Writing a quota of speeding tickets
Ticket writing quotas. Do police have ticket writing quotas?
Most places they don’t, but none of us are naive enough to think that no cities have ticket writing quotas for their police departments.
How often do you hear a Mayor come right out and say it? This from Monona, Wisconsin…
If Monona’s mayor has his way, a new police officer will focus only on speeders in this Madison suburb.
Mayor Robb Kahl says the officer’s $77,000 salary and benefits package would be paid mostly through speeding tickets the person would write if the 2009 city budget is approved.
But some are questioning that plan.
The new officer would need to issue about 1,600 tickets at a minimum fine of $48 a piece – almost one an hour.
Monona Police Chief Walter Ostrenga says he doesn’t know if it’s possible to write that many.
The department’s 20 officers issued 416 speeding citations in the first 10 months of 2008.
Kahl says he doesn’t expect it to completely balance, but wants the officer to issue at least three or four tickets a day.
Come on chief … we all know it is possible to write one speeding ticket an hour. We also know that minimum fine could be doubled or even tripled.
Times are tough for local governments.
Could this become a serious form of revenue enhancement in not just Monona, but other cities?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 11:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 2nd, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Even if there isn’t a quota, you have to wonder if there’s some sort of internal pressure put on officers who don’t write a set number of tickets.