Traffic Safety Unit

In early 2004 the Somerset Police Department began to see a disturbing trend in its statistics and near the end of the year that trend continued. They saw a 27% increase in complaints and incidents and a 14% increase in crime. If that wasn’t disturbing in and of itself, the other noticeable trend was that traffic enforcement activity had declined drastically. “Basically, in a department such as ours, the officers turn their attention to doing traffic when they have the time to do so. With our officers spending more and more time on complaints and crime incidents, and the accompanying paperwork, they simply did not have the time to devote to traffic enforcement”, said Chief Randy Cox.

He continued, “Traffic safety is one of our primary goals and missions and we were failing in the completion of that mission.” The answer was launch a Traffic Safety Unit. The officers assigned to that duty devote their entire shift to traffic safety. The goal of this unit is to adequately address the community’s traffic safety related issues.

Any citizen noting a traffic safety issue is encouraged to contact the department to report it.