Officer John Sangi works on a traffic stop, Oct. 24 at the corner of Chambers and Hampden. Police statistics show a sharp decline in traffic citations as traffic crashes are on the rise. Photo by Philip B. Poston/Aurora Sentinel 
Officer John Sangi pulls over a vehicle, Oct. 24 at the corner of Chambers and Hampden. Police statistics show a sharp decline in traffic citations as traffic crashes are on the rise. Photo by Philip B. Poston/Aurora Sentinel
AURORA | While motorists may rejoice in the decreasing likelihood of getting a traffic ticket in Aurora these days, the news may not be welcome for everyone on and off the road, officials say.
Records show Aurora police wrote almost 18,000 fewer tickets last year than they did in 2008, for a variety of reasons.
While the chances for getting ticketed have dropped, the odds of becoming involved in a car crash have dramatically risen, the same records also show.
Traffic crashes are up substantially, 13,524 in 2016 compared to 9,543 in 2008.
For police, the short answer to that dilemma is simple: There isn’t one.
Instead, police say a variety of complex factors — mainly an increased focus on limiting the worst highway crashes and motorcycle officers tasked with special assignments — have combined for the head-scratching stats.
Aurora police Lt. Mike McClelland said the traffic section, which he oversaw until taking over the police training academy this month, relies heavily on the Motorcycle Enforcement Team when it comes to citation. In all, that six-officer unit accounts for about a third of all the traffic tickets written in the city.
“That’s huge,” McClelland told city council’s Public Safety Committee last week during a presentation about the statistics.
The traffic unit fields traffic complaints from a variety of sources — including city council members relaying constituent concerns, letters to the department and the occasional anonymous complaint. McClelland said when MET officers are available, they try to follow-up on those complaints as much as they can, often focusing on a particular area and issuing tickets.
But six members is four fewer than the unit had a decade ago, and the team issues far fewer tickets than it did when it had 10 members. The unit issued 19,286 tickets in 2008, but just 8,688 last year.
McClelland said the dip in staff for the MET unit isn’t the product of staff cuts as much as it is re-allocation of those officers.
After a series of fatal crashes in 2015, the department created the Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic Unit which is focused only on Interstate 70 and Interstate 225. The unit’s aim is to stem the sort of driving that leads to fatal crashes.
“Their job is to go out on the highway and own it, be visible, stop the crashes from happening and write tickets,” McClelland said.
But the unit is made up of four officers from the MET Unit and two traffic crash investigators. And while they are writing tickets, McClelland said officers working on the highway don’t write nearly as many tickets as officers working city streets.
“The problem is that’s four motors that are being taken away from doing all those complaints and doing summonses,” he said.
The motorcycle unit also gets called on to assist with presidential motorcades. McClelland said that doesn’t just mean riding along with the president’s vehicle, but planning routes in advance, a process that can take days. During an election year those visits from presidential candidates tick up and McClelland said they take officers away from regular traffic enforcement.
“That’s another day my motors are out of the loop,” he said.
The dip in traffic tickets has largely coincided with an increase in motorcades or shifting officers away from traffic enforcement, according to the department’s data.
From 2008 to 2011, the MET unit’s citation data stayed largely flat, with 19,286 in 2008 and 19,582 in 2011. The numbers dipped in 2012 to 16,821. That was an election year, McClelland noted, and included a steady stream of motorcades that took MET officers away from traffic enforcement.
The numbers climbed back to a more-typical level in 2013 with 19,627 before a steady annual drop-off started in 2014.
That summer was the first time the unit’s officers were used for a special summer crime crackdown. Aurora police Deputy Chief Paul O’Keefe said the agile motorcycle units are especially useful for those task forces because they can quickly patrol an area that might have seen a spike in burglaries.
“But it does impact negatively their ability to produce summonses,” he said.
The MET Unit participated in that summer crackdown again in 2015 but didn’t in 2016, but that was another election year and it included officers deployed to the HEAT Unit on the highways.
City Councilwoman Francoise Bergan, who chairs the public safety committee, said the staffing of the MET unit is clearly an issue. While the department has added officers in recent years, that unit hasn’t received any extra staff.
“Population has increased, and yet we did not add,” she said.
The city is expected to add dozens of officers in the coming years, but just how many — if any — of those officers will go to traffic in general or the MET Unit in particular hasn’t been sorted out yet.
McClelland said that in the meantime there are other solutions. He said the city could shift some traffic crashes — those that don’t involve injuries or a crime — away from commissioned officers and to civilians. Other cities have worked with vendors on similar efforts, he said, and it could free-up officers from having to spend time working on crash reports. That time, he said, could be spent focused on traffic enforcement.