Suffolk Police Officer Clifton Sessoms Jr. has been committed to keeping the streets of Suffolk safe for nearly 10 years now.

Having joined the Suffolk Police Department in 2009, he has accumulated quite an impressive list of statistics that demonstrate how he is ensuring safe travel for Suffolk residents and visitors.

In 2017 alone, Sessoms conducted 196 field sobriety tests, resulting in 70 arrests for driving under the influence. He discovered 61 open container of alcohol violations, 33 refusal to submit breath alcohol test violations and four underage drinking violations.

Sessoms is on the DUI Task Force, so he is actively seeking these types of violations. But while out on the roads, he also wrote tickets for 696 speeding violations, 76 reckless driving violations and 35 seatbelt violations.

He has also become a Drug Recognition Expert, one of only three in the entire region, and has provided 25 drug recognition evaluations to assist other officers with arrests for driving under the influence of drugs.

In other words: don’t drive drunk, drugged or otherwise recklessly in Suffolk, mostly because it’s unsafe and wrong but also because Sessoms will find you, and you will be punished.

These may be just numbers on this page, but each of those numbers may represent someone who got home safe one night thanks to Sessoms. That person may be the intoxicated, speeding or reckless driver, with a ding on their driving record but physically no worse for the wear. That person may have been someone else who was endangered by the unlawful driver that Sessoms intercepted.

For his hard work on keeping Suffolk’s streets safe, Sessoms was honored as the city’s Top Cop back in November at the 18th Annual Greater Hampton Roads Regional Crime Lines Inc. Dinner and Top Cop Awards.

Awards, of course, are not why Sessoms or any other police officer does their job, but it’s nice to pause and recognize them every once in a while, and we’re pleased Sessoms was honored in this way.

Traffic safety is a dangerous part of law enforcement that many people take for granted, and it’s certainly not the only facet of the Suffolk Police Department, which works in many ways big and small to keep our city safe. But it is a big part of the public safety puzzle, and we appreciate the work of Sessoms and the others who do this job.