It's All About Funneling Your Money Into The City's Coffers
Andrew Blankenstein writes at the LA Times that LA traffic officers are suing the city because their supervisors berated and punished them for not meeting ticketing quotas:

Ten Los Angeles motor officers have sued the city alleging that their supervisors retaliated against them for resisting traffic-ticket quotas.

Attorney Matthew S. McNicholas said the officers would present evidence "that certain officers were prevented from taking their selected vacation despite being more senior officers and were denied overtime."

Officers who failed to meet daily and weekly ticket quotas were regularly berated in a small room known as the "room of doom," he said.

He added that "when one officer began detailing the quota enforcement in the daily log, he was immediately reprimanded and interrogated by supervisors and that this represented a pattern of ongoing conduct."

...In April, a jury awarded a pair of LAPD officers -- also assigned to West Traffic Division -- $2 million after determining that supervisors had retaliated against the officers for complaining about alleged traffic-ticket quotas.

Howard Chan and David Benioff, both veteran motorcycle officers, sued the department in 2009, alleging that they had been punished with bogus performance reviews, threats of reassignment and other forms of harassment after objecting to demands from commanding officers that they write a certain number of tickets each day, according to the civil action.

That case dated back to late 2006, when command of the traffic division was handed over to Capt. Nancy Lauer. Chan and Benioff alleged in their lawsuit that Lauer and her sergeants and lieutenants made it clear to officers that they were expected to write at least 18 tickets each day. The number of tickets an officer wrote was recorded on their performance evaluation, the suit alleged.

Best way to pay that $2 million? Up the cost of parking tickets! Maybe from $65 for a no parking/street cleaning ticket to $165.

Excerpt from the comment I left on the LAT story:

Next time you get a parking ticket, note how much it is. The city and state and country are going broke thanks to Big Government, and we all voted it in. (And hey, somebody's got to pay for Villaraigosa's junkets -- why not you with your broken tail light, Bub?)