BY CHARLIE ZACK

Whether you are a speeder, a partier, a ding-dong ditcher, or even a late night basketball player; the odds are that you have had a run in with the Terrace Park Police Department.

While the ultimate goal of any policeman is to uphold the law and keep the people safe, some would say that the TPPD go a little too far in the ways they patrol traffic.  

“Going through Terrace Park is like going through a minefield of little driving technicalities that you never learn in driving school,” said junior Ben Phelan.

The main complaint – at least by Mariemont High School students – about the TPPD is how picky they are when it comes to people stopping at stop signs, especially when it comes to teenagers.  

“They’ll pull you over if your car doesn’t rock back as you stop, I’ve already been pulled over twice for this,” said Phelan.

Enforcing the law is one thing, but being so meticulous that one can’t even drive through the town without a barrage of driving instructions is a little overkill.  And the police have also failed to enforce their laws some times.  Junior Adam Jacobs said, “The police called my dad and told him that I was speeding around Terrace Park and told him to punish me… they never stopped me or anything just called my parents.”

Terrace Park is a tiny, almost crime-free town where the biggest issue could very well be the safety of the children walking about the neighborhood.  If their goal is to make Terrace Park safer for kids walking around, stop signs are a great way to do so.  After all, it is hard to speed when one has to come to a complete stop and make sure their car rolls backwards before going again every few hundred feet.

One could say that if they have to make sure that their car rocks backwards, or “(Is) able to stop so that you could put your car in park,” says sophomore Miller Steele, then they are going to be focused on that and not looking around for kids on bikes – or more recently, hoverboards.

Is this just a ticky-tack way for the TPPD to torment young drivers in hopes that enough reform will make for as safer neighborhood?  “The makeup of this community is about 28% under the age of 18,” said Terrace Park Police Chief Jerry Hayhow.  “It is important for people to stop at stop signs, one for the safety of the kids and two, because the kids will learn by example,” Hayhow said.

One theory is that Terrace Park is such a crime free community, that the TPPD have no choice but to pull drivers over for nominal traffic offences.  NPR posted an article in April of last year where they talked about monthly ticket quotas.  Chief Hayhow said that he doesn’t have quotas for his officers, but he does have standards to make sure they are doing their job. “Each shift my officers have to check 20 businesses, 3 vacation homes, they have to sit in areas that are unexpecting, and make 2 traffic stops,” says Hayhow.

He also said that it makes sense that the officers write a ticket about every 4-5 traffic stops, coming out to around 15 tickets written a month per officer if the officer works every day in a month.

“This is my family, I’m in charge of the safety of everyone in Terrace Park, and that isn’t something that I take lightly,” said Hayhow.