Quotas (Tickets, Arrests)

Law enforcement quotas for the issuance of traffic tickets (citations) are illegal. According to many police union representatives, however, they do exist in practice under other names like “performance expectations,” “performance standards,” “performance criteria,” “quantitative expectations,” “statistical targets,” and “traffic goals.” According to police ethics, quotas requiring a certain number of tickets over a certain time period would be unethical, because this could be seen as coercing law enforcement officers to issue tickets when they might not otherwise do so in order to avoid administrative reprisal or a negative work evaluation. State laws might also specify that quotas for traffic stops and traffic warnings are illegal. For instance, at least 12 states have passed laws to prohibit any law enforcement agency from requiring traffic officers to meet quotas for numbers of traffic stops or arrests. In general, rank and file police usually support such legislation, as do agencies. In addition, there is a public perception that government bureaucrats responsible for city or state budgets will require quotas “to fill city coffers” or to make up for governmental budgetary shortfalls. In such cases, issuing traffic tickets to improve traffic flow and public safety would be displaced by the goal of raising funds. Importantly, the use of quotas, if set too high, could create the perception that law enforcement was not acting in the public interest and would negatively affect public cooperation with the police. Nevertheless, it remains [Page 393]common practice to include as a part of some field officer's performance evaluation a requirement that a certain number of traffic tickets are written in a month or per day. In some instances, federal transportation funds that are awarded to the states are based, in part, on a state's enforcement of traffic regulations as demonstrated by the number of tickets its enforcement agencies have meted out.

Traffic ticket quotas or “performance expectations” may also be the result of the average performance of an officer's peers. When such is the case, an officer might not be informed of how many traffic tickets he or she is expected to write over a certain time period. However, the officer's supervisor, who is aware of the average peer performance, may find an officer who falls below the average in ticket production to be underperforming, or to be overperforming if the officer writes more tickets than the peer average. Depending on the perceived traffic needs in a jurisdiction, an officer's performance expectations may include a certain number of specific types of traffic tickets—for example, 60 speeding tickets, 10 driving under the influence tickets, and 50 tickets of commercial vehicles in a month. Although traffic quotas are generally considered to be illegal, in some jurisdictions, a certain number of tickets for traffic infractions may be used. In some jurisdictions, law enforcement officers may be expected to demonstrate that they have had a certain number of public contacts when it comes to traffic enforcement of speeding, reckless driving, driving under the influence of alcohol, seatbelt violations, and commercial vehicle violations in order to analyze problems; gauge agency effectiveness; or satisfy a municipal, state, or federal reporting requirement.

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