Arkoe mayor arrested for making traffic stops
FORUM FILE PHOTO
Mayor Darrell Cronk, center, is shown during an Arkoe Board of Trustees meeting in 2019. Cronk was arrested in September for pulling over youths in a golf cart. He is charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer.
ARKOE, Mo. — When the mayor of Arkoe felt that drivers speeding through his town were putting residents in danger, he took matters into his own hands and started pulling people over himself. Though he now faces a charge for impersonating a law enforcement officer, Darrell Cronk told The Forum that he doesn’t regret his actions one bit.
Cronk has been on the Arkoe Board of Trustees for nine years and mayor for several now. Even among the other small towns in rural Nodaway County, Arkoe stands out as one of the smallest: depending on who’s home that day, Arkoe, population 56 in the 2020 Census, vies with Clyde (population 55) as the smallest of Nodaway County’s small towns. Nestled just south of Maryville, Arkoe even shares a zip code with the bigger city, which has resulted in some occasional confusion from delivery trucks and the postal service.
State Route U runs east and west through the center of town, doubling as Main Street within the town limits. Although the speed limit on Route U is 55 mph, it’s a long straightaway and drivers are often doing more like 70, Cronk said. The speed limit on the town’s Main Street is an even lower 45 mph, but that doesn’t seem to deter many drivers.
The problem reached fever pitch while two bridges on U.S. Highway 136 were being replaced in 2022, Cronk said, which necessitated that some drivers heading to and from Maryville find a new route while Highway 136 was closed.
“People figured out how to get to town through here,” he said. “… It saves them about four or five miles. But they’re just not comprehending when they come to Arkoe that they’re coming to, more or less, the center of town, not slowing down like they should — and it’s only 700 feet. (The speed limit is) 45 miles an hour from one end to the other.”
He said people heading to work at 5 a.m. “buzz through here, and I can stand out here because I can see the whole highway from my kitchen window and they’re just flying through there. There’s no sense to it.”
After watching a young neighbor cross the highway to check the family’s mailbox about six weeks ago, Cronk said it was just seconds later that a speeding car with a driver looking down at her phone crossed the neighbor’s path.
“If (he) would have stepped one foot farther, she’d have killed him,” he said. “She didn’t even bother to stop. She just kept going. … So when they come down through here at 65, 70 miles an hour in a 45 mile an hour zone, it’s gotta stop.”
‘We should be allowed’
On Sept. 29, Cronk was taken to the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Office, photographed, fingerprinted and released, and charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer, a class A misdemeanor.
According to the probable cause statement, Cronk had put a red light on the dashboard of his SUV, turned on a siren and pulled over a couple of teenagers riding in a golf cart.
“Once they stopped, Mr. Cronk told them that it was starting to get dark so they needed to return home,” the PC statement notes.
It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. The probable cause statement noted that Cronk had been reported in two unrelated incidents back in July for pulling over speeding drivers. He was warned then that it was illegal to do so, and told to knock it off.
Cronk told the sheriff’s office and The Forum that as the mayor of a small town without a police department, it fell to him to enforce the ordinances — which is what led to him pulling over the teenagers, who were not speeding in a golf cart, but, Cronk said, violating a town ordinance that doesn’t allow unlicensed drivers to operate vehicles within city limits.
“We should be allowed to enforce our own ordinance because we set the ordinance,” he told The Forum while seated at his dining room table last week. “… (The arrest) didn’t really bother me any because I knew I was doing what I thought (I should) to help kids.”
More roads, more problems
Cronk isn’t the only mayor of a small town in Nodaway County that has faced mounting frustrations over an inability to enforce municipal ordinances. Every town across the county struggles with the same issue, and many have to deal with speeding drivers as well.
But he is the only one to have started trying to enforce them himself.
In Skidmore, for example, the Board of Aldermen has tried to align municipal ordinances as much as possible with state statutes, which are enforceable by the sheriff’s office. One of the issues that deputies sometimes run into, said Capt. Austin Hann, is that by law they are not allowed to enforce ordinances.
“It doesn’t matter what town it is, all we handle is state law, whether it’s on a city street or a county road,” Hann, now sheriff-elect after Tuesday’s election, told The Forum. “… I think there’s historically been the desire to have ordinances enforced; we just can’t do it. … We can only enforce a statute. If it happens to line up with an ordinance that you have, that’s fine, that’s good, but we can only enforce the state statute.”
Another tactic that towns like Ravenwood have tried is to increase enforcement by sending more notices from a city attorney. But using the court system can be time-consuming and expensive for small towns, especially for relatively minor infractions that are nonetheless a consistent nuisance.
Speeding, though, is something the sheriff’s office and the Missouri State Highway Patrol can do something about, if they happen to catch it.
“Arkoe especially, because Arkoe is small and you come on it quick — right across the bridge, or you come on it coming down U Highway quickly — and you get there abruptly and then the change in speed. So I think it sneaks up on people in that sense,” he said.
Hann said there are numerous towns in the county with a highway running through them, specifically listing Ravenwood, Clearmont, Pickering and Barnard.
“Anytime you have a main highway, I think you’re gonna have people that are going too fast,” he said. “We do our best to address the issues that we have.”
Hann has asked people in those towns to contact the office so they can know to make a special effort to spend more time addressing speed issues in those areas.
“Just being there and being visible is a deterrent, and I believe that,” he said. “We’re doing what we can. We don’t have the ability to be in every town. We just don’t.”
He said Arkoe is no different, and that the sheriff’s office and the highway patrol have been there, even attending Board of Trustees meetings — which are held on the third Thursday of the month — to discuss the issue.
According to the Missouri Department of Transportation, Nodaway County has the second-most miles of road in the state, just behind Greene County — more than 1,175.
That’s a lot of miles for the sheriff’s office to patrol all the time, although they do their best, Hann said. Hann said the office is understaffed, like many law enforcement agencies across Missouri and in rural areas especially. Currently the office has 16 officers.
He said the office runs on 12-hour shifts from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. During the day shift, when court is in session, two deputies serve as bailiffs, one deputy is dedicated to roads and one is a dedicated school resource officer. During the evening shift, there are no bailiffs and there are three officers dedicated to roads. Hann said that the deputies decide on their own where they’re patrolling, whether gravel backroads or set up with radar on main roads.
Hann mentioned the possibility that while the deputies are out there working all night, the average person probably comes home from work, goes to bed and is in the house the rest of the evening.
“(They) don’t see us out there from 11 o’clock to 6 o’clock in the morning,” Hann said. “I think that’s the unfortunate aspect of the reality, they don’t see us because (they’re) not out. …
“I hate that the towns feel like they’re not seeing us,” Hann said. “I do hate that because we are out there working and really if somebody gets a hold of us, we do make a point to address the issues that are brought before us. And I think we are doing a good job of that. So it bothers me to hear it from the other side saying (they) don’t feel like (we) are.”
‘I would do it again’
Back in Arkoe, Cronk said he’s been frustrated when he’s contacted the sheriff’s office and the highway patrol, not getting what he thinks has been an appropriate response — hence his take on illegal, vigilante traffic justice.
“They just don’t wanna do their jobs,” he said. “They just don’t want to police it. They say it is a highway patrol problem. … It has been a constant battle.”
Cronk said he has made a little progress with MoDOT, which he said didn’t want the town to put up flashing lights near the speed limit sign on its own. MoDOT has jurisdiction over the state highway.
While still searching for a long-term solution, Cronk said thanks to his persistent phone calls, MoDOT is planning to bring down a car counter to see how much traffic is flowing down State Route U. Once that is determined, he said, it may help law enforcement plan patrols with the highway more prominently in mind. In the meantime, Cronk said he and the Board of Trustees are still working to find the best way to tackle the enforcement of the town’s ordinances, issues with speeding and unlicensed drivers of vehicles of all kinds.
“I would do it again in a heartbeat if we have kids in trouble and then they can call the cops on me,” Cronk said. “I really don’t care. I’ll go back in.”
Cronk is set to appear in Judge Robert Rice’s courtroom at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 10.
The class A misdemeanor of false impersonation of a law enforcement officer is punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000.
