Police ticket quotas are now illegal in Illinois. Over the weekend,Gov. Pat Quinn signed alaw prohibiting the practice.Brian Mackey reports on a new law prohibiting ticket quotas for police officers.
The backers of this change say there are better ways to evaluate a police officer than on how many tickets she writes.
They say quotas create divisions between the police and they communities they’re supposed to serve.
And Democratic Sen. Kwame Raoul, from Chicago, says some units of government might be tempted to impose ticket quotas not as a way to keep the roads safer, “But just because, ‘Oh, we need to pull in more money. And so let’s pull in some more money from motorists.’ That’s not good policy."
So now municipalities, counties, and the state are prohibited from requiring a certain number of traffic citations within a certain period of time. They also can’t use that kind of metric for evaluating a police officer’s performance.
But they can still require officers to issue so many warnings or make a given number of traffic stops or arrests.
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