DEARBORN — As the weather starts to warm up and more cars hit the road, the City of Dearborn wants to make sure that police officers and prosecutors know the rules in regards to traffic violations, and the citizens of the city should know as well.

In the past few years, Dearborn has seen tickets for impeding traffic violations issued in large numbers, but the city has taken steps to have those numbers reduced.

In most cases, impeding traffic tickets are eventually given when a cop or prosecutor recommends that another offense such as speeding be reduced. The reduction to impeding traffic allows the offender to keep their driving record clean and to avoid paying extra money on their car insurance each month.

Dearborn police sergeant Derrick Hadder explained why some cops feel the need to change speeding tickets to impeding traffic offenses.

“I personally think it’s somewhat of a double jeopardy,” he said. “A fine for the traffic ticket should be the deterrent to doing it; you shouldn’t have to pay insurance costs on top of that.”

A memo issued by 19th District Judge Mark Somers to other judges, prosecutors, and police officers intended to re-iterate the rules involving these cases for the month of April was sent to refresh their memories on who is allowed to recommend tickets be reduced in severity.

The rule has been on the books after being passed down from the Michigan Supreme Court for some time now and states that only prosecutors and cops are allowed to make the recommendation that a ticket be reduced. Problems can arise when a judge makes their own recommendation because the judge is supposed to be a fair and impartial observer. A judge is allowed to tack a note onto a case urging the cop or prosecutor to take another look at it, but the final decision doesn’t rest with the judge.

Somers said in an interview that he didn’t think judges making recommendations was a big problem but he acknowledged that it is human nature for them to stray at times and get a little too emotionally invested in different situations.

Somers wants to make sure that everyone involved in issuing tickets makes the decision on the merit of the offense and the evidence available without taking anything else into account.

At the same time, however, he wants to make sure repeat offenders don’t get off the hook too easily, so he urges his peers to look at the Dearborn and the state’s court records before making a judgment. Somers recalls one incident in which a Dearborn man was found to have committed nine impeding traffic violations in a span of about two years. He was placed in front of five different magistrates and one judge but none of the magistrates recognized that he had been in so many times before.

Only one of the nine charges was originally written up as an impeding traffic charge while the other eight were reduced from something else, so the man who had in reality committed eight moving violations on the road but appeared to have a spotless record, allowing the potentially dangerous driver to keep his license. Somers said the courts now have a rotation system in place to help keep this problem to a minimum.

The impeding traffic ticket phenomenon also drains time and money from the court system as many cops end up giving out tickets for one offense and then change them to impeding traffic tickets after citizens come in. Somers talked about how widespread the problem sometimes gets.

“A couple weeks ago I was in court and four of the five traffic cases I saw were reduced to impeding traffic,” he said.

One of the cases involved a woman who injured three people but had a clean driving record so she ended up with a recommendation for impeding traffic as the offense. Somers asked the woman if anyone was hurt and she said no, but then another young woman in the back told him that her mom was taken to the hospital in the crash.

Leaving the power to change moving violations to impeding traffic up to police officers and prosecutors is one way the Michigan Supreme Court has tried to contain the problem, but the ultimate responsibility rests on the shoulders of police on the street.

Somers has told police officers to make sure they use their best judgment when they’re out on patrol and to write tickets for the offenses they see instead of wasting the court’s time with speeding tickets that won’t be followed through with. He also encouraged them to offer more warnings for minor offenses.

“I don’t want them to pull people over for going ten over the speed limit and then have it changed to impeding traffic,” Somers said.

In the end, however, the only surefire way to avoid traffic tickets is for citizens to make sure they follow the rules of the road as best they can.