Menifee police apparently wrote too many tickets and broke state laws regarding revenue generated from traffic stops.
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Venture about 40 north of Little Rock, Arkansas and you’ll come across a small town called Menifee. And we do mean small town, as the population was just 274 residents as of the latest US Census data from 2020. It encompasses a stretch of US Highway 64, with Interstate 40 located just to the north. But regardless of the roadway, local police can’t write any speeding tickets for an entire year. Apparently, they’ve already written too many.
How many tickets are we talking about? A report from THV11 news in Little Rock doesn’t confirm a specific total, but the news outlet received a list of officer ticket activity for the Menifee Police Department going back to 2018. The list is presented in the video at the top of this article, revealing the number of tickets written by individual officers including 771 citations from a single person in that 4.5-year span. We don’t know if there’s additional data beyond that page, but just adding up those numbers, you get 2,318 tickets from January 1, 2018 through August 24, 2022.
As a result, Menifee pulled in quite a bit of ticket-generated income. THV11 reports a 2020 audit of the town revealed over $120,000 from traffic citations, which accounted for nearly 50 percent of Menifee’s revenue. Meanwhile, Arkansas apparently has a law on the books discouraging speed traps, stating that traffic tickets can only account for 30 percent of a city’s total revenue. Hence the ticket ban, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least point out the irony of Menifee police getting busted for going nearly double over the limit.
According to THV11, Menifee’s mayor claims he told the police chief to not write tickets for anything less than 10 mph over the speed limit, but they were doing it anyway. Meanwhile, the police chief says the 2020 audit included money collected on older dues and fees from previous years, making it look like more revenue was generated in 2020.
Whatever the case, local police for the 2.2 square-mile town are no longer allowed to write speeding tickets. Don’t go thinking you can zip through with a lead foot, however. While local police are barred from citing speeders, county and state officers are still very much on the job.