Ex-officers' false reports on ticketing called 'vast'
By Lance Benzel, The Gazette
Published July 14, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
Two former motorcycle officers faulted for exaggerating the number of tickets they wrote engaged in deceptions "so vast and so diverse they are difficult to describe adequately," Colorado Springs police said in a newly released document summarizing the probe that led to the officers' retirement.
The police department previously reported that the former officers, Elvin Hill and Dan Myers, shared credit for tickets in a bid to claim work they hadn't done during a two-month period beginning in January. The officers were allowed to retire July 2 before they were disciplined, police said.
A summary of the internal investigation - obtained through an open-records request - alleges that the officers reported they wrote 407 tickets when only 197 were served. It also contains previously unreported allegations suggesting that the scope of the officers' alleged misconduct was wider than what had been suggested.
According to the summary, the officers claimed credit internally for canceled citations, and they manipulated records to falsely claim that some of their tickets were written in high-priority enforcement zones.
"In fact, it seems that additional unexpected discrepancies and deceptive practices are discovered each time the Daily Activity Reports are examined," the summary states. "As a result, it is possible that not every nuance of their improper reporting practices has been discovered, even now."
The ruse did not involve issuing phony tickets, police said. But prosecutors in Colorado Springs were to send letters to more than 400 people who were ticketed by the officers to notify them of the abuses.
The case against Hill and Myers raised new questions about how police direct traffic patrols, particularly with regard to tickets. In response to an open-records request, police on Friday afternoon released documents showing they expect motorcycle officers to write a minimum of 11 tickets a day and patrol officers to issue one ticket a day.
But Police Chief Richard Myers described those numbers as performance objectives, not requirements.
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