Traffic Ticket Quotas: Do They Exist?

As a companion to my write-up on how I successfully fought off a traffic ticket, the question arose -- as I'm sure it will or has if you're fighting your own ticket -- of whether police officers have quotas for traffic tickets.

Shockingly, the official answer is no. Some states -- like Florida (see Title XXIII Motor Vehicles 316.640(II)(f)(2))-- want to emphasize this point so much that they pass explicit statutory provisions saying so. However, if you do a cursory amount of googling, you can find stuff like this which shows that violations of such statutes are quite common.

For its part, California's explicit prohibition is in section 41602 of the Vehicle Code, although California somehow -- per section 41600 of the Vehicle Code -- includes "citations issued" in the general category of "arrest quota". Actually, California wants you -- Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public -- to believe so much that it doesn't have a quota for tickets that it passed section 41603 of the Vehicle Code, which states that a cop's performance, demotion, dismissal, or earnings cannot depend on the number of arrests he made or tickets he issued. But wait, there's one very important word in 41603 -- "... as the sole criterion..." In other words, the number of tickets written or arrests made can be considered when evaluating a cop's performance, just as long as the department bases it's decision on other stuff as well.

So you might be thinking "Okay, the law says outright that cops don't have ticket quotas. Everything's fine, right?" Well, not really. California law says outright that many other things are forbidden too -- running stop signs, talking on a cellphone while driving, etc. -- and yet those still happen all the time.

If that doesn't convince you that there are, in practice, ticket quotas for cops, consider this piece of common sense reasoning:

The Common Sense Approach:
Most law enforcement agencies -- like a police department or sheriff's office -- organize the areas they cover into regions, districts, commands, or precincts. For patrol, for example:

And now for the common sense.

No matter what type of unit a department's patrol area is broken down into, it's logical to assume that -- from just a basic response time and officer safety perspective -- that there are multiple officers who work in any one of these units at the same time. To make scheduling easier, it further stands to reason that these officers work in a limited number of shifts -- graveyard, swing, and day shift, for example -- that all start and end at roughly the same time. When you combine these two facts, the conclusion is that in any given unit of a department's patrol area, there are multiple officers who work the same area in the same time period. As an illustration, the San Jose police above may have 6 officers working in each of the 4 patrol districts in it's Foothill division during weekday swing shift.

When an officer issues a traffic ticket, there is obviously a lot of processing that gets done. The officer keeps a copy of the ticket, obviously. Some entity of the county or city has to figure out how much your fine is and mail you the form telling you the fine and giving you the choice of whether you want to pay it or fight the ticket in traffic court. Somewhere along that line of processing, then, it seems not beyond imagination that the issuing department would know of or keep a tally of the number of tickets that were issued, when and where they were issued, and which officer issued them. With that then, let's go back to my hypothetical illustration of the 6 officers during weekday swing shift in each of the 4 districts in the Foothill division of the San Jose police department.

Suppose that you're one of the 6 officers working in the Charles district of the Foothill division and that at the end of a given month, your sergeant, captain, or lieutenant looks and sees that in that month you wrote 3 tickets for traffic violations. If each of the 5 other officers working the same area as you during the same time as you also wrote about 3 tickets during that month, then you're fine. However, suppose each of those 5 officers wrote 25 tickets each during that same time period. Your 3 tickets start to look really suspicious, doesn't it? Would 10 be less suspicious? Maybe, but the point is is that even though there is no official quota, there is very much a quota in practice because officers who work the same area during the same time are pressured to keep their ticket counts roughly the same.

Back to my 3 versus 25 example then: Is it possible you just didn't see an extra 22 more violations to cite? Sure, but it still looks suspicious all the same, especially if that type of discrepancy happens month after month. When you come up for performance review or promotion, will you have to deal with the suspicion that you're being overly lenient and lax in enforcing traffic laws? I think so. Will the number of tickets you issue or arrests you make affect your chance at a promotion or pay increase? Yes, because under section 41603 of the Vehicle Code, those are not the sole criteria, but they can very well be one of them.

  Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:02:18 PM