I asked Chief Seto about why some violations arent cited during traffic enforcement and why so many warnings. Here is his response: I believe your first question is why the police do not always stop vehicles for traffic violations. There may be several reasons why this is perceived by a citizen. The first reason is that the officer may be responding to a call for service. If a traffic violation occurs while an officer is on their way to a call for service, that officer has to use discretion on whether to stop the vehicle or continue on their call. The officer would have to consider the nature of the call and the type of traffic violation observed. Officers do have the discretion to delay responding to a call to make a traffic stop if they feel it is necessary. Another reason may be that the officer did not observe the violation or did not have enough information to make a stop. Speeding is one example that a citizen may believe a violation has occurred, but the officer may not have a radar reading of the actual speed or was unable to pace the vehicle to have sufficient reason to justify a legal traffic stop. As for your second question of why officers issue more warnings than citations, this is actually not the case. I believe you were going under the information I had provided for the “26 Weeks to Safer Streets” which indicated about 36% of the stops resulted in citations. Pulling out the statistics from 26 Weeks, all other traffic stops conducted this year resulted in citations about 70% of the time. If we look at just the Officers assigned to the Traffic Unit, 93% of their stops resulted in citations. One possible reason fewer stops during the 26 Weeks resulted in citations was because of the nature of complaints we were responding to. Many of the complaints were in neighborhoods and the focus was on education and warnings. As for Mr. Leeser’s offer, I have been in contact with him and we have utilized a decoy car in the area of Seventh St. The location of where the vehicle should be placed has been a challenge and we will continue to explore the option of putting a decoy vehicle in this neighborhood. I hope this helps. John
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 21:03:17 +0000
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