LAPD Officer Sues City Over Alleged Ticket Quota

City News Service
Apr. 29, 2015

A Los Angeles police officer is suing the city, alleging he was assigned to desk duty and demoted because he complained about having to meet a traffic citation-writing quota.

Earl Williams filed the lawsuit Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging he was retaliated against for being a whistleblower against a practice that the suit states violates a provision of the state Vehicle Code. He seeks unspecified damages as well as attorneys' fees and an injunction banning ticket quotas within the LAPD.

A spokesman for the City Attorney's Office could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit, one of several that have been filed in the past few years in which LAPD traffic officers claim they are told by management to meet a fixed number of traffic citations.

The City Attorney's Office has previously stated that the department does not have such a requirement.

According to the complaint, Williams reached the rank of Police Officer III in 1994. He was assigned in 2014 to the Southeast Division, where sergeants told the rank-and-file during roll calls that they were not writing enough citations, the suit alleges.

"Plaintiff understood that his supervisors wanted him to write 12 tickets a day,'' the suit states.

In January 2014, Williams was assigned to to desk duty as punishment for writing only one ticket on a day a fellow officer gave out three citations, the suit alleges. He was again relegated to desk duty the next month for the same reasons, but this time he was kept off field duty for more than two weeks, according to the lawsuit.

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