How many times have you heard those words spew from the mouth of a supervisor? We all have heard it at least once a month. The above phrase generally equals "you need to write more tickets". We all know that a lieutenant cannot (and will not) give you an exact number of how many tickets you should each a month. They get their baseline of ticket numbers from the highest amount of tickets being written by an officer. As we know, this is normally posted in the squad room with the daily statistics.
Here's the rub. If all of the officers on any given shift average 10-15 tickets a month, then the shift average would be around 12. When a rookie or ass kisser writes 100 tickets in a month, that makes the other officers appear to be performing below standards. Never mind the fact that the other officers are doing REAL crime fighting. These officers will almost always have higher violent felony arrests than the officer writing 100 tickets.
There are positive benefits to "selective enforcement", but being a police officer is more than writing tickets. Rookies hurt themselves by doing nothing other that writing tickets. They find themselves clueless in the future when handling serious offenses.
Every station in the city has an excess of uniformed officers on Fridays, unless it's changeover. It has been the normal response of supervisors to assign officers to a "radar car" when the ward assignments have been fulfilled. Some stations will assign their resources to a plain clothes detail. A more aggressive approach should be taken at crime reduction as opposed to citation "exploitation". BLUE CRUSH is not the answer.
