Survey: Cities that don't rely on fines for revenue write far fewer tickets

Cities that don&#039;t rely on fines for revenue write fewer tickets

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published 17 March 2015

A small survey of Illinois cities similar in size to Ferguson, Missouri by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found that when municipalities do not build police revenue collection into their budgets, citizens are subjected to far fewer fines and tickets:

In 2013, police in Madison County [Illinois] wrote just 17 tickets per 100 residents, about half the rate of Missouri and about one-quarter of the rate of St. Louis County. Consider Ferguson, population 21,111, which wrote 11,822 tickets last year. Or Creve Coeur, population 17,865, which wrote 14,382 tickets.Compare that to cities of similar size in Madison County: Alton, population 27,690, where officers wrote 6,653 traffic tickets in 2013, the last full year reported. Or Edwardsville, population 24,663, where officers wrote 3,128 tickets in 2013. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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