By Chris Powell
Everybody seems to be investigating the traffic ticket scandal in the Connecticut state police, exposed by an audit a month ago. It contended that about 25,000 tickets state troopers wrote over several years were phony — reported only to a state police database, not to the Judicial Department, which would have triggered prosecution of drivers.
Speculation has offered two possible explanations for the fraud.
First, more plausible, is that troopers wrote the phony tickets to make themselves seem busier and more effective so they could gain preference for pension-inflating overtime, promotions, and such.
Second, more sinister, is that troopers were trying to mask their prejudice against minorities, using the phony tickets to report more traffic stops of white motorists than they were actually making so their disproportionate stops of minority motorists would not be noticed.
The racial census state law required with state police traffic tickets was worth doing for public confidence even if it was based on the false premise that any racial disparity in criminal justice signifies racism. For crime itself long has been racially disproportionate, less because of racism in the criminal-justice system than because poverty and its pathologies long have been racially disproportionate.
Because crime is racially disproportionate, some racial disproportion with tickets had to be expected. But how much, and how much would trigger screams of racism? And could troopers have used the phony tickets somewhat innocently — to protect themselves against complaints of racism amid disproportionate traffic violations by minorities?
Misconduct on the job for financial gain will always be a temptation. But misconduct to conceal one’s racism on the job would be malicious and vile, the more so because it would require much work beyond what might be necessary for monetary gain.
*
What is especially disturbing here is that while state police executives already had a month to look into the ticket audit, at a General Assembly hearing last week they could not or would not explain what, if anything, their own investigation had discovered, though every ticket is coded so that its issuing trooper can be identified.
Some troopers who issued fake tickets surely could have been questioned by their supervisors prior to the legislative hearing. Were they? Did they respond? If so, what did they say? If not, did they invoke a union contract right against accountability?
State police executives were not prepared to say much more than that their investigation continues, along with everyone else’s.
Governor Lamont and some legislators say troopers who forged tickets should be fired. But whether troopers or other unionized state employees can be fired for anything is always a question. Union contracts — negotiated by the governor, ratified by the legislature, and adjudicated by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration — are designed to prevent any state employee from being fired and to ensure that any serious discipline is reduced to a slap on the wrist with loads of back pay once the public has mostly forgotten about the misconduct at issue.
Such protection of unionized government employees against accountability is the liberal Democratic way, since those employees are the core of the party’s political army. But the liberal Democratic way is also to clamor constantly about racism to keep members of racial minorities thinking that they are eternally victims and in need of special protection from liberal Democratic administrations.
*
This incongruity may be enough to justify hoping that racism will be the explanation for the fake tickets. For to overcome racism Connecticut needs to audit far more than those tickets.
It needs to audit all government policies bearing on racial minorities. It needs to ask: Why is life in the cities not improving? Why is the racial performance gap in public education never closed? Why does poverty remain so racially disproportionate? Why are so many more minority kids growing up without fathers? Why are so many more minority kids chronically absent from school?
Racism in traffic tickets is the least of the problem.
—–
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
-END-
Chris Powell column 