Another 100 troopers will still leave state short

GOV. MARK SANFORD continues to make rebuilding our Highway Patrol a priority, and for that he is to be commended. The degree to which lawmakers depleted the already-understaffed Patrol rather than making difficult choices during the economic downturn at the start of this decade is nothing short of shameful.

Although it’s premature and unwise to judge a sliver of the governor’s budget until we’ve seen the entire thing, there is no question that additional troopers are justified and needed. While many factors contribute to carnage that consistently ranks South Carolina’s highways among the most deadly in the nation, the dearth of law enforcement certainly is near the top: When the Patrol all but disappeared early in this decade, drivers noticed — and started driving accordingly.

But while there’s no question that we need to “restore the Highway Patrol to its previous level of manpower,” as Mr. Sanford put it when he offered another peek at his 2008 budget proposal last week, we mustn’t fool ourselves about what that means — or what it doesn’t mean.

If lawmakers go along with the governor’s proposal, that will bring our total force to 1,053. The previous high was 1,045, in 1994. That’s an increase of less than 1 percent. (It’s worth noting that the Legislature allowed the Patrol to dwindle long before the recession hit — and made only halting efforts to bolster the ranks despite record revenue increases and dire warnings of the fatal consequences.)

By comparison, the number of licensed drivers in the state increased by 19 percent, the number of vehicles registered in the state climbed 43 percent and, most significantly, the number of annual vehicle miles traveled climbed 31 percent — from 37 billion miles in 1994 to 49 billion in 2004.

All those extra drivers driving all those extra cars all those extra miles means more speeding, more reckless driving and more opportunities for collisions and injuries and death. Think of it as traffic inflation. Just as monetary inflation means it costs more to run government this year than it did last year, at the identical level, all that extra traffic means it takes a larger police presence to keep up.

Mr. Sanford’s proposal would be an improvement, but in real terms, it would still leave us far below our earlier levels. In 1994, we had one trooper for every 2,652 registered vehicles; adding 100 more troopers would give us one trooper for every 3,767 registered vehicles. In 1994, we had one trooper for every 2,441 licensed drivers; under this plan, we would have one trooper for every 2,885 licensed drivers. Most importantly, each trooper would be responsible for 46 million highway miles traveled — still far more than the 36 million vehicle miles each trooper had to cover in 1994.

It would take an additional 200 to 500 troopers on top of those extra 100 in Mr. Sanford’s budget to get the workload per trooper back to what it was in 1994.

There is some limit to how many new troopers we should hire in a given year — we must make sure we continue to recruit top-notch candidates and don’t deplete the ranks of local law enforcement. But whether it’s next year or the next or the year after that, we still need to expand our Patrol more than the governor proposes and far more than the Legislature has been willing to do — just to keep up with the traffic.