CHP Capt. Greg Tracey supervises about 80 officers, including supervisors, and nine civilian employees at the Rohnert Park office. Click to enlarge. Road Warrior photo
At age 52 and after 31 years as a police officer, Capt. Greg Tracey is eligible to retire. But the new CHP commander for the Santa Rosa area isn’t ready. He enjoys being a cop; it’s in his blood.
Tracey, who lives in Petaluma, recently talked about his job and the local CHP in an interview. Here’s the last of two parts:
Has he ever gotten a ticket?
That produced a chuckle. Yes, while as a student at New Mexico State he got stopped going 85 down a highway in the desert where the speed limit was 70, and he admits he deserved it.
When he’s off duty and driving the family car down the highway in the fast lane, does his heart start pounding and his palms start sweating when a police car pulls in behind him?
No, he says, because with his years of observation as a police officer he would’ve spotted the police car long before.
Does he ever go out on patrol?
Some times he’ll ride with another officer, but often he’ll go out on patrol by himself, handling some of the less serious calls. “I think it’s always a good leadership characteristic to lead by example.”
The last ticket he wrote, however, was several years ago when he was a lieutenant here and was driving down the Cotati Grade when a young woman threw a cigarette out her window just as she passed him.
“Do you want to know the secret to not getting a ticket?”
When an officer pulls you over, have your license, registration and insurance paper together ready to hand to the officer. Acknowledging your violation and saying you’re sorry in many cases is going to cause the officer to let you off without a ticket, he says.
While ticket quotas are illegal, a reader who said he or she was a CHP officer once wrote in that officers have to meet a performance standard on issuing tickets
He said the expectation is based on an officer’s beat. If he/she is patrolling Highway 101 north of Healdsburg where speeding is common, one would expect more tickets to be issued than for an officer whose beat covers the intersection of Highways 12 and 101 in Santa Rosa, where crashes are common and more of the officer’s time will be spent handling them.
Tickets aren’t always the answer, he says. “A verbal admonishment” may be as effective as a ticket in some cases.
If an officer is on patrol duty, Tracey says, he/she probably could write a ticket every day.
“We will write you a ticket but we’ll also fix your flat tire and call you a tow truck.”
To read the first installment of the interview, CLICK HERE.
