FAST GETAWAYS

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2004 by Amons, Nancy

Traffic schools allow repeat offenders to continue speeding with clean record

Terence Jackson's SUV screeched into the traffic school parking lot at an opportune time. Our I-teani photojournalist, Cam Cornelius, was videotaping a line of accused speeders checking in for class.

"What are you filming?" Jackson asked, as he took his place in line.

"Repeat offenders," we told him.

"Oh, it's my 10th time," he said, referring to his own driving record. He went on to tell us he probably still had some of the old textbooks from past driving classes he was required to attend because of his speeding infractions.

Zoom in. Focus. Jackson would become the poster child for the latest installment of our WSMV series, "The Need for Speed."

Faster and faster

Jackson had gotten 19 traffic tickets in four years, yet he kept u valid Tennessee driver's license. Hc kept the tickets oil his record by going to traffic school over and over again. This was his seventh traffic school class in a year.

Our investigation found that in Tennessee, as in many other states, traffic school information is not shared among jurisdictions, nor are traffic school attendance records forwarded to the state - so repeat offenders can keep their records clean. Dangerous drivers stay on the roads. Their insurance companies don't penalize them.

Our investigation found that more than 600 people had attended metro traffic school at least three times each in three years. Dozens had attended more than six times. The problem wasn't isolated to Nashville.

Ann McCartt, a senior research analyst with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told us that 39 states have some sort of diversion programs for traffic offenders, such as traffic school. The Institute, which is the voice of the insurance industry, contends that traffic schools are not effective, because bad drivers are not held accountable. In addition, the insurance industry believes that any insurer deserves to be aware of high-risk driving behavior.

When we began working on our story, we did an analysis that showed interstate drivers are continuing to speed more and more, despite already higher highway speed limits. (Thanks to Paul Overberg of USA Today, whose idea we appropriated. See Uplink box.) Also, Nashville's new police chief had begun a crackdown on speeders.

For our first stories, we ordered two sets of data - one with three year's worth of speeding tickets from the Tennessee Department of Safety, which keeps dispositions of tickets as reported by local courts, and one from the local police department. We paid less than $500 for both sets of data - a lair price - since programmers had to extract the data from clunky mainframes.

We used Access 2003 on a PC to crunch the data.

As we started collecting case studies from traffic court, we met a 16-year-old who had been ticketed at 114 mph. He told us it was his sixth ticket, yet, when we checked his official state driving record, it was clean. We found he had been sent to traffic school repeatedly, but in different jurisdictions. Each time, the judge dismissed the case because the teen had completed traffic school.

Wc wondered how many others were like him.

Data nightmares

We ordered even more data. We requested data from every county surrounding Nashville and every city and town within those counties.

Nightmare number one: Many of the clerks in the small towns had never gotten a request for anything but a paper record. We filed requests under the state's Open Records Act. We dealt with city attorneys who weren't sure if court records are public documents (they are). We dealt with clerks in tiny offices who had no idea how to extract the information from their computer systems. We dealt with private companies that wanted to charge thousands of dollars to write data extraction programs.

Eventually, we ended up with more than a dozen different databases. Some were huge; some had just a few thousand records. Fortunately, eight of the smaller jurisdictions all used the same nonprolit service, Local Government Data Processing. The processing service soothed the nerves of clerks who were terrified we might get the name of a juvenile speeder. After the service collected the data for us - clean and uniform - it even posted the data to our FTP site for us.

Wc weren't so lucky when the data came in from the jurisdictions that didn't use Local Government Data Processing. There was no standard format. The ticket dates, the name fields, the driver's license number- nothing matched in any database. Sometimes a driver's license number was TN123456, sometimes it was 123456TN. Each database took hours to clean and standardize.

I turned to the helpful folks on the NICAR listserv many times. Jennifer LaFleur at The Dallas Morning News and others helped with siring functions to clean the data. Mike Himowitz of The (Baltimore) Sun offered a life-saving suggestion for managing the data, which grew to more than a million and a half records. Himowitz suggested I create a stripped-down master database with as few fields as possible. I created a master table with name, driver's license number, ticket date and data source. The data source is needed to track the record back from where it came.