Every Three Days, Just Two Tickets?

Given the amount of speeding, distracted, reckless and wrong way drivers that I regularly see in Hudson, I often wonder just how much of an effort the Hudson Police Department is making to enforce our traffic laws.  The answer appears to be not much.  

The total number of traffic citations that HPD issued for the entire month of December 2023 was 39, for an average of little over one ticket a day.  But when you exclude citations that have nothing to do with actual driving and are left with just the offenses where drivers were actively making our streets more dangerous, the result is truly concerning.  Let's look at the 9 categories of tickets that HPD issued to that latter group of drivers.

6 drivers running red lights

2 drivers speeding (!!!)

1 driver driving the wrong way on a one-way street (!!)

2 drivers leaving the scene of an accident

2 drivers failing to properly signal

2 drivers failing to keep right

2 drivers failing to stop at a stop sign (!!!)

1 driver failing to yield at a stop sign

1 driver in a car with inadequate or no lights

While HPD did issue 6 DWI tickets in December, those drivers had to have been originally pulled over for one of the above infractions.  A DWI driver always gets pulled over for a traffic violation, right?  I will not include those 6 tickets in my equation, nor the 14 tickets issued for violations such as unlicensed operation, suspended registration, no inspection sticker, refusal to take a breath test and so on.  

That leaves a total of 19 traffic violation tickets issued to drivers driving poorly during the entire 31 days of December. 

I don't know how many police officers there are during a typical shift at HPD, but I'm thinking it's got to be at least 4.  Of course, they aren't all out on the streets in their vehicles at the same time.  But whatever the number of cops on a shift may be, they certainly weren't writing many tickets to reckless and dangerous drivers in December.  If 19 total tickets is accurate, that means that, on average, HPD officers issued two traffic violation tickets every three days for the month.   

Three days, two tickets?  Really?

The same can be said for November.  38 citation offenses, 19 of them for drivers I put in the category of driving poorly (rather than having no inspection, for example).

Three days, two tickets?  Really?  Is that all?  It seems to me that there shouldn't be a 24-hour period that doesn't have officers writing at least two tickets to poor, unsafe drivers.  Why wouldn't they be?  There's certainly no shortage of violators out there -- especially speeders.  But HPD does no enforcing of the speed limit downtown.

Two things of note.  There was not one ticket issued to a distracted driver in either month.  And one of December's DWI citations was for "Aggravated DWI - Operating School Bus With Student Passengers."  Yikes. 

It may also be worth noting that all 19 of those tickets I reference will be brought in front of the city court on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and all, or nearly all, of them will likely be reduced to a charge of 1201A, Parking on the Pavement, with a total cost to the driver of around $125.