We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Quotas — We Have Productivity Goals For That!

If you’ve stepped outside at 8:02 a.m. to find your car towed, this is probably why:

Traffic Enforcement agents don’t have ticket-writing quotas – they have “productivity” goals, police officials insisted yesterday.

“The number of parking summonses which has been issued is certainly part of the overall assessment of their productivity,” Assistant Commissioner Susan Petito said yesterday at a City Council transportation hearing.

Last year, the NYPD’s 1,100 agents issued 5.4 million tickets, carrying fines of about $500 million. At the Transportation Committee hearing, police officials repeatedly sparred with skeptical Council members over whether quotas exist.

“The primary purpose of these ticket-writing agents is to write tickets,” said Transportation Committee Chairman John Liu (D-Queens). “Do you judge them on the number of tickets that they write?”

“No,” said John Valles, head of the NYPD’s Parking Enforcement District. “We judge it by the accuracy of the summonses.” Petito quickly said other performance measures do include productivity.

$500 million, just so you know, is about two-and-a-half times the City of Buffalo’s budget.

Meanwhile, the Times notes the use of “expectations” as opposed to “quotas”:

The city has added hundreds of agents to issue summonses for parking violations. It counts on them to generate more than $500 million for its budget. And it has definite “expectations” for how many tickets they write.

But lest there be any confusion, the city wants New Yorkers to be sure of one thing: Those parking tickets on their windshields are not a result of a quota system.

That was the mixed message the Police Department delivered yesterday to skeptical members of the City Council. Some of them accused the department of imposing a stealth tax on New Yorkers through a concerted ticket blitz in recent years. Police officials denied that accusation, and said they did not force ticket writers to meet numeric goals.

But in careful language, they acknowledged closely tracking the number of tickets issued and using that data to assess the productivity of parking agents. Chopping his way through a semantic thicket, Councilman John C. Liu of Queens, chairman of the Transportation Committee, said the police were, in effect, admitting to an undeclared quota system.