What's the deal with police quotas?

Yep, you’re right. They do have quotas but I’m sure it varies from area to area and from city to city. If you called your local police office, perhaps they’d tell you.

Police Departments always deny having quotas, but it always seems that traffic enforcement gets ramped up and less lenient as the end of the month or the end of the quarter approaches.

The PD or the Highway Patrol will call it “enforcement focus”.

A friend of mine’s brother is a policeman. She told me had a quota of traffic stops he had to make per month. She never said what would happen if he didn’t meet that quota.

I doubt they will give any details about their quota scheme. I suppose it got started as a means to ensure ofgicers were doing their job while on patrol, but now it seems to be a way to ensure revenue.

They always claim there is no quota but if the average number of tickets for a given area suddenly drops in half, there is an obvious problem. Somebody is spending too much time in the donut shop. It’s hard not to notice that.

It’s one of those things always denied, but everyone knows for a fact. It’s the motivation for the motorcycle cop hiding in ambush behind the billboard, and other such classics. Out here highway 99 was notorious for the small towns dotting the route with traffic cops preying on the unaware as a method of generating revenues for town coffers.

I think it’s messed up to have the mentality that you want to bust people. And why is this not public information? Worse comes to worst, shouldn’t surveillance solve this issue? Police stations are run by the government, right?
@Jaxk Or it could be working vice-versa, like @zenvelo‘s scenario. It’s hard for me to judge.

@dxs What do you mean by “Worse comes to worst, shouldn’t surveillance solve this issue?” Please elaborate.
Do you want a victim of a drunk driver of speeder, or whatever else?

….I mean the difference between the number of dangereous ticketable things drivers do (according to what I hear regular drivers say), and the tickets handed out it doesn’t match. The number of tickets is lower for sure So what is the solution?

@dxs Please excuse my “Do you want a victim of a drunk driver of speeder, or whatever else?”

I was talking about why nobody can prove or show if quotas are in place. Meaning, do they hold meetings to determine what these quotas are or something? However the point gets across, it has to be recorded somehow.

. @dxs That part I don’t know. . All I know is that some people not city officials, chief of police, police, “green onions” or anything but just lay people have been saying that they don’t give enough tickets.