Atlanta has issued an increasing number of citations - and collected an increasing amount of revenue - since Mayor Kasim Reed took office in 2010.
Reader email August 3rd, 2015
Anyone who has landed in a speed trap in some never-before-mentioned small town on I-75 in South Georgia understands the most basic example of policing for profit.
A 2014 analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of five years of traffic fines paid in every police jurisdiction in the state – more than 500 in all – exposed numerous departments raking in exorbitant fine amounts.
Atlanta collected below the metro region average of $116 per capita in fines, but still netted $50.6 million, or $112.98 for every person in the city.
A reader recently reached out via email, arguing that the number of all citations has grown substantially since Mayor Kasim Reed took office, all in the name of generating income.
Has Atlanta issued an increasing number of citations – and collected more money – since Reed took office? PolitiFact Georgia decided to check.
Reed spokeswoman Anne Torres said traffic citations play an important role in overall public safety. There are more citations now, she said, because Reed has put more cops on the street in a bid to make Atlanta safer.
“With hundreds of additional officers on patrol, and special tactical units assigned to traffic enforcement, the number of citations issued today versus 2009 will be significantly different,” Torres said in an emailed statement.
The reader email claimed that the number of tickets and citations issued in Atlanta had grown 20 percent, from 337,697 in 2010 to 404,652 in 2014.
Those numbers, he said, came from the Atlanta Police’s website, which includes data downloads, and a record request for the number of citations issued annually by PARK-atlanta, the name of the city’s outsourced parking enforcement.
City leaders agreed in 2009 to a seven-year contract with Milwaukee-based Duncan Solutions to take charge of ticketing illegally parked vehicles and to install hundreds of parking meters across the city.
Duncan agreed to pay the city $5.5 million a year under the PARK-atlanta program and keeps any additional money collected.
The reader provided us with data from PARK-atlanta showing the number of annual citations. City officials confirmed the numbers.
Citations increased from 141,156 in 2010 to 196,895 for 2014.
That’s a 40 percent increase in citations in five years. But remember, the city collects a set amount - $5.5 million a year – to hand over the enforcement to PARK-atlanta.So there is no reason for the city or Reed to encourage more citations.
It’s a different story at the Atlanta Municipal Court, which handles the citations issued by Atlanta Police.
In 2010 there were 260,982 cases. That number increased to 269,257 by 2014.
The city court collected $19.33 million from all fines and other sources, including fines and fees such as those associated with controversial private probation in 2010.
By 2014, that number had grown to $27.94 million – a 45 percent increase in money that goes to the city’s general fund to pay for police, courts and other basic government needs.
City spokeswoman Anne Torres said some increase would be expected, in part because Reed kept a campaign promise to grow the city’s police department.
Even accounting for attrition, there was a 9 percent increase in the number of police on patrol in Atlanta between 2010 and 2014. And that growth came on the heels of furloughs that reduced manpower in the police department by as much as 10 percent in 2009 because of the city’s financial woes during the economic downturn.
That helps show the jump in tickets, and revenue, stems from the increased focus on public safety and is hardly a driver of the city’s budget, Torres added. Citations accounted for 3.5 percent of the city’s $552 million general operating fund in 2010 and about 5 percent of the $565 million operating fund last year.
“It’s not a money maker to just issue tickets,” Torres said. “The reason the city has a surplus today is because of pension reform, not revenue from traffic tickets. “
Karin Martin, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said while you can’t divine motivation for the growth, the city’s broad answer that it’s part of battling crime doesn’t help erase doubts.
While research would support that an increase in police officers would increase citations, Martin said those studies generally focus on foot patrols and so-called community policing that assign officers to the narrow areas to build visibility and trust.
There is no indication the citations are a result of that or renewed enforcement in unsafe areas, Martin said.
“If people are afraid of having their purse snatched or to walk alone because of crime, you would have a reason to approach traffic enforcement as increased policing,” she said. “But that doesn’t appear to be the explicit need here, which raises the speculation about motive.”
Our ruling
A reader reached out to PolitiFact Georgia, claiming Atlanta has issued an increasing number of misdemeanor citations since Mayor Reed took office in 2010. The reason was money, the reader argued.
We couldn’t confirm the numbers the reader had calculated. But our research showed that tickets issued since Reed took office have increased by 16 percent – and the revenue collected from them swelled a whopping 45 percent.
City leaders have a point that some growth would be expected, given the private parking enforcement and the increase in officers in the city.
Proving the motivation – increased revenue, more focused policing or a combination of both – is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint.
But even with the caveats, the statistics back up the claim about ticket and revenue growth. We rate the claim Mostly True.
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