Officers team up to hand out tickets

MAT-SU — Monday would be a good day to buckle your seatbelt if you’re driving through Houston.

This weekend marks the kickoff for the experimental Multi-Jurisdictional Traffic Safety Team. The team is made up of officers from Houston, Palmer and Wasilla police departments, as well as the state’s Commercial Vehicle Enforcement program. The shifts are voluntary and officers work overtime hours paid through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Click it or Ticket campaign.

The only Valley agency not participating is the Alaska State Troopers, though Wasilla Police Chief Angella Long said the hope is that won’t be the case for long.

“We’re still hoping to get the troopers on board as well. It’s just that they’ve got manpower issues,” Long said.

Wasilla police Sgt. Kelly Swihart, who is spearheading the campaign, said that the team’s first night out was Friday in Palmer. They made 120 traffic stops, handed out 95 tickets and made eight arrests — two for drunken driving, five for driving on suspended or revoked licenses and one for an outstanding warrant.

The first night drew volunteers from all the agencies — two Palmer officers, three from Wasilla, two commercial vehicle guys and Houston’s sole remaining officer. A group of Wasilla reserve officers brought the total for the night up to 11.

“I was hoping to run two four-man teams and we just had a lot better turnout than I’d thought,” Swihart said.

The plan, Swihart said Saturday, is to spend the night patrolling Wasilla and then spend Monday afternoon in Houston.

The team will get back together for Solstice next month and again for the Fourth of July. Swihart said this year’s effort is a test run. When the summer is over, the group will look at possibly expanding the program.

“What I’d like to see is maybe doing this quarterly,” he said.

A common assumption is that winter, when roads are slicker, sees more injuries and fatalities due to traffic accidents. But statistics show July has the highest number of injury accidents, Swihart said.

“People staying up later, people partying, people driving faster, it takes a toll,” he said.

He said he talked to Palmer officers to see if maybe Friday was just an exceptionally busy night with more drivers on the road. He said his impression was it wasn’t.

“When you’ve got 10 or 12 cops out there they can see a lot more,” he said.

Chief Long said Wasilla generally has at any given time three officers on the streets. Having extra personnel out focusing solely on traffic enforcement will hopefully get folks driving slower and safer.

The program will be especially helpful in Houston, an area that rarely sees that kind of police presence.

“They’re down to one officer now, but they’re very supportive of this and we want to make sure that they get an equal amount of man hours up there,” Swihart said. “They have a lot of traffic through there, especially with these holiday weekends.”

Swihart said so far everyone seems to be enjoying the patrols.

“It’s a lot of fun for us to get together with different agencies and work. It bolsters teamwork. It bolsters the interagency relationships,” he said.

In Palmer, Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney said he that lately he’d promised his wife he wouldn’t work too many overtime shifts. But when this opportunity arrived he couldn’t pass it up.

“You’re going to let me go out to Wasilla and write tickets for six hours? Come on!” Turney said, adding that the shifts are attractive because “you get to go work with some other guys, play in the other sandbox.”

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