Police greed not issue in proposed bill
A bill proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mike Dmitrich, D-Price would create a funding mechanism for a much-needed increase in retirement funds for police officers.
Dmitrich proposed SB 81 to allow for a cost of living increase to boost public safety officials’ retirement from 2.5 percent to 4 percent, level with virtually all other state agencies. An amendment to the bill would allocate $20 from every moving violation an officer assesses to fund the increase.
The idea of police officers receiving a benefit, although not immediate, from assessing moving violations has caused some Utah State University students and Logan residents to question the motives behind the bill.
Logan resident Tracey Gudmundsen said the legislation would encourage police officers to spend more time looking for speeding violations and less time preventing crime.
“They’d start pulling people over for going five [mph] over,” Gudmundsen said. “It’s stupid.”
Mindy Thornley, a junior studying special and physical education, echoed Gudmundsen’s feeling that officers would spend less time seeking criminals and more time looking for moving violations.
“The motivation behind pulling a person over and ticketing them would be solely based upon the need of their retirement fund to be larger,” Thornley said. “If that were the case and I was pulled over for every time I was speeding, I could probably provide an entire retirement for a police officer.”
Both Thornley and Gudmundsen said police officers deserve to have retirement funding level with other state agencies.
Capt. Russ Roper of the Logan City Police Department said the current state of retirement funding is a concern among police officers. But he said he thinks this method of funding is not ideal for the situation.
“It’s a little embarrassing from a police’s perspective,” Roper said.
Neither the Utah Chiefs of Police Association or the Logan City Police Department support Dmitrich’s bill, he said.
“The Utah Police Officers Association lobbied to have this amendment put on that would assess $20 to every moving violation, and that money would go to the public safety retirement system,” Roper said. “They fought for many, many years to increase the cost of living for the retirement system.
“It never has gone through,” he said.
Roper addressed the concerns of police officer greed presented by Thornley and Gudmundsen. He said police officers rarely even know what the fines are for speeding, as it is the courts that handle that aspect of the ticketing process.
“We’re not really motivated or generated into that enforcement capacity to generate revenue,” he said. “It’s more of a safety issue for us.”
Roper said the bill is just seeking a way to fund retirement, which he supports, but adding the cost onto tickets is not the way to go about funding.
“I don’t see any purpose in that, because the police department doesn’t get any money from the fines,” Roper said. “It goes into the general fund, and then we fight for money at budget time, just like any other department.”
Roper said he doesn’t think the bill will pass, but if it does, a campaign will be required to inform the public.
“If it passed, it would take some serious marketing, some serious advertising campaign to help people understand what the purpose of it would be,” he said. “I don’t really see it surviving.”
–str@cc.usu.edu