In two stories last month, the AJC's Andria Simmons examined five years of traffic fines paid in every police jurisdiction in Georgia, more than 500 cities and counties. A searchable database was created online; any driver in Georgia can look up total receipts in any city or county that collected fines (www.myajc.com/news/ticket-traps-search/). It shows how much each jurisdiction was collecting, according to the number of people who live there.
By that calculation, the worst “ticket traps” are in rural Georgia — including a string of cities and counties along I-75 in South Georgia that tap Disney-bound tourists and other pass-through traffic to fill their treasuries. But metro Atlanta has a number of aggressive traffic enforcers. Led by Doraville, others include Morrow, Jonesboro, Pine Lake and Riverdale.
The large metro jurisdictions actually collected at or below the metro Atlanta average of about $116 in the AJC’s per capita analysis. But those governments still rake in huge piles of cash from drivers. DeKalb County took in $84 million in traffic fines for the five years the AJC studied, by far the most for any single jurisdiction in Georgia. Atlanta netted $50.6 million, and Gwinnett County, $42.9 million.
Doraville officials say the department’s 46 officers are not writing an outlandish number of tickets, considering the amount of traffic that flows through the city.
Of course, one person’s speed trap is another person’s traffic enforcement. Police departments say disgruntled drivers often accuse them falsely of operating a trap — after those drivers are stopped for driving recklessly. Drivers are more apt to describe ticket traps as places where cops stop motorists not because their driving is unsafe, but because they are policing for profit.
Whatever their motives, many local governments are reaping huge rewards from traffic enforcement.
Doraville, a city of 10,600, took in nearly $9 million in traffic fines between 2008 and 2012. Jonesboro, with 4,700 people, netted $3 million during the same period; and Roswell, with 94,000 people, $9 million.
There’s no doubt the four square miles encompassed by Doraville are bustling; I-285, Buford Highway and Peachtree Industrial Boulevard all wend through the city, carrying an estimated 363,000 vehicles per day. But even anecdotally, Doraville appears to be an outlier when it comes to ticket revenue. Doraville collected almost the same amount of total ticket revenue as Roswell, a city with a population nine times larger.
The Roswell Police Department’s 143 officers issued 11,435 citations in 2013. By contrast, the Doraville Police Department, with a force one-third the size of Roswell’s, issued 14,560 traffic tickets last year — an average of three tickets per officer per shift. A majority of those were written on I-285, officials said.
