Will the Housing Crash Cause Police to Give More Speeding Tickets?

Judith Chevalier examines the impact of changes in local government budgets on revenues from traffic enforcement:

Welcome, Stranger. Here’s a Speeding Ticket., by Judith Chevalier, Economic View, NY Times: Driving through a tiny Vermont town a few weeks ago..., I saw flashing yellow lights appear in my rearview mirror. My car had picked up speed coming down a hill, and a police officer pulled me over. As I waited for a ticket, I wondered: Does this town supplement its finances by giving tickets to visitors like me?

I never got to the bottom of the situation in that particular town, but the broader question — whether police officers in some towns are motivated by fund-raising as well as safety when writing traffic tickets — has been examined systematically by ... Michael D. Makowsky, a doctoral student in economics, and Thomas Stratmann, an economics professor, both at George Mason University, ... in a recent paper, “Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?”

They examined every warning and citation written by police officers in all of Massachusetts, excluding Boston, during a two-month period in 2001 — over 60,000 in all. Their conclusion wasn’t shocking to an economist: money matters, even in traffic violations. They found a statistical link between a town’s finances and the likelihood that its police officers would issue a speeding ticket. The details are a little sticky, but they show that tickets were issued more often in places that were short on cash, and that out-of-towners received tickets more often than drivers with local addresses. ... The study focused on the local police. ...

Mr. Makowsky and Mr. Stratmann also showed that out-of-town drivers — especially out-of-state drivers — were much more likely to get citations. ... “This suggests that the local voters who voted down the tax increases have had some success in passing off their tax burden to nonvoters,” Mr. Stratmann said.

He and his co-author speculated that the seeming discrimination against out-of-towners by the local police might be explained by two factors: a desire to avoid antagonizing local voters and a preference for ticketing people who were less likely to travel to court to protest a ticket.

The phenomenon noted in the study may have implications beyond speeding tickets. During the housing price run-up, property tax revenue in the United States rose substantially — by 20 percent over all from 2002 to 2005. With housing prices now flat or down, town governments may try to seek property tax rate increases, and voters may resist. Historically, economists have noticed that when there is a lid on property taxes, towns turn to user fees and other sources of revenue — like speeding tickets — to avoid spending cuts. ...

In their paper, Mr. Makowsky and Mr. Stratmann did find that ticketing was modestly lower in towns with high levels of employment in the hospitality industry, suggesting that police departments might consider the effects of aggressive ticketing on local commerce. ...

When you live in a town, small towns even more so, you learn where police are likely to be hiding on the roads in the area. Thus, people without this local knowledge, i.e. outsiders, are more likely to get caught in speed traps. So police don't have to actively target cars from outside the area, people will self-select into outsiders who get caught, and locals who do not. Police can plausibly argue that they don't discriminate in handing out tickets, i.e. that they stop anyone who violates the speed limit, and do just that, but still end up with an unbalanced number of tickets between locals and outsiders. And by choosing sites that are well known locally but likely to snare outsiders - they can tilt the balance even further away from the local population.

Comments

[real person from the real world]

The self-rightous conservative talks about creative ways to punish sinners and fill local and federal piggybanks at the same time. We now have helmet laws, seatbelt laws, special sin taxes on cigarettes and booze, we punish those who drive w/o insurance, and we discuss gas taxes to punish those who overconsum gas, and ways to avoid paying for health care lest it subsidize sinful unhealthy overeaters and smokers.

Under the guise of protecting pedestrians from themselves, not too long ago, some municipalities decided to crack down on people who don't wait for the electronic bars at commuter train crossings, at about $1000 a hit.

The grand dame of all these creative sin punishing civic coffer-filling schemes is the speed trap. Anything to avoid having people who use the local services or live in a community actually paying for services. Wishfully we hope to pass it on to anonymous sinners.

Those often paying the bill are outsiders. From what I have seen, more often than not, the driver of a junker caught at just after peak hour traffic in the spring or fall, probably late for work at some minimum wage job, or a job that requires a lot of driving, and who is unlikely to take off from work and lose wages.

Who's to complain? The targeted individual should be a better driver, right? One of the aspects though is the size of the fines now-a-days. The wages of sin are pretty eggregious. Raise the fine high enough, and invent enough of them and maybe we could forgo taxes altogether.

[Don Quijote]

Virginia Introduces $3550 Speeding Ticket

Driving as little as 15 MPH over the limit on an interstate highway now brings six license demerit points, a fine of up to $2500, up to one year in jail, and a new mandatory $1050 tax. The law also imposes an additional annual fee of up to $100 if a prior conviction leaves the motorist with a balance of eight demerit points, plus $75 for each additional point (up to $700 a year). The conviction in this example remains on the record for five years.

I foresee a lot of clogged courthouses and busy defense lawyers.

Armed With Checkbooks and Excuses, First Casualties of Va. Fees go to Court

It just might be time to consider moving to another state.

[Don Quijote]

Washington Post - Armed With Checkbooks and Excuses, First Casualties of Va. Fees go to Court

[Alex Tolley]

The irony of having cops do traffic duty then asking for more money to do the job they were supposed to be doing - reducing crime is priceless. I my area, I see cops ramping up the end of year tax collection with beefed up traffic monitoring. regular as clockwork.

[robertdfeinman]

Sorry, I didn't notice this posting, so I commented on it in the links of the day section. I'll repeat myself, if you don't mind:

The column is based upon this research paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=961967

In this paper we study the political economy determinants of traffic fines. Speeding tickets are not only determined by the speed of the offender, but by incentives faced by police officers and their vote maximizing principals. Our model predicts that police officers issue higher fines when drivers have a higher opportunity cost of contesting a ticket, and when drivers do not reside in the community where they are stopped. The model also predicts that local officers are more likely to issue a ticket when legal limits prevent the local government from increasing revenues though other instruments such as property taxes. We find support for the hypotheses...

Now here's the thing. The authors are at George Mason. If we ignore the paper in detail and just look at the thrust, it is that government can't be trusted to be impartial, but acts in a self-serving way to maximize revenue and to avoid disfavor from local voters. Thus, it supports a common libertarian view of things.

This is the problem when an academic department is intellectually compromised by being the creation of a single person with an ideological agenda. Everything that is produced by this group carries a suspicion that the ideology trumps the science. Those who chose to work in such an environment need to have their work scrutinized more closely than others who are not so affiliated.

[real person from the real world]

Robert Feinman, as usual, provides a perspective that sees beyond the shortsighted common view.

While Speed Traps at the local level, and especially the new outrageous fines to be enfourced on Virginia highways have certainly been a bone of contention for drivers since the invention of the model T, he rightly points to the source of the paper as suggesting it is actually an indirect and generaliized attack on Gov't and it's enforcers ability to managing anything fairly, for the common good, be it traffic tickets or healthcare.

This is certainly an example of how easily we are all manipulated by spin, marketing, and in this case, libertarian think tank writers with a political agenda.

THANKS BOB!

[dd]

The logical extension of libertarian theology for those of us who remember the Chicago school's '70's take where monetary fines would free the masses from the tyranny of an oppressive police state as the "only" consequence would be a cash payment. Funny.
As these oppressive cash fines become more prevalent they act as a protectionist tariff and will find people reacting accordingly. As for Virginia...say goodbye to tourists or anyone staying on the Virginia side when visiting DC.

[The Baron]

Something more telling would be a broad analysis of what percentage of total revenue, police fines make up for various size governments.

I work for a small municipality in Texas, where we get criticized frequently for using traffic fines to bolster the City coffers. An analysis, which any citizen can do, and which in fact is published annually, shows that total revenue of all City citations, including Code Enforcement fines, makes up less than 2.5% of the City income. Going deeper, into unpublished, but publicly available records, shows that even if the Police increased the number of speeding tickets by ten times, it would have less than 0.5% impact on the City income. Thus there is no reasonable support to show that revenue is any basis for increased enforcement.

Despite the fact that Police Departments routinely deny the existence of ticket quotas, the reality is that individual officer performance evaluations revolve primarily around citations. There are very few other criteria to use in rating how effective a particular officer is. So the frequent ramp up of ticketing seen on a monthly, semi-annual, or annual basis, can be directly tied to officers who have been focusing on hard to measure, or hard to control tasks, i.e. number of calls responded to, or hours spent on investigation or neighborhood patrols, suddenly having to boost their citation numbers to ensure a good evaluation.

I would be very interested to see a broader analysis of municipalities of varying sizes, along with county and state revenues, to see if, as I suspect this is a more general trend. It is easy to pick on Police enforcement, especially if you were the lawbreakeer who got caught, and especially in light of the ridiculously low speed limits set in the name of "safety", but a rigorous review of the actual data, should show whether these particular claims have any validity.

[Wasn't Me]

I was pulled over once a few years back during the 2001 recession. After complaining to the officer that I didn't think I was speeding and that I was on government business and he was wasting productive time and he should be pulling over other motorists with vehicles having obvious problems, he said, "sorry about giving you a seatbelt ticket but we have been told to write infractions for everything possible." He actually took the time to write me a $32 ticket. When I told him I guessed that it cost more than $32 in administrative overhead to write that ticket he said, "budget crunch." I wanted to ask then if he or his policy makers had "ever taken an economics course," but I kept my mouth shut and took my $32 ticket.