Police Scandal Leads to 6K Nixed Speeding Tickets

Some 6,150 speeding-ticket recipients are getting off easy: Their cases are being dismissed because they may have been victims of police misconduct, according to an investigation. Four Houston officers were found to have falsely reported each other as witnesses on tickets they wrote, investigators say. In some cases, one officer allegedly reported another as a witness—when the second cop was elsewhere writing up a ticket of his own, KHOU reported last month.

Why would they do this? To get paid overtime when they testified about the alleged speeding, KHOU reports. Not all the thousands of tickets are necessarily problematic, but Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland says it's better to dismiss them all than to find someone guilty incorrectly. "If there's any perception that these citations may be tainted or someone questions the legitimacy or credibility of those, it is better to dismiss them," he says. Three of the officers—John Garcia, Robert Manzanales, and Gregory Rosa—are currently under investigation; the other, Rudolph Farias, killed himself following the emergence of the allegations, KHOU notes. (More Houston stories.)