Katy - absurd traffic citation frequency in May
It’s May again, and I'm sure you all and many Katy/West Houston residents have noticed the absolutely absurd increase in the Sheriff's Department with their radars out booking every person they possibly can for traffic citations. and the pattern is impossible to ignore. Across Katy, the surrounding areas of Fort Bend and Harris County, and the feeder roads into Houston, and even in residential areas, cops are sitting in wait at every fucking intersection, willing to steal from their neighbors to fulfill what seems like their yearly quota. Pull-overs are constant, and citations are being issued for the most minor infractions - even driving less than 5 miles over the speed limit, barely rolling stops, and technical lane movements that pose no actual risk to public safety. There is actually a cop behind my house right now, and in the last hour has pulled over 5 separate people at the residential intersection, whereas throughout the rest of the year you hardly see anyone get pulled over here.
This is not a coincidence. It is the cartoonish incrrase in booking residents for minor traffic violations that the sheriff's department seems to engage at this time EVERY year. In this fucking economy, at this time, when most working class people can barely pay rent or put food ont the table, when gas prices are still soaring and basic necessities like groceries seem to be at an all-time high, these departments, that consist of some of the more highly paid workers by the way in proportion to their education, are systematically extracting money from the very people least equipped to absorb it.
This practice is not public safety. It is revenue generation disguised as enforcement. The moral problem is straightforward: when police funding and performance evaluations are tied to citation volume, departments have a perverse incentive to treat citizens as funding sources rather than constituents to be protected. In Katy and west Houston, that incentive is clearly visible right now.
Compounding the absurdity of this injustice is the department’s well-documented performance in actual emergencies. Response times for property crimes, disturbances, and other calls for service are absurd. One look at nextdoor will show you that residents of Katy constantly report long delays before deputies arrive, followed by minimal follow-up and rare positive outcomes in a actually finding perpetrators or crimes. Yet when it comes to sitting on intersection shoulders with radar or conducting saturation patrols for minor violations, resources materialize immediately.
This disparity is absurd: the public is asked to fund well-compensated departments with generous pensions through high taxes and funding diverted from other areas, only to face aggressive ticketing campaigns that feel like harassment rather than protection. Drivers in Katy are now more anxious, more distracted by the fear of minor infractions, and many financially worse off, all while actual crime and danger to public safety is still rampant.
If you get stopped, be polite and follow directions but don't agree to or confirm anything and don't give away any information that woule make it harder to fight tickets later. I highly recommend you all to find some well-known law firm that deals in traffic citation deferral such as Gilligan and Susso & Susso, and drive safe (although that doesn't seem to matter in quota month anyway)