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Traffic Ticket Quotas The greatest harm can result from the best intentions
Fact LTSA & Police Myth
Frontline general police are forced to meet traffic ticket quotas.   Traffic policing is only directed at bad driving!

This has to be one of the worst kept secrets of all time.   New Zealand Police managers doggedly deny frontline police are being forced to meet traffic ticket quotas, but everyone including the Police Association knows the truth.

See my Official Information Act request, response and complaint for the extent they will go to brazen this out.

However they did provide these departmental forecasts, derived (sometimes inaccurately) from the NZ Road Safety Programme Objectives for each year:

Ticketing Forecasts for Year (ending 30 June)
1999-2000 2000-2001 2001-2002 2002-2003 2003-2004 2004-2005
Speed Camera Offence Notices (000's) 320 - 380 515 - 610 515 - 610 500 - 550 400 - 460 480 - 550
Traffic Patrol Speed Offence Notices (000's) 100 - 120 110 - 130 110 - 130 200 250 275 - 325 350 - 400
State Highway Patrol (Contacts per On-road Hour) 3+ 3
Seat belt Notices (000's) 25 - 30 50 - 60 50 - 60 40 - 55 50 - 60 60 - 70

Note that in 2001/2002 a new target was specifically and publicly introduced, namely that Highway patrol officers should record at least 3 "contacts" per hour of patrol duty.  A "contact" was defined as: assistance given to a motorist, a verbal warning or an infringement or traffic notice issued. 

Mysteriously after two years this public target was removed, seemingly transformed into an underground, unwritten requirement with verbal warnings no longer counting to meeting the target.  Presumably it is concealed in order to allow the police "plausible denial" that ticket quotas exist.

However, it is plain that the police budget and funding by the Government is based on meeting target objectives in the form of numbers of speeding tickets issued per year.  There is simply no other possible consequence than that police managers send out their staff on patrol with the demand that they return with the requisite number of tickets per hour.

 

Take a look at the growth in the actual number of traffic tickets issued by NZ Police each year:

( Source: NZ Police Annual Reports )

Speed camera and particularly Highway Patrol speeding tickets are showing an exponential rise since July 2000.

Now compare the crash statistics over the same period.  Deaths and Injuries have trended up and Average Speeds have reduced.

The evidence is spectacularly clear:  Hugely increased numbers of speeding tickets and reduced average speeds have had only an adverse effect on deaths and injuries in traffic accidents.  Government policies have been a catastrophic failure and motorists are paying the price in every way for bureaucratic incompetence. 

Click for more: detailed charts .

Note on the logarithmic scales used in the above graphs: 

The normal exponential growth equation is  y = e ax where a is a constant, x is the time variable and y is the population measure.  (e is approx 2.718)  This equation applies in situations where the increase in population is proportional to the size of the population, for example where a population has a net increase of 2% per year.  (In that case a = 0.02 for x measured in years.)

The natural logarithm is defined to be:  ln(y) = ln(e ax ) = ax.   This means that if we plot ln(y) against x we get a straight line of slope = a.   This is the reason for using logarithmic scales in these charts.   On a normal flat scale we would be observing changes in curved lines - much harder to identify and measure.

We expect that the growth/decline of traffic casualties will be proportional to the total number of them - that indicates a steady trend and will be shown on a logarithmic plot as a straight line. 

This was in fact what we see 1994-2000 inclusive - a steady decline in all the death/injury statistics.  From 2000 onward that decline has reversed in three out of the four statistics as shown here numerically: 

Average Annual Changes
1994 through 2000 2001 through 2003
Deaths in 50 km/h zones -13.0% 13.0%
Injuries in 50 km/h zones -7.0% 10.4%
Deaths in 100 km/h zones -1.6% -2.3%
Injuries in 100 km/h zones -3.4% 7.8%

 

Breakdowns of speeding tickets issued  (Source - Parliamentary Questions by Tony Ryall)

Camera Issued Speed Offences (Traffic offence notices and Infringement offence notices)
Calendar Year 1-10 kph 11-15 kph 16-30 kph 31+ kph Grand Total
2002 5 318,686 125,271 4,690 448,652
2003 11 355,336 134,181 5,080 494,608
2004 440 337,196 121,612 4,918 464,166

Officer Issued speed offences (Traffic offence notices and Infringement offence notices)
Calendar Year 1-10 kph 11-15 kph 16-30 kph 31+ kph Grand Total
1999 87 2312 91062 31419 124880
2000 106 3785 103883 29653 137427
2001 338 30836 167004 29571 227749
2002 682 76784 208129 27269 312864
2003 1581 139567 225735 23312 390195
2004 4266 161919 209686 20043 395914

Officer Issued Speed -Total Offences (TONs and IONs) for calendar year 2004
1-5 kph 6-10 kph 11-15 kph 16-20 kph 21-25 kph 26-30 kph 31-35 kph 36-40 kph 41-45 kph 46-50 kph 51+ kph Grand Total
Speeding (over 100 kph) - Officer Issued speed offences 6 191 16111 12503 6099 2993 1346 660 306 183 123 40521
Speeding (under 100 kph) - Officer Issued speed offences 24 4045 145808 113972 51957 22162 9235 4217 2082 1256 635 355393
Grand Total 30 4236 161919 126475 58056 25155 10581 4877 2388 1439 758 395914

Officer Issued Speed Bands  as a % of All Officer Issued speed offences for calendar year 2004
1-5 kph 6-10 kph 11-15 kph 16-20 kph 21-25 kph 26-30 kph 31-35 kph 36-40 kph 41-45 kph 46-50 kph 51+ kph Grand Total
Speeding (over 100 kph) - Officer Issued speed offences 0.01% 0.47% 39.76% 30.86% 15.05% 7.39% 3.32% 1.63% 0.76% 0.45% 0.30% 100.00%
Speeding (under 100 kph) - Officer Issued speed offences 0.01% 1.14% 41.03% 32.07% 14.62% 6.24% 2.60% 1.19% 0.59% 0.35% 0.18% 100.00%
Grand Total 0.01% 1.07% 40.90% 31.95% 14.66% 6.35% 2.67% 1.23% 0.60% 0.36% 0.19% 100.00%