Odds Of Getting A Traffic Ticket Depend On Where You’re Pulled Over

By Staff in News on Sep 19, 2009 9:00PM

In what seems like sort of an obvious story, the likelihood of getting a traffic ticket or walking away with just a citation in the Chicagoland area is based on where you get pulled over.

According to state data analyzed by the Chicago Sun-Times, at least nine out of 10 drivers received a ticket in 2008 in 35 different suburbs. For example, in the south suburb University Park, each driver stopped there in 2008 was ticketed. Compare this to Chicago, where only 74 percent of motorists stopped by police walk away with tickets, or to the state of Illinois overall where the average is only 61 percent.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, University Park Police Chief Melvin Easley claimed that residents had gone so far as to ask police to crack down on reckless drivers. "Yes, we have gone proactive," he said. "We had requests by our citizens to deal with speeders. Obviously that became a priority, and we made a lot of stops."

In the suburb of Richton Park, Police Chief Vito Mannino found that some of his officers were forgetting to record stops when they didn’t issue tickets, resulting in the data to show that 99.8 percent of drivers that were pulled over received tickets when the percentage was actually lower than that. Mannino speculated to the Sun-Times that this might be a problem in other suburban towns too.

Post by Anna Deem