Do ticket quotas exist? [POLL/AUDIO]

Interesting conversation I had last night about ticket quotas. According to some callers, they exist – others claim they don’t.

Apparently they must - or else Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon would not have proposed new legislation banning them.

According to a report filed online by our own Kevin McArdle:

O’Scanlon said, “The existing law which is supposed to ban quotas — and it does ban specific numeric quotas — leaves a loophole where a police management entity can say to their officer, ‘We’re going to compare you to other officers,’” “They take an officer who is an overzealous ticket writer and compare everyone else to him or her, and if you’re not writing that many tickets, you’ve got a discipline issue and that is a backdoor quota and it’s ridiculous.”

The assemblyman called ticket quotas a “dirty little secret” that turns officers into “revenue generating machines.” He said it’s unfortunate that he had to draft a bill to completely stop law enforcement agencies from engaging in this practice.

O’Scanlon said, “They’re writing tickets simply because they feel they need the numbers,” “That shouldn’t be happening. If my bill becomes law you will have some local officials who will be upset because it will hurt them in their efforts to turn their police into a revenue generating agency.”

However on the show last night, a caller named Peter from Linden – a councilman and chairman of the budget committee refuted the claim of ticket quotas.

You can hear the audio of our conversation here:

The caller after Peter pointed out that Linden is a city with a number of intersections that have red light cameras. All one has to do is travel down 1&9 and chances are you’ll get bagged by one.

Exactly the program that Assemblyman O’Scanlon has been trying to get rid of.

So if Linden doesn’t have ticket quotas, as Peter points out, they make up for it in red light camera violations.

Fact is, the Assemblyman wouldn’t be proposing this legislation if there weren’t some kind of ticket quota in place. Despite the councilman's claim to the contrary - who I thank for taking the time to call the show!

Do you believe ticket quotas exist? Check out the audio and take the poll.