Episode Details

Rough Notes

There is a real problem with traffic in the state of Florida. We have millions of visitors every year, and our roads are crowded from one end of the state to the other. This time of year, we see the perfect storm of congestion. Snowbirds return for the winter, vacationers arrive for the holidays, and year-round residents try to go about their daily lives. Add to that a growing number of young adults riding scooters, both gas and electric, darting in and out of traffic with little concern for safety or courtesy. Their behavior is not only reckless, it is often downright dangerous.
Even inside our 55-plus communities, where you would expect a certain degree of calm, we are now seeing aggressive and obnoxious driving behavior. People speed through gated streets, ignore stop signs, and tailgate golf carts as if they are on an interstate highway. The number of traffic accidents has climbed dramatically, and it shows no sign of slowing down.
What most people do not realize is that in Florida, your county sheriff’s office does not usually handle traffic accidents. That responsibility belongs to the Florida Highway Patrol. In some counties there are simply not enough troopers to cover the volume of crashes that occur every day. When that happens, some sheriffs assign a small number of deputies to handle traffic-related investigations, but only as a backup. Within city limits, the local police departments take over. Larger cities often create traffic divisions to handle these cases. The more forward-thinking cities have gone one step further. They use trained community service officers—civilian employees who handle the paperwork, measurements, and diagrams—so that sworn officers can focus on law enforcement, where their training and authority truly matter.
Let us move from crash response to traffic enforcement. Most county sheriffs in Florida do not handle crash investigations on a routine basis, and for a mix of budget and political reasons many also keep day to day traffic enforcement at a low level. Writing tickets is not popular, and elected sheriffs know it. That leaves the Florida Highway Patrol and the city police departments carrying much of the burden. When troopers are stretched thin, and when cities are managing their own call loads, the result is fewer eyes on the behaviors that actually cause crashes. Red light running, tailgating, improper lane changes, aggressive driving, and impaired driving need consistent attention, and too often they do not get it.
Now let us talk about what happens when a few bad actors distort the whole system. In the mid nineteen nineties the American Automobile Association publicly labeled two small towns on U S Highway three hundred one as speed traps, Waldo and Lawtey. AAA even erected billboards to warn motorists before they hit those city limits. The concern was simple. Speed limits stepped down quickly, and ticketing volume was far out of proportion to safety outcomes. Years later, the scale of the problem was undeniable. In one reported year a seven officer department in Waldo wrote nearly twelve thousand tickets and collected about four hundred thousand dollars in fines, which was a large share of the town budget. In two thousand fourteen, the Waldo City Council voted to disband the police department, and law enforcement duties moved to the county sheriff. By two thousand eighteen AAA removed the speed trap label from both towns after reforms, but the damage to public trust had already been done.
Those episodes triggered an understandable reaction in Tallahassee. Lawmakers advanced bills to ban ticket quotas and to require disclosures when citation revenue made up a large share of an agency budget. The intent was to remove the temptation to police for profit and to protect drivers from predatory practices. On paper that sounds sensible. In practice it set the stage for a long period where enforcement lost resources and clarity, while accountability d