Is It Really All About Safety?

That's been the Washington State Patrol mantra around the "Click it or Ticket" law.

Of course, now we come to find that writing 3 seatbelt tickets an hour means that troopers can "safely" pocket overtime pay.

The devil, as they say, is in the details.

And the details are in a contract with the State Traffic Safety Commission and law enforcement agencies, including the state patrol.

The contract spells out how federal money is funneled into enforcement of the seat-belt law: write "x" number of tickets and the state gets federal grant money, which in turn can be divvied up as overtime to law enforcement.

"x" in this case is 3; 3 tickets per hour, per trooper.

Naturally, official folks are falling all over their thesauruses trying to come up with another word for "quota."

My favorite so far in "minimal expectation."

I'm hoping someone will eventually use "harmonic proportion."

State patrol officials have said the whole thing seems quite reasonable to them.

I'll bet it does.

I mean, what could POSSIBLY be unreasonable about putting a bounty on unbuckled drivers.

For their own safety, of course.

Want to share your thoughts with Ken Schram? You can e-mail him at kenschram@komo4news.com