Still looking for a straight answer to this question. Maybe you can help.
Everyone I’ve talked to believes that traffic cops write tickets because they have to meet a monthly (?) quota. But a traffic school instructor I had two years ago insists that all tickets are written at the officer’s discretion and they have no quota to meet.
So what’s the deal?
A police officer friend of mine says that there is no written “quota” for Hawaiian officers, but if an officer consistentantly turns in a below average number of citations they are investigated for slacking.
This is done by the individual commanders who have some idea of what the traffic is like on specific beats and how many citations an officer “doing his job properly” should generate.
When I asked what happens if a cop has to respond to an unusual amount of calls that take him off traffic, he responded “yea it’s fucked like that.”
So I guess the answer for HPD is “not officially?”
From having observed drivers over the years, including myself, if there is a quota a traffic officer certainly won’t have any trouble meeting it.
My dad was a cop for over 30 years, and I know at his last dept. they did not have a quota of tickets to write. They did, however, have a quota for monthly “contacts”, which included tickets and written warnings, as well as contacts with those reporting crimes.
I was told by a former Missouri Hiway Patrol officer that they had a quota. But it wasn’t for tickets per se. It was for 'contacts". I don’t remember the number as it’s been over tweny years ago, but he said that a 'warning ticket" was just as good as a citation, so far as the quota went. The idea was that the officer was patroling and making contact with the public, not that he wrote 15 speeding tickets a day.
“Now get out there and be seen!”
Speaking as a former parking enforcer (not quite the same thing, I know, but probably the same general priniples apply.)
There were no quotas.
However, the chief knew what a “normal” day of ticketing would produce. If you didn’t match that for several weeks in a row, it was suspected that you were goofing off somewhere. An investigation would insue and if you were goofing off diciplinary action would be taken.
So there was no official quota, but you were expected to do your job and that by itself lent itself to a daily average that sort of amounted to a quota. Kinda.
I read a column in a motorcyle mag by a cop, it was a Q&A type deal. He broke it down in terms of what it costs to pay an officer (there’s a lot more to it than the 5 min by the side of the road) vs the fine collected, and made it sound like traffic citations were a red ink proposition.
Larry
When I was on the job full time for a small city in SE Wisconsin we had a citation quota of 1 for every 17 hours we worked. Seeing that shifts were 8 hours I have no idea how they ever came to that ratio, and nobody could ever remember who or when or why they came up with that ratio. “Because we’ve always done it that way” was the official answer I got directly from the chief!
As of now ticket quotas are illegal in Wisconsin. However I don’t believe that covers “contact quotas” that was mentioned before.
The department I work for now part-time has no quotas of any sort. In fact, a few of us even got chewed out for writing too many tickets once. it was considered bad P.R. at the time.
A friend of mine with Cal highway patrol said about the same thing, if you’re not writing X tickets per shift, you’re not paying attention, or sleeping under a tree somewhere. A few busy shifts here and there will not throw your average because its just that…average. If officer smith over a year wrote an average of 1 ticket every 2 hours he was on duty for a year that was every 2 hours including the times he was doing other things too. if thats the case a simple bell curve distribution is still going to ome out that there is plenty of days he dosent write a ticket at all as well as a similar number where he writes 8-10 tickets in an 8 hour shift.