Real citations or ‘ghost tickets’?
Blocks of traffic tickets entered in short succession raise questions for auditors
On July 17, 2017, a Connecticut State Police trooper reported in an internal department database that they stopped 43 cars in a little over two and a half hours — entering an average of one traffic ticket about every four minutes from late morning to early afternoon. Two of the 43 stops on that warm, partly cloudy Monday involved arrests, state records show.
All but ten of the citations were for speeding. The trooper reported logging them miles apart — in Middletown, Vernon, Berlin, Glastonbury and Colchester, records show. Simply driving back and forth to these cities in the same order the trooper reported would take well over two hours, according to Google Maps.
What’s more, a recent audit that found widespread ticket-writing problems across the state police flagged all 43 tickets as “unreliable” — some potentially falsified — because each of the citation records the trooper entered in the department databases had either no match at all that auditors could find in official court records or, at best, a tenuous one.
An analysis by CT Insider of the audit’s underlying data, obtained through public records requests, found numerous similar examples of troopers entering batches of tickets in the state police system just minutes apart, sometimes including other details that, taken together, would seem to defy logic.
“For some of these people, when we started actually looking at the details of the stop record, it just didn’t pass the smell test,” said Ken Barone, one of the audit’s co-authors and the project manager for the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project.
To some experts, it seems im
plausible many of these stops happened the way troopers’ records say they did.
Instead, experts say, there are several possible explanations — some entirely innocent or accidental, others not:
• One legitimate explanation: The internal state police database timestamps tickets when they’re entered, not when the infraction occurs. For electronic tickets, both times should be the same. But troopers who wrote paper tickets — for example, if the computer in their car was down — may have waited to enter several at once instead of doing so as they wrote them. The citations would have appeared to be in close succession when, in reality, they were more spaced out.
• Another: Sometimes troopers will do “spot checks,” particularly for cell phone or seat belt compliance. Those often involve writing tickets to several drivers in short succession.
• Yet another possibility: A trooper may give several drivers verbal warnings in short succession over their cruiser’s loud speaker — telling the drivers to put on their seatbelt or slow down, for example — then enter them in the system as if they stopped the cars and issued citations, either accidentally or perhaps on purpose to make their supervisors think they were writing more tickets.
• The fourth, and most troubling, explanation is that troopers may have entered ticket records into the system without making any stops at all, logging so-called “ghost tickets,” as several troopers were found to have done in 2018 — triggering the audit of all state police tickets.
There are at least three ongoing investigations into the audit’s findings — an internal review by the state police; a federal grand jury probe involving the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Transportation Office of the Inspector General; and an independent investigation by former U.S. attorney for Connecticut Deirdre M. Daly.
Those officials are tightlipped about their approach, but experts say reviewing the timing of tickets could help investigators to answer a key question: How many might be paper tickets or unintentional errors that fell through the bureaucratic gaps — and how many could be ghost tickets?
State police declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing investigations.
In an update released earlier this month, the agency said 26 of the 130 troopers flagged by the audit for significant disparities in their ticket writing have been cleared because of duplicate badge numbers.
Another 24 fell below the thresholds set by the audit once officials “reconciled” some or all of their disparities — in large part due to problems with paper tickets. Eighty cases are still under review, the update said.
Federal authorities declined to comment.
Neither Daly nor the Connecticut State Police Union, which represents the majority of troopers, responded to requests for comment.
Union leaders have repeatedly said there could be other explanations for tickets that auditors suspect are false — including data entry errors, gaps in technology and the fact that some legitimate tickets may go to towns rather than state courts.
More data, more problems
Experts who spoke with CT Insider were divided on what the timing of unmatched tickets could mean.
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, a professor of sociology at Brown University who studies policing, said the clusters of tickets logged in close succession were a red flag. She questioned why society gives more benefit of the doubt to the police officers who make traffic stops than to the members of the public whom they are stopping.
“What you’re seeing is a type of intent,” Van Cleve said of the data that shows many unmatched tickets entered close together. “You’re getting indicators of a culture and practice.”
Others were more skeptical of the data.
Eric Dlugolenski, a professor of criminology at Central Connecticut State University who served in the West Haven Police Department for over eight years, said looking at data alone can be misleading.
“There’s a whole laundry list of why these funny things can happen,” said Dlugolenski. “The people who are involved, it’s their statements that are going to matter. You could talk to a trooper, and they could give you a totally innocent explanation.”
If experts agree on anything, it’s that this kind of data is often messy.
Take the trooper who reported those 43 tickets during a two-and-a-half hour stretch on July 17, 2017.
Auditors were able to find tenuous matches for 27 of the 43 tickets — or about 63 percent — when they compared data in the state police system with court records.
All but one were based on potential matches to paper ticket books. That could well mean the trooper entered a large batch of paper tickets on July 17, 2017, for stops they made at earlier dates. If so, the timestamp in the system wouldn’t represent when the tickets were issued.
But auditors flagged all of those tickets as unreliable records, meaning that the data in the internal state police system wasn’t dependable even if a tenuous match could be found in court records.
Auditors could not find any match, either in the court records or in a paper ticketbook, for the remaining 16 tickets.
Overall, most legitimate electronic tickets should automatically have a match between the internal system and the court system. The question auditors faced was whether the tickets without a match were paper tickets that couldn’t be matched because of possible data entry errors or ghost tickets.
About a quarter of tickets issued by the state police are written on paper, not issued electronically, according to Barone.
The messiness of untangling this data and matching it — or not — to real-world events highlights the difficult task auditors face as they pour through dozens of similar cases.
Ghost tickets
The audit of all state police tickets began after an investigation by CT Insider in August 2022 found that four troopers were entering ghost tickets into the internal state police system without writing any actual traffic tickets, which would have shown up in both the internal system and in court records.
So far, state police investigators have not said that any of the 130 troopers they’re focused on were doing the same thing, and they believe they have found explanations other than intentional falsification for some discrepancies.
But auditors did find examples of troopers entering several tickets in short succession where none of the tickets had a match to court records.
On April 6, 2016, for example, a trooper reported logging five tickets for registration violations in Clinton and Westbrook between 8:08 to 8:38 a.m. — one ticket every six minutes. The first three stops were in Clinton, while the last two were in neighboring Westbrook. Auditors did not find matches for any of these tickets.
There are other instances, besides entering several older paper tickets at once, when it makes sense to write several tickets close together. For example, state data shows blocks of tickets entered in quick succession for cell phone and seatbelt violations — evidence that troopers were engaged in spot checks where they might wave over and ticket several cars at once, Barone said.
But speeding or registration enforcement — where troopers are looking for infractions, pulling drivers over, processing their tickets then getting back out on the road to look for another — generally take more time, Barone said. That could make it less likely that a trooper could write several mere minutes apart.
Still, it’s important to note that none of the troopers from the examples above have been found to have engaged in any wrongdoing. And some experts are skeptical of reading too much into this kind of data.
It’s important to look beyond the data before drawing any firm conclusions, said Terrence P. Dwyer, a professor in the Department of Justice and Law Administration at Western Connecticut State University and a former investigator with the New York State Police.
Dwyer’s experience representing troopers during internal investigations makes him especially critical of using data alone to determine whether an officer engaged in wrongdoing and should be disciplined.
“I’m always a little bit suspect on just the raw data, because I always want to know a little bit more,” he said.