Most larger Texas police departments wrote fewer traffic tickets in 2011

by Scott Henson of Grits For Breakfast

Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Garland, and Irving all showed declines.

I think we're unraveling a trend here. After the Dallas News reported the surprising news that the number of traffic tickets issued by Dallas PD has dramatically declined, Grits found that tickets statewide have declined as well, or at least those processed in municipal courts. So Charles Kuffner at Off the Kuff looked at Houston's data and found HPD issued 200,000+ fewer tickets in FY 2011 than in 2010, more than a 20% one-year decline. This inspired Grits to compile the number of tickets issued over the last two fiscal years in some of the largest Texas cities, and remarkably, the number of new traffic cases in municipal court are dropping nearly across the board:

I'd asked before what might be causing this, and now I'm even more curious. These are remarkable numbers considering Texas' population has continued to grow and Texas cities have big budget incentives to write more tickets, not less. And why is San Antonio an outlier? I find the whole situation surprising and puzzling.

Check out your town's numbers if they're not on the list above. See here for FY 2010 data by city, here for FY 2011.