern. Graffiti? Vandalism? Drug use? Drug dealing?

No. The most commonly mentioned anti social behaviour was speeding traffic. A survey in the Borough of Camden found that 66 per cent of respondents wanted more enforcement against traffic offences and 52 per cent wanted more funding for police enforcement against speeding. The uninsured, the unlicensed and the disqualified abound and some of them kill and maim.

Do they even bother to ask us what kind of law enforcement we want here?