Cop Records Police Chief Pushing Ticket Quotas, Boasting About Always Finding a Reason to Stop Someone
"I wanna stop that car load of dumb sh*** in the car, I wanna stop it, but they are not going to do anything wrong."
In this incident of cops caught on tape, an officer in Bethel Heights, Arkansas says he recorded his police chief pushing him to manufacture reasons to make traffic stops and get ticket numbers up. From the local NBC affiliate KNWA:
[Timothy] Brasuell, whose been with the BHPD since 2008, says in an effort to issue more tickets, [the police chief Don] McKinnon encouraged crooked cop behavior.
The voice goes on to say in the recording [sic], "If i seen a vehicle, I could always find some reason to stop them even if I made them do something stupid."
The voice, Brasuell says is McKinnon, goes on to describe his traffic stop method:
"I wanna stop that car load of dumb sh*** in the car, I wanna stop it, but they are not going to do anything wrong. Hell, I'll get behind or the other lane and I'd start crowding them. Kinda dirty pool but i got two or three arrests out of it."
The cop says he played the tape to the county prosecutor and the mayor, but the mayor would only say it was an "internal matter." Trying to defend revelations about quotas in the NYPD during a recent lawsuit, police commissioner Ray Kelly said they were just like performance benchmarks in other industries. Faced with the same kind of reasoning at the Auburn police department, former cop Justin Hanners, featured in a Reason TV doc last month, said: "Streets and fire hydrants don't have Constitutional rights. They don't pay taxes. They don't vote. We're supposed to protect and serve the citizens." Instead, in the last few weeks alone, we heard one Florida sheriff calling his department a "paramilitary organization" and saw cops in Georgia banging on a resident's door at 1:30 in the morning over a "civil fine".
Watch Reason TV on the Auburn cop who whistleblew about ticket quotas in his police department below:
h/t RJ