Posted on 03/19/2015 7:20:48 AM PDT by MichCapCon
It is against the law in Michigan for police agencies to impose a traffic ticket quota on officers. So when a Newaygo County sheriff’s deputy was caught on video telling county commissioners he would reprimand subordinates for not writing enough tickets to comply with a federal grant, motorists bristled.
“The damage this sort of abuse does to the credibility of police officers being there to 'protect and serve' is enormous,” said Jim Walker, executive director of the National Motorists Association Foundation. “We have had 40 years of it, and it is time to stop. And the feds are a major offender in promoting abusive enforcement for profits, by paying for overtime enforcement grants that are often abused for revenue.”
Newaygo County Sheriff Patrick Hedlund, who has been on the job for seven weeks, said his officers were not on a quota system.
“I can’t say what happened in the 15 years before I arrived, but the deputy made a silly statement, something, from what I can tell, he made up,” Hedlund said.
The video, which can be found in a news report of The Free Thought Project, shows road patrol Lt. Chad Palmiter telling commissioners in January that while he knows ticket quotas are against the law, he is a “numbers guy” when it comes to issuing tickets. Palmiter was seeking approval to accept a grant from the Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning.
“The guys that can't perform those numbers have been removed from all overtime for that particular grant, for the remainder of the year,” he said, referring to federal grants administered through the state.
On March 2, one day after the video was uploaded to the Internet, Hedlund issued a press release stating he immediately took action after became aware of the statements on Feb. 9. He said Palmiter has been disciplined according to union rules and banned from supervising personnel under the grant program. Hedlund added that if he becomes aware of a quota system, he would call in an outside agency to conduct a criminal investigation.
Hedlund said he did inquire about practices under his predecessor, Sheriff Mike Mercer, who retired in 2014, and was assured that a quota system was not in place. He added that the department wrote 1,895 tickets in 2014, but not all tickets were moving violations.
Michigan banned ticket quotas years ago, but tickets have become an expensive annoyance for motorists who may feel they were driving safely. Motorists face at least a $100 fine. “Points” on the driver's license, which can accompany a ticket, may trigger auto insurance surcharges. Until October of 2017, drivers may also be subject to costly state “driver responsibility” fees.
While the state does not keep track of the number of speeding tickets issued, it does have a record of the assessments levied on all traffic tickets (not just speed violations) that are earmarked to a state “Justice System Fund.” According to the House Fiscal Agency, in 2011 the state collected $40.8 million dollars in assessments, which would work out to over $130 million in traffic ticket revenue.
One problem has been roads with improper speed limits, which motorists may not recognize, and thus plead guilty to tickets. A 2006 law requires government agencies to set limits based on bona fide speed studies or a formula, described in the law, based on access points.
Hedlund said he does not support speed traps, and believes Palmiter was referring to grant requirements set forth by the federal government. Agencies that receive the grant in question must make 1.29 stops per hour when patrolling for impaired driving.
Retired Trooper Thad Pederson, who has been an advocate for mandating scientifically set speed limits, remembers the federal grants well.
“While I was running Traffic Services, I was able to keep the grant performance criteria moderated to some extent so that it read 'contacts per hour' rather than stops. Patrol time does not include the time when an officer is tied up on an arrest or call, so this makes a huge difference and takes the heat off the officer from making stops simply for the sake of making stops,” he said.
Hedlund says outside of the remarks to the commissioners, Palmiter has had an “impeccable record” and has never been disciplined. Citing privacy reasons, he did not divulge what Palmiter's discipline involved.
Will Holder “investigate” and then come out with a report claiming “disparate impact” and then work to takeover the PD?
Down in Alabama (I won’t speak of the name of the town)...there’s 1,500 resident town that got all hyped up after 9-11 and was looking for fed grants. Homeland Security was standing up and had lots of grant money.
So the town invented this gimmick....it was near a state lake which was on the Tennessee River and very close to a dam. The dam needed to be protected...that was the selling point to HS and getting the grant. They needed a real boat (not just a small bass boat deal)...but something with a larger engine. So they asked for roughly $15k and it was to buy a police cruiser boat for the lake. They got the money.
They bought the boat and hired two more deputies. They used the boat throughout the spring and summer to hustle up more tickets on DUI while boating. As silly as it sounds...they extended the city limits into a fair amount of the lake. There’s probably another $100k a year that they pulled in from this part-time boat-cop activity, and they used the two extra cops for the main road through town for the remainder of the year when no one fished or boated.
We got rid of our local cops because all they had to do was sit on the main road and write tickets. They were good enough guys but we don’t have enough crime to justify paying them.
Why would DOJ investigate the intended effects of federal (printed $$) grants???
/s
how wonderfully patriotic
Cops are revenuers for the welfare state, as this article proves.
And the Jack Booted Thug Supporter contingent at F.R. keeps scolding ME for pointing this out.
I was a police officer in California from 76-88. Things may have changed since then, but here’s what I saw. I saw how the feds encouraged more of “fill in the blank” by offering grant money to the city to buy police cars/motorcycles/equipment, as well as paying for new officers’ salaries for a set number of years, on condition that the equipment/personnel “purchased” by fed grants be used only for the intended purposes. In return, the city must report to the feds on the results of said grant.
I don’t know about now, but back then, quotas were not legal, so rather than calling them “quotas”, let’s call them “minimum performance standards”.
I don’t know when the practice of these grants started, but it was brand new to the city I worked for at the same time I was, and in my experience, it’s when “policing for profit” began.
Things changed a whole lot at the cop shop once the year end reports made their final stop not at city hall, but Washington D.C.
And not for the better.
Why wasn’t he ARRESTED on the spot and charged with:
Conspiracy
Larceny
Fraud
Extortion
Deprivation of Rights
Not to mention the tickets that were issued and paid as a result of this Criminal Conspiracy to Defraud..
because as our alderman(woman) told my wife “we need that money to live”
Where I live, the word “quota” for tickets is banned. They have several other ways of expressing it, however. The popular one nowadays is “performance measures”. If they don’t meet their quota, they get a poor rating on performance measures.
There is the problem. Local gov chasing Federal money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerial_state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Francis#Anarcho-tyranny
Sam Francis wrote: What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny – the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through "sensitivity training" and multiculturalist curricula, "hate crime" laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.
And he also wrote: The laws that are enforced are either those that extend or entrench the power of the state and its allies and internal elites ... or else they are the laws that directly punish those recalcitrant and "pathological" elements in society who insist on behaving according to traditional norms – people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools; or the people who own and keep firearms, display or even wear the Confederate flag, put up Christmas trees, spank their children, and quote the Constitution or the Bible – not to mention dissident political figures who actually run for office and try to do something about mass immigration by Third World populations.
So, when law enforcement is successful in getting the public to behave better, they get in trouble?
So, the ends justifies the means?
What was it I said to which you are responding? Now I’ve got to scroll way back and look.
OK, found it. So, when the cops successfully change public behavior and there are fewer violations, they should be punished for writing up fewer tickets?
So, the ends justifies the means?
Where did I say that?
Where did I say that?
Maybe you didn't. What did you mean in post 14?
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