If you’re a police officer, you’ve heard what follows countless times. After you’ve stopped someone and/or cited them, you are met with:
“You’re only generating revenue for the [insert jurisdiction here]!”
It is generally said with no small amount of disdain. If you are not a police officer, you may very well have uttered (or at least thought) those very words. I’m going to answer this accusation with two points.
The first?
So the eff what!? Let’s assume it’s an accurate statement. It’s not like we would be extorting money from you. You were speeding or ran a stop sign or failed to yield to another car, pedestrian, or cyclist. You were the one that violated the law. We didn’t dream up an arbitrary reason to stop you.
Do you enjoy the services your city, town, county provides you? Do you think they do those things out of the kindness of their hearts? Wake up. Those things cost money. So, if your fine helps to defray the cost of those services, so be it.
The only issue is all of that is complete garbage. Here’s some basic math this argument conveniently ignores.
Let’s take a basic speeding fine (numbers may vary by jurisdiction, so we’ll use some generally acceptable hypothetical numbers). Let’s say the fine is $250. Do you know how much of that actually ends up in the jurisdictional coffers?
$7.50. After court fees, state fees, etc., the jurisdiction typically gets about 3% of the fine.
How far do you think $7.50 is going to go?
Let’s take it a step further. Let’s say the PD as a whole writes 400 cites, on average, per month. That’s a whopping total of $3000/month.
That wouldn’t fund dinner for all the government workers your jurisdiction employs. So, your complaint argument that we are nothing but “revenue generators” is asinine.
So, let’s look at the second point.
Statistics. It ain’t sexy, but it’s accurate.
I have over eight years of anecdotal evidence that shows there is a direct correlation between the number of citations issued and the number of collisions in a year’s time. The relationship is inverse in nature.
That means the more tickets we write, the less crashes we have. There have been times when, for reasons out of our control, less tickets have been issued. Every time that happens, the collision rate ticks up.
The simple answer to the real reason I write tickets is because I don’t want to go to your child’s autopsy or your spouse’s autopsy or your mom’s autopsy. I don’t need to see pruning shears breaking through your loved one’s ribs and their organs removed and weighed.
The lion’s share of tickets I write are speed related. Speed is most often the primary collision factor in collisions and is the number one killer when it comes to crashes (at least the fatal collisions I have investigated).
While I understand the public’s misconception of the “revenue generator” myth (based on their faulty assumptions, not to mention their penchant for blameshifting), I think we can agree it is misplaced at best.
Statistical evidence, not to mention my eight+ years of experience as a motor officer is clear: More tickets = less collisions = lives saved.
It’s a simple equation.
