QPol Must Now Meet Quotas..

[falcongt4me]

Originally Posted by tweeked

Correct - but policing is different to a council ensuring enough pot holes are repaired, or a human services officer reveiwing 10 cases a day.

A police officer should view each act individually and take actions based on evidence. Whether or not enough other people are committing enough offences should not change the way he or she views one individual act. This causes flippant "offences" such as leaving your window 1cm too low to be prosecuted. This just makes the force look like revenue collecting puppets.

If everyone is behaving in a given period, why should the Police have to manufacture offences to hit a quota? - it can lead down a very slippery path.

After serving the NZ community for 12 years, it was very apparent to every officer that when it comes to criminal offences your 'discretionary' powers were allowed to be exercised without too much scrutiny from your supervisors. When it came to traffic offences, we were expected to reach 'targets' per shift (usually 10 infringement notices). These were reviewed at the end of each year financial as part of your "KPI"s (Key Performance Indicator) and you were expected to achieve them.

Originally Posted by mik

I wonder how much politics is involved in this sporadic piggy bank filling for the state, I wouldn't blame the cops, they take their orders from higher up like the rest of us, no doubt there must be someone prodding the commisioner???

And this is mostly true...the way the Police department is funded for traffic notices is through local councils setting targets for police to achieve for the police to receive funding. Its one government department paying another to service (or fine) the community. So if the police met their Infringement notice targets then they would receive funding from the local council and other agencies to continue to fine the public.
The reason this continues to be is because someone somewhere will always break the rules and receive a fine.

What would happen then if everyone obeyed the rules and no fines were issued full stop? Answer: the rules would probably get tighter again so that fines could be issued or the government would go bankrupt!

A conundrum for all!