HUNTINGTON BEACH : Officer Awarded for Money-Saving Idea

Police Traffic Officer Craig Bryant is saving the city at least $2,100 a year.

And his award-winning idea is also making Huntington Beach a safer place, according to city officials.

“This is the kind of ingenuity we look for,” said Jim Otterson, the city’s traffic engineer. “Officer Craig Bryant is a very capable and very creative officer.”

Bryant’s idea was to use recuperating police officers to help Otterson’s department conduct speed surveys on city streets. The surveys had always been done by civilian employees, and recession-caused city cutbacks have made it harder to keep up to date with the speed checks, Otterson said.

“Cities have to do a traffic-and-engineering, radar-speed survey every five years if they want to use radar guns to enforce speed limits,” Otterson said. “We’ve usually used a civilian employee or a contractor to go out and do the work. But for the last year, I’ve been short-staffed in my division.”

Otterson said Bryant’s suggestion to use police officers assigned to light duty to help with the speed surveys provides many benefits. “It helps with our (civilian) workload, and it also gives the officers who make the surveys a background in how and why the surveys are conducted,” he said.

Officers recovering from injuries are placed on light duty, usually doing paperwork.

Bryant, 43, a 20-year police veteran, said in an interview that he himself has sometimes been on light duty while recovering from injuries. He said he knows the frustration of being in the office, rather than out in the field. “Police officers want to be out there doing the job they were hired for,” he said.

Bryant said that having up-to-date speed surveys allows police to use radar guns to check motorists’ speed. A state law requires that speed surveys be conducted every five years on roads with speed limits of less than 55 m.p.h. The law is designed to prevent cities from setting up unfair “speed traps.”

To conduct a speed survey, a person in an unmarked car uses a radar gun to mark the speed of 100 cars selected at random. A safe, average speed is then computed.

Lack of up-to-date speed surveys on some portions of Huntington Beach’s section of Pacific Coast Highway embroiled city government in a high-profile federal lawsuit in 1990. A lawyer who formerly worked in Seal Beach charged that Huntington Beach police were consistently using radar illegally because of out-of-date speed surveys.

The lawyer, Ernest J. Franceschi Jr., charged in his suit that the alleged misuse of radar amounted to “racketeering” by the city.

Franceschi lost the suit in federal court, but the “racketeering” case caused the city embarrassing notoriety.

City officials have said that because of Bryant’s suggestion, Huntington Beach is now better able to keep up with timely speed surveys. Radar thus can be legally used and enforced, making streets safer, officials said.

The city earlier this month awarded Bryant $210 for his suggestion. Bryant said he appreciates the award, but he said his biggest satisfaction is in helping radar enforcement in the city.

“We don’t want to be hamstrung in using radar,” he said. “It’s a very valuable tool.”