UPPER MACUNGIE TWP., Pa. — An officer recently honored for giving out the most traffic citations in the entire Lehigh Valley region in 2023 came from what might be a surprising place.
Police Sgt. Dathan Schlegel doesn't work in one of the Valley's cities, or in a state police barracks that covers a large geographic area.
He's an office in Upper Macungie — a township of about 28,000 people.
Schlegel gave out 2,106 traffic citations in 2023, a much larger amount of traffic citations than the other honorees.Lehigh Valley DUI Highway Safety Taskforce
Yet Schlegel gave out 2,106 traffic citations in 2023, according to the Lehigh Valley DUI Highway Safety Taskforce, which last month honored officers with the most DUI arrests and traffic citations.
That’s a much larger amount of traffic citations than the other honorees.
Trooper Brian Bird of Pennsylvania State Police at Belfast gave out 837 citations last year, and Bethlehem Police Officer Jeremy Clinton gave out 607.
The large gap in the numbers begs the question: How could a police officer in the township have such a high amount of traffic citations?
'People violating the law out there'
Upper Macungie Police Chief Mike Sitoski said Schlegel is in charge of the traffic unit, meaning he is going out and looking for people who are speeding and engaging in unsafe behaviors.
“The focus of traffic enforcement is to make the roadway safer for all travelers."Upper Macugie Police Chief Mike Sitoski
“The focus of traffic enforcement is to make the roadway safer for all travelers,” Sitoski said. “It is an attempt to try and reduce traffic crashes and traffic fatalities.”
Upper Macungie Police Patrol Lt. Cory Reader said other police departments do not have the time or resources to have officers doing “proactive policing,” or looking for violations before calls come in.
“The statistics don't really show anything other than — in my opinion, at least — that there's violators or people violating the law out there, and people like Sergeant Schlegel are out there looking for that, and finding those things,” Reader said.
Sitoski said his department is able to have a dedicated traffic unit because of aggressive driving grants and support from the township.
Reader also said many people work and drive through the township, making the number of people who use its roads much higher than their population.
Breaking down the data
LehighValleyNews.com obtained the 2023 traffic citation data for Schlegel, which included the dates and the nature of the offenses.
Schlegel gave out citations on 198 days last year, with an average of 10.6 a day. Administrators in the Upper Macungie Police Department confirmed that some offenders received multiple tickets.
The most common citation was speeding — Schlegel gave out about 800 speeding tickets last year.
The next most common citation, at 364, was for traffic light violations, and the third most common citation at 269 was having an expired license.
Schlegel also gave out about 200 parking tickets last year.
The number of citations per work day ranged from one to 42, with the most citations on Sept. 14 and Sept. 30.
‘Real drivers are killing people’
Reader said there are no ticket quotas in the Upper Macungie Police Department.
“But what we ask the officers to do is go out and be visible, go out in the community, if you see an issue, talk to someone, address it,” Reader said.
“If an officer came right behind Sergeant Schlegel and they wrote 2,000 warnings, the chief would be tickled because that's 2,000 people that we talked to, and maybe change their behavior.”
Reader said it is particularly difficult for municipal police departments to give out speeding tickets in Pennsylvania, because they are not allowed to use radar guns to track speed.
"It's quite honestly a pain to do what we do to go enforce a speed limit.”Upper Macungie Police Patrol Lieutenant Cory Reader
Instead, Upper Macungie officers use bars and lines painted on the side of the road to help them measure speed.
“The equipment we use now is a labor of love." Reader said. "It's tedious. It's quite honestly a pain to do what we do to go enforce a speed limit."
But Reader said he thinks traffic enforcement is an important part of reducing injuries and deaths from car crashes.
And the data backs him up — a 2014 study from the National Library of Medicine showed that “reducing traffic violations may contribute significantly to crash and injury reduction.”
“Frankly, I don't really give a lot of thought to the folks who are out there saying the police have a better thing to do, or they could be going out and looking for real criminals,” Reader said.
“Well, those real drivers are killing people and themselves.”
