A new study has confirmed what many have long suspected: when local government budgets tighten, more traffic tickets are written, at least in North Carolina. After getting a speeding ticket, Thomas A. Garrett, an assistant vice president at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, teamed with Gary A. Wagner, an economist at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, to study the correlation between local economies and traffic citations.
The study, "Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror," examined 96 North Carolina counties over 14 years, and found, that "controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year, a statistically significant connection," reports Todd Frankel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Garrett said the study does not dispute that public safety remains at the heart of ticket-writing, but he said the study shows that political and economic interests affect how much emphasis is placed on writing tickets." (Read more)
The findings would not apply to all states. For example, when Kentucky unified its state judicial system in the mid-1970s, local governments stopped getting revenue from fines. They still get an annual appropriation from the state, based on the revenue they were generating then.
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