I’m pretty sure there are some general goals, risks, and rewards for those who write tickets as part of their job, and I assume it’s tied to career advancement and/or performance reviews. I just don’t know how it all works. FTR I’m not talking about when there is pressure to address a local crime problem, just general every-day work.
I once called parking enforcement to tow a car very obviously parked across my driveway. The officer looked around and said “nope, he could just say he couldn’t tell it was a driveway because of the snow”. He refused to do anything because he was scared his ticket might get thrown out in court. This tells me the motivation for action is more tied to a winning record in court than to actually enforcing the law or helping people. Also, the often quoted video of the law professor and detective showed the detective stating he felt his job was to bring forward cases to the prosecutors that required little or no effort to win.
As far as the number/volume of tickets goes I’m not talking about minimum quotas, but more what would motivate a cop to write huge numbers? Here locally we have a new cop who’s become well-known for being everywhere in town and doesn’t seem to sleep. He even posts a bit on facebook and mentioned that he just wrote his 32nd distracted driving ticket for the month… on the 3rd day of the month. Are cops like this just super motivated in general, or is there a reward for over-performing in the organizational structure?
So what’s the system in place… does each officer have a tracked record of how many successful tickets court cases they write or bring and is that how they get promotions?
Officer X gives 50 warnings a month to potentially impaired drivers and brings 5 of them to court, 3 of which get acquitted. He does a lot to reduce impaired driving.
Officer Y writes up 100 people a month for jay walking and burnt out tail lights; 99% are convicted but he does little to reduce the crime rate. How are they treated differently?
(Yes I know my examples are overly simplistic… just trying to paint a picture of what I mean)
“Scared it might get thrown out in court” is a good reason for not writing a ticket. You’re only supposed to write tickets for infringements that, in court, would be open-and-shut cases. Writing tickets for cases in which there is any real doubt about securing a conviction is oppressive behaviour.
If you wouldn’t prosecute it, don’t ticket it, basically.
I would make an exception for a blocked driveway - in many places, you can’t get a car blocking your driveway towed unless it is ticketed, and the owner of the driveway shouldn’t be blocked indefinitely because the ticket might get thrown out in court.
Other than that though, I wish that parking agents here were afraid to write tickets that would be thrown out in court for one reason or another. Because I often see tickets written that will absolutely be thrown out in court - ( or really through the mail) people who get tickets when the agent can see them paying at the centralized parking meter or cars that are ticketed while displaying some sort of placard that exempts them from a rule. That’s the ones the ticket writer knows will be dismissed as they are writing the ticket. Then there are others where the agent doesn’t know at the time of writing the ticket. - for example, I’ve heard about situations where agents apparently kept lists of license plates and other info on cars that were frequently in the area. My husband once got a ticket in the mail for an expired inspection near his job - he was actually off that day and the car was in the shop being inspected at the time of the ticket. Had he gotten a different sort of ticket ( say for violating street cleaning rules) weeks later in the mail , we would have had no way to fight it.
I haven’t seen any indication that the police don’t write tickets because they may not hold up in court. I can understand not writing a flood of invalid tickets that will get noticed by a judge, but otherwise I don’t know why they would care. Most tickets don’t get challenged whether valid or not, people just pay them by mail or online and get it over with.
That’s why I included my specific example: this LEO specifically said he wouldn’t ticket & tow a vehicle blocking my driveway (and preventing me from driving my own vehicle out) because the defendant might be able to win in court later on. The facts seemed very clear: a vehicle completely blocking a driveway on a public street. He had the authority to tow it, but refused and basically told me I was out of luck because it wasn’t a guaranteed win later on.
And this is where I’m getting confused… my understanding is that as long as a cop follows policy and doesn’t lie, the immunity and power LEOs have is pretty impressive and nothing is going to legally happen to a cop who destroys property, throws someone innocent in jail, or even kills someone who later turned out not to be the threat initially deemed. I’m having trouble squaring the essentially untouchable status and powers cops have with a very real fear/motivation not to take action in some cases. Hence, I’m thinking there is some sort of reward system in place for a cop who is always agreed with in court.
I’ve heard LEOs say they don’t abuse their powers because the behavior catches up with them and they start to become untrusted by judges. And I think to myself “So what? Can’t a cop write as many bogus tickets as they want to mess with people they don’t like? The worst that could happen is they all get tossed but the victim still has to show up and the cop still gets paid to write them”.
So there has to be a system in place to prevent this… is it as simple as unwritten peer pressure not to be a dick, or is it more formal as in a long-term tracking system showing # contacts made per shift, conviction rate of cases brought (or percentage the prosecutors agreed to take up), compared to the state average, only the top X% of performers are eligible for promotion or to achieve a certain rank, etc?
I just don’t know. I thought cops had to worry more about not acting after receiving a call. Maybe he thought the guy was just stuck there and honestly didn’t know he was blocking a driveway and having him towed was extreme. Did you ask him to help you locate the owner of that car? It had a license plate on it didn’t it, he could certainly have found out who the owner was.
I’m pretty sure none of those things typically happen. I think it’s much more likely to be something more specific- maybe the cop would have had to stay until the tow truck showed up and towed the car and he was due for a meal break or to go off duty. Even if there was a disincentive for writing tickets that were dismissed, one ticket wouldn’t make a difference. And then you also have to account for the negative effects of not writing the ticket - if that had happened to me , my complaint would have been in writing by next day with the officer’s identifying information included. I doubt having one fewer ticket dismissed is worth a potential complaint. ( Cops do lots of things that garner complaints, and plenty of the complaints are justified, but I just don’t see it happening to avoid a ticket being dismissed. To go home on time, maybe )
Refer to article to see if your state made the news on quotas mentions.
“A U-T-C is a Uniform Traffic Citation. But Florida State Law forbids quotas. According to the 2003 Legislative session, Title XXIII Motor Vehicles 316.640: “An agency of the state as described in subparagraph 1. is prohibited from establishing a traffic citation quota.”
While traffic ticket quotas are not legally mandated, there is enough evidence to suggest they do exist in some law enforcement agencies.”
The Waze app had an option for users to report speed trap location, accidents and alternate routes for traffic jams. Then Google bought them, I haven’t used Waze since I don’t drive like I used to. Where I live now I know where hiding spots are. Does anyone know if WAZE still has that option? Also the radio station used to report where speed traps were when I lived in Alabama.
As with every job on Earth the individual’s motivation is unique to the individual. Similarly the culture of each department is different depending on many factors including who happens to be the head boss at the time. All you can get are anecdotes from individuals.
It doesn’t work like that. At least not here. If I write a bunch of questionable cites they don’t just get tossed and that’s the end of it. Far from it.
First of all, it’s not the judges that I worry about it’s the prosecutor. If I write a bunch of chicken shit cites that he/she is not going to press he/she is going to bitch at my departments court officer who is going to come back and report that to my Sergeant and my Sergeant and Lieutenant are going to make my life miserable for pissing off the ADA.
AKA shit rolls downhill.
I write a heap more parking cites than traffic. At one time I used to tow a lot of cars. But that ended up causing serious blowback and my higher ups put a stop to so many tows by tearing me and some other officers new assholes.
I still tow cars blocking driveways, fire hydrants, etc. It’s a legitimate cite/tow.
There are many factors that come into play when deciding to write or not a ticket. Here are a few:
Seriousness of the violation - 10 mph over or 50 over? DUI?
Driver’s record. First offender or habitual speeder?
Citizen complaints - “They’re speeding up and down my street all the time!” And they are.
High accident numbers due to violations.
Funding - is a grant paying overtime for enforcement (cell phone, seat belt, dui, aggressive driving)? If so, the funders are going to want to see results.
Departmental pressure/performance evaluation sometimes called a “quota”.
In some places its a source of funding. Not that it should be.
Like it or not, who the driver is. Especially for minor offenses. Are you really going to give the mayor’s wife a ticket for tinted windows?
Last but certainly not least (for many officers it is THE deciding factor), attitude of the driver.
“I pay your salary!” “Why aren’t you out catching real criminals” “You only stopped me because I’m (fill in the blank”. “Do you know who I am?!” or worse. Sometimes, much worse. These things are only going to buy you more pieces of cardboard. Be polite, maybe apologize and you are far more likely to end up with a warning or, at least, minimize the number of tickets. Its not a guarantee (there are some real hammers out there who ticket everyone) but it certainly increases your chances.