Above: Reason TV reports on the firing of Auburn police officer Justin Hanners
A video report by Reason TV regarding the firing of former Auburn, Alabama police officer Justin Hanners is making the rounds on social media this week.
According to Reason’s Tracy Oppenheimer, “after the arrival of a new police chief in 2010, the department entered an era of ticket quotas and worse.” Oppenheimer says that “Hanners blew the whistle on the department’s tactics and was eventually fired for refusing to comply and keep quiet.” Tommy Dawson was named police chief in 2010 but he has since retired.
Officer Hanners made audio recordings of police department meetings during which his Sergeant, Terry Neal, instructed officers to make at least 100 “contacts” per month, split between warnings, citations, field interviews and arrests.
“Officers will have 100 contacts per month, minimum,” Neal is recorded saying. “40 of those may be warnings for traffic. The other 60 will be divided between traffic citations, non-traffic citations, field interviews and custodial arrests. Do not be the one who does not get 100.”
Hanners believes that is an astronomical number of contacts for each officer to make in a town the size of Auburn.
“That’s 72,000 contacts a year in, like, a 50,000 person town,” Hanners quipped.
In another recording, Sgt. Neal encouraged his officers to take advantage of the weekend crowds and “put some asses in jail.”
“Let’s go out here and make some contacts, put some asses in jail, write some tickets and all that neat, fun stuff we signed up to do when we signed up to do this job,” Neal is recorded saying.
Hanners disagreed with that being the reason he and his former police department colleagues had signed up for the job.
“The role of policy in society, I believe, are to interfere with the lives of people as little as possible… but protect them from the one percent element that wants to victimize them,” Hanners told Reason TV. “Let them be free to live their lives, but protect the people and property — that’s what they pay us to do.”
Hanners believes the competition cultivated by his superiors ultimately led to an out-of-control police force bent on seeing who could harass the public the most.
“The officer who wrote the most tickets and the one who came in second were given gift cards for like steak dinners and things like that,” Hanners said. “Stg. Neal started instructing me and my partner to arrest people that we didn’t feel like broke the law.”
Hanners sent a formal grievance to the director of public safety. He said he was pressured to drop his complaints, but ended up being fired for violating a gag order when he kept pushing.
When asked why the department was so insistent on increasing the number of tickets officers were writing, Hanners said he believes it was revenue driven. “At the same time their trying to raise property taxes…and sales taxes… They’re pushing us to get more tickets,” he said.
Radley Balko, an investigative reporter and author of the new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, says that quotas aren’t just a nuisance, they infringe on public safety.
“You have a policy that encourages police to create petty crimes and ignore serious crimes, and that’s clearly the opposite of what we want our police to be doing,” Balko said.
But Hanners said he believes things will only change when people step up and hold their elected leaders accountable.
“Once the people know they can hold their elected officials accountable, it’ll change. Officers have tried for years to change it from the inside… What you end up with is a police department where the good officers have been run off, and you have a bunch of officers just willing to play the game. They want to be the bullies. They want to show how bad they are with a badge. That’s what you get left with.”
Paul Register is now the Auburn Chief of Police. A call from Yellowhammer requesting comment from the Auburn Police Department was not immediately returned.
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