Michigan Police Chiefs Admit Speeding Tickets Are About Money

In 2002, police in the city of Detroit gave out a total of 126,007 traffic tickets. Last year, the number of tickets grew to over 245,000 - a 94% jump. The increase was even larger in small towns like Plymouth which saw the number of tickets go up from 440 to 2,500 — up 480 percent — over the same amount of time. According to Detroit area police the reason for the increase is dwindling property tax revenue. That lack of property tax revenue has forced local governments in Michigan to use average citizen drivers to fill the coffers. You might call it a new, “random driving tax.”

here is the full article: www.ridelust.com...



what do you guys think of this.


Anyone living in Michigan heads up cops will increase in issuing tickets. Hold your wallets... we already got screwed with a bail out and now we face this.

How much more robbing does it take in order for justice to be served??

I never knew the GOV needs to make profit??

here is some more articles that relates to this topic: Issuing Tickets a big business.

[edit on 19-11-2008 by computerwiz32]

The worst part is people die because of the speed zones they set and how and where they set them.
They set them in certain places in order to specifically make money.
Which makes certain roads more unsafe than others.
And they leave this out of the statistics on road fatality's and blame it on speeding etc.

That is one of the reasons that I resigned my job as a police officer . . .

I was told quite a few times to spend my 8 hour shift on the highway writing tickets (mind you, this was a small town . . . ~2500 citizens . . . and we had one officer per shift).

They also do not have quotas . . . they have contacts. We had to make 15 contacts in an 8 hour shift. So I drove around and would get out of my unit and talk to people. The Chief would get so mad when I did not come in after my shift with 15+ tickets . . . instead I made up a contact form, and every person I talked to would go on that form. I would end up with maybe 4 tickets and two warnings a day.

Funny thing was . . . I had about 50% less calls then the other officers who followed orders and ran radar all day.

Speed traps and cities creating revenue have been in existence as long as paved roads with cars have been around.

This is easy money for police agencies at all levels to make money for their respective budgets. But, on the flip side, court costs and overtime pay goes up with more tickets also. The agency needs to write even more tickets to cover those costs.

Who are they protecting and serving when writing tickets for no seatbelts or going 31 in a 30?

It is a rip off scam and always has been.

Throw racial profiling into the picture and it gets a lot uglier.

Unfortunatly police have allways been 90% revenue agents and 10% crime control. Trying to speed up your daily drive in NYC is one thing. That does raise the probability of mayhem, but in a rural setting to go 10 or even 20 over the limit, or maybe have one light out of 6 on the back of your car is ridiculous!

Zindo

Originally posted by jam321
It is a rip off scam and always has been.

Throw racial profiling into the picture and it gets a lot uglier.

Funny thing is . . . we had to racially profile to stop racial profiling . . . figure that one out


lol

Speeding tickets have always been about generating revenue.



Detroit and other parts of Michigan are so poor they are probably trying to figure out a way to hand out speeding tickets to pedestrians and bicyclists.

If GM and Ford shut down, people may be using those speeding tickets to heat their homes this winter.

reply to post by BlackOps719


lol, you don't even know how bad it's in michigan. I live in the subs outside of detroit.

My city used to be a nice city but people from detroit moved in trough pigeons and crime with them.

Crime roused over here. For about 2 years our stop sign in our neighborhood gets gratified. We also in front of our house would get teenagers from the local high school at night getting high. My sister one time came from work and parked her car in our drive way and a cop out of nowhere shows up and taps on the windows and my sister got scared and she goes is their a problem officer?? He asked her if she lives here and she said yes and he still didn't trust her so he let her go but was watching her until she got inside.

We now are seeing a increase in home break ins. We also in local malls have a high auto theft rate.

The malls currently are closing down due to too many robberies in my area.. .well the malls been rob many times and lost alot of money.

So it's starting to look like a ghost town over here seeing more and more businesses going under.


Also that bail out stuff about GM and other people. I notice they have huge profits in CHina.

They have about 125 million dollars from sales in china.

I personally think the ceos are trying to rob us.

I would like to see Ron Pauls reaction. I also lol when Ron Paul schooled mr.bernake.

Well your response are interesting.


I also notice the Detroit mayor and my city mayor and many other mayors in our country and wayne county are headed to Washington to try and get a piece of that bail out plan for the auto cars companies.

I so far never got a ticket and I hope i never will get one.

People over here drive crazy.

My parent company that I broker loans through is based right outside of Detroit, MI and I hear those guys in the home office crying the blues every day it seems.

They told me about the whole crime ridden mess that Kwame Kilpatrick created up there. The economy was already bad in MI two or three years back. The guys I work for have told me tha there are abandoned homes everywhere in Detroit and other towns like Flynt, and it is driving the property value down to nothing.

Many people who couldnt find a job just abandoned everything and moved. You can buy a house in Detroit right now in some spots for as little as $10,000. And from what I understand it is all high crime and full of squatters and crack heads.

Now brace yourself and imagine what Detroit will look like once GM shuts its doors. It is going to be an apocalyptic waste land like something out of Mad Max. Im glad I dont live there, no offense, but it is going to get even worse.

[edit on 11/19/08 by BlackOps719]

I've known this for years. Everyone in the metro Detroit area knows that a drive through Taylor, you've got a 80 percent chance of getting a ticket. I've never seen a city give out as many tickets as Taylor does!


I'll be on the lookout for more speedtraps now.

Yea, Detroit and the suburbs are suffering.

I am living in Detroit. I recently moved here in order to be closer to the college I am going to. And yes, Detroit is in pretty bad shape.

There are empty, run-down buildings everywhere; one is even right next door to where I live. There are even entire abandoned skyscrapers in the middle of downtown, with cryptic messages taped or spray-painted in some of the upper-story windows. If you're driving and happen to take a wrong turn, you can easily find yourself on a road lined with prostitutes, ruined buildings so long abandoned that they've become overgrown with tall grass and weeds, and entire crowds of homeless or otherwise impoverished people, standing around in the grass and bushes, almost every one of them staring at you as you drive by.

Around 3:00 am is when it seems to be the worst. A few times now, I've fallen asleep to the sounds of some guy screaming obscenities not far away, followed by what were probably gunshots, followed by a moment of silence and then the screeching tires of a car.

But in all honesty, not all hope is lost here. On the contrary, many here in Detroit seem to be decent people, fighting the good fight to bring this place around. Many areas, especially those around the schools and universities, have been surprisingly cleaned up over the past year or two. In 2002 there were numerous articles about corruption throughout the Detroit police department, but supposedly much of it (though I doubt all of it) has been reduced since then, by the implementation of third-party investigation teams and the replacement of many of Detroit's officers (thus the '02 articles). In fact, the very anti-corruption efforts that have rooted out the Mayor himself in many ways began with the re-organizing of the police in '02. Anyway, the local police here are so busy trying to stay on top of the crime that I doubt they have enough time to bother with extraneous speeding tickets. The state police might be another matter.

Generally, I'm finding that if you don't give people here any reason to dislike you, and know what areas to stay away from, you can find a surprisingly positive and friendly atmosphere here. But then again, I just moved here, so what do I really know? Hopefully I don't someday find myself being proven wrong in a dark alley somewhere.

Originally posted by xxpigxx
That is one of the reasons that I resigned my job as a police officer . . .

I think it's hilarious that your username can be interpreted as "Ex-Pig" in light of this.

@the OP: This shouldn't be suprising. Traffic tickets, minor drug offenders- that's the recipe for generating revenue in the eyes of the small-town cop. Let me rephrase that slightly; in the eyes of TPTB that tell the small-town cops what to do. I'll be the first to admit that police do a lot of good in big cities, but in small towns, for the most part, they're an additional tax.

reply to post by BlackOps719


not fully true on the satement on how low you can buy a house.

you can buy a house as low as a buck. The reason for this is that the home was abandoned and the banks had to sell it. They didn't secure the homes so people when inside and told copper pipes and stoves and many other stuff.

Now it's nothing but a empty house with no eletrical wiring no plumbing or anything just a buidling.

some builders buy those home to fix it up.

Just wanted to correct that since I seen such things in newspapers that showed you can buy a house with just a buck and it's yourse it's that bad.

I live north of detroit in the suburbs and it is starting to get bad here.

My mom car somone attempted to hot wire my moms car we see on the dash board a securtiy flag.

We also saw the chevy logo on the montecarlo car ripped off.

reply to post by Magnus47


well... Detroit has many friendly people. The problem is that there are mafia people that have alot of investment in Detroit.

Detroit has their own problems. The only thing that I can saw is watch out.

I have read articles where truckers that drive through detroit and flint they carry a shot gun with them. Since there is a huge spike in thefts with trucks.

There has been situations were truckers stop for a red light and then see a guy walk up to the window with a gun pointed at him and asking them to get out of the truck.

so now they carry shot guns to prevent such situation.

I am also heard that it's common in many areas of detroit where you stop for a red light and then a guy will walk up to you to hyjack your car.

I am just saying that people that lived in detroit are moving out and bringing the crime to the surberbs. This devils night this year was the worst I ever seen. some kids tried egging my car and I chased them before they could do anything.

The area were I live it was great in the past until 2 years from now. We slowly increased in crime.

Now I see abandon homes and many homes that look like crap due to lack of maintenance.

.