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Officer Ronald Richardson Named 
April Employee of the Month
 

On Friday March 8, 2002 at 1330 hrs, Officer Ronald Richardson stopped a tractor-trailer unit on Rt. 9 for failing to stop for two red lights at the Oak St. intersection. While obtaining the operator’s license and registration, due to his training and experience, Officer Richardson had the foresight to ask where the driver was coming from, the location of his home base, and where he was headed. Officer Richardson learned that the truck was garaged in Maine , the terminal was more than 100 miles away, and the operator did not return to his home terminal on a daily basis. Due to these circumstances the operator is required to keep a daily log of his hours of operation and destinations of travel.

Officer Richardson requested the logbook of operator’s hours and locations of travel. He discovered that no entries were made since February 28, 2002 . The lack of these entries automatically established the driver had violated the ten-hour rule, fourteen-hour rule and seven-day rule relative to operation of commercial vehicles.

Officer Richardson requested a member of the Mass State Police Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Team to assist him. The State Police responded and subsequently cited the operator and placed him out of service for logbook violations.

During the course of the trooper’s inspection of the vehicle, an empty 4’ x 5’ false compartment was located in the front of the trailer box. The driver indicated prior to dropping his load in Chelsea he had been traveling north from Florida . As a result of the intelligence developed from Officer Richardson’s “traffic stop”, State Police indicated that they would flag this truck through Project NORTHSTAR, a nationwide drug interdiction database. This will result in a thorough search of this trailer including the false compartment, whenever stopped by police or inspected at a truck stop.

Recent studies by NHTSA have indicated that driver fatigue is a substantial contributory factor in commercial vehicle crashes. The use of Officer Richardson’s training resulted in the removal of a fatigued commercial operator from the roadway and possibly may have provided drug interdiction officers with information concerning a trailer equipped with a false compartment to possibly transport illicit drugs.

For his excellence in police duty, Officer Richardson is hereby commended and named Employee of the Month for April 2002.

Dennis R. Mannix
Chief of Police