Speed enforcement is a necessary action local police need to take

Wednesday, July 5, 2006

Mr. Bothwell stated that citizens in need of assistance would be wondering why it’s so important that half the county patrol a 45 mph road while crimes were being committed against those citizens.

I am addressing only Mr. Bothwell’s concerns regarding the Calvert County enforcement efforts. Most of the Calvert County law enforcement officers participating on that day were grant funded on a special overtime assignment. In case of an emergency, they would have then been directed to attend to the urgent situation instead of the special assignment. In that case, the unspent overtime would have been redirected to another day’s enforcement efforts.

Both the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office and Maryland State Police participated in the June 18 through June 24 aggressive driving enforcement effort mentioned in Mr. Bothwell’s letter. Enforcement efforts against speed, stop sign and red-light running as well as other aggressive driving behaviors were conducted as part of a regional campaign known as ‘‘Smooth Operator.” The four Smooth Operator waves throughout the summer are federally funded and have been conducted throughout Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., for the last five years.

Whenever possible, federal and state grant funded education and enforcement efforts are very focused to Calvert County’s concerns. Typically, grant funded overtime efforts take place in locations documented through citizen complaints, citation statistics or crash location data. The particular 45 mph Calvert County location mentioned by Mr. Bothwell was selected for stepped-up speed enforcement efforts following meetings between various state and Calvert County officials with southern Calvert County senior citizens. The citizens stated their difficulty in accessing Route 2-4, due to the well-documented, excessive speed frequently demonstrated by drivers traveling through the Lusby and Solomons Island corridor.

In fact, after a review of crash data, the Maryland State Highway Administration extended the length of the 45 mph speed limit zone, to assist all motorists in judging the speed of oncoming traffic and entering the flow of traffic safely.

In his letter, Mr. Bothwell also stated, ‘‘our state and local police forces’ preoccupation with self-preservation results in continual attempts to generate revenue at the expense of law-abiding citizen. ... Speed traps, DUI checkpoints, red-light cameras, federal Click It or Ticket programs are merely a handful of ways the Nanny State masquerades as our protector ... trampling our liberties in the process.”

I’d like to offer a different perspective.

The Maryland State Police and the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office are fortunate to have dedicated police officers that attempt to make our roadways as safe as possible during regular patrol hours. However, due to our county’s population growth, they are continuously responding to ‘‘urgent” situations throughout a typical workday, and all too often are unable to conduct routine and⁄or large scale traffic enforcement efforts for any length of time.

Therefore, in order to ensure that traffic safety issues are specifically addressed during well-documented crash times or at problematic locations, additional grant-funded overtime enforcement assignments are distributed to available law enforcement officers. For instance, the DUI checkpoints (as well as our saturation patrols) mentioned in Mr. Bothwell’s letter are conducted in locations where DUI arrests or crash data documents a problem.

I’m sure that the families of those injured or killed on our roadways in one of Calvert County’s impaired driving crashes could share a story that would radically alter any negative opinion of the enforcement operations conducted by police officers. With an average of nearly 130 DUI crashes and 800 DUI arrests yearly, Calvert County’s motorists need these and other dedicated enforcement and educational efforts to continue, however inconvenient they are to those of us that are ‘‘law abiding citizens.”

Calvert County well exceeds the state’s average in injury crashes. Over the past five years in Calvert County, 68 percent of all crashes and 81 percent of all fatalities resulting from those crashes have occurred on our higher speed roadways. The bottom line is we need law enforcement officers to continue large-scale efforts to remind all motorists to slow down, buckle up and drive sober and responsibly.

Calvert County has some of the most dedicated police officers in the state.

Rather than being criticized, they deserve to be applauded for their commitment to keeping our roadways safe.

Debbie Jennings, Prince Frederick