Commission suing union
Suspension of city officer at the root of police dispute
By Suzanne Klunk
Staff Writer
8/11/98

Sheriff's office may be fined over slain deputy's holster

By HECTOR CASTRO
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

State officials have cited the King County Sheriff's Office for allowing slain Deputy Rich Herzog to use a holster not intended for the type of gun he carried, but Sheriff Dave Reichert said he plans to appeal the fine.

The state Department of Labor and Industries has proposed fining the sheriff's office $3,000 for what is labeled a "serious" violation, one that could result in injury or death.

But in a statement released yesterday, Reichert said Herzog was killed "by the criminal act of another" and was not the victim of some industrial accident.

"I take the safety of my employees seriously, and I will contest the citation through the appeal process," he said.

The citation says Herzog was "exposed to the hazard of having his handgun accidentally or intentionally removed from his holster during a suspect altercation, which potentially could result in serious permanent disabilities or death."

That is allegedly what happened June 22 when Herzog responded to reports of a naked man running through traffic in Newcastle. After a brief struggle, the man allegedly took Herzog's handgun and shot him to death.

Ronald Keith Matthews, 44, was charged with first-degree murder and awaits trial.

Sheriff's officials have said it isn't clear whether Herzog's .40-caliber Glock 22 fell from his holster or was removed by Herzog.

The state's citation does not address what happened during the shooting, instead focusing on the fact that the use of the holster was itself a danger.

Although the sheriff's office has policies regarding the use of non-department-issued equipment, Labor and Industries officials said they were not followed in this case.

"They, in essence, could not show us that they had followed their own policies and procedures," department spokesman Steve Pierce said.

The sheriff's office said yesterday that the investigation was flawed and the conclusion drawn by state investigators is not supported by the evidence.

Herzog was using an Uncle Mikes brand holster that the state said was intended for a 9 mm Beretta.

But Deputy Steve Eggert, president of the King County Police Officers Guild, said the holster was approved for use and is virtually indistinguishable from the holster meant for the Glock.

"This wasn't an accident," Eggert said. "This was a homicide."

Rather than fine the department, Eggert said, he would rather the state had issued a new standard requiring all officers to use the more secure holsters, level-three holsters.

"If L&I wanted to make a statement, it seems to me they could have mandated the carrying of level-three holsters," he said.

The type of holster Herzog used has a level-two security rating, Eggert said, and is not as secure as the level-three holsters used by about half the 630 county deputies. The more secure holster has two straps to hold the pistol, which must be removed at a specific angle.

They're trickier to get used to, Eggert said, but the gun is far more secure in one.

"We've had instances where officers have been picked up off their feet by people trying to pull their gun out of the holster but the gun wouldn't come out," he said.

Although Labor and Industries frequently investigates state agencies and issues citations to them, such action in the death of a law enforcement officer is rare. The Ocean Shores Police Department was issued a citation after an officer on the department's dive team drowned while on a rescue in 1998.

"This is not a common kind of citation," Pierce said.

The state also cited the sheriff's office for a "general" violation because the department was not requiring annual training on the dangers of blood-borne pathogens.

Eggert said there were initially four citations against the department, but two were dropped after further state investigation.

The sheriff's office has 15 days to appeal the citation, Pierce said.

That will prompt a meeting between sheriff's officials and Labor and Industries as a first step, although appeals can be heard all the way to the Superior Court level, he said.

Motorists beware: Redwood City (California) police are under the gun to write more than a dozen citations a month or risk unfavorable job evaluations.

Under a controversial police department performance policy, patrol officers are expected to make at least seven arrests and conduct 10 field interviews a month. They are also required to issue one ticket per shift.

The policy was introduced in August and led to a flurry of ticket writing. The number of citations has risen 50 percent in the past four months.

While supporters see the program as a morale booster, the policy has come under fire from inside and outside the police department because of concerns that officers may feel pressure to write more tickets and make weak arrests just to meet monthly goals.

Police defended the policy, saying it is simply a guideline used to determine whether officers were adequately doing their duty.

"What the public gets from this is officers with a heightened sense of what the expectations are. Each and every officer has a role in traffic safety, and in paying attention to crime that leads to arrests," said Capt. Scott Warner.

Those who don't meet the minimum goals receive counseling on how to improve their statistics. Officers who far exceed the standards get their name posted on a "leader" board at the police station.

Point system

Police administrators also have established a point system with arrests counting for three points, citations for one and field interviews for one-half point. To make the board, an officer must have 60 points in a month.

One sergeant treated his top-performers to pizza as a reward for their high monthly tallies, police officials said.

Critics, who include leaders of the Redwood City Police Officers Association, a statewide peace officers association and civil libertarians, denounced the policy as demoralizing and insulting to the profession.

"It sounds like a used-car lot, where a guy who sells the most gets a bonus. That's not law enforcement, that's a production line," said Steven Craig, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a Sacramento-based organization with 44,000 members.

He was unaware of whether other departments in the state have a similar system but said the longtime trend in law enforcement has been away from quota-type evaluations because of the negative reaction from police and the public.

Redwood City officers offered a range of views on the policy. Some say it has invigorated them while others expressed distress about having to meet numerical goals.

"We're now looking at everybody as a point. You're a point. We joke around about it on the street, you hear it on the radio," said one officer, who requested anonymity. "I have cited some old ladies that I never would have before, who had clean records for 20 years."

Other officers worried that they're spending too much time writing tickets at the expense of patrolling their beats.

But others, including officer Todd Hurst, who has been atop the leader board for several months, said drivers should not fear they're going to get tickets unjustly.

"Just obey the law and you're not going to have a problem," said Hurst. He accumulated 125 points last month.

Numbers are up

Early results show that from August to November of 1996, the Redwood City Police Department issued 2,033 citations. For the same time this year, and after the policy was in effect, that number was 3,082.

Arrests for the same time period climbed from 1,140 to 1,189, according to department records.

The department said it has not received any complaints from the public about the program.

Police Chief Carlos Bolanos said that putting the performance standards into effect in August was a way to recognize the department's high achievers while providing support to those struggling to meet these standards.

The chief called the standards reasonable and said the department should be given credit for being "honest and upfront about what is expected.

He did not accept critics' assertions that officers who once would have let a teen involved in a minor fistfight get off with a warning now would arrest that person to earn points.

"I have too much respect for my officers to believe anybody would make a false arrest," Bolanos said.

Redwood City officials expect to fine-tune the standards during next month's six-month review. They are considering modifying the requirements because officers who work active beats during busy times may have an advantage over officers with quieter patrol areas.

American Civil Liberties Union managing attorney Alan Schlosser said the program should be disbanded, not modified.

"Given the power that a police officer has in terms of decisions on the street, to gear rewards based on the decision to arrest is to assume their job is to just add up the numbers. This will make police more aggressive," Schlosser said.

He said savvy defense attorneys will challenge their clients' arrest, using the argument that police had a self-interest in the process.

Erin Hogan, president of the Redwood City Police Officers Association, said she shares the concern about officers being overly anxious to make arrests under the new policy.

"I know there are officers who have made arrests (lately) for a small amount of marijuana when before they'd let it go. It's a three-pointer," Hogan said.
 

Preoccupied with violent crime, police departments across the nation are writing far fewer traffic tickets than they did five years ago -- with no discernable effect on safety, according to national and local figures.

Even with more vehicles crowding the roads, accidents and fatalities fell sharply between 1989 and 1993, casting doubt on the age-old belief that police protect the motoring public by issuing more traffic tickets.

The trend is important not only to bad drivers. It means police are spending less time filling out citations and making court appearances for traffic violations at taxpayer expense. The burden on traffic courts is easing. Ticket revenue is down. And auto insurers that base premiums partly on how many tickets their policyholders have racked up are waking up to the loss of revenue -- and warning of danger ahead.

As police departments reexamine how they fight crime and deploy officers, many jurisdictions have opted to eliminate quota systems that encourage patrol officers to write more tickets, specialists say.

"The reality of it is (that traffic enforcement) is not a priority," said Dennis Martin, president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police in Washington. "We have so many police chiefs and sheriffs come to us and say, 'we're under the gun to be dealing with more violent crimes.' Traffic enforcement can be a public relations tool -- but often a negative one. Critics of traffic enforcement efforts say the public will benefit from the shift.

"I have not seen, nor do I think you will ever see, a study that shows that intensive speed enforcement makes the roads any safer," said James J. Baxter, of the National Motorists Association, a Wisconsin-based group opposed to speed traps and the federal 55 mph limit. "For the most part, we believe traffic tickets are a self-perpetuating exercise to generate revenue and justify the existence of the agencies writing them."

Lon Anderson, a spokesman for AAA Potomac, called the trend "the best of both worlds -- but we think this is a trend that needs to be watched very carefully. If we see any sudden upturn in serious accidents or fatalities, we would call on the police to rethink their strategy. But, thank God, that hasn't happened yet."

On the national level, accidents dropped from 6.9 million in 1988 to 6 million in 1992. Fatalities declined from 47,087 in 1988 to 40,115 in 1993, and injuries dropped 10 percent in the five years ending in 1992. Significantly, federal officials report that during that period, a steady 44 percent of motorists exceeded the national 55 mph speed limit.

Government reaction to the ticket falloff has been muted. The acting chief of the National Highway "Traffic" Safety Administration (NHTSA), Christopher A. Hart, said that "death and injury patters vary from year to year and are not necessarily tied to the level of enforcement activity."

The nation's improved safety record is the result of numerous factors, Hart said, including traffic enforcement, increased seat belt use, avoidance of speeding and drunken driving and improved vehicle safety features, such as air bags.

"The fatality rate nationwide is at the lowest point in history, because these factors are working together to make our roads safer," he said. That rate fell from 2.3 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in 1988 to 1.8 in 1992.

Despite the improvement, Brian O'Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry-funded research group, warned of a "nationwide breakdown" in speed-limit enforcement that would have dire consequences because it would encourage motorists to break more laws.

"The evidence shows clearly that what does control the worst behavior on the highways is the perception of the motoring public that they are going to get a ticket if they break the law," O'Neill said.

O'Neill argued that the number of accidents reported over the past few years is artificially low because police are less inclined to report accidents that don't involve injuries or flagrant traffic violations.

Although there are no combined nationwide statistics for all categories of traffic violations, analysts have noted an unmistakable drop in speeding citations.

Federal statistics show that tickets for violations of the 55 mph speed limit dropped nearly 6.5 percent, from 7.5 million to 7 million from 1988 to 1992. Jurisdictions across the nation reinforce that impression:

• Citations for moving violations from 1989 to 1993 dropped nearly 11 percent in Florida and nearly 28 percent in Massachusetts.

   

• The Texas Highway Patrol wrote 35 percent fewer tickets during that period.

   

• The city of Los Angeles reported traffic tickets dropped 44 percent from 1989 to 1992.

   

• New York state's four largest reporting regions, New York City, Buffalo, Rochester and part of Long Island, reported a combined 7.8 percent decline in moving violations from 1989 to 1993.

Insurance annalists predict the declines could actually boost rates for policyholders, despite improved safety.

"We don't see it simply as lowering of the number of traffic citations, we look at the increased costs of the accidents," said William E. Bailey, a Boston lawyer for the Insurance Information Institute. "Ultimately those costs are borne by the public."

The easing of "traffic" enforcement allows more high-risk drivers to meet basic eligibility requirements and pay lower premiums, he said.

"When people drive recklessly and more people are allowed to get away with it because law enforcement does not have the resources to devote to enforcement, we pay for it through the insurance mechanism," Bailey said.

Even if the number of deaths and accidents continue to drop, Bailey said, insurance rates still would rise because "the average cost per accident is still going up."

Baxter, the head of the National Motorists Association, accused the insurance industry of trying to protect its bottom line.

"One of the greatest cash cows in the insurance industry is adding surcharges to auto policies when (drivers) receive speeding violations. Any time someone talks about raising the speed limit of de-emphasizing speed enforcement, you'll find the insurance industry at the forefront of the objectors," Baxter said.

Texas Insurance Commissioner Robert Hunter, a former Washington-based consumer advocate, labels "absurd" the insurance industry's assertions that rates might rise as "traffic" citations fall.

"They never want to say rates can go down," Hunter said. "If the people in the insurance industry say something like that, they're afraid they're boxing themselves in. They always want to find the cloud attached to every silver lining. That's the way they do business."

(end)

Union Claims Officer On Aggressive Campaign To Write Tickets For Obscure Violations Simply Trying To Meet Quota

(From The Macomb Daily, September 15)

A Sterling Heights police officer, chastised for writing traffic tickets for little-known laws, was ordered by supervisors to increase his ticket output, a police union official said. Officer John Wood was "acting in response to severe job pressures from supervisors," according to a statement released by Fred Timpner, executive director of the Michigan Association of Police.

"The pressures brought to bear on Officer Wood were significant," Timpner said. "It began months ago when he was put on the department's Performance Improvement Plan because he supposedly was not writing enough tickets."

Although Wood said he was writing as many - or more - tickets as other officers, he was told the number was not enough, the union said. It was after being threatened with "further disciplinary action" that Wood decided to become "even more aggressive regarding parking citations."

That's when Wood started writing violations for "parking too close to a driveway" and "parking a car on a residential street without the emergency brake being applied." That brought numerous complaints from residents and a response from Police Chief Barnett Jones that "this officer obviously doesn't have the best interest of the community in mind."

Jones said that anyone who received one of the questionable tickets should call Traffic Bureau Lt. Al Byrd or Pat Lehman, director of the city's Community Relations Department. What will happen to those who received the tickets, however, is not known.

As the police union noted, Wood started issuing the unusual violations after "he reviewed all parking regulations in order to increase his ticket-writing volume."

Judge Kenneth Kosnic, chief of the 41A District Court, said he cannot make a decision on whether to dismiss the tickets until after he receives a recommendation from Jones. "At this point I don't know all of the facts," Kosnic said. "The court has to act on the facts."

Only a judge has the authority to dismiss tickets.

When information about the tickets for obscure infractions surfaced last week, Jones said he felt Wood may be writing the tickets in response to a suspension earlier this year for his part in a brawl among police officers outside a tavern.

Although Wood has refused to comment on the dispute, the Michigan Association of Police said the officer did nothing wrong. "The situation was created by supervisors who insisted on emphasizing a greater volume of parking citations as such a major aspect of their evaluation process," Timpner said.

Last week Wood was taken off street patrols and assigned to the administration division. Wood, who is married and has children, worked as a Detroit police officer for nine years before joining the Sterling Heights Police Department four years ago.