I usually get into more trouble than it's worth when I try to explain this, but here goes again.
On the matter of a town, county or state using speeding tickets to generate revenue:
Here's the way that works. When a town council, county legislature or state government is preparing its budget, it looks at the revenue that was generated "last year" from court imposed fines in their jurisdiction. They then must consider that as a revenue stream, just like license fees and tax revenue. Its real money that was generated. It is put into the budget for next year as a real source of revenue to run the jurisdiction They never tell cops, "hey guys, you gotta hand out 2-million dollars worth of tickets." It's expected that "on average" a certain percentage of people will get caught breaking the speeding laws.
Now, do cops have a quota they must meet on tickets? Well, you can answer that yourself. Let's say you have 20 police on your force and part of their job is to enforce traffic violations. 10 cops write an average of 50 tickets per month. (that's a little over 1 a day). 5 officers hand out 60+ per month. (more aggresive) 3 write 40 tickets per month. But, two of them only write 3 tickets a month.
You say to those two, "hey guys, what are you doing while on duty? The other guys are outproducing you by 300%"
Now, if you tell them to start doing their job like everybody else have you established a quota.
If you own a widget factory and everybody makes 60 widgets except for two guys who make only 2, they are out the door, right?
Let's say for a moment that there is a quota. What that would really mean is that the police are told to catch as many law breakers as possible. In a ticket quota system, they would never be told to give tickets to people who are "NOT SPEEDING." Isn't that want we want, for them to catch law breakers.
One final question.....................................If a speed limit is 45 miles per hour and somebody is driving 55 miles per hour in that zone and a police officer sees them, what should that officer do:
1. pretend he didn't see them
2. give them a ticket
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