Traffic law illustrates the problems with having laws that don’t really mean what they say.
There was an interesting long piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 24 about ticket quotas in Virginia traffic enforcement. It highlights some of the oddities in traffic enforcement that we don’t often think about.
The Times-Dispatch obtained an email sent to Virginia State Police for a certain area of the state that said troopers should write a minimum of five tickets per day, or “one every two hours.” They quote directly from the email:
It appears . . . that many of you are not aware that we have returned to normal enforcement activity. 4, 5 or 10 tickets for a week of work is unacceptable. . . . There is no reason you should not be writing 5 tickets minimum on a typical day (that’s one every two hours). If you are on free patrol, you should be writing more if you want to remain on free patrol. I realize that some weeks court, crashes, weather, etc. factor in but they do not justify the pitiful enforcement numbers I am seeing. Let me be clear that the evals you got for the last performance cycle took into account the reduced enforcement periods and that those same numbers will not result in similar evaluations for this cycle.
This seems really strange at first glance. The relevant criterion for a trooper to write a ticket should be, “Is this driver breaking the law?” not, “How many other tickets have I written today?” They should just pull over people who are breaking the law!
The problem is that the proper criterion, “Is this driver breaking the law?” is unworkable because driving like a normal person is basically illegal and we all break the law every time we drive.
Check out some examples from Virginia. The law says that vehicles “proceeding at less than the normal speed of traffic” must be driven “in the lane nearest the right edge or right curb of the highway.” Failure to do so carries a $100 fine. That means the guy driving five miles per hour below the speed limit in the left lane on the highway is breaking the law, and a police officer can pull him over and write a ticket.
You don’t have to have driven very long to know that he never gets pulled over. People drive slow in the left lane all the time. In fact, the car driving slow in the left lane may be the only car on the road not exceeding the speed limit. We all generally understand that driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit is acceptable, but that’s not what the law says. A police officer could legally pull you over and write a ticket for going one mile per hour over the speed limit.
Have you ever done a rolling stop when making a right on red when there’s clearly no traffic coming? The law says you must come to a full stop, so you could be pulled over for that.
Have you ever made a U-turn in a developed area that wasn’t at an intersection? That’s against the law, too.
We break traffic laws pretty regularly because we know the risks are pretty small, and we know that the police do not enforce them as they are written. That’s all fine — nobody is arguing for actually pulling over everyone who goes one mile per hour over the speed limit.
The problem is that when everyone is breaking the law, police still have to decide whom they are going to pull over. They can only pull over one driver at a time, and if the criterion, “Is this driver breaking the law?” doesn’t help to make that decision, some other criteria will have to be used instead.
Enter quotas. The Times-Dispatch questioned the Virginia State Police about whether they use quotas, and they said they don’t, but they sorta-kinda do. From the story:
When confronted with an email obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch in which a first sergeant scolded troopers for writing too few tickets and told troopers they should write at least five a day, a spokeswoman for the department acknowledged that the department’s various offices around the state set a target number of tickets to write, calling them “average benchmarks” rather than quotas.
“The reason we don’t have quotas is not because quotas are inherently a bad thing, but because they would not work for VSP,” said spokeswoman Corinne Geller. “Each VSP Area Office has different roles and responsibilities in their community. In addition, what a trooper does each day varies greatly. It would be nearly impossible to set a ticket quota even if we wanted to.”
Got that? They don’t have quotas, but they do have benchmarks, and quotas aren’t a bad thing, so if they did have them, it wouldn’t be bad, but they definitely don’t have them; in fact, it would be nearly impossible to have them, if they even wanted to, which they definitely don’t.
The story went on to say:
Geller denied the email established “a ‘ticket quota’ requirement/minimum for the troopers. It is simply the first sergeant stating his enforcement expectations now that COVID restrictions are lifting and with the onset of spring break and summer travel.” . . . Each area office sets its own benchmark based on “performance averages to evaluate how troopers are performing in relation to other troopers in that same area,” Geller said. “This process has been in place at VSP for decades.”
Whether you call them “quotas” or not, it seems pretty clear that Virginia State Police are expected to write a certain number of tickets over a certain span of time.
The state government has another reason to do this too, which is revenue. There are millions of drivers committing infractions that correspond with fines every single day. Pulling over more of them brings in more revenue for the state. (The revenue aspect is much more of a factor in local governments; fines and forfeitures account for more than half of general revenues in some localities.) Law enforcement really shouldn’t be about bringing in revenue, but it’s something police are forced to consider.
So if you’re a Virginia State trooper, and you know you have to pull over a certain number of cars per day, you have to decide somehow. Everyone’s breaking the law, but just about everyone is also being relatively safe. Maybe you decide to only pull over drivers doing something really outrageous, like going 100 miles per hour or totally ignoring a stop sign. But not that many people do those things, and you might not be able to write five tickets per day if that’s the standard.
Instead, you have to use other criteria that aren’t related to safety or lawbreaking at all. Things like the color or make or model of the car, whether the car has out-of-state license plates, and in some cases, unfortunately, characteristics of the driver, such as race or gender. It’s also why speeding is the primary traffic infraction we think of, even though other infractions are dangerous, too. Speeding isn’t really a judgment call and is easy to spot and prove with a radar gun, so it’s the easiest way to write a lot of tickets that will be slam dunks in court.
The Times-Dispatch story says that the union representing the Virginia State Police wants the Virginia General Assembly to pass a law banning ticket quotas. The reason the union gave:
“The quota system is definitely a good ol’ boy, outdated, ineffective form of policing,” said Sean McGowan, executive director of the Virginia PBA. “It forces negative interactions with the public. Officers know when it’s appropriate to give a ticket and when to give a warning, but put a quota over his head, that discretion goes out the door — he’s more likely to write a ticket than give a warning.”
Since unions exist primarily to protect their members’ right to be lazy, and eliminating quotas would mean less work for state troopers, the stated reason is probably not the actual reason for the union’s position. But he’s correct nonetheless. Quotas create bad incentives for police, and the fewer negative interactions we have with police, the better.
Traffic law illustrates the problems with having laws that don’t really mean what they say. Enforcing such laws will always be based on arbitrary criteria and law enforcement will have lots of discretion — discretion that they won’t always use wisely, especially when it generates revenue for the government.