Following years of denial that Montreal police are assigned a daily quota of tickets to hand out, a member of the top brass has finally fessed up.
"Yes, Montreal police officers have an objective for traffic tickets" for every shift they spend on the road, Chief Inspector Stephane Lemieux acknowledged Thursday.
"Call it what you will, a quota, a result," the head of the road safety and traffic division added.
"I don’t think we’ve ever said it very clearly in the past."
No kidding. The top ranks had repeatedly denied the existence of any such quotas.
On the traffic squad, officers working alone in cars are expected to write up 16 tickets a shift, said Yves Francoeur, president of the Montreal Police Brotherhood. Motorcycle cops have to come up with 18.
For those not on traffic duty, he added, "depending on the police station where you are working, it’s between two and four tickets a day."
Under these quotas, ticket revenue has mushroomed, with the take more than doubling to more than $100 million a year. It all flows into municipal coffers.
Lemieux said such enforcement has paid off "very significantly" in lives saved and injuries avoided.
Since the start of 2006 – when the force’s specialized traffic squad was relaunched after having been disbanded in the late 1990s – traffic deaths on Montreal Island have fallen to about 30 to 35 a year, an overall average annual drop Lemieux pegged at "close to 20."
During the first 11 months of 2006, Montreal Island traffic-ticket revenue simultaneously surged 56.4 per cent, to $63.2 million from $40.4 million a year earlier.
Inspector Paul Chablo insisted in late 2006 that "we don’t have quotas." In fall 2007, assistant chief Pierre-Paul Pichette likewise flatly declared that "we don’t give quotas."
And last March, Station 42 Commander Sylvain Arsenault stuck to the line that "this is not a quota" – after an internal memo was leaked in which he instructed officers at his St. Leonard station to issue at least 7,500 tickets during 2010.
Why is the city’s top traffic cop, on the job for two years, now pulling this abrupt U-turn and coming clean?
Under new Montreal police chief Marc Parent, Lemieux responded, "we’ve decided to be more transparent, more open."
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