The Hinesville Police Department has updated its policy for handling vehicles flagged as uninsured after concerns involving a former officer who, according to Police Chief Tracy Howard, was involved in multiple similar incidents.
Many residents may remember a previous incident involving former Hinesville Police Officer Todd Parmentier, who stopped a vehicle after a state database indicated that it did not have active insurance coverage.
Rather than further verifying the driver’s insurance status, the vehicle was impounded.
The incident left the occupants without their vehicle despite questions surrounding the accuracy of the state’s insurance database.
According to Hinesville Police Chief Tracy Howard, that case was not an isolated incident involving Parmentier.
Howard said he was prepared to recommend that Parmentier be terminated before the officer resigned from the department.
Following the incidents, Howard said the department updated its policy to more clearly outline what officers are expected to do when a vehicle is flagged by the state system as uninsured.
Under the updated policy, officers are expected to contact the insurance company and verify whether coverage is active rather than relying solely on information displayed in the state database.
The change is significant because concerns have been raised about delays in the state’s insurance reporting system.
Insurance information may not always be reflected in the database in real time, meaning a vehicle can potentially be flagged as uninsured even when the owner has active coverage.
The issue stems in part from how insurance information is transmitted to the state. Because coverage information is not necessarily reported and updated immediately, discrepancies can occur between a driver’s actual insurance status and what an officer sees in the database.
The updated Hinesville Police Department policy is intended to provide an additional verification step before enforcement action such as impounding a vehicle is taken based on an insurance flag.
According to documentation from the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, commonly known as Georgia POST, Parmentier remained POST-certified in Georgia at the time of this article.
The documentation reviewed by News Now Georgia did not show Parmentier reporting new employment with another Georgia law enforcement agency as of the time of publication.
Yolonda Harris
News Now Georgia
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