Hacker News Reader

Comment by morninj | Hacker News Reader

There's no way that the trickle of revenue is greater than the cost of enforcement. Officer salary and benefits, equipment maintenance, and all the costs associated with the court system...

View on HN

The use of traffic tickets as supplemental revenue is a time-honored tradition with many real-world examples. Some places fund their entire police department this way.

I don't know why you'd think it couldn't be greater than the cost, either. It takes, what, five minutes to write a ticket, which might average $100? That's $1,200/hour of revenue. No way the officer costs that much, even including benefits and equipment. Most people just pay tickets, they don't contest them, so court costs will be small.

In LA, for example, most of the driving infractions are violations of the California vehicle code, not city-specific vehicle codes. And so it turns out that a very substantial portion of ticket revenues go to the state, not the city.

California even has a law preventing cities from creating these kinds of local vehicle code laws that could generate local revenue.

I imagine that jurisdictions which place a heavy emphasis on revenue from traffic enforcement are also careful to place a heavy emphasis on infractions which provide revenue to the local government.

It sounds like the law we are talking about here is very local.

In Los Angeles the policy is just to parking-ticket the hell out of drivers at every opportunity.

The 'unofficial' policy of parking enforcement here is to ticket everything you see, regardless of whether or not the car is actually in violation of something.

They know it's far cheaper for drivers to just pay the fines than it is to fight the tickets. Arguing a parking ticket can literally take several entire days. Forget just contesting them in writing, the written appeals are automatically denied every single time. I don't even think anyone reads them, there's probably just some flunky at a desk who opens them and immediately sends them back with a pre-printed denial letter.

Yes. And since those actually are city infractions, LA truly does rake in the cash on parking tickets.

Somebody should really fight the LA ticket system in bulk.

It's what I'm doing in Chicago, and it's actually not as much money as you'd think it is. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot and is about as predatory as it gets, but it's not in the billions, compared to many other things.

Of the parsable ones I have, the total since 2009 up until March of this year, there's been a total of $764,775,070 marked as "paid". Tickets marked with a bankruptcy flag has added up to 18,433,390.0.

Wanted to finish up some code to get better output, but I have to run.

I visited LA once, and parked for less than two hours. Managed to get a ticket even though a studied the sign for a few min to try to establish it was a legal parking. It was really hard to figure out if it was legal or not.

Of course I just paid it.

yeah. i've had the same problems in Santa Monica and LA.

i've heard about a couple of apps for this sort of thing, e.g. http://www.parksafela.com

In New York, the hack around this is to plead down small speeding tickets to stiff zero-point parking tickets "in the interest of justice". The town gets the cash, and the speeder dodges the insurance impact.

seems a tad corrupt. also seems totally awesome. new yorkers are just smarter than us. sigh.

To get to 12 tickets an hour, you need at least 12 offenders an hour which is probably the bottleneck the GP alluded to.

That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line. A more normal scenario where the officer has to cruise around, pull someone over, get out, talk to the person ("no no, I'm not passing through, my sick uncle lives over there"), write the ticket and get back in the patrol car, I'd guess closer to 15 minutes as a lower bound.

Also, doesn't Waze have a feature where you can warn other driver against this kind of thing? That would further reduce the ticket-rate.

$400/hour would still be plenty. Usually they go after speeders, which are really easy to catch, because everybody speeds. It's often an unwritten rule that you don't get ticketed unless you're going 10+ over the limit, but revenue-hungry jurisdictions don't need to honor that. I'm sure Waze cuts down on this, but they can hit a trouble/lucrative spot for a day or three, then move on.

Even with 15 minute per ticket, that's ~$400/hr. Assuming he spends two hours there, and gets an average of 8 tickets per day, that still accounts for almost $200,000 per year. That's a ridiculous amount. Of course, doesn't take into account individuals learning and adjusting their behaviour accordingly, instead of being repeat offenders on the same street.

> That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line.

Officers get exactly that when they set up shop in a place where they know there are going to be plenty of violators. Highway 66 inside of the DC beltway is HOV during rush hour. The police will just sit at the end of the on ramp and write tickets for everyone trying to cheat HOV or with expired tags or inspection. Makes for a great haul, especially because HOV tickets are $125 for the first offense, $250 for the second, $500 for the third, and $1000 for the fourth.

And court stuff is minimal for that one because there is absolutely zero room for discretion on the part of the judge if the violation is established. If it's shown that you did violate the HOV rules, then you must be fined the given amount, doesn't matter what your reasons were. If you got a ticket, it's pretty much a given that they can show that the violation occurred.

I kind of want my police force to do their controls in the most efficient manner, to catch the most violators with the least amount of manpower. (Of course supplemented with an element of surprise.)

No real reason to make a DUI checkpoint in the end of a cul-de-sac, is there?

Unless they're doing the wrong things (e.g. warrantless surveillance, civil asset forfeiture) in which case that efficiency starts to look quite terrifying.

I think you underestimate the average cost of a ticket. Our city sets the minimum ticket price close to the maximum price set by the state. It is hard to get away from less than a $250 ticket. The means of writing a ticket are automated. The second they type in your plate it looks up your record, which they cross check your ID. The cop verifies it and sees if you have any warrants or are committing any other crimes. It prints out on a handheld unit the officer carries. Most of the time you are in and out in less than 5 minutes. If you are not, it is very likely you are paying much higher fines.

In cases like cut throughs, or common speeding areas 3 officers can write many more than 12 tickets/hour. I see it quite frequently. 1 officer stands off to the side behind a tree and watches for infraction. Sees infraction and walks out in the road and points to the driver to pull over onto a side street into the line of people getting tickets from the other 2 officers. Really quite efficient.

I'm pretty sure that most states, if not all, have certain freeways where police could have a constant feed of speeders.

Don't think of it as a new standalone line of business; think of it as an "upsell" that your reps can incrementally sell, since you need them there to sell the occasional big ticket items.

Suburban PDs tend to be vastly overstaffed for the level of serious crime and bored most of the time. Mine spends the majority of its hours on mall shoplifters and dogs at the park.

The marginal cost of those items, for the police anyway, might be close to 0.

Those costs are going to be paid regardless of whether they write tickets for that or not. If a police officer is sitting around on an otherwise slow day, they might as well go write some tickets.

How do you know there's no way?

At the very least, it might be paying for itself....

the ticket revenue is greater than the marginal cost of enforcement. the cops are already out there. they just need to give them more reasons to write tickets.

economies of scale!

Many tickets are generated through automated camera systems.

Actually there is one way: civil asset forfeiture. Then it also pays for things your PD absolutely needs to do its job like margarita machines, etc.

Most states don't allow local PDs to keep forfeiture proceeds from state-law forfeitures; the federal government allowed local jurisdictions involved in federal-law forfeitures to keep a large portion (80%) of the assets, but the standards for that program were made more restrictive a few years back, and it was suspended entirely last December (notionally, at least, as a cost saving measure), so right now there's really no way for a local PD to raise funds by way of forfeiture.

Officers are paid by tax revenue, as far as I know. Any revenue they generate through tickets is still extra revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com