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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Oldmanchubs on 2025-06-06 13:18:55+00:00.
Years ago I worked for a suburban police department, fairly small but average size for my state. Many people suspect that these smaller towns generate revenue off tickets/citations and that is generally true. My boss, the chief, was in his heyday a “go getter”..loved writing tickets and therefore expected us to follow suit. I was a patrol supervisor-a sergeant-so I was expected to set the standard for the others to follow.
One month I’d been called in and counseled about my low “stats”..in other words, I wasn’t writing enough tickets. Legally, they cannot tell a police officer to write tickets and quotas are illegal but..your overall “contacts”, which includes citations, written warnings, and arrests, can be used as a metric to judge performance. Mine were low..typically 20ish tickets and warnings in an agency where most were writing 70-150 tickets a month. I didn’t sign up to be a revenue generator though and it didn’t sit well with me to have to make someone decide between paying a stupid ticket for a broken headlight or feeding their family.
Anyway, I was told that I needed to improve my contacts. Yes sir was my response, knowing that he meant write more tickets but couldn’t tell me to write more tickets. So..my contacts improved. Every single person I stopped that month, which if memory serves was around 40, got a written warning. No tickets. No revenue generated.
The following month after our stats had been compiled-and posted on the wall of shame for all to see-I was called back into his office. You wrote 40 warnings last month and no tickets, he said. Yes sir, that sounds about right, I replied. And none of those deserved a ticket? Well, I used officer discretion, and in my opinion, none of them did. He was angry by this point and told me he knew the game I was playing. I’m not playing a game, I told him. You said my contacts needed to improve, so are they or are they not improved over the previous month? Oh yeah, they improved alright you smartass, he said..
That was the last time I was hounded about stupid stats or contacts.