Police Ticketing Quotas

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Overview: Police officials have a crazy amount to discretion, they also have many police department rules to follow that can be detrimental to society, such as police ticket quotas for the purpose of making money, speed traps, and trying to maintain an ethical appearance in society. We expect police officials to abide by the law, we expect them to ticket solely when needed, and we expect police to do their job, and not look for a way to make money. But in our society, many police are corrupt, and are looking for a way to be on top. Ticketing quotas, speed trap cities, and if these practices are ethical are all reasons why police agencies are unethical and need to come up with viable solutions to turn back the clocks to police officers being …show more content…
These officers then get rewarded for meeting these quotas. (Arthur G. Sharp) Essentially officers are given an incentive to pull every person over and issuing them a ticket instead of letting certain things pass. In some states police ticketing quotas have been very detrimental and have hurt the reputation of some agencies. In New York, the NYPD, deputy Inspector Norman H. Anderson, led his police officers to write 1294 parking tickets in a single day (Brownstein). Due to so many tickets being issued, this story became known through the New York times, where the Police commissioner came out and said “quotas do not solve problems.” However, the NYPD did not stop their quota regulations. During the Knapp commission, quotas were used while arresting people with or using narcotics. The Knapp commission even created a slang dictionary to use when understanding police testimony. To which they found many officers using the word "flake," defined as "[t]he planting of evidence on a person who is arrested, either to meet an arrest quota or to give leverage to shake down the arrested person.(Brownstein)" Although, the agency did not admit they had quotas, the definitions clearly pointed that they did. The findings of the Knapp commission were that the NYPD needed to eliminate arrest and ticketing quotas if they were to end the corruption. New York Police Departments turned to less formal quotas systems. If the police department supervisor never clearly stated that an officer needs to preform a specific amount of activity, then no law has been broken (Brownstein). So they made the quotas system more informal. Quotas can seriously hurt society, the point of a quota system is to catch everyone who is breaking the law, but it isn’t always looking out for the people

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