Ticket quotas are supposedly illegal
This stains people.
We (I wasn't driving but was in the car with my teenager) recently got caught in a speed trap. A street near our neighborhood, non residential, in fact, non anything except a golf course on one side and woods on the other, has always been 35 mph, then it would change to 25 mph at a certain point. Well, they changed the entire street to 25 mph, and "discreetly" placed the new mph sign.
So around the bend, where you would normally slow to the 25 mph area are 6 police cars, pulling folks over one right after another, because most of the cars, our included were above the 6 mph allowed before they write a ticket.
I was a little miffed that with crime in the city, they'd target cars on a 25 mph non-residential street, and charge them for going 35 mph. Good lesson for my teenager, I guess, that speed traps do exist, so pay extra close attention to all speed signs in case they've just changed the speed limit on a whim.
The ticket was around a hundred bucks and he also had to take a class online to remove points from driver's license etc.
It does not surprise me at all that police men are rewarded for tickets, that's their "bread and butter," unfortunately.
P.S. in the article, the name of the sporting goods stores that they received gift certificates to seems appropriate
B@STARDS!
I find this rather interesting. When they were widening I-40 through Gboro, the cops would sit on the side of the road with a radar. They would only nab people doing 15 mph over the limit in the construction zone. They said they barely had time to set up before they would catch someone. The average speed over was 25 mph over the speed limit. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
The world is full of idiots.
Some local police departments simply look at this kind of thing as a revenue hunt...lots of them couldn't pay officer salaries without speed traps.
If it shouldn't be against the law--and I believe there are illegal activities that shouldn't be--then the law should be changed, not the LEO.
Here's a good one about a cop who was threatened with being fired if he didn't write enought tickets:
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/12/1216.asp
Oh, wait a minute, that pesky word 'individual' ... aaah, I answered my own question ...
Read about your favorite speed trap here:
http://www.speedtrap.org/index.html
We have a mutual friend that said she was doing 80 something on I-81 in VA.
The speed limit was 60mph.....
You can guess the end of the $$$$ story.
I have long suspected that cops had quotas to meet for writing tickets...