I live in California and just like about every other state we're flat broke (tho Cali has run into a deficit that dwarfs just about everyone else.) Recently I drove from San Diego to San Fran and back, a good 500 mi plus each way. What I noticed is that every single highway patrol car I saw on the way was stopped and giving someone a ticket. This was maybe a dozen the whole trip. Not ONE was cruising or stopped for other reasons.

This last week in San Diego I've been seeing the same thing on our local highways. Every single patrol car is by the road giving tickets. Conclusion: They turned our "Protect and Serve" force into one, giant revenue-generating machine. I've seen no reports or discussions about this but wonder if anyone else has witnessed this phenomena in any state.

No crap. I was driving from San Diego up to Las Vegas in February, showing off my car to my brother. I was driving in the low 90s when I get stopped by the CHiPpies, got a ticket going 101! I of course fought the ticket, because if they have the wrong speed you can't be guilty of going the speed on the ticket. Then the judge says "I'll tell you what I tell every person who comes before me going 101. I'll allow you to plead this down to speeding, one point instead of two, but you'll have to pay the maximum fine."

So the authorities have this nice little racket going, where they inflate your ticket, only to "let" you plead down to what you should have had in the first place (but with a larger fine).

How accurate do you think your speedometer is?

so let me get this straight just because everybody is speeding and the police are giving them a ticket for it. the police are wrong?? werent you the one going in the 90's? perhaps you hit 101 at some point and did not notice, and dont say you watched the speedo the whole time, because at that speed you should be watching the road. yes the police are out there to serve and protect and that includes protecting innocent drivers from people who race across town at 90 miles an hour. just remember you guys are the one speeding. if your going to speed its not the police that is the bad person it is the person speding. at that speed it just takes one guy to cut you off or something before there is a major fatal accident. the police are doing their job, i think it is great to see the highway patrol out in force patrolling the highway. that is what my taxes are for. and yes i speed and yes i have tickets and yes i have gone to traffic school and yes im sure i will speed again, and every time i never have and never will blame the police because i know i am the one in the wrong not the police.

ok, back to my original post... we're diverging. And by the way, I didn't get ticketed so I have no ax to grind despite averaging maybe 80 mph on my SD-SF trip. My point is, it seems clear to me that the cops are acting on orders from the top to maximize revenues. There are no shortage of speeders out there, ripe for the pickin' as it were. Normally our good ol' CHP will just ignore all but the most aggregious offenders. From my limited observations over the last couple weeks they are systematically working full-time issuing tickets, all of which I'm sure are deserved. This is not one or two tickets I've talking about; probably 25 over the last couple weeks and this means 100% of the CHiP's I've seen during that period. Not a lot of cops, not most cops, but all cops all the time. Has anyone else noticed this surge?

yes i have noticed the uprise in police. and im glad to see it. and i think they do a great job and they should be out in FULL force to write tickets. THATS WHAT THEY ARE PAID TO DO!!

Originally posted by Andrew
How accurate do you think your speedometer is?

no speedometer is allowed from the factory to show a slower speed than you are traveling. The bias built in is usually in your favor depending on rim/tire size. There is no way it would be more than 3mph off from the factory. There is another post on this sometime ago.

The idea that police are only there to make money for the state disheartens me. I do believe that they are no longering concentrating on what they should be concentrating on. There are a lot worse things than speeding, but they don't make money.
Sad to say I see this getting worse before it gets better.:(

Coincides with a post on the maxima board...don't have a solid source, but word of mouth from Cali claims over 500 CHPs got a letter warning of layoffs in the past month.

It's still their law to enforce, so I can't say it's wrong that they're doing it, if even for $$ (we all have a drive from the almighty dollar, or euro on this forum :) To argue too little/too much of a drive is a tricky argument).

We can say there's other crimes to concentrate on but as soon as you make that point, someone going 140mph on the freeway kills an innocent family in a collision because that patrolman that could have stopped them was off investigating a threat of terrorism that turned out to be a nine-year-old kid messing around on the phone.

I didn't complain I got a ticket, I also agree that if I'm speeding then there's no room to complain, it's my own fault. I complained that I got a ticket for too high, for the express purpose of increasing my fine. My speedometer is not off by 10%, and it's pretty hard to "accidentally" increase speed by 8-9 MPH going that fast. And what makes you think I was speeding "across town" or that there were even other vehicles around? It was a road trip, straight highway (freeway), in the middle of the week. During the entire time he gave me my ticket we weren't passed by a single vehicle in either direction - the freeway was that empty (I-40, in case you were wondering).

The system of calling tickets "infractions" as a means of depriving us of our rights is already a joke. Why is it that the same week I paid my fine the newspaper ran a story about a mother who murdered her husband, and got off with probation and a smaller fine than the one I paid for my ticket? Because she was entitled to due process of law, including an assumption of innocence. But that's a separate discussion, I suppose.

So yes, I believe my original comment was matching the theme of the thread. I believe that not only are they increasing the number of stops they make, they are increasing the severity of the perceived infraction specifically to increase the resulting fine. BTW, it's been documented in NYC that the regular 5-0 are doing that, giving out tickets for loitering, smoking outside a restaurant, jay-walking, littering, etc. as a means to increase city revenues.

cueball, blizz: Thank you for replying to what was the original intent of my post. I'm not griping about tickets or what cops "should" be doing with their time. I'm just commenting on a phenomenom that appears to be system-wide thus coming "from the top." I am trying to compare observations from others (not "my brother got a ticket" but rather, "Yeah, every CHP I have seen recently was issuing tickets." This gives us a stronger statistical basis to confirm a hypothesis. It is a recent and very striking change in my mind. I think you both picked up on what I was trying to say.

Blizz, thnx for sending me the link:

CHiPs Pink Slips (http://www.acssonline.org/news/20030612-layoff-letters-being-mailed-500-CHP-officers.asp)

This raises an interesting ethical question. 500 CHP officers are given pink slips. But they are also told, if you raise enough revenue then we can protect your jobs. Now the CHiPs have a vested interest in ticketing, they can no longer be presumed to be an unbiased, disinterested party simply enforcing traffic laws. Doesn't this inherently give them a conflict of interest?

Case in point, here in San Diego they installed cameras tied to redlights to catch speeders. A private company was given the job of checking out the pix and issuing administrative notices (aka, tickets) to the violators. Problem is, the company got paid for each ticket issued so they were motivated to issue as many as possible. They lost their unbiased status. A judge put a stop to this, the cameras were turned off, and the contract renegotiated to a flat rate independent of the number of tickets issued. Now the CHiPs are in the same position: The more tix they issue, the more jobs they can protect, they are no longer unbiased. They have a personal vesting in the outcome. Is this wrong?

slightly off topic, but here in the UK most of the traffic wardens are contract, as a result they've become absolutely tenacious.

used to be they concentrated on keeping the main arteries clear, now instead they go hunting for all the people who have parked up on quiet side streets. My office is in a crap part of town, the kind of place you'd think they'd be trying to encourage people, instead we have masses of pay and display street lining, with city centre extortionate rate meters, result... the place looks like a desolate war zone,

while the main roads are jambed because of that one car that's parked illegally (but it's not worth their while patroling whose kind of streets, there's richer pickings elsewhere.)