Last summer, a small group of Connecticut state troopers were caught running a racket, involving fake traffic tickets, for personal gain. This sparked some curiosity about what other sorts of illegal activity might be going on with state troopers and the ticketing, resulting in a 78-page audit from the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project that revealed a larger, statewide racket of falsified traffic ticket schemes.
From CT Insider:
The report found there was a "high likelihood" at least 25,966 tickets were falsified between 2014 and 2021. Another 32,587 records over those years showed significant inaccuracies and auditors believe many of those are likely to be false as well.
The auditors emphasized their analysis was extremely conservative, and "the number of falsified records is likely larger than we confidently identified."
So anywhere between 26,000 and 58,000 fake tickets over the course of seven years. And according to the audit, all of those tickets were submitted by less than 1/4 of the state's 1300 troopers.
Out of 1,301 troopers audited, between 130 and 311 troopers had a statistically significant number of false and inaccurate records in at least one year. There were 22 troopers with 200 or more overreported records, including one trooper who had 1,350 unsubstantiated records accounting for 83 percent of the tickets the troopers submitted.
So it's not just one bad apple — it's 25% of the apples that are rotten to the core, and could possibly have infected the remaining apples in ways that are yet to be seen. Curiously, a disproportionate number of those tickets were also attributed to white drivers, skewing the state's demographic data collection by making it seem like the staties were less racist than they actually were.
Of course, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont was quick to clarify that, "There's no indication that was purposeful. A lot of it may have been inadvertent. We've got to look into that." Which is fair. Sometimes 1/4 of your corrupt, rotten apples were just accidentally corrupt and rotten, and that accident should not be indicative of larger problems with your crop. That's what my dad's CT golf buddies would likely say, anyway.
'High likelihood' hundreds of CT state police troopers falsified thousands of traffic tickets, auditor says [Bill Cummings,
Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, and Joshua Eaton / CT Insider]
