Florida Traffic Tickets: Public Safety or Big Business
Four million – that is approximately how many traffic tickets the state of Florida issues every year. FOUR MILLION! Think about what a huge number that is. That averages out to almost 60, 000 traffic citations for every county in the state, although the amount number issued differs tremendously from county to county. Some counties issue a great deal more traffic citations than others based upon population and how stringent the law enforcement is in that specific county, but no matter how you look at it, that equals a huge amount of revenue for the state.traffic ticket miami
Keep in mind that most of these tickets are the result of speeding, therefore, they have widely varying fines depending upon the county you are in when you get the speeding citation and by how much you have exceeded the speed limit. When you combine the millions of traffic citations written and factor in the speeding ticket variable, this creates quite a prolific industry. In fact, although traffic citations are a multi-billion dollar industry on a national scale, one television investigation determined that from early 2011 through early 2012, the state of Florida alone received more than $101 million in traffic fines. This is just the amount that the state got and doesn’t include whatever portion of the traffic fines that was divided up with the cities or counties in which they were written.
Law enforcement agencies use much of these funds to hire more enforcement officers to keep the wheels of this financial machine moving, and it’s not just the law enforcement agencies who write traffic citations that realize financial rewards either. When you consider the number of entities that benefit from this revenue, it is easy to see that this is a profit-motivated system that thrives off of what is often just human error. Public and private agencies, just like law enforcement, get a piece of this financial pie. These agencies include court systems, city and state governments, insurance companies, and traffic ticket camera companies. Here just a few of the ways that these profits are used:
