North Hampton enforcement is overkill

5:44 PM Saturday, March 6, 2010

No matter whether you call it a speed trap or an enhanced velocity capture zone, North Hampton’s reputation has suffered due to its zealous enforcement of traffic laws.

This village of 352 people issued 1,296 citations in 2008, the year News-Sun reporter Valerie Lough used to examine the town’s traffic enforcement policies for a story beginning on springfieldnewssun.com home page.

Springfield, with a population of 62,269, issued 4,189 traffic citations for the same year.

That’s a ratio of 3.68 tickets per North Hampton resident compared to .067 per Springfield resident.

Village officials and many residents believe the hyper enforcement — North Hampton ranks fifth among Ohio’s 330 mayor’s courts for traffic cases — has made the village safer.

North Hampton straddles state Route 41 between Springfield and Troy. Speeding is a valid concern for the village’s residents.

But the more than $200,000 North Hampton spends a year to field a police force seems to be an out-sized solution for the problem. For 2008, North Hampton residents even had to subsidize the force with tax money.

Moreover, the village uses a mayor’s court to collect the fines. Mayor’s courts are controversial in themselves. Ohio Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer has condemned their use, arguing no one person should hold the executive power and serve as a judge in the same place.

Therein lies the problem. It has the innate appearance of a conflict of interest and therefore undermines the rule of law.

Or, to put it simply, anyone ticketed there might well be guilty, but they would also be justified in wondering if they were pulled over as much to help meet the police department’s payroll as to pay the price of their traffic sins.

If you get caught speeding in North Hampton, you can request the case be heard in Springfield Municipal Court, depriving North Hampton of your money. Your request would be up to the North Hampton magistrate, who makes $100 per court session. If many such requests were granted, the town would soon need to rethink its out-sized police force.

There are, in fact, few accidents along that stretch of road, either inside or outside the village limits.

Village officials point out, correctly, that if you don’t want to get a ticket, don’t break the law. Speeding is certainly not to be condoned.

But North Hampton could control this problem with occasional enforcement used by most small towns.

Certainly a lot less law enforcement is needed than the $200,000 spent each year on this speed bump it has erected to shake money out of the wallets of visitors passing through their village.

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