Recently a letter came to me. It read:

“Dear Sir, I am the wife of a state trooper and I’m very concerned about the condition of the SC Highway patrol.... Most of the troopers are working another job in order to support their family. They are underpaid — (thousands of dollars) less than Georgia and North Carolina. They are leaving for other law enforcement jobs.... Morale is down. I am determined to let the members of the Highway patrol know that they are heros. I cannot do it alone!”

This wife’s frustration is evident, and it is a legitimate frustration. In 2000, our Highway Patrol consisted of 1,006 troopers. The current force has 785 troopers. We have seen an almost 25 percent cut in the Highway Patrol’s strength. During that same time, the number of cars and drivers on the roads has increased rapidly. This reduction in troopers, coupled with an increase in drivers, has resulted in the remaining troopers being asked to do more.

While we have been asking our troopers to do more, we have not been willing to do more for them. During the past four years, our state has watched as the salary levels of our Highway Patrol and Transport Police stayed almost flat, failing to keep up with inflation. As with all state employees, troopers saw no raises for two years.

The pay for our troopers has now been outstripped by some local police forces. For much of the history of this state, many city and county officers sought to become members of the Highway Patrol. Now some of our troopers are leaving to work for county and city police forces that pay better. Our Transport Police, who are our primary enforcers for large-truck violations, face the same issues.

On a local level, the reduction in troopers has meant fewer officers patrolling in our counties. In Kershaw County, we are lucky to have three troopers patrolling at any given time, plus one supervisor. If a trooper is sick, on vacation, or in court, we have even fewer patrolling than we are assigned. These four officers are now also required to patrol Lee County at the same time as they are responsible for Kershaw. Combined, these two counties are a tremendous area with hundreds of miles of roads, including a large stretch of I-20 with its thousands of cars per day.

These troopers not only patrol for traffic violations, but they must respond to accidents, often spending hours to conduct the investigations, interview injured persons in the hospital and control traffic at the accident site. A trooper may have to drive from the western portion of Kershaw County to respond to a traffic accident in Lee County, eating up precious minutes of his day. And if two serious accidents occur at the same time in Lee and Kershaw counties, we have essentially no troopers patrolling the highways.

Nearby Sumter County faces a similarly heavy workload because of the trooper shortage. Formerly, Sumter was assigned four officers to patrol the county. Now Sumter has three. Not only does Sumter have fewer troopers, but those troopers now must patrol Clarendon County also.

In our society, we ask a lot of our local and state law enforcement. By and large, they perform admirably. However, we can only ask so much from them. Our leaders are well-aware of the problems facing our state law enforcement community, and we must work now to solve them.

First, we must increase the numbers of our Highway Patrol and Transport Police. Second, we must move toward paying them what they are worth. For our own safety, we cannot wait another year, and we should not expect our law enforcement officers to wait, either.

Sen. Sheheen represents Chesterfield, Kershaw and Lancaster counties in the S.C. Senate.