Traffic Court: A Growth Industry
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| Above: A rare trading card of Patrolman Roscoe P. Coltrane from the Dukes of Hazzard |
The recent repudiation by the public of the City Council's attempt to double the vehicle registration fee - backed by city and county alike - following the failure of the prison levy, is likely to result in a growth spurt in the city's 4th largest industry - Traffic Court.
Traffic fines are an easy source of revenue, requiring only two votes - the patrol officer and the traffic judge, and both are generally a 'Gimme'.
| Our Leading Industries |
| Durable Goods (Manufacturing and Services) - "slowest growing" (Bureau of Economic Analysis) |
| Retail "fastest growing" (BEA) |
| Traffic Court fines: " have remained high as more effort has been made" (City Manager) |
| Agriculture "orchards, chickens up; grain. livestock in decline" (Census) |
| State and Local govt.(no comments found) |
| Clandestine Meth Labs "a surge in the use" - Judges Gardiner, Holcombe, Dickerson |
| Farmers' Market "large and consistent clientele" - OSU Extension |
The Corvallis Chief of Police said she used the number of tickets written by officers as a 'performance issue', on which jobs and salaries hang.
Traffic Court generates more than a million dollars a year and the income is constantly flowing into the treasury: one city council member noted "55 arraignments in 50 minutes", a factory pace.
The data indicates that one ticket is issued for every five citizens (about 200% of the national average: see adjacent article) every year, a manufacturing pace where the raw material is automobile drivers, and often students.
Indeed, the city manager's report sounds like the CEO of a factory with his report that traffic fines "have remained high as more effort has been made."
From letters to the editor at the local newspaper, it would seem that much of the public believes that the patrol officers are merely looking for the slightest infraction, however innocent, to meet the quotas.
That seems especially true of citizens writing about experiences in South Town, where the sheer volume of traffic, often above the speed limit, allows an officer to pick out a driver at will, like a hunter weaving in and out of a buffalo herd to single out a helpless calf.
Indeed, the patrol officer's livelihood seems as dependent upon it as was that of the Sioux hunter.
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| Above: a Sioux hunter |
As a consequence, it is rare to find anyone who believes that patrol officers have a sincere concern for Safety. There is of course, no real interest in truly curbing all traffic violations in a revenue-dependent model of patrolling: it would be killing the Golden Goose.
The flourishing of oversized pickups and SUVs seems to be yielding an increasingly aggressive traffic flow. As a consequence, officers looking to make their 'quota' have no difficulty 'bringing home the bacon'.
An informal poll showed that the sight of a police officer in the rear view mirror leaves most citizens, entirely innocent drivers, feeling anxiety. There is a fear, that the officer will, effectively levy a fine for some slight infraction of a law the driver is unaware of.
Such citizens are unlikely, it would seem, to be anything but suspicious of a prison levy (who do the county plan to fill the cells with? Corvallis CPD, for example, has retrieved and jailed a 'fugitive' from Bend for failure to appear on a bicycle light infraction.
In this emphasis upon revenue and auto exhaust there has been the loss of neighborhood good will toward police officers. Warnings were once far more frequent, and as effective, as tickets. Drivers were, in the minds of older drivers at any rate, much more considerate of one another and the law.
Neighborhood patrolling, once a marked characteristic of Corvallis police officers and the source of friendly exchanges, has become rare indeed. It simply 'doesn't pay' for itself in fines, as does a traffic patrol, which can actually yield a substantial profit, as much as 300% or greater than the cost of the wages involved.
The traffic officer's wages are an investment yielding quick cash returns. The neighborhood police officer is an investment in the public's feeling of security. The latter doesn't pay.
The consequence has been a separation between the community and our officers, who were formerly simply citizens with special responsibilities, rather than armed professionals apart from others in the same sense that other professionals, such as lawyers, or city managers, are.
Ironically, the emphasis on revenue has led to an erosion of public feelings for law enforcement and to a rejection of additional law enforcement levies - and thus to a decline in actual revenue.
The police officers themselves have expressed intense dissatisfaction with a quota imposed upon them by a CEO who is an expert at PR and motivational speeches but whose management skills, they say, leave something to be desired. There is no doubt but that the rotating shifts and the 12 hour work days which were introduced several years ago, created morale problems in the CPD which the current chief has been unable to address. The police chief's personal intervention on behalf of the child of a teacher at her child's school has only exacerbated the problem. Police officers and staff voted 35-2 for a no confidence motion directed at the chief, probably an unprecented unfavorable vote on a manager.
Following is from the May 14 Gazette's summary of the circumstances:
| "...the
case under investigation involves tickets issued to Lance D. Wicks, 20,
and Gabriel K. Magee, 21, both of Chico, Calif. The men were passengers in
a vehicle that was stopped in the 1700 block of Northwest 29th Street
around 3 a.m. on Oct. 14. Corvallis Police officers towed the vehicle,
which was owned by Butch Wicks, father of Lance Wicks. The driver, Timothy
Bedgood, 21, of Chico, was pulled over for alleged speeding and cited for
drunken driving.
According to an internal investigation by the police, Butch Wicks called Roskowski two days later to express his dissatisfaction with the manner in which his son was treated during the traffic stop, which resulted in Lance Wicks being cited for minor in possession and the towing of Wicks’ vehicle. Sgt. Dennis Carson, who is the supervisor of the officers involved in the case, was asked to look into the complaint by Butch Wicks that the young men were treated unfairly. Carson determined Wicks’ complaint to be unfounded. Carson is president of the police union and the person who submitted the complaint of misconduct against the chief to the district attorney. However, Roskowski said after further review of the complaint, she and Capt. Gary Boldizsar agreed that although the department’s policy on towing vehicles allowed for the vehicle to be impounded, officers had made a judgment error in towing the vehicle, and the police department would refund the $175 towing fee. The city’s finance office issued a check to reimburse the Wicks family on Oct. 30. As for the minor in possession citations, Roskowski said there was a mistake in writing the tickets, and that the defendants should have been directed to municipal court. She considered re-issuing the tickets, but a lieutenant pointed out that has to be done in person, and as the defendants live in California, Roskowski said she decided it would be best to dismiss the tickets because they were “minor infractions.” The Corvallis city attorney is usually involved in voiding tickets, but in this case, Roskowski said, the decision was made internally. She told Butch Wicks that his son did not need to appear on the charge. However, the lieutenant who at first advised Roskowski that the tickets could be dismissed changed his mind and did not contact the court to request the tickets be dismissed. So on Nov. 14, Circuit Court Judge Henry Dickerson issued default judgments against Wicks and Magee for not appearing. A letter from the court to the family prompted Butch Wicks to call Roskowski in December, and so the chief asked a different lieutenant to write a letter to the court and to Heiser. That letter said Magee and Wicks were not to have been processed and they were told not to worry about showing up for court. Within a day of receiving the letter from Corvallis Police about the minor in possession citations, Heiser said Carson delivered a package of information to him about alleged misconduct by the chief. It was the same incident he had been asked to dismiss from the circuit court. Heiser said he decided to turn Carson’s complaint over to the Department of Justice. On Dec. 12, he wrote a letter to Magee and to Wicks notifying them they had received incorrect information about the status of the case. “The letter that I wrote to Gabriel Magee and Lance Wicks relates to a couple of citations that are at issue with the Department of Justice and Pam Roskowski. The letter I wrote to those guys was to get them back in court,”€¯ Heiser said. “Since the Corvallis Police Department had told them not to come to court, I was telling them they needed to come to court and address their tickets.” According to court records, Wicks entered a plea of no contest to the charge of minor in possession and was fined $134. Magee did not make his rescheduled court appearance, and a second default judgment was ordered on Jan. 25." |
The public would have been a little more sympathetic if the timing of the officers' airing of their complaints did not so closely follow their open disagreement with the City's decision NOT to cooperate with John Ashbrook's policy of picking out people of middle Eastern descent for detention and interrogation. The police officers were very opposed to this move by the city to protect civl liberties regardless of race.
The author of a series of letters to the City Council and Mayor, signing as Theseus 313, is particularly emphatic on this score. And, says the 911 Lead Dispatcher, Scott Haberkorn, "Whomever thesus313 is, he/she speaks for over 90% of Police Department employees".
That's ominous. The last time, that the CPD whole-heartedly cooperated in such a racially biased federal effort was in 1942, and ended in 11 Japanese Americans of Corvallis - primarily OSU students from Hood River - being shuttled off to concentration camps (Gazette-Times, Feb.1942) - from which, incidentally, they were permitted to return to Corvallis (Camp Adair) under guard, to pick beans alongside 3600 German POWs, as part of the 'war effort'.
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| Above:Ansel Adams' (click here) photographed interned Japanese Americans on the farms. Below, a POW from Camp Adair on the farm. |
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Today, we have an Attorney General who believes slavery was not 'some pernicious cause' (click here): what might we expect now?
However, a number of the press releases issued by the Police Officers on the Chief were sensible indeed, especially those concerning the waste of resources in the Department (click here for an example), and consequently the police chief has been pressured to leave her job for one with a university in the San Francisco area. UPDATE: The police chief did resign and moved to California.