Ticket quotas? Let cities decide
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ouse Bill 264 could be like a greased pig at the county fair: It'll shoot through the legislative process before anyone can get their hands around it long enough to stop its progress. It's already passed the House on a 39-31 vote.
Sponsored for the second year in a row by Rep. Neil Hansen, D-Ogden, the bill would prohibit the state, counties and municipalities from instituting traffic-ticket-writing quotas on police officers. Hansen, in a Dec. 6 guest commentary in the Standard-Examiner, said he was re-introducing the bill at the behest of his Ogden constituents who do not favor the city's use of ticket-writing in performance evaluations for local peace officers. As Hansen explained the legislation, it "prohibits a law enforcement agency from requiring its officers to issue a specific number of citations, complaints or warning notices within any specified time period."
At first blush, this may seem a reasonable approach. Nobody likes to get a traffic ticket; the fines are expensive, and they can drive up the cost of your insurance. The thought that you may not have been cited but for an officer's requirement to write a certain number of tickets could be upsetting.
But we heard another point of view late last year from Roy Police Chief Greg Whinham that seemed more persuasive. In a Nov. 30 guest commentary in this newspaper, Whinham explained unashamedly that Roy has a ticket quota in place for its officers. There are three overriding reasons for Roy's policy, Whinham wrote:
* "The No. 1 complaint I receive is that every neighborhood and street has drivers driving too fast, and residents ask that we do something about it."
* "A professional traffic enforcement presence is a deterrent, and will increase safety on our roads and in our neighborhoods."
* "Traffic enforcement is a productive way to locate criminals. Many drivers on our roads are driving without insurance, and/or they are on revocation and they have warrants for their arrest for failing to appear in the courts for other criminal activities."
Furthermore, Whinham was blunt in his assessment of how police officers, generally speaking, don't enjoy traffic enforcement: "... it is not fun to do." Still, he wrote, "we have decided that it must be done in a professional manner and with equity among all officers."
So, a panel of Roy police officers studied the issue and settled on the following "quota": Every officer is required to stop 350 observed traffic violators each year and write 250 citations during that same year. As Whinham explained, "This means that an officer working 2,080 hours of regular assigned patrol a year would need to make a traffic stop every five and a half hours they work, and write a citation every eight hours."
We prefer to drive on safe roads. We like the idea that if people are breaking the traffic laws they'll be ticketed -- since that's the only way most drivers will improve their behavior behind the wheel. If, as Whinham explains, police generally don't enjoy traffic patrol and would be more likely to let infractions slide rather than writing tickets, the policy of instituting quotas sounds like a benefit for traffic safety.
We hope state senators take heed of Whinham's arguments, and those of other police chiefs in their own cities, before exercising state control over local law enforcement jurisdictions. This is a matter to be decided, as needed, on a city-to-city basis.
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