The auditor for the West Virginia state legislature concluded that the state police use ticket quotas.

The West Virginia Legislative Auditor announced yesterday that a performance review of the West Virginia State Police found significant evidence that the agency imposes traffic ticket quotas to boost the number of citations issued. Nearly a third of all troopers involved in patrol duties statewide told the auditors that troopers are punished if they failed to generate a specified number of citations each month. In Troop 4, one of the six surveyed, 55 percent of the law enforcement officers admitted that they were under a ticket quota. The auditor confirmed this admission with documents, including a September 12, 2005 memo from Troop 4 commanders that ordered supervisors to impose a quota.

“Effective immediately anyone who does not have 100 min. contacts in the highlighted areas [should be given an] EPA-2 [performance appraisal] at the end of the month, or before if you see they aren’t producing,” the handwritten memo stated.

The emphasis on contacts in effect directed patrols away from rural areas and onto the highest volume roads to issue as many speeding tickets as possible.

“Here is the deal on our activity; a murder investigation is worth one point, so is one citation, so if they want numbers up, they tell you to go out and write citations,” a trooper told the state auditors. “It all looks good on the outside. My (goal) a month is fifty contacts. Other troops are requiring 100 contacts.”

This concern was supported by statistics that showed the number of investigations and arrests for misdemeanors and felonies remained relatively static from 2003 to 2006. Over the same period, however, traffic citations grew sharply year after year (page 25). Despite the increase in ticketing, the rate of fatal road accidents did not change significantly.

Read the rest of this entry »