For The Love Of Port

This appeared in my local Sammamish on-line news feed today:

A: The answer is no. This is our job and it’s no different than any other – WSP officers work for a day’s pay. We don’t always write tickets and we give lots of verbal warnings. If an officer does give a verbal warning, it is documented. Every officer has discretion.

Not everyone is going to get a ticket. Our goal is to educate the public and sometimes our presence is enough to change someone’s behavior.

All of our data is tracked, with audio and visual recording. Every stop we make, we track in a document. We record the time, location, offense and whatever the outcome is.

My understanding is that while no police departments have quotas, they almost universally use the number of tickets written as one metric of job performance.

(What??? How is that different from a quota? How does each officer think at the end of the month knowing that he or she will be "graded as to job performance" based at least partially on number of tickets written? No one gets fired for writing 99 instead of 100 tickets, but the feeling of their superiors is that if they didn't write some number of tickets over a long period, they must be doing something else while on traffic duty.)

Let me put some facts out there regarding this.

First, I have no doubt that some small po-dunk police department somewhere has a quota. This is, thankfully, VERY rare. And illegal mind you.

Now that that is out of the way...Departments do have expectations depending on what your assignment is. Let me clarify, an expectation is different than a quote, so don't confuse the terms. If you have an officer dedicated to traffic enforcement who's working a 10 hour shift there is an expectation that he will be productive during that time. If he is only writing 2 tickets in a 10 hour period and his co-workers are writing 10 tickets there is a problem. That is taking into account the officer wasn't busy with some other detail which prevented him from working traffic enforcement. If that officer regularly isn't doing his job then yes that could be, and probably will be, reflected on his evalutaion as it should be. As he's being paid a decent wage to do his job, a job all people expect him to do for that pay.

In California the Office of Traffic Safety says that a traffic officer, working a 10 hour shift, who's dedicated soley to traffic enforcement on a motorcycle should be able to write between 8-10 tickets a day on average. That expectation goes down a bit for someone in a car who's dedicated to traffic enforcement dutues, as it's harder to work traffic from a car.

Of course that expectation can go down a lot if the officer gets redirected to other functions, such as helping in Patrol, handling a traffic collision, or other duties which prevent him from writing tickets. That is why, like all businesses, there is a daily log of what an officer has done to make sure they are doing the job they are paid to do.

Interesting fact checking. Thanks Andy!