• 17
  • August
    2011

For some of use, police officers seem like this other entity, separate from the average population. They have a certain amount of legal control over residents whether it is through preventing crime and protecting the citizens or catching them when they are misbehaving by handing out citations. Police officers in California work hard for their income, sometimes having to meet ticket quotas that seem extreme and are in fact against state law.

Police officers are not differentiated from the rest of use when it comes to labor protections, and several Los Angeles patrol officers say their rights were violated when their employer retaliated against them for complaining about stringent ticket quotas.

Officers cannot just write tickets to fill a quota; they actually have to observe a traffic violation first. When their Los Angeles supervisors allegedly began comparing one officer to another based upon traffic ticket numbers, several motorcycle patrol officers became fed up. When they spoke out against the practice, they were denied badly needed overtime pay and were given poor reviews during performance evaluations.

The group of West Traffic Bureau officers filed a lawsuit in the Los Angeles Superior Court late July. This is not the first instance where the illegal traffic quotas were the subject of litigation. This past April, a jury found that two other Los Angeles West Traffic motorcycle officers had been punished by their supervisors for similar complaints. The jury proceeded to award the two a sum of $2 million as a result of the labor violations.

Source: Motorsports News, "Police Motorcycle Officers Sue Over Ticket Quotas," Aug. 5, 2011