Scandal has rocked the Connecticut State Police following the publication of a damning audit that found that troopers were inflating their traffic ticket numbers and under-reporting real tickets to racialized drivers.
The audit was authored by the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, which reviewed more than 800,000 infractions that were issued between 2014 and 2021. It showed that troopers over reported by nearly 26,000 tickets in that time. Most of the fake tickets were issued to white motorists.
Matthew Ross, a professor at Northeastern who was one of the audit’s lead authors, told Rolling Stone that it’s hard to isolate what was motivating individual troopers. In a disproportionate number of cases, the fake tickets were issued to white drivers at midnight, the two first options on the drop-down menu in the reporting system.
“Basically, they were going through and checking the first box, and not really putting in any information,” Ross said. Meanwhile, WFSB reports that troopers who appear more productive are often eligible for federally funded overtime.
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However, the tickets were filed to a system designed specifically to track and combat racial profiling in the Connecticut State Police. That means that, whatever their intentions, the troopers’ malfeasance has had the effect of making the department look like it was stopping many more white people than it actually was, skewing data.
More alarmingly, still, the audit found that 500 troopers failed to report 16,000 real traffic stops involving Black and Hispanic drivers in the racial database, further skewing data. The failure to record this data is a violation of state law, the auditors said.
“It’s hard to think of a reason for doing that,” Ross said, “other than not wanting to report certain stops to the racial profiling system.”
One trooper filed 1,350 fake tickets
In the most shocking case, a single unidentified trooper in Bridgeport was responsible for 1,350 fake tickets, accounting for a staggering 83 percent of their overall infraction record, the audit found.
The audit has now been handed over to the state attorney’s office and the Connecticut State Police, which is conducting an internal investigation. They have refused to comment on the probe, which is still ongoing, meaning that the status of the trooper who filed 1,350 fake tickets is not known.
The pressure is on to do something about these cases, because the statute of limitations is five years. WFSB reports that some of the troopers could face felony forgery charges if the state attorney’s office decides to bring them.
