"Cops don't have quotas" Ask any member of any law enforcement agency in the country. Hell, ask any public official and you will most likely get that exact answer. The reason is a simple one, quotas have been ruled by numerous courts across the land to be unconstitutional. Hence, law enforcement agencies could be putting themselves in a serious liability situation if it were shown that they had a monthly quota of tickets they were required to write. The Florida law prohibiting quotas is called The Waldo Law. So named because of the small town of Waldo Florida, where after an FDLE investigation, it was uncovered that the tiny Police Department in Waldo required it's officers to write at least 11 tickets per shift. Countless people were cited and fined for going 2 mph over the speed limit traveling through town. The fines generated from this avalanche of tickets generated over twice the annual budget of the tiny department. The state shut down the department and turned over law enforcement in the area to the Florida Highway Patrol. This was about 10 years ago.
So, by making an example of this kind of questionable behavior, and clearly defining that law enforcement quotas were unconstitutional, the State of Florida once and for all killed quotas in law enforcement agencies in the state, right? Right? Well, yes, and no. You see, the laws are usually written quite specifically so as not to be interpreted poorly. So, Florida passes a law that pretty much says "Law enforcement agencies are prohibited from having ticket quotas". This is simple and direct. it forbids quotas. It does not however, forbid strawberry ice cream. (stay with me on this)
Some time ago, administration types in the law enforcement field, (This crowd is usually comprised of people who went to 4 years of college, studied law, got a job in law enforcement, and never actually worked a beat. Hired and promoted solely based on their ability to accrue student debt and produce a piece of paper that for some reason makes them smarter than people who actually do the job) these people latched on to the notion that numbers equate to productivity. Since they have never actually worked as policing personnel, they only see that generating tickets is the only way to prove that an officer is actually doing something during their shift. They get stuck on the idea of quotas and are fiercely reluctant to let them go.
Their answer is a simple application of the law. They eliminated quotas from their operating procedures. They then quickly implemented new policies with names like "Strawberry Ice Cream". The new strawberry ice cream policy dictates that officers will be required to issue a minimum of 11 tickets during every shift they work. Officers will be judged and reviewed quarterly based on how well they adhere to the strawberry ice cream policy. Any officer found to not be meeting the minimum requirement of strawberry ice cream can be disciplined, and even terminated for not following standard operating procedure as outlined within departmental policy. The policy of requiring 11 tickets per shift is never ever referred to as a "quota" in spoken or written word since quotas are illegal. It's always referred to as Strawberry Ice Cream.
This tactic serves a couple of purposes. For one, it allows the administration to keep their immoral, unconstitutional policies in place, having convinced themselves that this is the only way to measure productivity among their own staff. It gives them numbers to put on a page to use as statistics for election campaigns and official state reports. Another, equally devious accomplishment of this approach is hiding it from the public, specifically the media, in plain sight. You see, public record laws are pretty direct in the US, but especially in Florida. If a citizen or a member of the media asks a public agency for information from a government agency, they are compelled legally to turn over that information to the individual or organization. With this setup, a member of the media places a public records request for any and all information in agency records relating to quotas. The agency can simply respond that the word "quota" does not appear anywhere at all in their standard operating procedures or for that matter any of their records anywhere whatsoever. And they can confidently make this statement without lying.
With quotas established in such ways, the only way to force the agency to produce the information relating to the program that requires officers to write 11 tickets per shift, is for the individual writing the records request to specifically ask for any and all documentation about "Strawberry Ice Cream". At this point the agency in question can justifiably call the individuals sanity into question and refuse to fulfill any public records requests based on frivolity. Officers are warned that discussing any agency policy including strawberry ice cream, with anyone outside the agency is a breach of policy and a fire-able offence. Officers stand to lose their income, retirement, benefits and their law enforcement certification if they discuss it or even acknowledge it outside of work.
If this level of deceit bothers you, it should. I can tell you that the law enforcement personnel that I interviewed for this information were deeply disturbed by it. The largest law enforcement agency in my county has had at least 2 officers that I am aware of who have been disciplined for writing citations to people without even pulling them over. Their excuses were that they were under such pressure to meet the "strawberry ice cream requirements" that they didn't even have enough time during their shift to do the minimum ice creaming. Except, when I interviewed these officers, they called it "quotas".
For the sake of clarity here, I feel the need to point out that agencies actually use more technical convoluted jargon to name their quota programs, like "Performance requirement Marks" or some such crap. The end result is universally the same however, in that the agency gets to circumvent legislation by using creative dialogue.
