Or, the cop just wanted to hit a quota.
In Joseph Wambaugh's The New Centurions, there was a cop character confronted by an irate motorist who was getting ticketed, declaring loudly how the cop was just trying to fill a quota. The cop (played by Stacy Keach in the movie) coldly replied "No, they've gotten rid of the quotas. Now we can write as many tickets as we want," implying that without the quota they'd write more tickets.
That always struck with me.