Ticketing quotas 'offensive', says police boss

The idea of police issuing speeding tickets to meet a quota is offensive, says Police Commissioner Howard Broad.

However, he has defended police setting "general enforcement targets", saying the difference between a target and a quota was a fine distinction but an important one.

The police have been under fire all week, after a Central North Island District police document urging staff to "get our ticket count up" became public.

A hastily-convened press conference on Monday, where Mr Broad and Police Minister Annette King denied police had a quota policy, failed to drown out howls of protest from motorists upset that they might have been unfairly targeted by police trying to meet a ticketing target.

It is understood Mr Broad has been under pressure to clear the matter up quickly, and yesterday he made public a memo sent to all district commanders, setting out the road policing enforcement strategy.

The memo says it would be permissible for "general enforcement targets" to be set on a district, area or group basis, but those were not to be allocated to individual staff.

However, that wording led National police spokesman Simon Power to ask whether it meant there was a quota or not.

Mr Broad rounded on his critics yesterday, saying people who broke the road rules would reach for any justification they could, to deny that they placed themselves and others at risk.

"If they can think that the police are somehow not operating ethically or justifiably, they will reach for it. There are plenty of people who would want to muddy those waters," he said.

Mr Broad adamantly denied officers were asked to meet a quota.

"I have a fundamental opposition to that because quotas, to me, suggest that we are somehow a beneficiary of what it is that we do, that we are collecting the revenue, that we are somehow punching the ticket along the way, that officers are somehow benefiting from this," Mr Broad said.

"That's just not the case. We're not a bunch of bounty hunters who are out there ticketing for ticketing's sake."

The idea of someone being ticketed to fill an officer's quota was offensive, Mr Broad said. "A citizen could be rightly upset about that. I don't believe we do that."

Police did count the number of tickets officers issued as part of their performance management processes, he said. That way, they could check officers were using the right tactics against dangerous drivers and could use tools such as speed cameras.

"There seems to be an awful lot of people who can't understand the subtle difference, and I accept that it's a subtle difference, between a performance management process and an arbitrary quota system," Mr Broad said.

"People might criticise me for hanging off what is a fine distinction and denying that what we've got is a quota system. Even some of our officers who think it's a quota system, I deny that as well."

Mr Power said Mr Broad's memo sent out confusing signals and left fundamental questions unanswered.

"It simply doesn't matter whether individual officers know there's a 'target' because their bosses will know and will allocate resources accordingly," he said.'

"This clarification of policy only serves to reinforce the perception that there are quotas and district by district the pressure will still be on to meet those targets."

Ms King said the Government had never had a quota for speeding infringement notices.