An Afternoon With a Traffic Officer

Pfc. Tara Fruecht parks on Braddock Road, just down the street from , and balances her LIDAR detector on the back of her unmarked police car. It's a warm weekday afternoon and in any minute now, dozens of kids will start pouring out of the school building.

Some days Fruecht will chat with them for a bit, and hand out stickers and pencils that she keeps in the car. But on this particular afternoon, she stands outside and waits for speeding drivers. And it's not long before she spots a minivan traveling at 39 miles per hour. She waits a few seconds, until the driver has traveled well into the school zone—744.6 feet, to be exact. Then she steps out into the road and directs the driver to pull over.

The ticket she issues is one of hundreds written by police officers from the during the station's LEAD (Let's Eliminate Aggressive Driving) campaign in the month of March. Officers wrote about 1500 summons for aggressive driving, not even counting radar and LIDAR tickets. Local police, including Fruecht, looked not just for speeders, but for people running red lights, cutting off other drivers to change lanes, tailgating and other behaviors that make the roads unsafe. Primarily, their efforts focused on Route 28, where many drivers fly down the road at speeds far above the limit. 

Fruecht, the only police officer at Sully whose job is exclusively dedicated to traffic, thinks people are getting the message. She's seen a big difference on Route 28 since February.

"We're starting to get to the point where speeding isn't so much a problem; it's more people whipping in and out of lanes," she says. 

Among the reasons that police say they consider aggressive driving a serious problem is because it's the leading cause of death for Americans under age 40. In Fairfax County, there were 34 fatal crashes last year, police data shows. The congestion that gets worse in Northern Virginia every year doesn't help matters.

Fruecht, who works ten-hour shifts four days a week, usually finds that mornings, particularly after 7 a.m., are the worst. That's when people are running late for work, and more inclined to speed. But the afternoons are an important time too, and in no small part because that's when kids get out of school. 

This particular school zone, near Ormond Stone, measures 1500 feet, Fruecht can tell you without a moment's hesitation. She's worked at the Sully District Station since she graduated Police Academy in June 2007 and has found that fact to be useful knowledge in traffic court. 

"People tend to speed down here because they're getting ticked that they're going 25 [mph] for a mile and a half," Fruecht says of this particular section of Braddock Road. Right next to the zone for Stone Middle School is a zone for . 

So Fruecht sits in the same spot, often several days in the same week, hoping that with enough time—and enough tickets issued—people will eventually get the picture.

"That's my goal: to burn it out to the point that there's no speeders, nothing," she says. "Every day I come here and I hope I don't have to write tickets."

But just minutes after the driver of the minivan departs, Fruecht spots a white SUV barreling down Braddock and again steps out into the road, signaling the driver to pull over. 

The driver has big black sunglasses perched on top of her head, and the top strap of her seat belt tucked underneath her arm, resting against her rib cage. "That'll slice you open," Fruecht notes, with a nod toward the belt. The driver slips it back into place. After they talk for a few minutes, the driver leans forward hopefully. In a low voice, she asks if Fruecht can give her a warning. 

"Nope. Sorry, anywhere else I might give a good driver a break, but not in a school zone. The kids are too important," Fruecht says. And she means it. Not once in four years has she given a warning or lost in court over a ticket in a school zone, she says. She wants to be a school resource officer eventually.

After the driver departs, she heads down to . She likes to keep an eye out for the teen drivers who more often than not don't put on their seat belts. And before her shift is over, she'll drive down Route 28 at least one more time, where there's certainly no shortage of work for her.