California IN BRIEF : SAN DIEGO : Traffic Ticket Count Padded, Probe Finds

At least seven San Diego traffic officers are under an internal investigation for allegedly padding their daily activity logs with scores of traffic citations that don’t exist and administrators have recommended that at least one be fired, police officials said. After conducting an audit, which included examining thousands of traffic tickets by hand, police supervisors discovered a significant disparity between tickets written and the numbers recorded by officers in their daily logbooks over a three-month period. In one case, a traffic officer logged 170 tickets over three months that apparently were never written. Some officers, none of whom have been identified, have apparently told their superiors that they faced intense pressure to write a daily quota of at least 20 tickets, sources said. Capt. Nancy Goodrich, the head of the traffic division, confirmed Tuesday that her office was conducting a “routine audit” of traffic citations and had recommended firing an officer.