Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Seipler and Truck Enforcement

Zane Seipler weighed in on the Northwest Herald article about truck enforcement on his own blog.

I encourage you to read that article, in which Seipler reports that the one "dedicated" truck enforcement deputy is not really enforcing any truck violations. He is assigned to the MCSD Training Division, and he "gets" to chase after abandoned vehicles.

If I remember correctly from my cops-and-robber days in Colorado, a detail investigating abandoned vehicle required Special High Intensity Training, which sometimes was referred to by its initials. It's a dead-end assignment, right next to patrolling the stockyards at midnight on a Sunday. Except there aren't any stockyards in McHenry County. So you can imagine just how important that duty is.

Why take a good deputy and pigeon-hole him like that?

If McHenry County had a paid investigative reporter, he'd be filing FOIA requests for the details on truck tickets issued in the past 4-5 years. How many? For what violations? Who wrote the tickets? When were they issued? Who was cited?

And, importantly, who was stopped but not cited?

What was the disposition of the tickets? Were there multiple violations by the same driver or same company? Where were the tickets being issued? What parts of the County were left alone?

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