Kent Citizens Police Academy, Week 3: Traffic, Crashes, Speed Enforcement Devices

Week Three:  Traffic, led by Kent Police Lt. Ed Wheeler and assisted by Officers Dominic Poe, J. P. Gormsen and James Ennemoser

I always assumed laser guns used by police for traffic tickets were aimed continuously at passing motorists. In fact, police training and experience enable an officer to first estimate that a given vehicle might be speeding. Upon making such a determination, the laser gun can then be used to confirm or negate the suspected excessive speed. This is a good example of the constant attention to procedure and restraint which characterizes police work in the city of Kent.

Our Kent Citizens Police Academy (KPCA) class went outside to see for ourselves how police laser guns and radar are used for traffic enforcement; both technologies must be calibrated before each police shift. Known distances are confirmed by the laser gun while special tuning forks placed in front of the cruiser-mounted radar units must register the correct frequency on the display. These tests are necessary to assure the public that the equipment is dead-on accurate and the acquired data will hold up in court if a citation is contested. The equipment is not used if the calibration fails.

Everyone hates to get a traffic ticket and we assume this is a money-maker for the city. Not so, say the cops. A basic ticket waiver, which you pay to avoid court, is $140, but $97 of that automatically remains with the court for its costs. That leaves only $43, which will buy barely one donut for each of Kent’s 45 sworn officers. (I’m leaving room for long-term inflation here.) By rough calculations the top five traffic citations of 2010 (1,915 tickets) multiplied by $43 amounts to $82,345. Anyway, you get the point.

Even worse, if a ticket is contested the officer must appear at court, which usually means overtime pay or diversion from normal duties. At that point the particular traffic enforcement equation goes negative and Kent clearly loses money.

So, why bother if the entire traffic enforcement effort, which Lt. Ed Wheeler estimates consumes 25 percent of police work, is such a money loser? It’s a necessary component of police work, he says, which has as its goal the “avoidance of accident and injury.” He said several times during last Thursday’s 6 to 10 p.m. session that the police are looking for intentional or flagrant flouters of traffic laws. But are the police, at this point, becoming engaged in the dreaded, politically incorrect, cardinal sin of “profiling”? The way Lt. Wheeler cautiously approached the subject conjured an image of the ACLU logo projected Batman-style above Kent City Hall.

Profiling is a natural human tendency that occurs when a decision is based upon another being’s inherent characteristics such as ethnic or racial traits. Instead the police are trained to look for legitimate cues, such as someone who goes out of their way to change lanes when driving to create distance between them and the police. That will attract police attention and if the vehicle outwardly manifests a safety defect or if the nervous driver then commits a traffic violation as the police cruiser (a “coffin” in police terms) follows, you can be certain a traffic stop will ensue. Clues or cues prompt police investigation, not pre-determined “profiles.” It’s a sticky topic and your guess is probably not as good or interesting as mine.

While outside, Lt. Wheeler, assisted by officers James Ennemoser and J. P. Gormsen, demonstrated the techniques of a police traffic stop which exposes them to mayhem if the routine stop (“There is no such thing as a routine stop” Lt. Wheeler adds) should turn deadly in a flash. Reaction time is only about 1.5 seconds with half of that being the recognition of a problem, which leaves but three-quarters of a second to make a decision how to react. Someone with bad intent, however, is moving without hesitation and therein lies the dilemma, thus explaining police caution. Officer Gormsen graphically illustrated the problem by suddenly bolting out of the car toward Lt. Wheeler, shouting and waving his arms. The situation was threatening but he could just have surely been someone overly animated.

In daytime, the cruiser coffin is parked at an outward thrust angle to both divert traffic away from the stop and to also provide better cover afforded by the engine block in the case of gunfire. At night the thrust angle is not used and the officer can choose to approach the vehicle from either side. We each duplicated the officer’s steps to realize the degree of exposure and how the driver is obscured until the very last moment. This is why the police more often than not come up to the vehicle with a hand on their sidearm. This is from training and becomes second-nature to officers whose weapons almost become a body part. Lt. Wheeler recalled a traffic stop he performed on a car which had earlier been implicated in a murder but the information had not yet filtered down into the alert/reporting system.

Lt. Wheeler is the department’s “accident reconstructionist.” He is tasked with developing accurate reports for serious accidents involving damage or fatalities. Software and math formulas from data gathered by officers at the crash scene are used to reconstruct the vehicle movements. In extreme cases, special software assistance can by supplied by the Ohio Highway Patrol to create a three-dimensional animation for use in court to establish culpability. Some cars, especially GM vehicles with Onstar, now have a black box (EDR) which records accident information: speed at the time of the crash; speed five seconds before the crash, brake and seatbelt usage.

In August of 2010 my car was totaled at the intersection of Haymaker Parkway and South Water Street, directly in front of the Kent Police Station (Officer Poe took my report). This was relatively simple because neither driver was injured and the other party, who violated the red light and hit me, took responsibility for the accident. These reports were generated: OH1, mandatory state crash data report with three pages for the insurance industry; OH2, a longer descriptive narrative with a rough drawing; OH3, witness statements.

My accident involved a red light violation. The law stipulates that drivers must stop at the white stop bar before the cross walk lines to protect pedestrians — any intrusion beyond the stop bar is technically a violation. Drivers can enter an intersection on yellow but never on red, even after furious braking to avoid running the light. Someone asked about the red light hold for both directions and why people still run stop lights. To my mind the red stop light lost its absolute authority during the early 1970s Arab Oil Embargo. President Nixon lowered the speed limit from 65 to 55 and authorized a right turn on red after a full stop; both changes were conceived to decrease fuel consumption nationwide. From then on the red stop light lost its almost sacred prohibitive power.

We have to give the cops credit for trying. It’s obvious — from the detailed presentations given in front of a mere 20 KCPA participants — that this level of professionalism, in synch with national norms, opens a new chapter in the history of Kent policing. The academy is funded by a grant and has been in development for about two years.

The police seem like a military organization. In front of the KCPA class there is frequent acknowledgement and deference to rank. I recognize this from my time spent in the military and I am comfortable with it. Military discipline and clear lines of authority help the organization operate with efficiency. Military societies are somewhat closed, however, and it should be no surprise if the officers regard the rest of us as “civilians” who just don’t “get” what the police do nor appreciate the demanding nature of their profession. The concept of the KCPA represents a positive effort to counteract the “us vs. them” mental barrier, which degrades both sides of the relationship.

The class is moving along nicely with eight more sessions remaining. Lt. Paul Canfield returns next week and will no doubt be pleased to see us all wearing our matching KCPA shirts. The next topics: OVI and jail procedures.