This is what we are told is happening in the state of Connecticut where police officers are reportedly manipulating their internal records to make themselves appear more productive than they actually are.
Truth be told, perhaps there is just not enough actual crime happening in Connecticut to warrant the established quotas. On the other hand, it could be that police officers throughout the state are too busy doing nothing, and thus have to cook the books to appear as though they are keeping up with their duties.
A report found that at least 100 police officers in Connecticut have fabricated traffic reports in order to reach their quotas.
The associated audit revealed "a pattern of record manipulation" in Connecticut that suggests a "high likelihood" of nearly 26,000 recorded traffic stops being fraudulent between the years of 2014 and 2021. As many as nearly 59,000 recorded stops "may have been, at minimum, inaccurate," to quote The New York Times.
"What was the motivation here, really?" asked Ken Barone, one of the audit's co-authors. Most likely, he answered his own question, "the motivation here was to appear productive."
(Related: The original plan during COVID 1.0 was to have law enforcement round up all dissidents and involuntarily detain them in medical concentration camps.)
If people are committing so few crimes that cops are struggling to reach certain quotas, perhaps the quota system needs to come to an end?
The revelations come at a very inopportune time considering the national conversations that are currently taking place about police abuse and accountability. While what has been unearthed in Connecticut does not involve anything horrific like a murder or killing, it does point to a culture of corruption in at least some police forces.
"The trust and the confidence in Connecticut state police is clearly shaken by this," said State Representative Steve Stafstrom, a Democrat and the co-chairman of the Connecticut legislature's judiciary committee.
There are also concerns that the fabricated ticket reports may have irrevocably smeared the racial data that Connecticut collects on traffic stops.
"That is because the motorists who were purportedly stopped were disproportionately white, said Mr. Barone, who is the manager of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, which seeks to identify and address racial and ethnic disparities in traffic enforcement," the Times reported.
There are further implications that go beyond just the traffic stops as well. One defense attorney representing a man accused of murder is trying to argue that he deserves to be informed if any of the officers caught in the audit are involved in his client's case.
"He suggested other defense attorneys might do the same. It's a valid question – if these officers can't be trusted to report traffic incidents honestly, how can they be trusted with more critical cases?" asked Jeff Charles, writing for Red State.
Brown University sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve agrees.
"If we can't trust them for traffic tickets, how are we going to trust them for cases like sexual assault, or murder," she said.
Another concern is that, if hundreds of police officers were fabricating traffic stops on the regular without any accountability, what other questionable things are Connecticut police officers doing in violation of the law?
"It is not beyond the realm of possibility to speculate that at least some of these officers might abuse their authority in a way that violates people's rights," Charles further writes. "If there is no real oversight, what is to keep them from doing so?"
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