Bloomy says there are no quotas — there are "performance standards." Sheesh. Can’t people just tell it like it is. Its a quota. Period. And so what? Read about it here.
As Bea Reyna-Hickey told me last week in Chicago, you don’t balance the budget on the backs of the people who pay traffic tickets. However, when someone breaks the rules, they pay a fine.
I have absolutely no problem with that. If, as the auto club says, there are a lot of tickets that are improperly written, then these officers should be retrained and if they persist fired. The union needs to get its act together and earn its money and provide people who can do the job properly.
Assuming that tickets are written properly, then who has complaints. The people getting them? They "double parked" only for five minutes or were only "two Feet" too close to the fire hydrant,. or were moving their car "in 10 minutes" when they meter ran out. Give me a break.
If you don’t want a ticket, don’t break the law, or get the law changed. Don’t blame the cops. As for the folks who manage the street cops, they have to use come method to make sure they are out of the donut shops. If over the past six months the average number of tickets written in an area was 10 a day, then they should expect, on average 10 a day. What’s the mystery here.
Is this a quota? Sure. You have a beat that produces 10 tickets on average a day so your average better be 10. Now if you do 8 on one day, common sense tells us you will do 12 on the next. But if you are consistently doing 8, then something is probably wrong, and should be reviewed.
Human nature doesn’t change, unless there is something else that has changed. Citizens don’t like to pay tickets. So they cheat. They see no moral problem parking too close to the fire hydrant or overstaying a meter. Its not cheating, its getting back at the "man". But much of the chaos in our cities goes to those who cheat at parking. The ones that jam meters and ignore their citations are probably doing something else, too. You either respect the law, or you don’t.
Wouldn’t it be great if a politician would come out an say something like "Quotas, Standards, call em what you will. People who break the law will be charged and if our police aren’t doing the job, we will find some who will. If you don’t like it, vote in new councilmen and a new mayor. In the mean time, we will enfoce the law whether the police union or the auto club or the folks on the upper east side like it or not."
Agree? Disagree?
Let me know
JVH
