General
Do quotas exist? Yes. Are they bad? Not necessarily. Friday, September 17th, 2010
The New York Times recently reported a story about a clandestine recording made at a Brooklyn, NY police station which, the story set forth, finally put to rest any questions about the existence of traffic ticket quotas.
Great story other than the fact that we really didn’t have any questions about this. Quotas, or whatever you want to call them, do exist. The recording only reinforced what we already knew.
As a traffic attorney, I get questions/comments about ticket quotas all the time. Mostly “do they exist” questions and “he only gave me the ticket because it was the end of the month, he was filling his quota” type comments. Here are some thoughts:
There’s no specific quota or number that an officer must reach. However, if an officer is sent out to do traffic enforcement and comes back with zero tickets issued, is his supervisor satisfied with the job? What about one ticket? Five tickets? Bottom line is there’s some “performance” level which brings either a “bad job”, “acceptable job” or “great job” response from a supervising officer. Consider somewhere between “acceptable” and “great” to be the so called “quota”.
Officers have been candid with me in the past about the existence of some expected performance level. I’ve never heard an officer mention anything about an end of the month rush. I do not believe extra tickets are issued just because it was the end of the month.
And what if extra tickets were issued because it was the end of the month or because a supervisor went on a rampage about issuing more tickets? There really is no inherent problem with this. This would only be a problem if, for example, an officer was expected to write 10 tickets during a period where only 7 violations were committed and he therefore wrote three bogus summonses to satisfy his boss. In NYC, there are thousands of violations of varying severity committed every hour. A “quota” seems more an expectation that an officer will actually pay attention, expend some energy and write some tickets when he sees violations moreso than a call to write X number of tickets whether you observe a violation or not.
Officers issuing more tickets in response to violations they observe because they’ve been asked to work harder is not a story. The real “quota” story will be when an officer admits to making up violations and issuing bad tickets because he was “forced” to out of fear for his job. Just consider that in a typical day at least 10% of the drivers in an urban area likely commit at least a single violation, whether it’s a fail to signal or not wearing a seatbelt or even driving a few mph over the limit. Now consider that way fewer than 10% of all the drivers on a road in a given day will get issued a ticket and it’s pretty easy to see that there are plenty of legitimate violations to go around.
Submitted by Scott Feifer
Facebook and traffic tickets Friday, August 13th, 2010
Facebook was in the news twice recently in connection with traffic ticket stories.
First, a story about issuing tickets with the help of Facebook…
Traffic officers in in New Delhi, India have started issuing traffic tickets based on images uploaded to Facebook by motorists who claim to have witnessed certain violations. There are so many posts that police actually have two full time staff members looking through them for legitimate traffic violations. The justification for this enforcement method is that, with only 5,000 traffic officers patrolling a city with 6.5 million registered vehicles, too many violations go unpunished and motorists drive with little fear of receiving a traffic ticket. With the help of pictures where a license plate was visible, police have been able to track down and issue almost 700 tickets since mid May and, in theory, encourage many more to drive safely out of fear for being the next violator photographed.
Now a story about tickets getting dismissed with the help of Facebook…
A Houston, Texas woman recently made a public Facebook plea for help with a few Houston traffic tickets she had been issued. An investigator from the Houston Fire Department responded that she knew the police officer and within a few hours there was a public posting that the tickets had been ripped up. The woman who received the tickets may have had a story that would ultimately have helped in court–apparently her father was a firefighter who recently died and she was attending to his funeral arrangements at the time the tickets were issued. Nevertheless, the use of such a public forum to conduct this type of business has resulted in further investigation of the parties involved.
Social Media really is infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives.
Submitted by NY traffic lawyer Scott Feifer
Driving while Demented-new guidelines Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
The American Academy of Neurology has issued a new guideline to help determine when people with Alzheimer’s disease or another type of dementia should stop driving. The guideline is published in the April 12, 2010, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
People with dementia can safely drive for some time, but almost all will eventually have to give up driving. It’s not safe for the driver or for others on the road.
The guideline recommends doctors use the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale to identify people with dementia at an increased risk of unsafe driving. The CDR provides a tool for clinicians to integrate information from caregivers and from direct examination of the patient to develop a comprehensive view of the dementia severity.
If you are a caregiver for someone with dementia, trust your evaluation.
The guidelines found that caregivers who rate a patient’s driving as “marginal” or “unsafe” were often proven correct when the patient took an on-road driving test. On the other hand, patients who deemed their own driving as “safe” were not necessarily accurate in their own assessments.
