I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Despite the fact that ticket quotas for police officers were banned more than 30 years ago in the state of Michigan, a loophole written into the law allows police departments to evaluated officers based at least partly on the number of tickets they write — which defeats the purpose of doing away with such quotas in the first place. The Detroit News reports:
“Nobody likes to call them quotas, but that’s exactly what they are,” Trenton Police Sgt. Richard Lyons said. “When you’re being told how many tickets you need to write, to me that’s a quota.”
State lawmakers banned ticket quotas in 1979, but in 1988 an exception was written into the Motor Vehicle Code that allows the number of tickets written to be used in evaluations of traffic enforcement officers, as long as ticket writing is weighed equally among other job criteria.
“It’s a bit of a loophole,” said James Tagnanelli, president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan.
“Chiefs never like to use the ‘Q’ word, but they’re certainly telling officers they have to write ‘X’ amount of tickets.”
This problem is getting worse as cash-strapped local governments and police departments look to tickets to raise revenue:
A Detroit News analysis of court and police records shows the number of tickets has increased dramatically in many Metro Detroit communities over the past six years, a period during which state revenue sharing dropped by $3 billion.
To help offset that loss, many communities are mandating the number of tickets traffic officers must write, Tagnanelli said.
“Police departments are being pressured to bring in more money by writing tickets,” he said. “So we’re seeing more and more of these performance standards, which are basically quotas.”
Some departments defend this by saying that writing tickets is part of an officer’s job, so they have to evaluate how well they do so. But if you can’t define how many tickets should be written, you have nothing to compare their numbers to and the entire practice of such evaluations therefore means nothing.
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