Published on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
in the WINK TV News

State Trooper shortage hurts response to citizens

Right now, if someone you know has an accident it could take awhile for a state trooper to respond.

In Lee county alone, state troopers are nearly 25 percent understaffed.

Longer response times, more speeders, red light runners and backed up traffic are just some of the consquences from a small staff for the highway patrol.

Just last year, troopers took in 34,000 calls for service.

That's nearly 3,000 calls a month for only 14 troopers.

Captain Eddie Johnson says, "we haven't kept up with the personnel that we need to adquately enforce the law and keep the public safe."

It's a direct effect of a growing population and too slow of a response.

That means you could wait nearly half an hour for an investigator to show up at an accident.

We found an accident at Daniels and Six Mile Cypress - it took twenty minutes for a trooper to respond because he was already working another accident.

Lee county has three squads on the streets - one of them has only four people on a shift. One person calls in sick, another is on vacation and all of a sudden you have only two troopers covering 600,000 people.

They're having a tough time getting troopers because other law enforcement agencies pay more.

And once a trooper is hired, it takes awhile before they can get behind the wheel.

Captain Johnson said, "it takes 32 weeks to train a trooper, then 10 weeks once he gets into a field so if we have a class in now, it's a year almost before we can put him out by himself."

Troopers mainly cover the interstate and major state roads so they see a lot of crashes.

Captain Johnson says it's a problem drivers could help prevent.

"Their driving habits are what's causing the crashes...Law enforcement can't do it alone, we've gotta have their help," he said.

Just in the last month, the highway patrol has spilt into yet another division to deal specifically with red light runners and speeders.

The community response team as it's called has already written two thousand tickets in that time - so it's working but it's also taking away from the already short staff.