Traffic ticket quotas are often perceived as non-existent in U.S. police departments, yet an unwritten policy pressures officers to issue a certain number of citations. While formal quotas may not be in place, performance reports can create expectations for officers to meet citation targets, leading to scrutiny from superiors. The focus on citation numbers may overshadow the broader responsibilities of officers in preventing crime and serving the community.

1. Do Traffic Ticket Quotas Exist?
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Often times, people on the receiving end of speeding tickets complain that
they were unfairly targeted by a police officer who was looking for an excuse
to fill his traffic ticket quota. Is this a valid complaint, or are traffic ticket quotas
simply a myth that speeders came up with to make themselves feel better
about their poor driving habits?
The truth is that for the majority of police departments within the United States,
traffic ticket quotas do not exist; at least not in the fashion that most people
assume. Many police agencies have a common problem that the majority of
their officers find it a chore to write traffic citations. That may come as a
surprise to many of you, but the majority of these officers believe that their
duty to serve and protect is goes beyond writing those tickets that seem to
annoy you so much. For this reason, there is an “unwritten” policy which says
that if you aren’t writing enough tickets as a police officer on a weekly or
monthly basis, then you must be slacking or simply not doing your job.
Since this has become a growing problem in several police agencies, some
patrol officers find themselves filling out documents detailing all of their
activities for the day. The document is more of a log that includes the exact
time spent, specific locations visited and what was done by the police officers
that day. Although you may not find this very interesting, what is surprising to
learn about these documents, is that on the back there are areas to fill in the
amount of traffic citations issued, along with criminal citations, parking
citations and how many felony and misdemeanor arrests were executed by
that officer.
While this isn’t going to be the deciding factor of how big of a quota the officer
will have every day, keep in mind that often times, if the number of citations
the officer writes on a monthly basis is found to be lacking, they will be
expecting a talk with their superiors about why they aren’t properly doing their
job. It’s quite unfortunate that these supervisors pay such close attention to
the amount of citations that are being issued, and instead ignoring the amount
of lives that these officers save along with the number of domestic disputes
and assaults that are solved and even prevented on a daily basis. So to
answer our initial question, yes, traffic quotas sometimes do exist, however
they are disguised under other names such as performance and daily activity
reports. The real question to ask though is whether or not officers are being
encouraged or forced to maintain a high quota of citations and hand out more
tickets than necessary.