Akron City Council is expected next week to approve two pieces of legislation that give the go-ahead for police to buy 20 cameras that will enable officers to detect speeders. The city amended language in a measure introduced last week that called for buying only 10 of the cameras.
Amended language also gives City Council members more say in determining where Akron Police officers will patrol for speeders, after some city council members said they hear more complaints about speeders than any other issue.
"This is a very important and critical issue to the mayor and to the chief as well," said City Chief of Staff James Hardy. "You hear often before we do where the hot spots are, so we want to be as responsive as we possibly can."
The legislation introduced last week was for 10 new Stalker II radar cameras, costing $18,000. The cameras will be mounted on the dashboards of cruisers, or held by hand, and will be used primarily by patrol officers rather than traffic officers, Akron Police Sgt. James Hentosz told council.
This week, the city introduced legislation to get approval for 10 ProLaser units at $25,000. The units, which use light-imaging technology and thus are more precise, will be used by traffic officers.
City Council added both pieces of legislation to its consent agenda for passage next Monday.
Last week, council members questioned why the city would pay for the Stalker II devices, when Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Blue Line Solutions offered last year to provide free of charge, DragonCam radar guns, which issue tickets through the mail.
But Mayor Dan Horrigan's administration publicly opposed citywide use of unmanned traffic-enforcment technology because Akron could lose some state funding.
That's because House Bill 410, the Ohio General Assembly's latest attempt to shut down the use of the controversial traffic cameras. The bill, which is still pending, proposes to penalize communities using the unmanned cameras by reducing the local government funds the communities receive from the state by the same dollar amount as the fines they collect from the cameras.
The city now uses unmanned cameras only in school zones. Horrigan is working with the sponsor of HB 410 to not penalize cities that only use the unmanned cameras used in school zones.
According to Akron Police Chief Kenneth Ball, the city gets a lot of complaints about speeders, in part because Akron only has about 20 traffic cops, he said.
In the past six months, the Police Department has changed its enforcement strategy and now devotes 12 hours per day to catching speeders in the neighborhoods, with enforcement divided equally between all the city's wards.
The new cameras will allow police to be cross trained, so more police officers can enforce traffic laws, Ball said.
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