Ticket quota


Ticket quotas are commonly defined as any establishment of a predetermined or specified number of traffic citations an officer must issue in a specified time. Some police departments may set "productivity goals" but deny specific quotas. In many places, such as California, Texas, and Florida, traffic ticket quotas are specifically prohibited by law or illegal.

United States

One common way of preventing traffic ticket quotas includes statutorily regulating the distribution of ticket fines, to prevent fine revenue generated by tickets from going directly back to the law enforcement agency budget which issued the tickets; thus eliminating any direct monetary incentive between issuing tickets and the fine paid. For example, Florida law distributes traffic ticket fine monies by small percentages or amounts to several separate funds preventing it from going back to the agency which issued the ticket. Some of these different funds include the overall governmental entities' general revenue fund, Child Welfare Training Trust Fund, Juvenile Justice Training Trust Fund, Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Trust Fund, Indigent Criminal Defense Trust Fund, Emergency Medical Services Trust Fund, Law Enforcement Radio System Trust Fund, Vocational Rehabilitation of the Department of Education, Division of Blind Services, Epilepsy Services Trust Fund, and Nongame Wildlife Trust Fund.
Al O'Leary, a spokesman for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association in Brooklyn, New York says: "Such quotas put the cops under pressure to write summonses when the violations don't exist... It takes discretion away from the police officer."

Netherlands

The national quota system for issuing tickets was previously scrapped from police performance contracts, but individual forces may still impose their own quota system. In 2009 Guusje ter Horst told Members of Parliament the justice ministry had agreed that the police should raise €831m through fines.