CT Insider, September 2023
Experts say investigators probing the Connecticut State Police traffic ticket scandal should use data from GPS systems in department cruisers to help determine if thousands of suspected tickets were fraudulent. The GPS data can verify whether a trooper’s vehicle was at the location they listed on a ticket when the infraction was issued – offering a telling indicator of whether the trooper inputted false information on the citation.
If tickets are found to be falsified, GPS data could also point investigators toward the motivation for doing so. Other police departments with false ticketing scandals have used GPS data to uncover troopers’ cruisers were parked at their homes at times they claimed to be patrolling highways and writing tickets.
“There is no reason the state police could not pull the data to see where the officers were when they wrote some of these tickets,” said Matthew Ross, an associate professor at Northeastern University who co-authored a recent audit with the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project which found a “high likelihood” that hundreds of troopers falsified thousands of tickets.
