Federal Prosecutors say that troopers from the former Troop E not only had an overtime billing scheme, but also required troopers to write up at least eight traffic citations during an overtime shift. Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with WGBH News legal analyst and Northeastern law professor Daniel Medwed to talk about the latest twist in the on-going investigation into the disbanded troop, and the legality of ticket quotas and similar practices. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Joe Mathieu: To be fair, state police deny all of this. They say Troop E did not have a quota system. But assuming it is true, would that be illegal if not unconstitutional?

Daniel Medwed: Well on the one hand, there is strong case law suggesting that a formal quota system like this could be illegal. Specifically, there's a 2005 case involving the Newton Police Department in which the Massachusetts Appeals Court interpreted our laws to effectively bar a police chief from directly interfering with a traffic cop's discretion in issuing tickets. I think the reasoning of that case could apply to ban this particular practice, too. But on the other hand, there's a gray area here: situations where there's not an explicit policy – a quota, per se – but more like an implied practice [or] an expectation that officers will write up a certain number of tickets or make a certain number of arrests. We've had a bunch of rumors about this in Massachusetts for years, and it's come to a head in places like Dracut, Sutton and Abington in the last four years.

Mathieu: What's the benefit beyond punishing us or having fun with drivers to actually have a quota system at a police department?

Medwed: Not to be too cynical, but when it comes to issuing tickets it's revenue generation.

Mathieu: So they actually make money off of this?

Medwed: They can make money. You can pad your budget, I guess. But there might be some good reasons, not to be too cynical. I'll get out of the cynical comfort zone for a moment. I think it could be part of this general movement toward metrics in assessing employee performance, which is sweeping the nation. In a job like law enforcement where performance is otherwise difficult to gauge – it's so subjective, after all – it makes sense for the brass to gravitate to hard data: number of arrests, number of tickets as a way of quantifying performance and determining whether someone does or does not deserve a promotion. But obviously, this has its downside because these metrics are harming all of us. We have to pay tickets, we get arrested. That's worrisome.

Mathieu: And in this case it was an incentive to get these lucrative overtime shifts.

Medwed: It's a double incentive there. You get paid overtime and then the department, or in this case the state police, gets the revenue from the tickets.

Mathieu: Daniel, have you run into stuff like this personally? What's the worst story you've heard about a quota system or similar policies?

Medwed: Perhaps the worst one I've heard is an informal arrangement from Illinois. Many years ago, a bunch of prosecutors banded together to develop what they called the "Two-Ton Contest." Here's how it worked: the first prosecutor to convict 4,000 pounds – two tons of defendant flesh by weight of the defendants – won. So instead of angling for the most serious cases, they were angling for the heaviest defendants based on their listed weights on the arrest reports. [It's] absurd.

Mathieu: That's almost worse than ticket quotas.

Medwed: It almost is.