TWO-WHEELED ENFORCERS

WASILLA — More drunken drivers will likely be seeing a smaller set of flashing lights in their rearview mirrors in the coming months.

Up until this summer, the Wasilla Police Department had just one officer — Jentry Crain — trained to ride its motorcycle. Now they’ve got two more.

Crain was hired to do traffic patrol work in 2004 when the department used grant money to start the motorcycle patrol. Since then, he said, he’s paid attention to department statistics and has seen traffic accidents go down every year he’s been on the motorcycle. Having an officer focusing on enforcing traffic laws, he said, has made a difference. In 2008, when he wasn’t on the bike, accident rates went back up.

The two new officers in the traffic unit — Ben Dudley and the unit’s new supervisor, Sgt. Ken Conn — don’t have their own bikes. But the officers work different shifts, which means the bike can be on the road more hours each day.

“The current motorcycle we have is several years old and we would like to probably try to sell that back to Harley-Davidson and get a couple of new motorcycles,” said Wasilla’s acting Police Chief Craig Robinson.

Robinson, Conn and Crain all agreed that one of the major goals of having a motorcycle patrol is to increase officers’ visibility in the community.

The target, Robinson said, is, “not so much the individual they’re contacting, it’s the 50 other individuals that see them being contacted by the police.”

Conn agreed, saying, “The idea is when we’re doing traffic, is to hit it hard. Not necessarily lots of tickets but lots of stops.”

Wasilla is the only Valley agency using motorcycles. The Alaska State Troopers used to have bikes stationed in Palmer but don’t anymore. There has been talk, said trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters, of bringing them back. But so far there hasn’t been any action. Palmer police last year considered starting up a motorcycle program but the plan was eventually shelved indefinitely, said the city’s Emergency Services Director Jon Owen.

Conn said the motorcycle unit appealed to him because he enjoys riding motorcycles in his off time. Still, getting trained was hard work. Conn said he’s been taken a lot of police training courses but the two-week motorcycle course was the hardest he’s been through.

Thursday morning, fresh off his first shift on the department’s Harley, he seemed to be saying that the hard work paid off.

“You just see so much more sitting on the bike, or you seem to,” he said.

Crain said another benefit of patrolling by motorcycle is the vehicle’s maneuverability as compared to the department’s standard-issue Crown Victoria sedan.

“In a motorcycle it’s much easier. I can get up and pass people and get up to the offender much easier,” he said.

That factors heavily into police work, where every stop, he said, has to be weighed against the potential danger to the public. If an officer sees an expired registration tag in heavy traffic, chasing the offender in a full-sized sedan often isn’t worth the risk.

“I can be much more effective and be able to enforce some of the infractions that would normally go un-enforced,” Crain said.

Unlike Conn, Crain said he’d never even ridden a street bike before he was hired to start the traffic unit. He said he enjoys riding motorcycles now and might consider buying one for his own use but has other priorities to think about.

“Got to get my plane instead,” he said.

Motorcycle work, Crain said, is a different breed of police work. Motorcycle cops can’t take somebody to jail on a bike. There’s no place to store evidence collected at a crime scene. And there’s no laptop to use like in a police car.

“Anybody who’s a police motorcycle operator will tell you that additional weight is a bad thing,” Crain said. The motorcycle “is best suited as a traffic enforcement unit and really nothing else.”

But, he said, he enjoys traffic work. Accident investigation is one of his specialties. He enjoys the technical aspect of it. And he doesn’t mind studying up on the arcane minutiae of traffic law.

“Some people find it a bit tedious and difficult because of how the traffic laws are written; they can be considered a bit complex as compared to criminal laws,” he said.

But enforcing them, and seeing the accident rate go down, makes it much easier for a traffic cop to see he’s made a difference,” Crain said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.