By Mindy Ragan Wood
Staff Writer
Piedmont residents may howl about the number of tickets written in their town, but police officials say it’s for good reason.
“The ticket to warning ratio is really closer to 43 percent,” Police Chief Scott Singer said Tuesday.
Last week, a rough estimate of the number of warnings was originally reported at 15 percent, but Singer said he expected a final number to be higher because the city manager’s report did not include oral warnings.
Officers wrote more than 3,000 citations in a year’s time – from Sept. 1, 2017 to Aug. 28, 2018 – resulting in $554,780 in revenue, a fraction of the city’s annual $9 million budget.
The tickets were written for everything from speeding to driving under suspension and failure to properly maintain a lane.
Two Oklahoma towns with similar populations write half as many tickets officers give out in Piedmont. Seminole’s population is 7,552 and Tecumseh’s is 6,630. Piedmont has grown to 7,118 people. All three departments staff 10 officers.
In Seminole, officers 1,171 traffic tickets. Tecumseh wrote 1,124 citations.
That sounded like a lot to Tecumseh Police Chief J.R. Kidney. So far this fiscal year his department has issued 1,031 citations, which he credits to a new hire who has been a “go-getter.”
“I feel like we write a lot of tickets,” Kidney said. “She (the new officer) write a lot of tickets in school zones and she gets out there and hustles. What’s to say they (Piedmont) doesn’t have four or five who really get out and hustle?”
Singer said there are good reasons Piedmont officers write more tickets.
“It’s very different when you look at the geographic area,” he said.
Tecumseh and Seminole have only 15 miles to patrol while Piedmont has 47 miles to cover.
All three towns are sandwiched between busy state highways, but Piedmont, a bedroom community for Oklahoma City, receives a lot more traffic from the Oklahoma City metro area.
“We have a considerable amount of traffic that is traveling Piedmont or (State) Highway 4 and a lot of traffic in the east and west aspects that are coming in from Oklahoma City, from the west out of Okarche,” Singer said. “We have a large number that come out of Oklahoma City to the north. Unfortunately, they end up on (State) Highway 4, Sara Road, Mustang Road. We have a lot of cross streets and some of our back-road areas are where we get a lot of them travelling at a high rate of speed, which is particularly dangerous given those areas and the quality of the road.”
According to city records, 98 speeding tickets were issued for motorists traveling 10 miles per hour or below the posted limit. In addition, 62 tickets were given for drivers traveling 11-14 miles per hour over the speed limit, 15 were issued for going 15 miles per hour or more and three were issued for traveling 16-20 miles per hour above the limit.
The high number of citations for under 10 mph is due to officers reducing the offense when speeders have a good driving record and are cooperative, among other reasons, which Singer said are at the discretion of the officer.
Many tickets are written in school zones, particularly on the busy SH-4 which runs through Piedmont and right along a school just south of Edmond Road.
He pointed to another reason for so many stops.
“We are on a grant from the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office which is funded by federal funds. The grant requires when we work grant hours that we make at least two contacts (stops) per hour and issue a written warning or citation. It was funded based on speeding, because that seems, in our town, to be the greatest factor in traffic accidents. We have three factors: speeding, inattentive driving and ignoring warning or traffic signals,” Singer said.
The rants on Facebook have not escaped the chief’s notice.
“I think you’ll find those people that are complaining, should someone cut them off in traffic on the interstate, or speed past them or ride their bumper, those people will be screaming, ‘where the heck are the police?’”
Regardless of the scorching feedback, Singer said they do their job just the same.
“Is it spiteful, is it hurtful? Sure it is, sometimes. But it doesn’t alter that we have a job to do and we’re going to do our job,” he said.
The police department is reviewing its policies on issuing warnings and has promised to write fewer speeding tickets if a warning is justified.
