Free Republic

High court in Mississippi says state trooper who issued 25 bogus tickets should never have been reinstated with full back pay. A Mississippi Highway Patrol officer who issued bogus traffic citations to meet his ticket quota was fired on Friday by the state supreme court. All nine justices agreed that the department was right to terminate Sammy William Ray and that the state Court of Appeals was wrong to intervene to give him his job back, with full back pay. Ray was a six-year veteran trooper in 2009 when a routine audit revealed that he had been responsible for an...

In Washington, D.C., where issuing traffic citations is a $179 million-a-year business, drivers get speeding tickets for violations they donÂ’t commit and for vehicles theyÂ’ve never owned. Those are among the findings in a 115-page audit of the three city agencies that issued nearly 2.5 million parking and traffic tickets in fiscal 2013, according to a withering report issued Monday by the D.C. inspector general. The report portrays the District as the Wild West of traffic enforcement when compared with neighboring jurisdictions and the states, with a shortage of regulations, a legion of ticket writers often confused about the rules,...

LOS ANGELES — In a city of seemingly endless highways — with its daily parade of car accidents, frustrating traffic jams and aggressive drivers — the Los Angeles Police Department these days is training its sights on a different road menace: jaywalkers. It is not quite “Dragnet,” but the Police Department in recent weeks has issued dozens of tickets to workers, shoppers and tourists for illegally crossing the street in downtown Los Angeles. And the crackdown is raising questions about whether the authorities are taking sides with the long-dominant automobile here at the very time when a pedestrian culture is...

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday agreed to pay nearly $6 million to a group of police officers who accused their superiors of imposing a secret traffic ticket quota system on the Westside. The settlement, approved unanimously, brings to more than $10 million the amount of taxpayer money spent on payouts and legal fees from the ticket quota cases. But that number could grow because one more officer's case is still pending. The ticket controversy has been a black eye for the Los Angeles Police Department. Ticket quotas are against state law. After the officers’ allegations were made public,...

BERKELEY, CA -- A truck driver was beaten within an inch of his life by California Highway Patrol for not signing a traffic ticket that he could not read. The driver, who broke no laws, was beaten so badly that he woke up in a trauma hospital. Olegs Kozacenko, a local resident originally from Russia, was pulled over and cited by police for allegedly driving too many hours in one day. Kozacenko refused to sign the ticket because he had not or could not read it. CHP Officers didn't take kindly to the driver's refusal to sign. Two officers, one...

The federal government recommends that yellow lights at intersections last for at least three seconds before turning red. So why are so many yellows being timed at 2.5 seconds? And why are those fleeting yellows often located at intersections where red-light cameras are installed? The mandarins tell us that red-light cameras are for our own safety, and that we need more of them than the 150 already in New York City. “While we wait,” city transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said last month, “New Yorkers are dying on our streets.” So why increase the mayhem by cutting the duration of the...

Standards aren’t about generating revenue. Motorcycle officers in Colorado Springs should each be writing a minimum of 11 tickets a day, and their counterparts in patrol cars should issue at least one... But these aren't quotas, Police Chief Richard Myers said. During an impromptu media briefing Friday, Myers described them as guidelines that help supervisors keep track of their officers' job performance ... Ticket quotas - feared and despised by drivers everywhere - demand that officers meet goals or face mandatory discipline, Myers told reporters. That's not the case here, he said. "Police officers are paid for by taxpayers, and...