Deputy has just the ticket for Madison traffic violators

DANIELSVILLE - Jason Ring's been a Madison County sheriff's deputy for five years, but lately, colleagues have given him a new title - "the Glenn Carrie police," with its own 1.7-mile-long jurisdiction.

As part of a new traffic patrol unit within the sheriff's office, Ring has been hitting Glenn Carrie Road hard, watching for speeders and seat-belt scofflaws on the popular two-lane, 35-mph cut-through between Georgia Highway 72 and U.S. Highway 29 near Hull.

He's been patrolling that road and others around the county since January and has found no lack of violators, he said.

"I wrote so many tickets out on that road - it's been nuts," Ring said Monday on an afternoon patrol around Southern Madison County. Now that he's been out there for a few weeks, people are starting to get the message, though, he said.

The new traffic unit's job is to prevent drunken-driving crashes and slow down drivers, and give deputies a bigger presence on county highways and back roads, said Sheriff Kip Thomas, who took over the rural county's law enforcement Jan. 1.

To form his traffic unit, Thomas took two deputies from the uniform patrol division and one K-9 officer and assigned them to eight-hour traffic patrol shifts that overlap throughout the day.

"That gets you more presence during the peak hours of the day," he said, especially in the mornings and evenings when people are driving to and from work.

Under former Sheriff Clayton Lowe, who lost his re-election bid last year, patrol deputies clocked speeders and looked for traffic violators "just whenever they could work it," Thomas said.

The new effort is slowing people down, he said.

Thomas' office certainly is issuing more tickets.

So far in the first quarter of 2009 - January, February and half of March - the sheriff's office has issued 772 traffic citations, according to records.

That's a 55 percent increase over the full first quarter of last year, when deputies gave out 465 tickets for things like speeding, not wearing a seat belt, reckless driving, DUI and driving with a suspended license or without insurance.

In January alone, officers cited people 215 times for speeding, compared with 48 times in January 2008.

New Madison County Probate Court Judge Cody Cross, a former sheriff's deputy, also recently raised fines for speeding and other traffic offenses, which means greater expense for violators.

Thomas, though, is sensitive to criticism that his crackdown is just to fill county coffers.

"It's not to create revenue; it's not to write tickets," he said. "It's to prevent accidents and to slow these people down."

The pace of ticketing also has slowed since deputies came out in force in January. Deputies gave out 93 speeding tickets in February and 32 in the first 15 days of March.

And Ring often doesn't have to give people tickets to make them put on the brakes, he said. "The biggest thing about this is just being seen."

Sitting in his patrol car at the top of a hill on Ga. 72 during rush hour, Ring slows people down - whether he pulls over speeders or other cars flash their lights at others to warn them, he said.

"I win both ways ... at least they slowed down," he said.