San Francisco's Traffic Tickets Helping with Budget Problems

A recent spike in traffic tickets issued by the San Francisco Police Department, has added more than $1 million to the city’s coffers and is obviously a significant help to the budget deficit. Still, city officials claim that one thing has nothing to do with the other. “Was that some kind of plot to increase revenue for the city? I can sit here and say, absolutely not,” SFPD Deputy Chief John Murphy said. Some local residents disagree. “I think it’s out of control. It’s criminal,” said a man who works on the Broadway strip. According to Deputy Chief Murphy, the SFPD deployed a “violence reduction unit” two years ago – and that is the reason for the uptick in tickets. “So the officers were stopping the vehicles, they’re talking the conveyance away and by taking that conveyance away, they were preventing drive-by shootings.”