VA POLICE RANK-AND-FILE SUPPORT BAN ON TICKET QUOTAS
The Virginia Police Benevolent Association is working with state lawmakers to draft legislation banning ticket-writing quotas for law enforcement agencies across the state. Virginia State Police, which the PBA says uses the practice that requires troopers to write a certain number of tickets as a measure of effectiveness, initially denied using quotas. However, after being confronted with an email obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch in which a first sergeant scolded troopers for writing too few tickets and told them they should write at least five a day, a spokeswoman for the department acknowledged that its “various offices around the state set a target number of tickets to write,” calling them ‘average benchmarks’ rather than quotas. Ah, what’s in a name?
Ticket quotas are illegal is several states, including California, New York, Florida, and Texas, over concerns that police could unnecessarily stop drivers to meet mandated goals.
The email included these admonitions:
“It appears . . . that many of you are not aware that we have returned to normal enforcement activity. 4, 5 or 10 tickets for a week of work is unacceptable. There is no reason you should not be writing 5 tickets minimum on a typical day (that’s one every two hours)…. I realize that some weeks court, crashes, weather, etc. factor in but they do not justify the pitiful enforcement numbers I am seeing. Let me be clear that the evals you got for the last performance cycle took into account the reduced enforcement periods and that those same numbers will not result in similar evaluations for this cycle.”
Well, OK then! Strong words for “average benchmarks.”
According to a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University with expertise in policing, “There is an over-reliance on the things that are easy to count. Tickets issued, arrests made, response time, are all easy to measure. In reality, these are very poor representations of police effectiveness.”
How do you measure respect for all citizens?
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WILL BOONES MILL, VA, BE RENAMED ‘TRUMPTOWN’
Listen to the owner of the Trump Store: “We have a lot of new 2024 merchandise including: hats, flags, bumper stickers, shirts, and yard signs! We also have the very popular Biden Sucks yard signs in stock!“
The store’s owner, who also owns the Franklin County Speedway, is a 71-year-old who locals say is flamboyant, controversial, and whose antics have generated headlines in Franklin County for more than 40 years.
He insisted that he holds no hate in his heart. “If you hate anybody because of their skin color or what they want to do or anything, then you’re totally against God, because he is love,” he said. He clarified, though, that he views liberals, Democrats and LGBTQ lifestyles as evil and anti-Christian. “I call them Islamic socialist communists,” he said. “I’m not for abortion. I’m not for gays and lesbians.”
No information was available concerning the opinion of the other 169 residents of Boones Mill regarding a renaming.
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COUNTY GOP WANTS STATEWIDE AUDIT OF 2016 ELECTON
Of course they do.
The Campbell County Republican Committee has called on the Virginia General Assembly to conduct a full audit of the Virginia 2020 General Election. The resolution reads:
“BE IT RESOLVED, that the Campbell County Republican Committee calls upon the Virginia General Assembly, in the performance of their oaths of office will order a full, kinematic, forensic audit of the Virginia 2020 General Election and that we respectfully request the Campbell County Boards of Supervisors to adopt a similar resolution.”
The resolution was ratified.
Kinematic? Forensic? The county librarian may be needed to translate.
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Categories: elections, Issues, legislature, Local, police, POLICING, political discourse, politics, republicans, State
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