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by RyanIyengar 4986 days ago
Well out of the 7 times a 31st appears, 2 of them are holidays, Halloween and New Year's Eve. I would have guessed that this might increase ticket issuance, but I suppose it's possible it could have a negative impact as well.
3 comments
rpicard 4986 days ago
I'm playing around with the data[1] and it looks like you may be on to something. October 31, 2010 (Halloween) had 122 tickets, while August 31, 2010 had 531!

[1] https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Financial/Parking-Citations-2...

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ShabbyDoo 4986 days ago
Do union-required holiday pay rates cause the PD to only staff for minimum requirements? Perhaps the PD simply staffs at minimum levels because most officers want those days off? Do holidays cause so many "real" crimes that the police don't have time to write tickets?
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bigiain 4986 days ago
I'd guess that at least for the new years eve 31st, there's be more staff rostered on than usual, but probably fewer then normal doing regular traffic patrol. I suspect Halloween is similar. I've got no data or evidence to back that up (and even less for Halloween, since I'm not in the US), but I'd probably choose to remove those two days as "exceptions". Filtering out other known public holidays might improve the signal to noise ratio of the data too...
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DrStalker 4986 days ago
In Australia long weekends usually trigger double demerits and an increase in visible police, especially roadside breath testing. I don't know what it does to the ticket rates but the effect on every driver I know personally is to be extra cautious, which would reduce ticket rates.
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bigiain 4986 days ago
"which would reduce ticket rates"

Maybe, there's a possibility of increased ticket rates too due to the extra driving km done by people "going away for the long weekend", and by drivers being less experienced on the routes they're driving (compared to regular commuter traffic who know exactly where the speed/redlight cameras are, and are usually in heavy enough traffic to not be able to exceed the speed limit).

I wonder if there's local (NSW, Australia - for me) tickets-by-day day available to analyse?

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pheon 4986 days ago
i think your analysis is slightly flawed - you have no anchor / point of reference.

maybe a better question would be, for ever hour worked, how many ticks are issued. aka normalizing against the number of patrol men/women active for a day or an hour.

e.g. more police on patrol == more tickets, but does not mean each police man/woman is biased to issue more tickets near the end of the month to meet their quota.

also consider counting backwards. e.g end of the month = 0, 1 day before end of month = 1, 2 days before end of month = 2 etc..

my 2cents.

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