Month-end tix surge no myth

Traffic ticket quotas just might be New York city’s worst-kept secret. NYPD whistleblowers, from Adrian Schoolcraft to Adhyl Polanco, have caught police supervisors on tape setting targets. The NYPD denies that quotas, which are illegal, exist, and Commissioner James O’Neill threatens consequences for any supervisor caught using them. Meanwhile, announcements of record-high fines and fees pouring into the city’s coffers arouse suspicion of perverse incentives.

Add to the mix some old-fashioned New York cynicism, and you get an accusation that won’t go away: Just about every driver insists police officers write more tickets at the end of the month to satisfy mandatory targets. And, as it happens, at the end of each month, each officer undergoes a performance review.

Rather than weigh official statements, I did something simple: I looked at the data.

I analyzed the traffic tickets issued by the NYPD from 2013 through 2015 and found the driving public does indeed experience a higher ticketing rate toward the end of the month. The rate at which all tickets are issued increases more than 25% between the first and 30th of the month, according to all publicly available summonses for moving and parking violations.

Further inspection of the most commonly written traffic tickets by police officers in the NYPD’s 77 precincts reveals the increase actually happens twice over the month. At the beginning of the month, fewer than 2,500 tickets are issued each day. The number rises to more than 3,000 by the 16th of the month, then dips only to surge again by the 30th.

All ticket types analyzed showed at least a 10% increase during the month for all violations except failure to show a current inspection sticker. The largest increases were for citations like bad headlights, tinted windows and double-parking, while violations involving a red light or mobile phone showed the smallest increase.

It is difficult to interpret these increases as anything other than a coordinated push for quantity. If officers were responding to changing traffic conditions over the month, a similar increase should be found in other data collected on driver behavior.

But the rate of reported vehicle collisions does not show a similar increase. Neither does the rate of crime reports for “violation of vehicle and traffic laws.” The absence of a corresponding pattern suggests that the increase in tickets is not in response to traffic conditions or directed at reducing hazardous conditions.

For this reason, the 25% increase in the ticketing rate translates to a 25% increase in the probability the typical driver will receive a ticket.

However, these patterns are unlikely to drastically alter any one driver’s experience. On average, 44% of tickets are still written before the 15th of the month. Even if you’ve received more than one ticket at the end of the month, it would be difficult to directly connect your bad luck to a departmentwide quota. In fact, you would need to amass more than 250 tickets to have enough statistical evidence to conclusively establish that you personally were the victim of inconsistent policing.

Still, when then-Assemblyman Chuck Schumer successfully advanced the original 1979 traffic-ticket quota ban, the prevailing concern was not inconsistent enforcement of the law in and of itself, but that a focus on summonses would distract officers from more important duties. For the most common ticket types analyzed, also including violations for speeding, failure to yield, driving without a seat belt and parking near a hydrant, the increase in the ticketing rate after the first of the month represents more than 3,000 hours of officer time, assuming issuing a ticket requires 15 minutes from start to finish. Those hours are roughly equivalent to the annual output of 30 officers writing a constant stream of tickets without break, excluding time spent handling escalated confrontations or making court appearances.

With more than 200 fatalities from traffic collisions each year, the primary purpose of traffic tickets should be to deter dangerous behavior. Yet productivity targets incentivize decisions that leave the longest paper trail, not necessarily those that produces the greatest impact.

The distinction between achieving productivity targets and public safety is certainly not new. The NYPD was professionalized in 1845, and central to its original guidelines was the belief that “the absence of crime will be the best proof of the efficiency of the police.” But it is more important now than ever in today’s data-filled world. It is too easy to focus on readily available productivity numbers rather than on improving quality of life in the city, the far more difficult target.