Ferrari Mailing List: Re: (OT) NY Times - I'm shocked, shocked I say.

[A.J. Merrifield (101pdt]

Funny, my out-of-state tag tends to help me avoid tickets... but then, it IS
a Fraternal Order of Police license plate, sooooo...

- A.J.

On 9/3/07, Dennis Liu <bigheaddennis [at] gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/business/yourmoney/02view.html?ex=13463856
> 00&en=3433641694d7701e&ei=5090
>
> September 2, 2007
>
> Economic View
> Welcome, Stranger. Here's a Speeding Ticket.
>
> By JUDITH CHEVALIER
>
> DRIVING through a tiny Vermont town a few weeks ago on my way to drop off
> my
> daughter at camp, I saw flashing yellow lights appear in my rearview
> mirror.
>
>
> My car had picked up speed coming down a hill, and a police officer pulled
> me over. As I waited for a ticket, I wondered: Does this town supplement
> its
> finances by giving tickets to visitors like me?
>
> I never got to the bottom of the situation in that particular town, but
> the
> broader question - whether police officers in some towns are motivated by
> fund-raising as well as safety when writing traffic tickets - has been
> examined systematically by others. Michael D. Makowsky, a doctoral student
> in economics, and Thomas Stratmann, an economics professor, both at George
> Mason University, studied the issue in a recent paper, "Political Economy
> at
> Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?"
>
>
> They examined every warning and citation written by police officers in all
> of Massachusetts, excluding Boston, during a two-month period in 2001 -
> over
> 60,000 in all. Their conclusion wasn't shocking to an economist: money
> matters, even in traffic violations. They found a statistical link between
> a
> town's finances and the likelihood that its police officers would issue a
> speeding ticket. The details are a little sticky, but they show that
> tickets
> were issued more often in places that were short on cash, and that
> out-of-towners received tickets more often than drivers with local
> addresses.
>
> First, some background: In Massachusetts, a police officer is given the
> discretion to decide whether to issue a warning, which carries no fine, or
> a
> citation, which does. The fines for the tickets issued in that period by
> local police officers totaled $1.8 million, with state troopers issuing
> $1.7
> million more in tickets. The study focused on the local police.
>
> Municipal finance in Massachusetts is affected by Proposition 2.5, which
> in
> 1980 placed a cap on overall property tax levies and on their rate of
> growth. It turns out that traffic tickets are affected by the proposition,
> too - or at least that's what the study found.
>
> Under Proposition 2.5, total property tax collections cannot rise more
> than
> 2.5 percent a year, but local voters can override that restriction by
> passing a referendum. The researchers assumed that, on average, towns that
> had proposed to override referendums but failed to pass them were more
> constrained financially than other towns. In fact, they found that for
> drivers who exceeded the speed limit by any given amount, the probability
> of
> receiving a fine rather than a warning from a local police officer
> increased
> by 28 percent if the town's voters had rejected a Proposition 2.5 override
> in a referendum.
>
> Mr. Makowsky and Mr. Stratmann also showed that out-of-town drivers -
> especially out-of-state drivers - were much more likely to get citations.
> A
> driver from out of town had a 10 percent higher probability of getting a
> ticket than a local driver, holding speed and other characteristics
> constant. Out-of-state plates added 10 percent to the probability of
> getting
> a ticket.
>
> Furthermore, if an out-of-town driver happened to be driving in a town
> that
> had rejected a Proposition 2.5 override, he or she had a 37 percent higher
> chance of getting a ticket than a local driver traveling at the same
> speed.
> "This suggests that the local voters who voted down the tax increases have
> had some success in passing off their tax burden to nonvoters," Mr.
> Stratmann said.
>
> He and his co-author speculated that the seeming discrimination against
> out-of-towners by the local police might be explained by two factors: a
> desire to avoid antagonizing local voters and a preference for ticketing
> people who were less likely to travel to court to protest a ticket.
>
> The phenomenon noted in the study may have implications beyond speeding
> tickets. During the housing price run-up, property tax revenue in the
> United
> States rose substantially - by 20 percent over all from 2002 to 2005. With
> housing prices now flat or down, town governments may try to seek property
> tax rate increases, and voters may resist. Historically, economists have
> noticed that when there is a lid on property taxes, towns turn to user
> fees
> and other sources of revenue - like speeding tickets - to avoid spending
> cuts.
>
> Assuming that the study's results have some predictive power for other
> states, it may seem surprising that I received only a warning from the
> officer who stopped me in Vermont, despite my Connecticut license plates.
> In
> their paper, Mr. Makowsky and Mr. Stratmann did find that ticketing was
> modestly lower in towns with high levels of employment in the hospitality
> industry, suggesting that police departments might consider the effects of
> aggressive ticketing on local commerce.
>
> Perhaps the officer wanted to make sure that my daughter would return to
> camp next summer - or perhaps he really just wanted me to slow down.
>
> Judith Chevalier is a professor of economics and finance at the Yale
> School
> of Management.
>
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