Salem police handing out big traffic fines

By Tom Dalton
Staff writer

February 25, 2008 07:14 am

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SALEM — Salem police issued more than $3,000 in traffic fines in just one weekend this month as part of an ongoing crackdown on speeding and aggressive drivers.

One officer working Highland Avenue and North Street on Feb. 16, a Saturday afternoon shift, wrote up $1,400 in tickets to drivers who were going too fast or who failed to stop at red lights.

Since the summer, Mayor Kim Driscoll's new selective enforcement program has tallied $73,000.

Although the city is strapped for cash and the police work has raised a lot of money, that's not the goal, city officials said.

Driscoll and police Chief Robert St. Pierre started the crackdown more than a year ago in response to mounting concerns from residents and neighborhood groups, officials said.

"It actually came together after we went to a series of neighborhood meetings," Driscoll said.

"We just couldn't keep up with the complaints," said Lt. Robert Preczewski, head of the police traffic division. "And we had to try to find a way to make the city as safe as possible."

The department couldn't keep up with the complaints because it had an understaffed traffic division. A unit that once had four officers was down to one, the current level.

The selective enforcement program meant sending out officers in four-hour overtime shifts and on city work details. It was an attempt to find a creative way, officials said, to compensate for a lack of police manpower and budget limitations.

"It's cheaper for us to send men out to do this ... than it is to actually assign police officers full time to traffic," Preczewski said.

Even though the city doesn't get all of the money issued in tickets — some of the fines are dismissed or reduced in court — the program was set up so that the fines would cover the cost of the overtime and details, Driscoll said.

Since the program started in the fall of 2006, police have focused on familiar trouble spots — speeding on Highland Avenue, Jefferson Avenue and the stretch of Lafayette Street leading into Marblehead; stoplights along North Street and on Loring Avenue; cut-throughs like Dearborn Street; the intersection with no traffic light at Derby Street and Hawthorne Boulevard, and other locations.

Although police choose the spots, they get recommendations from the public.

"I had a neighborhood meeting with people up at Pickman Road, and they basically pleaded with us to please enforce the red light (on Loring Avenue) because every time they pull out, people are running it," Preczewski said.

Last summer, the traffic enforcement police spent time in Salem Willows after residents complained about the noise from loud motorcycles.

Police say they don't know if the city is safer, but they do know that a lot of motorists have been stopped and a lot more have seen the flashing blue lights. The message, they said, has to be getting out.

"I would hope that if you travel the same streets every day ... and see an officer engaged in a traffic stop," Preczewski said, "that sooner or later people would say, 'I've got to watch my speed because police could be on the street today.'"

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