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Brokenlinkage, I think you are slightly misguided. Are there quotas for certain agencies? Yep. Mostly local agencies where towns adopt ordinances that mirror state laws. These local ordinance tickets allow those local municipalities to collect all of the money from that ticket. The police agency gets about 50 percent. On a state citation (because I don't work for a municipal agency) all of that money goes to the prosecutor. You know how much goes to my agency? 2 percent. 2. And it goes to the general fund, which never makes its way back to the road guys who earn it anyway. The idea that this ticket, written by THP, was a revenue generator is total crap.
Do I write tickets on crashes? You bet. That person that crashed just forced me to drive in the same terrible weather conditions and stop on the side of the road with them to take a report. I've been rear ended while dealing with crash reports and fellow officers have been killed. Meanwhile, if the person that had crashed hadn't driven too fast for conditions or if they had stayed off the roads until they improved neither one of us would be in this situation. Tickets also assign fault in a crash. You'd think a report stating what happened would be enough, but insurance companies are great at being snakes. Especially in a two vehicle crash, I write a ticket to the at fault driver. This assists in documenting what happened.
We don't write the laws. We just enforce them and honor the decisions that folks have made.
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