For the first time in 30 years, the Elyria Police Department will now have a traffic unit to enforce traffic and parking violations. This all comes after Elyria Police received numerous calls about violations of both traffic and parking-related incidents happening across high-flow traffic areas in Elyria. Lieutenant James Welsh, Patrol Commander with the Elyria Police Department, says this push for a traffic unit is not driven in any way to generate revenue, instead, this is a direct response due to the community’s outreach.
“The high-volume traffic times, rush hour schools in session. We want to try and direct our resources towards those peak hours when you'll have the most traffic on the roadways” said Welsh.
The reason Elyria Police has not had a traffic unit before is that the department was understaffed and focused its resources on calls for service. “We handle approximately 45,000 calls a year. And like all departments nationwide, we're short-staffed. So we tried to use our resources to just handling calls for service, you know, whether that be thefts, burglaries, disturbances, just the general type of calls that police respond to on a day-to-day basis” said Welsh.
This new traffic unit will benefit the whole community both on and off the road and there will always be two officers on patrol. “We had ten fatalities in 2021. We only had one fatality in 2022, but one is one too many. So this is solely about trying to reduce traffic crashes and make people comply to the traffic ordinances within the city” said Welsh.
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