Dallas Police caught using quotas for tickets

[Pawpaw]

Dallas police officers get suspended from overtime if they don't write enough tickets.

http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/112210 ... s-legal%3F

And after the City Attorney told them not to do it.

[lonewolf]

Saw this on the news last night. Using grant money to fund traffic patrols, tying elgibility to participate to the number of tickets written by assigning points to tickets. One officer was barred from participating (earning money) for three months because he was helping an elderly stranded motorist and could not make enough points on that shift. They said the overtime average was about $58.00 an hour and the officers were lined up to participate. Dang! For half that I would write the tickets all day long. Just give me the job of traffic enforcement. For $29.00 an hour I can write a lot of tickets, generate a lot of revenue for the city.

Oh, and by the way, shouldn't they be enforcing traffic laws as part of their regular duties anyway? Why get a grant just to do their jobs? Can I get a grant to mow my lawn?

[Pawpaw]

The big takeaways I got from this are:

1. The program has nothing at all to do with public safety... It's about revenue generation for the city of Dallas. The state pays the overtime & expenses, but the city gets to keep half of the money from the tickets.

2. The quota system they're using removes the officer's discretion if he is to continue getting paid overtime. The example you cited was a prime example. The officer appealed his removal from the detail and was denied anyway. Again, not about public safety.

3. Ticket quotas are illegal, per state law.

Wasn't it the city attorney that dropped the dime to Fox News?

[Fangs]

I was under the impression that there "aren't quotas" for traffic tickets, but "if some officers write drastically fewer tickets than others then they aren't doing their job"... so, yeah, unofficial quotas.

[saltydog452]

Ticket quotas may be illegal and rightly so.

However, tickets might provide management with a decent idea of who is working and who isn't. A ten hour solo shift that provides 10 pieces of paper, evenly spaced throughout the shift, might offer some verification that the traffic officer was 'on the job' for all ten of those hours.

There are two sides on every coin.

salty

[Hoi Polloi]

Many years ago, someone was explaining to me how the point system wasn't a quota system. What I took away from the conversation is that it actively discourages officers from doing important tasks because they prioritized tasks based on points per minute/hour and some tasks might get them more points but they weren't enough points for how long they had to spend on them (like misdemeanor arrests of people with warrants) compared to how many points they could get by spending their time doing something else (like writing traffic tickets). It disgusted me.

[The Annoyed Man]

Ticket quotas may be illegal and rightly so.

However, tickets might provide management with a decent idea of who is working and who isn't. A ten hour solo shift that provides 10 pieces of paper, evenly spaced throughout the shift, might offer some verification that the traffic officer was 'on the job' for all ten of those hours.

There are two sides on every coin.

salty

There's a much cheaper way to do it. Have sergeants and up in rank ride along with randomly picked officers, once or twice a week. Then compare that random officer's "production" on that day against the daily production on other days when nobody rode along with that same officer. If the production during the ride-along is higher than other days, both before and after, then the officer has not been "doing his job."

Now, that does mean that sergeants and up in rank are going to pull longer hours and earn overtime, but their overtime - being fewer in number than the number of street level officers - will cost less money than paying overtime to all the street level officers. Furthermore, if the same rank and file officer exhibits more than one production spike on the days he/she has a superior riding along, then a pattern of "not doing their job" has been established, and the individual officer can be counseled in a performance review....

...if quotas were legal. I'd personally prefer that they remain illegal.

[WildBill]

if quotas were legal. I'd personally prefer that they remain illegal.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Benjamin Disraeli