Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In today’s society police officers are asked to first and foremost make certain that citizens feel that they are free from any sort of criminal activity. In the meantime citizens expect that they will be able to travel the roadways safely in their vehicles to go where they need to go and be able to arrive there without any concerns. The dilemma facing policing today is to try and handle all of society’s wishes concerning major crime and still be able to keep the streets free for vehicular traffic. The implication to policing is to balance their role in crime suppression and traffic control.  The current literature has addressed the role of police in roadway safety by focusing on citations from a Leviathan perspective where government is assumed to act as a monopolist that maximizes revenue.  In the contemporary literature this perspective has been investigated as the link between citations and municipal revenue, finding that citations increase when property taxes are limited or the value of properties decline. The assumption is that municipal employees, in these cases police officers, are budget-maximizing agents of the municipality. Although the contemporary literature regarding traffic citations has discussed the role of traffic citations in reducing car crashes and injuries associated with those crashes, the fact that these studies approach the issue of citations as a revenue generator for government appears to be a myopic rational choice story. Some studies have acknowledged the role of traffic safety and reductions in crashes as influenced by traffic citations, few seek to understand what issues affect the citation count or rate or provide a thorough discussion of the specific mechanisms by which citations reduce crashes beyond the basic rational choice story.  As an example, traffic fines can increase the price of unsafe driving thereby leading to less consumption of unsafe driving and fewer crashes.  Therefore an increase in citation writing behavior by local law enforcement during tight fiscal times might enhance the deterrence effect, giving local government police officers a reputation for strictness, with drivers taking note to drive more conservatively within its jurisdiction. The issuing of additional citations may improve traffic safety by changing the subjective probability of future tickets, and thus the behavior, of their recipients.  This study addresses the limitations of prior research into what effects citations by looking at citations from both a socio-economic and political view.  Approaching the issue of traffic citations, the study identifies the primary functions of the local police as law enforcement, order maintenance, and service delivery.  It then explores the local socio-economic conditions and political influences that affect the traffic citation rate.  The preliminary findings from a fixed effects regression for the time period 2003-2014 indicate that counties with higher crime rates and higher criminal traffic citations have increased traffic citations.  Evidence for Leviathan, race, or income effects are statistically present, however, they are economically minuscule.