The police in Belleville, Illinois have a ticket quota. That’s really starting to be a common theme among small towns across America. Traffic ticket enforcement and ticket quotas are becoming more and more popular as revenues decrease to to decreasing property values.
Speeding offences and stop sign violators seem to be the prime target for traffic enforcement officers who are assigned daily ticket quotas.
Here’s an excerpt from the article in the News-Democrat in Southern Illinois:
<blockquote>Look out, leadfoot.
Belleville police are making more traffic stops because of a new rule that they make two self-initiated contacts per 12-hour shift. Those can include any combination of traffic tickets, traffic warnings and field interview reports.
In January 2010, before the requirement was in place for those assigned to patrol, officers wrote 22 speeding tickets and 13 warning tickets. Last month, the first full month of the new rule, officers wrote 210 speeding tickets and 165 warning tickets.
Also, for all of 2010, police made 2,259 traffic stops. In January, the first full month of the two-contacts-per-day standard, police made 1,603 stops — 70 percent of last year’s total, all in one month.
Police Chief William Clay said it’s not just busy work, and it’s not about money from tickets. It’s his initiative to get officers more proactively engaged with the public. He thinks that’s the best way to address crime. In other words, the more contact officers have with the public, the more likely the officers are to find people with drugs, guns or arrest warrants.
And he may be on to something. Though weapons arrests stayed the same, warrant arrests in Belleville were up by 40 percent last month over the same month last year, and cannabis arrests were up 130 percent. Capt. Donald Sax, who provided the statistics, couldn’t say exactly how many of the warrants and cannabis arrests came from traffic stops, but he said that’s where they usually come from.
About a year-and-a-half before Clay began the requirement in December, he had done away with a long-standing 10-ticket-per-month quota because, at a law-enforcement training seminar for administrators, he heard an expert talk about the benefits of leaving the process alone, and not applying any type of quota. Plus, Clay thought the ticket quota took away from officer discretion.<cite>Laura Girresch, News-Democrat</cite>
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What do you think about police ticket quotas?
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