Do Traffic Ticket Quotas Exist?

By www.easyfastcheap.com Easy Fast Cheap Online Traffic School

Often times, people on the receiving end of speeding tickets complain that

they were unfairly targeted by a police officer who was looking for an excuse to fill his traffic ticket quota. Is this a valid complaint, or are traffic ticket quotas

simply a myth that speeders came up with to make themselves feel better about their poor driving habits?

The truth is that for the majority of police departments within the United States, traffic ticket quotas do not exist; at least not in the fashion that most people

assume. Many police agencies have a common problem that the majority of their officers find it a chore to write traffic citations. That may come as a surprise to many of you, but the majority of these officers believe that their

duty to serve and protect is goes beyond writing those tickets that seem to annoy you so much. For this reason, there is an “unwritten” policy which says

that if you aren’t writing enough tickets as a police officer on a weekly or monthly basis, then you must be slacking or simply not doing your job.

Since this has become a growing problem in several police agencies, some patrol officers find themselves filling out documents detailing all of their activities for the day. The document is more of a log that includes the exact

time spent, specific locations visited and what was done by the police officers that day. Although you may not find this very interesting, what is surprising to

learn about these documents, is that on the back there are areas to fill in the amount of traffic citations issued, along with criminal citations, parking citations and how many felony and misdemeanor arrests were executed by

that officer.

While this isn’t going to be the deciding factor of how big of a quota the officer will have every day, keep in mind that often times, if the number of citations the officer writes on a monthly basis is found to be lacking, they will be

expecting a talk with their superiors about why they aren’t properly doing their job. It’s quite unfortunate that these supervisors pay such close attention to

the amount of citations that are being issued, and instead ignoring the amount of lives that these officers save along with the number of domestic disputes and assaults that are solved and even prevented on a daily basis. So to

answer our initial question, yes, traffic quotas sometimes do exist, however they are disguised under other names such as performance and daily activity

reports. The real question to ask though is whether or not officers are being encouraged or forced to maintain a high quota of citations and hand out more tickets than necessary.