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What’s happening on PTC cart paths?

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

Police can’t patrol the entire 80-plus-mile meandering cart path network in Peachtree City, and doing so full-time would take roughly 30 to 40 officers, said Police Chief James Murray.

By contrast there are a minimum of six patrol units, including supervisors, to cover the entire city, with maybe an extra officer or two sometimes running backup to make sure all zones are covered, Murray said.

Another two traffic officers are on duty 18 hours a day, and roughly two to three hours of their day is on the cart path, working “the hot spots,” high traffic areas and the more isolated areas where citizens have called in complaints, Murray said. The majority of the traffic officers’ time is spent reporting to motor vehicle accidents, he noted.

A number of citizen complaints are reported on the paths between apartment complexes, so officers sometimes concentrate there when on the paths, Murray noted.

It was on a cart path near the Harmony Village Apartments March 28 when several juveniles robbed another kid at gunpoint, police reported, but that was a staged crime planned well in advance and not a random attack, Murray said. The apartments are near the intersection of Crosstown Road and Peachtree Parkway in southern Peachtree City.

“We know where they are,” Murray said of the “hot spots” on the paths. “We get a great deal of complaints and information from citizens who are on the paths.”

Although a number of drug and alcohol arrests have been made on the cart paths over the years, the main scourge of the paths is an altogether different beast, the chief said.

“The biggest problem we have is young drivers not driving safely,” Murray said, adding that the city hasn’t had a serious crime problem on the cart path system. “... The potential to have a lot of crime on the cart path is there,” he added.

Part of the inherent danger involves the secluded nature of the paths, Murray said.

“Some of the paths run right behind or next to houses, and on some paths you can’t see what’s going on until you’re on the paths themselves.”

It can be easy for the cart path patrol to go unnoticed because sometimes they do so in plainclothes, particularly when on a surveillance mission, Murray said. Sometimes uniformed officers are on a bike, a golf cart, or even a small SUV, and occasionally an undercover officer will be on Rollerblades, the chief acknowledged.

“It depends specifically on what we’re out there looking for,” Murray said.

Putting an officer on the cart path is time-consuming, and it can take that officer 15 to 20 minutes to respond to an emergency call five miles away just because it takes time to get back to a car, Murray said.

Officers already respond to routine calls on the path system, and in some cases such as a juvenile out after curfew, it can take two to four hours just to locate the youngster’s parents, taking an officer out of commission for almost half a day, Murray added.

The design of the cart paths keeps officers from patrolling a large area because you can’t cover the paths as fast as you can streets, Murray noted. And time is important as the department’s calls for service increased from 67,583 in 2003 to 77,905 in 2004, the chief said.

Although there are four new officers enrolled in police academy who will be ready for patrol soon, that will represent the department’s first manpower increase in four years, Murray noted.

The department does not keep statistics of how many incidents are reported on the cart path for a given time period, Murray said.