Wiktor Goes to Court, pt 3
If you haven’t yet, read the last two posts about my court experience to get the full picture.
After all the action in the courtroom I had a brief chat with the Officer about the things that went on that day. Well actually, he did most of the talking. Basically I just told him that I didn’t want the demerits due to insurance, and he went on to tell me this:
Everyone knows that the Police have a quota for tickets that they must meet. It’s no secret. (Actually it was to me. I had heard people talk about ticket quotas but I had never heard solid confirmation until now). Every Officer has to write 20 tickets a month, it’s no secret. That’s why close to the end of the month you see guys out there with the radar guns so that they can meet their quota. Now it’s unfortunate when we have to give out tickets to good citizens like you. And because of that there are some “chicken-shit” tickets given out, tickets that you don’t normally see. And with those tickets you can usually get them dropped. But for speeding they have become very strict, and they won’t just drop them.
So he was explaining all this to me, almost apologetically for having given me this ticket. He wasn’t too thrilled about the ticket quota and I can understand why (they have to write close to one ticket every work day). Moral of the story? Don’t speed in the last 5 days of the month (thinking back, I got my ticket Dec 28). And if you get a chicken-shit ticket, fight it! (I am still not sure what would make a chicken-shit ticket. Maybe changing lanes without signaling or something like that?)