Drive on a winding rural road in southern Middlesex County and you might eventually see a sign that says: "Helmetta Welcomes You."

Only a few yards after that sign, you'll see a second, smaller sign that foreshadows the kind of welcome you might get – if you're a visitor: "REDUCED SPEED AHEAD."

Hundreds of out-of-towners who didn't pay attention to that second sign over the past few years have received speeding tickets.

But very few of the borough's own residents have met the same fate.

Between September of 2011 and March of 2013, Helmetta police gave 222 speeding tickets in this square-mile borough in southern Middlesex County, according to police department records.

Of those, only two lived in Helmetta.

The statistics, which the top civilian police official in town acknowledged were "startling," provide evidence for longstanding allegations that borough police targeted out-of-town residents for speeding tickets while turning a blind eye to borough speedsters, a policy that would violate the U.S. Constitution. It's not exactly a smoking radar gun, but borough officials are struggling to come up with an explanation.

"I wish I had a magic answer; I don’t," said Greg Bennett, the director of Helmetta's police department. "The numbers speak for themselves."

Bennett can say this: After he took over the police director job 11 months ago, he found no written policy that discouraged his officers from ticketing borough residents for speeding, and he hasn't given any such orders. When the first allegations that borough cops targeted out-of-towners surfaced in March, he met with every police officer on the force and asked whether they'd ever been told they shouldn't ticket Helmetta residents. They all said no, Bennett said.

He said most people in Helmetta know that the police department and its six officers aggressively enforce traffic laws. That might help explain the discrepancy, he said: Helmetta residents know the rules, and they are less likely to speed.

And yet the numbers, which are now public for the first time, are glaring.

Consider this: Two out of 222 is less than 1 percent. The borough gave more speeding tickets to Monroe Township residents (30) than to Helmetta residents. To put that in perspective, in that time period, the borough gave speeding tickets to two Florida residents and two Maryland residents.

NJ.com obtained the records under an open records request, filed after the first allegations hit the press earlier this year. Bennett, who is the top civilian police official in town, tasked one of the officers with making the hundreds of photocopies required to carry out the task. When the officer came back to him with the statistics showing how few Helmetta residents had been ticketed, his immediate reaction was: "OK, what are the real numbers?"

He thought the officer was joking.

The disparity in speeding tickets will fuel widely held suspicions that some small towns are inveterate speed traps, seeking to squeeze every penny out of the pockets of passing motorists to help cushion local coffers. But it only came to light here because of infighting in Borough Hall.

In January of this year, Bennett's predecessor as police director, Andrew Ely, filed suit against his old employer.

Ely was hired as the top civilian official in the police department at the beginning of 2011. But by September of that year, Ely says Mayor Nancy Martin stripped him of his duties.

Then, in December of 2011, Martin allegedly ordered police to issue speeding tickets to all out-of-town residents going at least 5 miles per hour over the speed limit, but to give only warnings to Helmetta residents.

Ely says he sent a letter to the Middlesex County prosecutor outlining the mayor's alleged order shortly after (the prosecutor's office declined to comment). That's when the dispute between the mayor and the police director escalated: Ely says he was literally locked out of his office, and the borough withheld his paycheck after he blew the whistle on the speeding tickets. He resigned in the summer of 2012, citing harassment.

The allegations are outlined in Ely's whistleblower suit. Reached by NJ.com, Ely referred comment to his lawyer, Robert Tandy. Tandy said that the numbers prove that police followed Martin's orders.

"I think the numbers speak for themselves. It’s very clear," Tandy said. "This was the directive issued down from the mayor, and the police officers acted upon the directive from the mayor."

The borough's own records indicate that even before Martin's alleged directive, in December 2011, Helmetta police did not ticket Helmetta residents nearly as much as out-of-towners: None of the 55 speeding tickets given in September, October, November and December of 2011 were given to Helmetta residents. (Helmetta is in southern MIddlesex County, near Monroe Township and East Brunswick, and just west of Spotswood.)

The former police director's lawyer said he has an audio recording of Martin making the order not to ticket borough residents, but declined to share it with NJ.com, citing professional standards for attorneys.

Martin did not respond to numerous requests for comment, because she's named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along with the police department and the borough itself, according to Bennett.

Issuing speeding tickets based on residency is a violation of equal protection and due process under the U.S. Constitution, Tandy says. (Bennett, the current police director, doesn't dispute that such a policy or practice, if it existed, would be unconstitutional.)

Professor Frank Askin, the director of the Constitutional Rights Clinic at the Rutgers Law School in Newark, said that he believes targeting out-of-town residents for speeding tickets while letting borough residents off the hook violates equal protection provisions in the U.S. Constitution. And out-of-town residents who have gotten tickets might have a case to have their tickets thrown out in a class-action suit.

"It’d be an interesting case for some enterprising lawyer down there," Askin said.

Professor Thomas Healy of the Seton Hall Law School agreed that it would be unconstitutional, on different grounds – the dormant commerce clause and the privileges and immunities clause, which, in broad terms, require that people from other states be treated the same under the law.

"It would essentially create different speed limits for people depending on whether they live locally or out of state," Healy said.

Back roads with 25 mph speed limits and a Main Street with a 40 mph limit that eventually lowers to 35 mph make up the borough's road map. It's a square-mile town with a population just over 2,000. There are no traffic lights in Helmetta, and only a few smatterings of businesses. No major roads cut through Helmetta, although many drivers use Main Street, also known as County Road 615, as a shortcut to avoid traffic on Route 130 and Route 18.

Helmetta is worlds apart from its busier neighboring towns. You get the sense that you're not in Central New Jersey but in upstate New York. Train tracks run parallel to Main Street and lead to an abandoned factory that will soon be developed into housing units. Helmetta is just a few miles from Route 18, but the hustle and bustle of suburban New Jersey does not abide. It's a small town where everyone seems to know one another.

On a fall weekday recently, people were filing in and out of Helmetta Foods, a convenience store on Main Street, a quick pit stop before they continued with their day. Brad Borghaus, who has lived in Helmetta his whole life, said that his town has a certain reputation when it comes to traffic tickets: Police strictly enforce the rules.

"It's a known fact – you don't speed through Helmetta," Borghaus said. "It's always been like that."

He got a speeding ticket 20 or 25 years ago, he said. He no longer drives because of a medical condition. He said that two Helmetta residents out of 222 speeding tickets sounded low to him, but whether it's fair would depend on context: how fast the car was going, for example.

And it doesn't surprise him that a town would lay off its own residents: Speeding tickets are a way to generate revenue, but you don't want to upset people in town.

"I think that's typical of a small town," Borghaus said.

(For the record, Bennett, the police director, objects to arguments that cops give out tickets to raise money; in his mind, they're a way of discouraging traffic violations and keeping people safe, and the world would be a better place, he said, if there were no traffic tickets given out at all because everyone followed the speed limit.)

The number of traffic tickets given by Helmetta police is on the decline, according to Bennett. He has instituted a new order that all Helmetta police drive by every home and business in town twice during their shift to increase their visibility. And police officers are stationed outside all Helmetta businesses while business owners are closing up shop at night. In the meantime, they can still run their radar guns and pull over speedsters, Bennett said, but "That’s not all we do, and I need that to be clear."

He said he's worked since he took over the top civilian police job to make sure that the policies about ticketing residents and non-residents alike is "crystal clear": You can't target out-of-towners.

"My argument is, you’re absolutely right, the numbers are very disturbing," Bennett said. "They are startling numbers, they’re surprising numbers, and I think a lot of other things are at play since then. But I don’t have anything that I can put forth to justify those numbers."