Former police patrolman Justin Hanners made national news when he said he was fired from the Auburn Police Division for speaking out against the department’s policy of ticket quotas, a method of requiring a predetermined number of citations to be written.
Hanners spoke to Auburn’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty on Thursday, Oct. 22.
The Auburn Police Division fired Hanners for “refusal to obey reasonable and/or necessary orders or job assignments” and “recording conversations,” based on an order released by the United States District Court which heard his case.
The district court ruled in favor of the City of Auburn after Hanners sued the city for what he said was a wrongful termination.
The ticket quota began in 2010 under former police chief Tommy Dawson, who took office in the same year, according to Hanners. Hanners said the ticket quota is disproportional to the population of Auburn and violates the rights of its citizens.
The population of the City of Auburn is only around 60,000 people during the school year, and 25,000 of the population is composed of Auburn students.
The APD and Chief Paul Register have said that the quotas do not exist.
According to Hanners, the APD targets students, specifically freshmen, disproportionally. Hanners played an audio recording at the meeting, which he said proves his claims.
“We get a whole new group of idiots that come here every fall,” said a voice on a recording played by Hanners at Thursday night’s meeting. “We need to stay on them, you know – learn them quick, learn them early.”
Hanners said the recording was of Lt. Matthew Coffey of the Auburn Police Division.
“Talk about populations, if you do the math, they want 100 contacts per officer,” Hanners said. “If you multiply that by every officer, that’s 72,000 contacts per year.”
A contact is a formal interaction between a police officer and a citizen. Those interactions can be tickets, arrests, field interviews or a warning. Hanners said the department gave gift cards to the officers who made the most contacts and interactions.
Hanners said he made it known he had a moral objection to the quota system and his objection, which he said later got him fired, went largely unheard.
Hanners is a veteran of the United States Air Force, where he served four years in the USAF Security Forces; he was based in Afghanistan. After his military service, he applied for a job with the APD where he was subsequently hired and employed from 2006-early 2013.
“[Hanners] presented a lot of good information about why many people kind of feel disenfranchised by the way policing works throughout the city,” said Tyler Bradshaw, senior in mechanical engineering. “There is the fact that this group of people who are supposed to be protecting are instead being used to exploit people for gain.”
Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian political organization, is known for its calls for criminal justice reform.
Hanners told those in attendance that the city has ticket quotas not to prevent crime, but to gain revenue.
“Basically, they’re using the monopoly of force, point of a gun, to take money from me for their own gain,” Bradshaw said.
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