Miami-Dade Florida Trooper jailed for issuing false tickets
A former Florida Highway Patrol trooper based in Miami-Dade will spend a year in jail for writing hundreds of phony tickets to motorists who were never pulled over for traffic offenses.
Paul C. Lawrence entered a guilty plea to eight misdemeanor counts of falsifying public records. Originally, Lawrence was charged with 22 felony counts, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The charges were reduced after he agreed to permanently relinquish his law-enforcement certification.
Prosecutors charged Mr. Lawrence with issuing hundreds of false traffic tickets using the information of motorists he had previously pulled over on legitimate car stops. Tickets would arrive in the mail and the recipients would understandably be confused.
Lawrence said he wrote the tickets to boost his overall summons count. FHP has responded by reassuring the public that it doesn’t set quotas for tickets.
More than 200 Florida traffic tickets were dismissed in connection with this incident.
I find two things notable here:
1. How in the world did he think he was going to get away with this? Some people would have convincing evidence to submit showing they were elsewhere at the time of the incident. All would complain vociferously that the charge was completely fabricated. Eventually, the volume and veracity of the complaints certainly would catch up with him. I can only imagine what type of cutting corners and lying he was able to get away with earlier in his career that led him to think this might work. In how many cases involving actual car stops did he successfully offer false testimony before he decided he could do away with the car stop altogether?
2. THERE ARE QUOTAS. Period. Why would an officer ever do this if there weren’t? I don’t believe there’s an outright monthly number that departments must hit–the number of troopers on the road, the hours they are on the road and the area of enforcement will always cause a fluctuation in the number of violations observed and cited. However, police management clearly expects either a certain number of tickets to be written by troopers during their time on certain patrol shifts or rewards those that hit certain numbers. If a superior sends a trooper out on an 8 hour traffic enforcement shift, what happens if the trooper comes back and says he wrote zero tickets? What about one or two tickets? Ten tickets? Clearly, the police have some idea of what constitutes a good shift, average shift and/or a “waste of time” shift where no summonses at all were issued. There’s no way Lawrence bothers with this unless there was some expectation of him to issue a certain number of tickets over certain periods of time.