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.
Read Article