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Comment by sareon | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak about all police but I've asked this question to my father who works with the RCMP. He has been in charge of traffic sections for years. They don't have a quota, not in the usual sense but they do keep track of data on tickets, this includes how many tickets each member is giving out. They don't require them to give out X tickets per month but what they do look for is members who are not giving out around the same amount of tickets as their peers. This usually indicates they are not patroling and doing their job.

Another thing they can look at with this data is where they are giving out tickets. If they notice one officer has all his tickets in one location which is known for high accident rates then they know that person is "fishing" rather than actually doing active patroling.

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Isn't giving out tickets in a high accident area is exactly what should happen? Tickets in a low accident area must surely be less likely to change accident rates?

This is why the Roomba cleans the edges of the room. It's the dirty part.

This is an anecdote from me, but that's all most people in this thread have, so... One day I was sitting in an empty parking lot with my girlfriend eating pizza on the tailgate and watching traffic go by. A cop came along and ticketed a driver for rolling through the stop sign. As soon as the cop turned off her lights, another car rolled through the stop sign, and she lit that driver up as well. This continued for probably 5-10 drivers before the officer came up to us and asked if we were enjoying the show. She said she hopes everyone involved learned a lesson about stopping completely at stop signs. I offered her a slice of pizza, she declined, and we drove off.

I guess my take-away from that was, cops can give out tickets in short order if people are consistently breaking the law right in front of them. I wouldn't necessarily punish an officer for giving out many tickets in a high-offending area, just based on what I saw that day. Sometimes people in an area need to have the rules reinforced. For every driver that got pulled over, 20 other drivers were witness.

My take would be that if there's an intersection where people are doing that many rolling stops, then it's probably perfectly safe. In my neighborhood people do that all the time at certain spots as long as they're the only one near the intersection.

If those people were driving safely, then ticketing them for a technical violation of the law probably isn't helping anything. The point of tickets is to punish the unsafe drivers so that they learn a lesson and have a record that makes it easier to reform or weed out the really bad ones.

So a cop that spends all day writing tickets on technical violations probably should get a talking to from their superiors. They're wasting their time and ticking off solid citizens while actual unsafe behavior gets a pass.

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