EPD Chief Reports Results of New Safety Corridor Supplemental Patrol Program
Information from Eureka Police Chief Steve Watson:
In November 2018, the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG) and the Eureka Police Department executed an agreement for supplemental patrols on the Safety Corridor to improve safety and reduce collisions on Highway 101 between Eureka and Arcata.
Since then, our officers have been diligently conducting traffic enforcement and education efforts in the Safety Corridor. These supplemental patrols are fully funded by HCOAG with up to $200,000 in funding reserved for this purpose. This agreement has no impact on the staffing of EPD’s regular patrol operations as officers volunteer for this duty during their days off.
January 2019 Safety Corridor Stats:
Officers worked most days of the month logging over 300 hours. In addition to highly visible patrol activity along the corridor (5,981 miles logged), officers made 159 traffic stops, issued 57 citations, issued 102 warnings in lieu of citation, made 7 arrests (2 DUI arrests, 2 Felony warrant arrests, 1 arrest for transportation of 5 lbs. of illegally possessed marijuana, 1 arrest for possession of methamphetamine, 1 arrest (cite) for being an unlicensed driver). 6 speeding tickets were issued for 70+ MPH violations (in a 50 MPH safety zone). The top speeder was traveling 78 MPH from through the corridor from Arcata.
Additionally, one officer working safety corridor overtime located a vehicle that had just been carjacked from a person in Eureka.
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🕯Really great article Kym,hope no officer’s were hurt during this time?
This was a press release, it has a yellow background to distinguish it from articles.
Isn’t patrolling Hwy 101 the responsibility of CHP?
Why is our tax money paying EPD overtime wages to do CHP’s duty?
It is in the city limits so it is up to EPD to patrol.
Then they should have been doing it all along, not pretending they’re providing some extra, “bonus” service.
Eureka city limits bpundary ends on the north side of the bridge that traverses over the slough that is near Bay Street.
That is incorrect – Eureka City Limits actually extend on the east side of Highway 101 all the way up to Indianola. It was zoned this way long ago so the City could collect tax revenue from Jacobs Ave, the auto dealerships, Cash & Carry, and other businesses they likely thought would spring up along this corridor (remember when Home Depot was a proposed option for Indianola?).
No. The city limit ends just over the first bridge going North.
🕯They also work together around here.😁
Interagency cooperation. CHP patrols Humboldt Hill and sometimes parts of Eureka.
How about some stats on the number of cell phone tickets written, stoners arrested, or other things that might actually improve road safety? I don’t care if people are going 70 on a highway obviously designed for going 70 – as long as they’re sober and fucking paying attention to the road!
That section of road has regulated cross streets and someone going that fast would make it difficult to enter and exit at any of them. It’s not all about you- it’s a road shared by people all along the way.
I believe the 50mph speed limit causes congestion and confusion, especially for southbound traffic where the “safety corridor” begins, leading to difficulty for many drivers exiting and even more so entering the highway. In my opinion not disrupting the 65mph rhythm would make the corridor much safer than it is now.
The speed of 50 mph was started so people pulling out of side roads might survive a crash!!!! It has worked!!!!! I am tired of peeps saying it hasn’t worked, “still wrecks happening”, the speed reduction has helped SAVE the crash victims…too many College students and elderly killed before the 50 mph.
I wouldn’t be surprised that there has been less fatalities during the whole time of the safety corridor’s existence, than there where in the last year of the 60mph speed limit. The 10 mph speed limit reduction has made a HUGE difference, especially for someone trying to merge onto the corridor.
Just like the cliche says – “speed kills”
Speed doesn’t kill, people who don’t know how to drive kill.
There is no 65 mph zone from the Eureka city line until after the last cross street past Bayside cutoff going north or starting at the Baydide cutoff going south. How can one change of speed limit be confusing? And how can it cause congestion unless some ignore the speed limit and thus fill in off the gaps created by the traffic lights in Eureka? I suppose going south they could sort of pile up where the change in speed is done but the south bound lanes pretty much need only merging space, not crossing space.
You are correct and my wording was incorrect. The congestion and confusion I was referring to is only southbound (obviously). Maybe the people who get confused are out of towners. I really don’t know the answer to your question but that’s my assumption. How it causes congestion is also an answer I don’t have for you but maybe it’s caused because not everyone on the road drives exactly like everyone else. I’ve never once entered the corridor and had every other vehicle near me adjust their speed exactly like everyone else thus creating the perfect transition and uninterrupted flow of traffic.
Look at the facts. Before the safety corridor was put in place, there was at least one, and usually several fatalities every year due to collisions at the crossovers.
Since then, there has not been one (how many years has it been?).
I need no further argument.
There have been several. And, just like before the un-safety corridor, they were entirely caused by the people entering the freeway fucking up. I think the last one was the woman who didn’t cross from bayside and tried driving south in the northbound fast lane, but I could have missed news of others. Fatalities have gone down, but overall accidents have gone way up, and now they occur along the whole length, not just at the intersections. The only reason fewer of them die is that there’s less energy in the collisions, and vehicles have gotten safer with time. Hell, for all I know, the reduction is entirely due to vehicle improvements. How many major injuries is equivalent to one fatality? Because the number of injury accidents has skyrocketed…
There are similar (and much worse) roads throughout the state and country with normal speed limits and no accident problems. It’s a wide, straight, divided road with excellent visibility. It’s actually a lot better than most. Clearly there’s nothing wrong with the road. Thus, there’s something wrong with the people on it!
I watched one of the collisions that got us stuck with this idiocy. A girl pulled out from the south jacobs exit, turning south (back when you could actually get from south jacobs to eureka without a scenic tour), directly in front of a northbound semi, in broad daylight on a clear day. Perfect hit right in the middle of the driver’s side. Absolutely no factors in the collision other than whatever failure went on in the driver’s head.
Humboldt attracts bad drivers (many of them are bad at being people in other ways, too), and our local drug culture (which more resembles the type of culture you’d find in a petri dish) just makes it worse.
There’s two main types of bad drivers I see… First, there’s the unintentional type. This mostly consists of elderly or disabled people with comprehension issues that should prevent their driving, but they drive anyway. Some of this is very likely due to ignoring “do not drive or operate machinery” warnings on half the pills they take. This area attracts these people, and we have a lot more of them than many others, and a lot worse public transit or other ways of keeping them off of roads. If, due to a medical condition or a medication you’re taking, your reaction time is slowed or you’re unable to maintain situational awareness at all times, you need to stay off the road. A single moment of confusion is all it takes to kill someone.
Then… There’s the oxygen-wastes that make up our drug culture. No one seems to think there’s anything wrong with driving drunk, high, on the cell phone, reading a book, playing with the stereo, or fussing with a child. It’s not just OK, it’s cool! There is some deep-rooted problem with our local culture with thinking it’s OK to be harmful to others. It’s what brings all the pot growers here. Ever notice how the number of vehicles with dark tinted front windows has massively grown since the cell phone bans? It’s all people who, rather than listening to the message that driving while phoning is dangerous, instead try to avoid getting caught for it.
Cell phone users are often stupidly easy to spot… Look for signs of intermittent attention. Drifting, suddenly correcting, then drifting again. Slowing down, suddenly accelerating, then slowing down again. Initiating their turn late when the road starts to to turn, as they weren’t watching the road. Speeding up when someone passes them, or slowing down when they pass someone else, as they’re subconsciously grouping with other vehicles to make up for not paying any conscious attention to their surroundings. And so forth. I see it dozens of times a day. I’ve seen them drive straight into things! Note that many of these same behaviors apply to DUIs, too. I recently saw a kid on a cell blow right through a stop sign and not look up until halfway across the main road the side road he was on intersected, and just manage to slam on the brakes before landing himself in the ditch on the other side. I had already come to a complete stop for him, as I saw his non-attentive driving well before he got to the intersection.
Then there’s the drug addicts… For some reason no one here has any problem driving while impaired. I saw a guy by the old BofA in eureka taking hits from a bong between his legs driving down 4th. People spend all night in a bar, and fucking drive home, with no one attempting to stop them. People start drinking at 7am and don’t have a problem with it. What is so badly broken with humboldt county that not only do these individuals think their actions are acceptable, but that their friends don’t try to pressure them to stop? I think it was the journal that found that, in one year they studied, 23 of the 26 traffic fatalities involved drugs or alcohol. But people every day do it anyway.
If you’ve had any alcohol, even one beer, or any marijuana, or any other drugs, you need to get a friend to drive, or use public transit. And if your cell phone usage consists of anything more than a verbal “Sorry, can’t talk, driving”, you need to pull over. Doesn’t matter if it’s hands-free or not, the problem is your attention, not your hands. If your kids need attention, pull over. Seriously. While I haven’t seen a highway-speed accident caused by it yet, I’ve seen more than one minor accident caused by a parent looking over at a child in the passenger seat and fussing with it, or even worse the back seat (what kind of idiot puts a child of fussing-with-requiring age in the back seat? And then turns around and looks at it?!!!), while driving… right into something. If you can’t find the CD you want to hear, pull over and look for it. If you need to enter an address into your GPS, pull over. If you have an utter shit should-be-illegal car with a touchscreen instead of mechanical buttons, and you need to interact with it, pull over – do not ever divert your eyes from the road long enough to interact with a touchscreen while your vehicle is moving.
(As a side note, while I think you’re a fucking moron if you don’t wear your seatbelt on the highway, I don’t mind it one bit – natural selection works!)
What we need to lower the accidents is a cultural change. “I’m not going to do this because I might harm others” needs to be part of people’s thought process. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to driving, but to all the thievery, drug sales, good-old-boy politics, meth usage, and lots of other parts of humboldt…
And until then, what we need is for the cops to look for drivers on drugs (illegal or prescription) and phones, as they’re the two biggest problems in the area. A florida study, which probably isn’t much different than here, found that only 2.2% of accidents were caused by speeding. The journal’s own stats show most fatalities locally are caused by DUIs. Nationally, 25% of accidents are caused by cell phone use. The average speed of people causing an accident is 10mph under the speed limit. Only 26% of accidents have speed as a contributing factor (note that this is not the same as causing an accident – both because it includes innocent parties who might have been able to avoid the guilty person if they were going slower, and because most of the accidents were caused by another factor, such as being drunk, unrelated to the vehicle’s speed – as the florida study showed, only 2.2% were actually caused by speed), while 81% of drivers drive more than 5mph over. Studies repeatedly show that slower drivers cause more accidents, probably due to impaired drivers tending to be slower than non-impaired drivers.
And yet, what do the police do? Completely ignore the cell phone users and drunks, and write more speeding tickets.
DUI and cell phone tickets are much harder to identify (you can’t just point a radar gun at a car and determine the driver is stoned off his ass), much harder (i.e. costly) to prove, much easier to fight, less profitable, and take a lot more man-hours. An officer needs to drive carefully in traffic, observing others looking for signs of bad driving (which is harder than you might think, because so many years of police abuse causes everyone in the area to slam on the brakes and act guilty whenever they see a cop around, making the actual problems harder to spot), develop enough evidence to be able to deal with an expensive lawyer in court, etc… i.e., you know, actually do their jobs. But hiding in the bushes is easy money…
Kinda like how all the drug dealers and users who don’t have large amounts of cash for asset forfeiture don’t get busted… The priority is easy profit, not actually helping society.
And until we fix this too, accidents aren’t going to go down at all. No amount of enforcement of the wrong thing is going to help in the slightest. Police being harmful rather than beneficial is one of the cultural issues we need to address to actually make the roads safer.
And I’m done ranting, back to work.
EDIT: made slightly less ranty.
FFS… Bushytails… You typed a lot of words to make an invalid point! The fact is the number of fatal accidents has gone down dramatically. There may have been one or two multiple fatality accidents.
I could only find one article about a death in the safety corridor. Your long-winded rant is just your base-less personal opinion.
There’s also this: “In the five years before the safety measures were installed, collisions at four of the seven intersections happened more frequently than the state average at similar intersections, according to Caltrans reports. Two of the junctures — at Mid-City Motor World and Indianola Boulevard — had more than double the average rate of serious collisions (those resulting in serious injury or death), Caltrans found.”
Please don’t make Fake News out of your personal opinions, especially on such a serious topic.
Oh yeah ! Now if we could just get rid of that silly seat belt law!
🕯Hey!! It was a good article and it’s the weekend. I even asked for more information but I realize it’s the weekend. 🖖
How would arresting stoners make the road any safer? It is designed for 50mph, not 70. Sounds like you’re part of the problem.
No, it is designed for normal traffic speeds. Similar roads in other areas, for example once you get past I5, have much faster speeds, with no unusual number of accidents. 299 out east is still only one lane in each direction, with frequent intersections, and a 65 speed limit. Our nice two-lane divided road is not a 50mph road. Similar roads in other states have speed limits up to 85mph.
Also… “How would arresting stoners make the road any safer?” Well, for a start, by keeping them from driving while stoned…
299 slows at cross-trafic as does the 101. Boo F n Hoo, you got caught, pay your ticket.
Sorry your wrong because it is not a freeway it is not safe to drive 70. Ask someone who’s lost a loveone in the corridor. It may have been years ago but since they dropped the speed limit no more deaths
There have been at least three traffic deaths, that I remember, but none due to collisions at the crossing points. The three corridor traffic deaths I remember, were due either to a wrong way driver head on collision, a driver falling asleep and colliding with a power pole or bridge, and one driver losing control of their car at 120+ mph
You must not have lived here before the safety corridor or else don’t remember the horrific crashes at Indianola and the other cross intersections along this stretch of highway.
I’ve lived here longer than the corridor, and in fact witnessed one of those crashes. It wasn’t the fault of the road, or the through traffic, then or now.
70 mph has not worked over the years because, unlike most of 101, you have side roads directly adjoining or crossing 101. No ramp. So people have been dying on clear, sunny days. So it’s Not exactly the same. Plenty of maniacs still drive Myrtle Ave. – Old Arcata Road to avoid the cops and endanger a whole ‘nother bunch of people. Thank you, LEOs and you can hang out on Myrtle Ave, if it’s A slow day in the corridor.
It says the officers volunteered for that Duty during their days off.
I’d bet my year’s pay they aren’t unpaid volunteers. As Guest notes, they are almost certainly actually being paid overtime.
a previous article has already told us who is paying for it. its a government non-profit association.
Yes. Where do you think HCAOG gets it’s money?
This is tax money being inefficiently spent on overtime to do a job that is part of the department’s basic duties. To add insult to (fiscal) injury, they provide a press release to brag about it.
~they have to keep the illusion in place, no matter what the cost.
Yeah, that appears to be a bit mis-leading. Volunteer means no-pay. If they are getting overtime, then volunteer should be out of the text. Yeah, they are earning it, but don’t Pretend it’s free. That is clarified later in the Chief’s text, but it was off-putting. I guess the idea is that they are not ordered to do it. What if the officers declined?
Not designed for going 70 with cross-traffic. I’m with you on the cell phones. The penalties should be far more severe. The number one killer of teens is texting and driving.
It also kills people in the other car who may not be teens.
It would be nice if EPD had the funding and staffing to enforce traffic laws and equipment violations throughout the rest of Eureka, with even half the zeal they showed in enforcing every law on the books in the Safety Corridor. It would certainly reduce the number of crashes throughout the city.
LOL, we can’t win with some folks it seems. This past year we also obtained a $60,000 grant from the Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) for enforcement of DUIs and primary collision factors (PCF) across the whole city along with traffic safety education. These PCFs include distracted driving (cell phones etc.), speeding, seatbelts, stop lights and signs and other dangerous moving violations.
This grant is completely separate from the safety corridor one and will increase proactive traffic enforcement efforts throughout the rest of the city focusing in particular on locations where we see the highest numbers of traffic collisions and also around our schools.
Again, just like with the HCAOG funding, officers will conduct these supplemental patrols during their normal off-duty days and times so EPD patrol operations will not be negatively effected. Also, there is no cost to the City or it’s taxpayers as these operations are fully funded through existing grants. We will be splitting our overtime efforts this month between both grants per our traffic safety coordinator. Furthermore, we have applied for the same OTS grant for this next cycle to continue our efforts.
It is difficult for our patrol officers to sufficiently emphasize traffic enforcement during their normal patrol shifts due to our very high call volume (around 175 calls for service a day on average in 2018) and staffing levels. EPD currently has 4 police officer vacancies with another 5 positions frozen (we did gain two new Community Service Officers and a sworn Waterfront-Parks Ranger) we also have 4 dispatcher vacancies but are recruiting hard to fill these positions. When staffing allows, I plan to bring back two full time traffic officers.
Thank you Chief Watson,
you’re a very good chief and I hope you stay on for a long time, the safety of Eureka has been much improved since you have been chief.
The patrols in the safety corridor were an excellent idea, and the efforts of your officers and yourself are applauded.
There are a lot of law abiding citizens that appreciate the service of your officers and yourself.
I support the eureka police department.
Boo hoo.
~second that.
How handy for those who favor hating. Damned if they are successful and damned if they don’t (why didn’t you fix everything and how dare you pick on this one when there is worse going on) . If all else is not obvious enough- blame, blame, blame. From a list of excuses criminal routinely use- “My justifications involved [blaming] corrupt politicians, police, and society.”” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gqmz4m/how-criminals-justify-crimes-psychology-gangsters-uk.
Thank you Chief Watson for the explanation of the situation and your efforts to improve it!
I support EPD just like they have supported me, many times when I had, problems with drug addicts. Always fast to respond and professional. Read What the chief is saying. They are trying to hire more officers. They cant be issuing tickets for failure to signal when there are more serious crimes to address.
~i can only guess where the “more officers”* will be RECRUITED from – San Diego. Because of the military influence there? idk.
When is the last time you saw a cop car with the signal turned on for a right or left turn? Or a lane change? I don’t travel in Eureka much, this is based more on observing vehicle highway movement.
* Bulging “Budget”.
I would guess they will be recruited from wherever they are available, but then I’m not a bat shit crazy conspiracy theorist.
I think you make a very good point about police failing to signal. They also use distracting devices while driving.
” but then I’m not a bat shit crazy conspiracy theorist.”
~and this isn’t the 20th century. You can’t name any fallen soldiers that weren’t used as cannon fodder via conspiracy.
Conspiracy theorist – Nothing more than a derogatory title used to dismiss a critical thinker.
Do we have to go over John F. Kennedy’s speech within a week of his assassination again?
Now if only DUI enforcement didn’t mean checkpoints, where you can both violate people’s rights and fail to actually catch anyone, all in one easy step. Driving in traffic and carefully observing for signs of impaired driving is the only thing that works, and doesn’t involve an effective search of people with no probable cause. What do you catch, an average of 0.5 people per checkpoint? They’re not even effective.
Nor, for that matter, does the send-a-teen-into-the-gas-station money waste actually seem to do much of anything to benefit society. I know you didn’t mention it now, but from the periodic press releases about it, clearly someone there thinks it’s helping.
I don’t care if people wear their seatbelts. At all. I wear mine, because I’m not all too interested in flying through the windshield of my truck. But people aren’t harming anyone else when they don’t, and thus I don’t care. If people want to hurt themselves, that is their prerogative. No resources should be spent on this.
Studies consistently show that increasing speed enforcement increases collisions, for two reasons – until it reaches the point of recklessness, or is caused by something else (like being an alcohol-fueled idiot), speed itself is rarely the cause of accidents, so reducing it doesn’t decrease accidents – and that anything that increases the range of speeds, like having people worrying about tickets interrupting the flow of everyone else, does significantly increase accidents. This has been well-studied for a while, and there were a lot of studies on this when we got rid of the double nickel, as accidents went substantially down in all but one state, contrary to all the doomsayer’s predictions.
For stop lights and signs, again, enforcement targets the wrong thing. Rolling through a stop sign after you’ve determined both that you have the right of way and that it’s safe to proceed does not create a risk. Same with a right turn on red. Since this doesn’t create a risk, enforcing against it won’t reduce accidents. The accidents are caused by people who don’t notice the stop light or sign even exists (it’s amazing how fucking often I see this!) and continue without the slightest idea that they even need to determine right of way and whether it’s safe to proceed, and by people who come to a stop (possibly even a complete one) but for whatever reason don’t process the need to yield before continuing. And, like so many other accidents, this is caused by alcohol, drugs (both illegal and prescription – and I think prescription causes this more often than it causes some other forms of accidents, from the looks of some of the people I’ve seen doing this), distractions (especially cell phones), various age-related medical issues that prevent proper comprehension of one’s surroundings, and the other usual suspects. But you can’t tell any of these by parking around the corner on henderson and waiting for someone to roll through the stop sign. These people might stop just fine at a thousand stop signs in a row, and then kill a busload of kids the next time. You need to identify the underlying issue (alcohol, drugs, distractions, time to give up driving, etc) and get them off the road _before_ they run a stop sign, not after, and you need to not penalize people driving in a safe but not letter-of-the-law fashion. Doing otherwise won’t improve anyone’s safety.
Why do dangerous moving violations always seem to include a whole lot of expired registration stops?…
I like how you point out “and also around schools”, because they sure don’t have any unusually high accident rates. Sure you’re not just taking advantage of a sudden speed limit change to write easy tickets, with “won’t someone please think of the children?!” as an excuse?
You need to put those officers to work doing things that will actually improve safety. Yes, it takes a lot more work to spot drunk and distracted drivers than it does to spot someone in a hurry – and it won’t bring in any cash – but that’s what will actually improve safety, and won’t be harming innocent people.
If you’re adding on/bringing back more officers, maybe you should assign some of them to deal with the rampant property, drug, and violent crime? Or the people camping in the bushes on top of giant mounds of trash, usually near waterways? How about all the stolen bicycles everywhere, outpaced only by the number of discarded needles? How about a couple bait cars, like other cities with car burglary and theft problems employ? Or doing something about a rather substantial portion of the population being on meth 24/7? Along with DUI and cell phones, those are things I’d much rather see prioritized…
Become a cop and instead of just talking about what you’d like to see prioritized, do it. Or, get involved in local politics and be part of the prioritization process. But, just sitting on your ass, spouting off by clacking that keyboard does nothing to help.
Thank you, Chief Watson, for the comprehensive response. Drivers in and around Eureka seem to get worse every year. Glad to get an update. Did Calif. ever have drivers ed. in high school? Something is not working.
The only problem I have with this enforcement in the safety corridor is that this is all over time. They get paid extra to work the corridor, mean while there is little to no traffic enforcement within the more populated portions of the city. Look at the number of accidents due to speed, failure to stop at stop signs, and pedestrain/ right of way violations in the city. Do we need to pay over time to get the EPD to educate the pedestrains how to cross the streets, drivers to watch for pedestrains, and to slow down. I see lots of money going to make the streets safer for the homeless and cleaning up the encampments over and over, but nothing towards traffic enforcement. Between dodging the peds that walk out into traffic, dressed in dark clothing at night; the bicycles shooting in and out across traffic; and the speeding cars, traveling Broadway is like playing a game of Frogger. Makes me wonder why EPD doesn’t have a grant or use some of that magic measure Z (O) money to make the city streets safer to drive on. I would have liked to have seen EPD do more for the traffic problems in the city rather than the corridor where it over laps 3 different agencies and is like shooting fish in a barrel. The only way to get officers on the corridor is to pay these guys time and a half?
~with 56 Police Officers (26 too many per City of Eureka’s Charter -based on one per 1,000 population*), you would think, that at some point in time, a safer way of traveling within the city limits would have surfaced by now.
*the City of Eureka bases the 56 officers on their “Budget”, not population. Can you say, “Charter violation”?
That is a totally uninformed assertion (if you are implying EPD only needs around 30 officers in total to police the city). Please do your homework before spouting nonsense. We couldn’t even begin to provide adequate police services in 2019 with only 30 officers. Patrol alone takes around 24 officers to staff and those levels are too low for our MUCH higher call volume today.
Times have also radically changed since the original creation of the Charter, and I disagree that it currently legally restricts police department staffing to no more than one officer per 1,000 residents. And staffing levels are not set by the Chief of Police anyway, but ultimately through Council action. Far more responsibilities and much higher crime and calls for service rates exist today, and we are increasingly being required to police more “gaps” in our broken systems than ever before in our history. Just look at the mentally ill and homeless problems. They call the police to deal with these issues because there is no one else and this is wrong.
Also, Eureka’s census population (which likely does not include many of the hundreds of homeless) is around 27,000 but our daytime service population nearly twice that. So, even using your outdated math we should have 50-55 officers.
With our 5 frozen police officer positions, we are currently allocated 38 police officers, 9 sergeants, and two Captains (49 officers) not including the Chief. Previously (2017 and before) this was 54 total sworn positions not including the Chief. We did add a Measure Z funded Parks Ranger last fall not included in our budget.
So, 49 vs. the 56 you quoted. Also, consider that currently we have 4 unfilled officer positions with two more officers off on work related injuries, another on modified duty, and a sergeant on family medical leave. That presently leaves two Captains, 8 sergeants, and 31 officers available to cover patrol operations, investigation units, special teams and schools.
And check out this article on police officers employment—per capita rates in U.S. cities: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/police-officers-per-capita-rates-employment-for-city-departments.html
For cities of 25,000-50,000 the average officers per 10k population is 16-17 (much higher than 1 per 1,000).
1.6 officers per 1,000 = 43.2 officers for a city of 27,000 using your math and 80 officers for a city of 50,000 (Eureka’s actual service population).
Check out this article on the topic too and factor in our calls for service volume.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-cities-police-officers-hiring.html%3fAMP
I’m done here and signing off for some family time. Good discussion points though. All the best,
Chief Watson
I said “with all due respect”. And, you have earned mine.
Thank you so much for taking the time to set me straight.
All the best back atcha Chief Watson
P.S. You didn’t answer my main question of have you read the City of Eureka’s Freeman’s Charter? Simpler times . . . maybe something in there that could simplify your work job. Just sayin.
P.P.S. i have a reply letter from-i’d have to find it- someone in the Finance Dept., that states 56. It is two years ago.
Don’t know about the “Freeman’s” Charter (do you have a link?), at least by that name, but have read the relevant portions of the City’s current Charter which is also available online through American Legal Publishing.
Simpler times sounds great to me. We are policing and living in an ever more complex world.
Two years ago sworn officer staffing should have reflected 54 total officers allocated in our budget including sergeants and two Captains but not the Chief. 5 frozen positions drops this to 49 but we did add the Parks Ranger in late 2018 which is not included as one of these allocated positions I believe.
Enjoy your weekend—might snow tonight!
Chief Watson,
The www has been scrubbed. I may be able to get to a link thru the wayback machine.
Otherwise, i’ll send you a copy to the Eureka Police Dept., address if that’s okay w/you. I’ll mark it Attention to Chief Wilson.
You too, enjoy the weekend.
Captain Watson,
you’re doing a good job; the extra patrols on the “safety corridor” helped get at least 2 drunks off the road, those drunks could have killed somebody.
Furthermore, your officers show up when called, much appreciated.
Thank you for your service.
I’m pretty sure there were a whole lot fewer tweekers when that was written.
~u b correct on that Bushytails.
I certainly agree with the need for more traffic enforcement in the Eureka besides the safety corridor (which also is a high need area, a large portion of which out to airport road or so is EPD’s responsibility as it’s within city limits), and my previous post outlines what we are doing about it now, what we plan to do in the future as soon as staffing allows, along with some very real challenges we are facing with current staffing and call volumes.
There isn’t space enough in this post to fully explain the reality of managing expectations and triaging resources and problems today. The bottom line, is we have plenty of equal or greater other crime problems in the city we don’t have the luxury of ignoring and we have to maintain minimum staffing levels on patrol to ensure officer and public safety, handle calls on a priority basis, and still provide an acceptable quality level of customer service to our citizens.
Officers who put in 40-60 hours of mandatory difficult shift work each week to protect and serve their community shouldn’t be criticized for choosing to work extra overtime shifts to either help maintain minimum critical patrol staffing levels, or to work these grant funded traffic safety operations. These grants are intended to fully fund officers working overtime in the accomplishment of their stated goals. In other words, the grants specifically are for overtime traffic enforcement operations like the safety corridor or OTS PCF, not regular duty hours work. No city tax payer funds are used. They are designed this way in recognition that most agencies do not have the resources to adequately address these safety issues with their existing resources.
The participating officers earn every penny spending time away from their families and adding more long hours to their work week. Being compensated at time and a half is an incentive for participation we would not otherwise get and again, it is well-deserved. It’s also the law—they are entitled to this benefit per FLSA provisions. And paying officers at the overtime rate is actually cheaper in this case than the fully weighted cost of hiring a new employee when you factor in salary and benefits.
It may not be funded by city taxes, but the OTS is funded by state taxes…
Sure there’s enough space. As I’ve demonstrated on more than one occasion, you can fit a whole lot in one of these boxes. 😛
Dear Chief Watson:
Since speeding and DUI are the most common moving violations which result in injury and death, and since, in my experience driving both North and South in the “safety zone” indicates a maximum of violations and a minimum of enforcement, it appears that increasing patrols and citations is certainly indicated.
Obviously, each officer on every shift could spend 100% of his or her time citing violators. It is a target-rich environment.
Please know that there are sober drivers, driving the speed limit, who applaud any increase in enforcement. Thanks for attempting to hold the line, and, persevere, while remaining alert.
Thank you for you understanding and support, Billy.
Chief Watson, who lives in Fortuna,
~with all due respect, have you ever read the City of Eureka’s Charter stating that the Chief and policemen must receive copy of same, and have a duty to adhere to it?
But not your singular interpretation of it.
What?
The Freeman’s Charter for the City of Eureka was in place until the 1920’s. Amended on the same despicable lines as the Constitution for the united States of America in 1871. No different than California’s 1849 to 1879.
I’m glad you’re sober, but if you want to improve highway safety even more, don’t be a rolling road block, which causes accidents.
Billy,
excellent comment. Your writing is also excellent.
Wow, 2 dui’s in the “safety corridor” within a 30 day window; with the drunks seeing the black and white and the drunks still got caught. Those drunks are bold! Excellent work, officers.
Just about anything that takes a drunk off the road is a good idea.
Furthermore, police can’t be everywhere; they are doing their best to patrol the corridor more.
Were they to patrol the corridor more, ordinarily (without a grant), in addition to their regular duties, more officers would need to be hired. More officers may be a good idea, but that would require more funding.
Maybe funding to hire more officers could be added to the next ballot; but with the understanding that it’s just for more officers, or for more overtime for the officers, and not to go to something else.
A 78mph for the corridor?, well that beats my seeing 75mph posted on one of the corridor’s speed feed back signs.
Heh, I got passed by a car the other day like I was standing still. Based on a rough estimate of the proportionate time it took to reach the next exit, I’d guess the were going about 1.75 times my speed. And, no, it wasn’t yet another CHP with no lights or siren creating a safety hazard…
Oh yeah ! Now if we could just get rid of that silly seat belt law!
🕯Damn. Like I said on the other post my dog,my cat my hot ⛾ cup of whatever and my potbelly stove on an inclosed porch. Can’t beat it.
Chief Watson, I’m interested in knowing what the other of the 57 stops were about, since 6 were for speeding. What attracted the officers to stop the vehicles? I’m all for enforcement and remember the horrendous crashes that went on before the speed was lowered to 50.
I believe many if not most of those were also for unsafe speed but just not 70-plus. I’m not in the office at the moment so I can’t check and confirm this.
I disagree with BushyTails that excessive/unsafe speed is not a problem. Speed kills. Higher speeds = greater injury, longer braking distances, and less time for drivers to react to suddenly emerging threats like a car or pedestrian (or cow, or bushy tailed bunny rabbit) crossing in front of you.
And when I say speed most definitely is a causal factor in many traffic collisions, its about more than a highway’s posted limited being 70MPH vs. 65 or 50 and a driver exceeding these limits, it’s also about driving at an unsafe speed for conditions (rain, ice, snow, low visibility, traffic congestion etc.) and following too closely vehicles in front of you (which is a separate vehicle code section for which someone can be cited).
I do agree there are many other equally and sometimes greater driving offenses that need to also be enforced like distracted cell phone driving, DUI drugs/alcohol, unsafe lane changes etc.
How many tickets do you write for driving a speed unsafe for the current road conditions vs for exceeding the posted speed limit?
Heh, some roads today, the safe speed looks to be about 5mph…. my plan is to stay home and do housework!
In my experience, most of the time someone is following too closely, it’s because someone else is ignoring proper lane selection or refusing to pull over to let other traffic pass, things that seem to receive little to no enforcement whatsoever. When out on 36, I usually start looking for a turnout as soon as I see someone gaining on me, and am usually rewarded with a wave or two quick honks, not having someone six feet behind my truck wishing I’d go away. Of course, I said most. For some reason some people on 101 absolutely refuse to pass you, even when there’s an empty fast lane they should use to pass you, and instead follow six feet behind you in the slow lane for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Slow down, they slow down too, still won’t pass. Speed up, they’re still six feet behind you. Drug usage is my best guess…
Meanwhile, in Manila cars speed through our poorly marked and uninforced 45 mph residential area at 70+mph!
Almost never see any cops, except rarely the ones dealing with all the people living in their vehicles. The cops just put cute yellow stickers on the vehicles, they are not forced to move or clean up the garbage and whatever is leaking out of underneath the rv’s(in front of mini golf). It’s the same logic as forcing homeless camps from one area to another, it never solves anything. It is insane to selectively enforce the laws in one spot resulting in increased number of vehicles speeding through the other way around the bay to avoid the cops. 101 “safety corridor” was engineered for freeway speeds, 255 was not! Yes I’m a complainer, go eat some yellow snow if you don’t like it.
Poorly marked perhaps because it doesn’t exist? As I recall, last time you tried whining to caltrans, they threatened to raise it to 60.
Only 159 stops?!? Hell, they could do that many in one day if there were enough LEO’s. I see county buses, county cars, private business vehicles, etc…passing me every single day, both directions.
Interesting article. I remember before the speed limit reduction there was approximately one lethal accident per month, mostly from people trying to cross the oncoming traffic and misreading the oncoming driver’s speed.
I also remember reading that the use of the “safety corridor” was put in place by a law that allowed CalTrans to address problem areas. The article stated it was only to be used for ten years. The ten year limit allowed CalTrans the time to get funding and improve the road and bring it up to freeway standards; ie; eliminate the cross traffic. This article was written more than ten years after the safety corridor was put in place, and by my recollection, was written about ten years ago. How long has the corridor been in place?
Perhaps if our politicians were a little more considerate of their constituent’s needs, safety being the primary one here, they would focus on bringing our highway up to freeway standards, instead of things like trying to build a high speed rail between Sac/SF/LA, which would primarily benefit politicians who want to go home for the weekend. Or a tunnel that would take all our water from north to south. But of course a better highway means more traffic and higher speeds, which means more co2, which means more global climate change, something the majority of our population detest and believe in.
We seem to be making headway in building a side trail for pedestrians and cyclists. That seems good. Perhaps we could make headway in this situation, by building one or two overpasses, with frontage roads connecting them, and eliminating the dangerous intersections that allow someone to attempt to get on to the highway and get up to traffic speed.
Of course that would be building infrastructure, something our current president (and all others) has stated needs to be done.
So I guess nothing will be done. Which leaves us drivers with one good option; slow down and be a defensive driver.
P.S. Thanks to EPD Chief Watson for chiming in on this subject. Although I can’t vote for you, not being a resident of Eureka, I do own property within the city limits, and have a vested interest in seeing Eureka improve, which it has in recent years.
The current plan is for an overpass at indianola. It can’t proceed due to the idiocy that is the coastal commission and caltrans’s unwillingness to take them to court once again, and caltrans’s own stupidity by trying to close bayside cutoff and force all the freeway traffic through the school zone, which no one sane would think is an acceptable idea.
There’s nothing particularly dangerous about the intersections – just the people who drive on them! Other roads throughout the state and country have similar intersections with no issues.