From Reason.com:

Tracy Oppenheimer | July 24, 2013

Auburn, Alabama is home to sprawling plains, Auburn University, and a troubling police force. After the arrival of a new police chief in 2010, the department entered an era of ticket quotas and worse.

“When I first heard about the quotas I was appalled,” says former Auburn police officer Justin Hanners, who claims he and other cops were given directives to hassle, ticket, or arrest specific numbers of residents per shift. “I got into law enforcement to serve and protect, not be a bully.”

Hanners blew the whistle on the department’s tactics and was eventually fired for refusing to comply and keep quiet. He says that each officer was required to make 100 contacts each month, which included tickets, arrests, field interviews, and warnings. This equates to 72,000 contacts a year in a 50,000 person town. His claims are backed up by audio recordings of his superiors he made. The Auburn police department declined requests to be interviewed for this story.

“There are not that many speeders, there are not that many people running red lights to get those numbers, so what [the police] do is they lower their standards,” says Hanners. That led to the department encouraging officers to arrest people that Hanners “didn’t feel like had broken the law.”

It’s no secret that I’m a cop, still employed at my advanced and decrepit age.  In my moribund decline I’ve discovered that I lean more Libertarian in my views, along with an exuberant bushel and peck of Conservatism.

That said, I respect privacy and I respect common, decent behavior and expect that kind of behavior to be exhibited, by cops, to the public in general.  As a supervisor, I expect my troops to mirror this behavior.

A quota for traffic and a quota for arrests grates against the already-chafed side of my Libertarian bent.  Producing just to produce — and producing it poorly — provides the public just another way to denigrate the overall authority, cogency and trustworthiness of law enforcement.

In this same vein I also mightily dislike red light cameras or other means of automatic, mechanical ticketing, eliminating the human aspect.  I believe these devices diminish the respect for law enforcement and remove human interaction from the loop.

Manufacturers of these systems also, had you not known, get a kickdown percentage of the cut from each ticket issued.

Now, some cities are actually removing their red light cameras.  The City of San Diego pulled its red light cameras “as city officials cited public hostility and no measurable decline in accidents.

Mayor Bob Filner, at a Friday press conference, carried away a photo-enforcement sign from North Harbor Drive and West Grape Street, near San Diego International Airport, reports U-T San Diego.

Nearly 20,000 motorists a year received $490 tickets in a program that “can only be justified if there are demonstrable facts that prove that they raise the safety awareness and decrease accidents in our city,” Filner said. “The data, in fact, does not really prove it.”

Real cops know what’s right and wrong.  Ginning up arrests and tickets for stats is meaningless and serves to minimize respect for law enforcement in general.

BZ