The St. Louis community is not the only place that has raised red flags when it comes to issuing too many traffic tickets.  The state attorney general has filed a lawsuit against the City of Marshfield for doing just that.

AG Eric Schmitt announced a lawsuit in early December against the city of Marshfield for enforcing a ticket quota on police officers. The suit also alleges that the town’s police chief attempted to intimidate potential whistleblowers.

The suit says that the police chief began in January 2019 posting monthly citation numbers on a department bulletin board and stopped after the city of Diamond, Missouri was sued for illegally putting ticket quotas on officers.

The suit outlines that if an officer wrote less than 16 tickets in a month, they would have to face the Chief to discuss performance issues.

To support the lawsuit, the AG states that citations from officers increased from 383 in 2016 to 1,386 in 2018. Warnings from officers fell from 982 to 767 in the same time period; and the number of highway stops in the same time period went from zero to 241.

In response, the City of Marshfield says the lawsuit is meritless, and that the increase in tickets can be directly attributed to the City hiring additional officers in each of the last two years as their community grew in size. Also, it noted that radar guns were added in March 2018 to all police vehicle whereas only one had a radar gun prior to that.