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Police resent it when they are exploited by politicians who are too cowardly to raise taxes and instead vote in draconian fines for speeding and other offenses to fill the state’s coffers. It was only a few years ago that the Connecticut State Police picketed the Connecticut State House with placards that read, “If you need more taxes, don’t send us out to collect them.”
Now in Massachusetts, officials from the Mass.State Police union are calling for an immediate end to a controversial new policy they say pressures troopers into handing out traffic tickets instead of warnings.
Union lawyer David Wagner called the policy an “artificial quota” and has fired off a letter to department officials arguing that it violates the troopers’ contract.
“The more discretion officers have, the better they can perform their service,” Wagner told reporters from the Boston Herald. The policy, he says, “ . . . exposes the public to a false facade, and it’s really counter-productive.”
Under the policy, troopers are credited with 1.5 hours on their daily time sheet for writing a ticket, one hour for a written warning and a half-hour for a verbal warning. The forms, which are used to show how troopers spend their day, previously allotted the same amount of time to tickets and warnings.
Union officials say the policy discourages troopers from writing warnings because doing so could make their time sheets come up short, giving the appearance they didn’t put in a full day. The program, in place in barracks in Western Massachusetts and the South Shore regions of the state, could also encourage troopers to write more tickets to justify overtime.
In a statement, department officials said the system is designed to make troopers accountable for their time and denied the system encourages giving tickets.
“Officers receive no incentive or monetary compensation for issuing citations,” the statement reads. “The Massachusetts State Police receives no revenue for any citations issued within the Commonwealth and at no time have officers been directed to increase the number of citations issued to members of the public.”
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