Data: Police issuing fewer tickets
Officers in state giving more warnings, raising safety concerns
Police in Connecticut gave drivers fewer tickets and more warnings in 2022, continuing a long-running trend that accelerated during the pandemic, state data shows.
Officers also continued to make far fewer traffic stops in 2022 than before the pandemic began, though the number of stops did rise slightly in both 2021 and 2022.
Research is mixed, but some studies have found traffic enforcement helps reduce crashes. The reduced enforcement in Connecticut, which resembles national trends, has stirred concern among traffic safety advocates as the number of crashes and roadway deaths climbed to record highs in recent years.
“We’re hoping that (the number of stops) is going to continue to tick back up,” said Amy Watkins, who heads the pedestrian safety group Watch for Me, which works closely with law enforcement. Watkins said she’s grateful the number of stops has risen somewhat since the pandemic began but that there’s more work to be done.
Police reported stopping 313,346 drivers across Connecticut in 2022, according to data from the state-funded Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project — up from 274,433 in 2021, but still well below its pre-pandemic level of 512,697 in 2019.
Nearly 62 percent of those traffic stops in 2022 resulted in all warnings, the data shows. Most were verbal warnings — which, unlike written warnings and tickets, do not appear on a driver’s record.
Just under 30 percent of stops in 2022 resulted in a traffic ticket, according to the data — down from a high of almost 43 percent in 2017, the earliest calendar year for which data is available.
In addition to tickets and warnings, about 8% of stops in 2022 resulted in either an arrest, a misdemeanor summons or no recorded disposition.
The drop in traffic tickets coincides with a sharp rise in deaths of both motorists and pedestrians in 2022, with 367 total traffic fatalities statewide, according to state data — up from 302 in 2021. However, looking back over several previous years, data on traffic deaths in Connecticut doesn’t show a clear pattern that correlates with either the decline in traffic stops or tickets.
The recent decline in stops and the rise in traffic deaths both appear to be part of nationwide trends.
Research on what effect traffic stops have on crashes and deaths, if any, has been mixed.
In one 2022 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, researchers compared traffic stops and motor vehicle crash deaths using data from 33 state police agencies from 2004 to 2016, including Connecticut. They found that stops did not reduce the number of traffic fatalities.
But another study of Massachusetts’ Click It or Ticket seat belt enforcement campaign, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2014, found issuing tickets had a major effect on both the number of fatalities and accidents.
The decline in tickets has also had an impact on state coffers. Revenue from both traffic and non-traffic infractions has been trending down for more than a decade, according to separate data from the Centralized Infractions Bureau — from a high of more than $30 million in 2010 to just under $12.4 million in 2022. Unlike in some states where ticket revenue goes to local coffers, in Connecticut this money typically goes towards the state’s general fund.
It’s not clear why officers are issuing fewer tickets
The drop in overall traffic stops appears to be primarily related to the pandemic trend. But officers were beginning to issue more warnings and fewer tickets as far back as 2018, the first year for which year-over-year comparison data is available.
“For a long time, the most common outcome of a traffic stop was a ticket,” said Ken Barone, who manages the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project. “That is not the case today.”
Barone’s group analyzes data from police departments across the state on an annual basis to identify potential racial and ethnic bias. He said that while
officers have been writing fewer and fewer tickets for a long time, the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement spurred by the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 both accelerated that decline.
The data bears that out, showing a steady decline in the number of infractions and rise in the number of warnings from 2017 through 2019 before both trends accelerated dramatically in 2020.
Some Republican Connecticut lawmakers have pointed to understaffing and low morale as problems across law enforcement in the state, and they’ve laid at least part of the blame on a police accountability bill Democratic lawmakers passed in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement — a dynamic sometimes referred to as the “Ferguson Effect.”
“The full-on assault by the Democrats on police officers has led to very low morale,” House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora told reporters in January before a debate on a new state police contract.
But, according to Jorge Camacho, the director of policing, law and policy at Yale’s Justice Collaboratory, the shift may have less to do with the Ferguson Effect and more to do with a shift in departmental policies away from enforcing low-level equipment and administrative infractions and toward public safety.
“I don’t think that most officers are trying to make a point and make fewer stops out of spite — or even out of a fear that there are going to be negative consequences for them,” Camacho said. “I do think … that there’s a deliberate effort to focus on quality over quantity.”
However, the data shows officers are writing fewer tickets for all categories of offenses — including moving violations like speeding that have a known impact on public safety.
Both Barone and Camacho emphasized the importance of doing the right kind of traffic enforcement. A 2021 memo for lawmakers by the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project’s advisory board found that equipment issues like broken tail lights contributed to roughly 12 percent of traffic accidents from 2015 to 2019, while speeding contributed to at least 29 percent of accidents.
A bill introduced last session would have prohibited police in Connecticut from making traffic stops for certain equipment or administrative offenses. It passed the state Senate but failed in the House.
The 2021 memo concluded that moving
violations — like speeding, using a cell phone while driving or running a red light — are a greater risk to public safety than equipment or administrative violations, like a broken light or an expired tag.
Barone and Camacho both echoed that sentiment.
“Giving officers a clear directive that they are to enforce roadway infractions that have a clear link to roadway safety is the stronger option,” Camacho said.
Research in other jurisdictions has often found a racial bias in traffic enforcement, with people of color more likely to get a ticket than a warning. Back in 2003, The Boston Globe found that white Massachusetts drivers received tickets for speeding from local police 31 percent of the time, compared to 49 percent for people of color.
The opposite has been true in Connecticut, Barone said, with drivers of color more likely to receive a warning than white drivers. He chalked the discrepancy up to two factors. First, he said, police departments in some major Connecticut cities — which tend to have the most diverse populations in the state — lean more heavily on warnings than infractions.
Minority drivers are also more likely to be stopped for low-level equipment or administrative violations, Barone said.Those types of stops are less likely to end in a ticket, he explained.
Experts also noted the increase in warnings over tickets could make it more difficult for the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project and other groups to audit police departments.
In late June, the project released an audit of the Connecticut State Police that found tens of thousands of potentially false or inaccurate traffic tickets in a departmental database. Auditors were able to find the potentially false tickets by comparing the departmental database to court records, which should match.
A CT Insider investigation had previously revealed that four troopers were caught entering tickets into the departmental database for stops that never happened. Because those troopers never issued real traffic tickets for those “ghost stops,” the departmental records did not have a corresponding court record.
Unlike citations, written and verbal warnings do not have a corresponding court record, either. So there’s no easy way to see if officers are making real traffic stops when they say that they gave someone a warning.