Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon lawmakers won’t know until Friday how much money they’ll be able to spend during this legislative session. But there seems to be a consensus that a good chunk of the funds will go towards hiring more state police.

It can’t come soon enough for at least one cop on the beat.  Salem correspondent Chris Lehman has more.

Senior Trooper Roger Reid puts the pedal to the metal along a busy state highway near the Oregon coast.  A white muscle car pulls to the shoulder and Reid cautiously approaches.

Roger Reid:  “Good afternoon, Trooper Reid with the State Police.  The reason I stopped you, you don’t have the front license plate on the front.  Did it come off, or get knocked off, did it?”

The driver got off with a warning.  But not all traffic stops are this routine.  And if Reid wants back-up, he doesn’t always know how soon it will arrive.

That’s because the State Police force is several hundred troopers smaller then when Reid started 20 years ago.  He says it’s changed the way he does his job which takes him from busy Portland suburbs to rural coastal highways.

Roger Reid:  “When you went out you would have maybe four or five or six people working with you on a shift, so you would have cover in different areas that if you wanted to do a vehicle search you could, because there would be another officer maybe minutes away or just nearby that could respond to help you.”

Now, he has to weigh the odds.

Roger Reid:  “If you don’t have the manpower, there are some areas you don’t go into anymore.”

Places like out of the way state parks that are the site of drug and alcohol fueled late-night parties.  Reid says it can be a daunting scene.

Roger Reid:  “There’s five of them, there’s ten of them, there’s twenty of them.  I’m by myself. I’m going to leave. And I can’t investigate further. And that’s what gets frustrating at times.  You want to look further, you want to dig further but you use caution as your side and not.”

So how did the Oregon State Police force get this way?  Voter initiatives in the 80’s and 90’s steered tax money away from police patrols.  And an overall economic downturn after the 9/11 terrorist attacks hurt state agencies across the board.

Flush coffers last year led to funding for 100 new State Troopers.

Republicans howled because they said that wasn’t enough to get the state back to 24-hour a day coverage on major highways.  But House Majority leader, Democrat Dave Hunt, says the state didn’t have the ability to hire and train that many troopers at once.

Dave Hunt:  “There are definitely capacity issues because the State Police have been forced to ratchet down during all those years of Republican legislative control.  It took them awhile to be able to get up to the place where they could aggressively recruit and train and deploy these new troopers.”

The issue hits home for Republican Representative Andy Olson.  He was a state cop before getting elected four years ago.  He said watching cut after cut prompted him to run for office.  He says he’s hopeful things are finally looking up.

Andy Olson:  “I think there’s a lot of folks in this building that feel like that State Police has been pretty neglected.  I’m really pleased to see that there’s a lot of folks now that see that and are moving in that direction and supporting it.”

Increased staffing couldn’t come sooner for Roger Reid, a veteran of the Oregon State Police.  When the 44-year-old gets off work at one in the morning, no one takes his place until 6 a.m, unless a regional dispatcher phones with an emergency.

Chris Lehman:  “Have you ever been called in the middle of the night and gotten out of bed?”

Roger Reid: “We have, yes.  I could say everyone in our office has at one time or another.”

Reid says it’s all part of the job.  But he says he and his fellow officers could be much more effective if they weren’t stretched so thin.

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Oregon State Police