Kent Cops Keep Close Watch on Traffic

Kent police officers know they are badmouthed for their tough stance on traffic violations.

It’s a reputation they don’t want – yet statistics show that their vigilant watch on city streets is making driving much safer for everyone.

Since 2004, the number of injury accidents in the city has dropped 31 percent. Impaired driving accidents have dropped 71 percent. And there hasn’t been a traffic fatality in Kent since 2007.

This is in a city where the average age of drivers is 23, compared to the national average of 35. And it’s in a state ranked eighth highest in the nation for traffic fatalities.

This is just a sampling of the myriad traffic-related statistics revealed Thursday during the third session of the  Citizen Police Academy.

Filling in as instructor for Lt. Paul Canfield, academy coordinator, was Lt. Ed Wheeler, a 10-year veteran of the force. As the department’s lead accident reconstructionist, Wheeler is charged with investigating the worst of all crashes: fatalities.

“Investigating fatal accidents is very time consuming. I can’t do it all myself. I have to rely on others … it’s quite a team effort, just as with any major crime,” Wheeler said. “I approach the investigation of fatals just as I do any other violent crime: someone violated the law and took someone else’s life.”

Fortunately for Wheeler and all city motorists, there hasn’t been a traffic-related death in the city in four years. There were three fatalities in both 2004 and 2006, and one in 2005.

The primary reason Kent officers work so hard at enforcing traffic laws is to reduce accidents, injuries and deaths. Injury accidents dropped from 165 in 2004 to 114 in 2010, a reduction of 31 percent.

The department’s drunk-driving related accident stats are divided into years before taxicabs started running in Kent in 2009 and after that year. The number of impaired-driving accidents dropped from 45 in 2004 to 22 in 2008, which is a 51 percent reduction. In the year taxi service came to town, 2009, drunk-driving accidents dropped to 17, followed in 2010 by 13.

“Officers get called names and have a reputation for being heavy handed and overbearing. But if those numbers keep going down, we can live with that,” Wheeler said. “We’d like to change that perception, but our ultimate goal is to reduce accidents.”

Assisting Wheeler was four-year Kent officer Dominic Poe, who presented students with a breakdown of the city’s top five traffic violations in 2010. Heading that list was the combined category of speeding and “assured clear distance ahead,” which resulted in 1,235 tickets being issued.

The other four most-committed driving transgressions in Kent during 2010 were: turning infractions, 253 tickets; red light violations, 185 tickets; stop sign violations, 178 tickets; and lane infractions, 64 tickets.

Wheeler and Poe’s Powerpoint presentation on facts and figures ran much longer than they intended, primarily because the class has developed such an easy rapport with the personable officers who serve as academy instructors.

Students freely asked stat-related questions of Wheeler, Poe and 15-year Kent officer Jim Ennemoser that would lead into discussions about notoriously bad intersections in town or “letter-of-the-law” traffic issues.

As Canfield has done with the class, Wheeler pointed out several times that “police officers are humans, too, and all humans make mistakes.” He even confessed to once unintentionally running a red light while driving a marked police car because he was intently listening to police radio traffic.

“We all make mistakes,” Wheeler said. “It’s the intentional violators that we’re out there looking for … in order to reduce traffic crashes.”