EUGENE – With a depleted force of state troopers and an increase in fast-driving motorists, Oregon State Police admit they are losing the war on speeders.
“Guys who go by you at less than 80 miles an hour, you don’t even look at them twice,” said senior trooper Rick Hamilton.
Like much of state government, state police are in a financial squeeze. Trooper numbers for years have been well below historic staffing levels, and they continue to drop.
In carrying out one of their core duties – enforcing traffic laws – the state police now struggle to keep up with heavier-than-ever traffic with lighter-than-ever staffing levels.
Agency officials say they’ve used creative, dollar-stretching methods.
One tactic has been the use of one-time grants to pay for overtime so troopers can flood the highways for a few days at a time, concentrating on speeders, drunken drivers and those driving unsafely in construction zones.
Another approach has been to patrol the freeways with unmarked muscle cars, looking for the worst offenders who dodge from lane to lane and tailgate other vehicles.
State police have even stationed unmanned patrol cars on freeway shoulders as a deterrent to speeding, but say staffing has become so thin they don’t like to tie up troopers’ time dropping off and picking up the vehicles.
State police officials argue that there’s no substitute for troopers on the roads – and they have the data to back it up.
From 2000 to 2004, the number of state troopers fell from 374 to 241 – a 36 percent drop. In that time, the number of speeding citations they issued dropped by 29 percent.
“I hate to say this, but it’s a weak effort we’re putting out there,” said Lt. Mike Bloom, commander of the state police field office in Springfield.
State police say fewer tickets mean faster, more aggressive driving and compromised public safety.
In the same time frame, calls from the public to the agency with complaints about motorists driving too fast or aggressively have risen 70 percent. The number of calls from the public about accidents has increased by 32 percent.
The staffing drop has resulted from falling state dollars. The first wave of cuts came after 1980, when voters ended the practice of using gas-tax dollars to pay for highway patrols. The department’s numbers fell from 641 troopers in 1979 to 392 in 1995.
In the prosperous late 1990s, the state started to rebuild staffing levels, with trooper levels budgeted to reach 495 by 2001. But the recession caused further cuts.
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