SPRINGFIELD – Police chiefs must not include tickets in performance evaluations, Illinois Supreme Court Justices ruled on Nov. 19.
They affirmed Fifth District appellate judges who found that a policy awarding points for tickets does exactly what statute prohibits.
The Illinois Police Chiefs Association defended the policy, but the Justices advised them to address their argument to legislators.
Illinois Municipal Code prohibits ticket quotas.
It allows chiefs to count “points of contact,” but provides that these shall not include either the issuance of citations or the number of citations.
Chiefs have responded by awarding points for enough contacts to meet minimum requirements with few tickets or none.
Sparta adopted the policy in 2013, and the statewide Policemen’s Benevolent Labor Committee sued the city in Randolph County circuit court in 2017.
Associate Judge Gene Gross brought the dispute to a hearing in 2018.
Committee counsel Shane Voyles of Springfield told him a rational point system uses the particular experience of a department as a baseline.
“It’s not degrees Fahrenheit, watts, volts, horsepower, something like that,” Voyles said.
“Can’t compare Sparta to Chester, Chester to Peoria, Peoria to Chicago.”
Sparta counsel Paul Denham of Rosemont said, “The purpose of this evaluation tool is to make sure the patrol officers are staying busy.
“A patrol officer can choose to write as many citations as he or she wants or write zero citations in a given evaluation period.”
Judge Gross adopted Sparta’s argument and found the policy wasn’t unlawful.
The labor committee appealed to the Fifth District.
The police chiefs association filed a brief as friend of the court, stating their departments commonly used the same system.
Association counsel Donald Zoufal wrote, “Officers are not specifically directed or required to achieve quotas in any specific activity.”
He claimed reversal of Gross’s order would tie the hands of supervisors “and make targeted direction of officer activity in enforcement of traffic laws an impossibility.”
Fifth District judges reversed Gross in October 2019.
Justice Thomas Welch wrote, “Statutory ambiguity is not created simply because the parties disagree, and where there is no ambiguity in the statutory language, there is no basis to delve into the legislative history.”
He wrote that he failed to see how the decision would impair evaluation of officers.
Justices David Overstreet and Randy Moore concurred.
At the Supreme Court, all seven Justices reached the same conclusion.
“We must apply the statutory language as written,” wrote Justice James Kilbride.
“The number of monthly activity points is used to discipline officers and to issue awards.
“The policy, at least indirectly, may compare police officers based on the number of citations issued because points are awarded for citations and officers are compared and receive awards based on points of contact.
“By granting awards based on points of contact, the policy may provide an incentive for officers to write citations to accumulate as many points as possible.”