‘High likelihood’ hundreds of CT state police troopers falsified thousands of traffic tickets, auditor says

In 2018, 4 troopers were caught submitting fake tickets in order to boost their productivity numbers

The department sustained, or upheld, internal charges into each of the four officers, Troopers Timothy Bentley, Noah Gouveia, Kevin Moore and Daniel Richter, for committing an intentional act of deception, using his position for his own benefit and misuse of state equipment.

Each of those three internal charges is considered to be a “serious offense” that can result in troopers being fired.

But Moore, who had two additional charges sustained, received a 10-day suspension and Richter a two-day suspension. Both were transferred to new units. Bentley and Gouveia retired as the investigations began, avoiding discipline altogether; they are now collecting pensions of more than $70,000 annually.

They committed fraud and were allowed to just retire.

The findings, presented at a public meeting Wednesday, allege systemic violations of state law and that the misreporting skewed racial profiling data making it appear troopers ticketed more white drivers and fewer minority motorists than they really did

The report found there was a “high likelihood” at least 25,966 tickets were falsified between 2014 and 2021. Another 32,587 records over those years showed significant inaccuracies and auditors believe many of those are likely to be false as well.

The findings showed significant numbers of false and inaccurate tickets were submitted by up to nearly one quarter of the 1,301 troopers who wrote tickets for the state’s largest law enforcement agency during those years.

Still, he took issue with the tickets being called "false" or characterized as "inappropriate,” and he emphasized how the report found the discrepancies had declined over the years and urged the public to not rush to judgment.

“I wouldn't jump to conclusions,” said Lamont, who became governor in 2019, a few months after state police found four troopers had been fabricating tickets. "There's no indication that was purposeful. A lot of it may have been inadvertent. We've got to look into that.”

After all this time, I don’t understand why anyone would, in the year two thousand and twenty three, expect us to buy the “maybe it was just accidental” shtick. It’s 25k fake records that just happened to tip the states racial profiling data away from the conclusion that the state police are definitely racially profiling. 25k is not accidental it’s systemic

They were given a get out of jail free card and now they're committing crimes. It's a shocker.