{ "id": "2001-mayjune-outside-the-gates", "slug": "2001-mayjune-outside-the-gates", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-mayjune-outside-the-gates.html", "year": 2001, "month": "May/June", "monthNum": 5, "headline": "Outside the gates", "kicker": "FIRST VENTURE", "author_name": "Brian D. Crecente", "author_title": "Reporter", "affiliation": "The Palm Beach Post", "summary": "The Palm Beach Post's investigation found that the gated city of Atlantis issued traffic tickets almost exclusively to non-residents (99.3 percent) after taking control of three boundary roads, with fine collections jumping 1,067 percent in five years. The story required extensive data collection and database analysis from court records and police files to uncover the discriminatory ticketing pattern.", "keywords": [ "tickets", "investigation", "database" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Data & Databases", "Government & Politics" ], "technologies": [ "Access", "Excel" ], "full_text": "A year of investigation, database entry and query building boiled down to just two numbers: 1,067 and 99.3. But those numbers made the story. The Palm Beach Post found that in 1997 and 1998, the tiny gated city of Atlantis quietly took control of three major roads framing its boundaries and began churning out tickets to nearly everyone but its own residents. In one year's time, 99.3 percent of all tickets written by city police went to out-of-town drivers. In the past five years, Atlantis fine collections jumped from about $5,400 to more than $63,000 - a 1,067 percent increase.\n\nDespite Florida's wonderful sunshine laws, getting to those numbers wasn't as easy as it could have been. The story began as we followed a tip from a disgruntled ex-Atlantis cop who alleged tickets were being issued on racial lines. We later found that not to be the case.\n\nMy colleague, Matt Mossman, made dozens of requests for traffic ticket data from the city, but officials said tickets weren't tracked and that there weren't any electronic records. Finally we went to the source, the Atlantis police chief, and requested copies of all traffic citations and warnings issued by the department from July 1998 to June 1999. The result of the request came in four large boxes, 1,506 tickets sorted by date and several hundred warnings.\n\nConstruction\n\nDatabase editor Christine Stapleton constructed a database in Access which included fields for everything from the officer's badge number to the specifics of the citation and when and where it was issued.\n\nMossman spent the next few months entering the data and then as his data entry drew to a close, left the paper.\n\nI was left with the enviable task of sorting through a well-organized database, filled with the sort of numbers investigative reporters dream about. There were about 2,000 records between Access and Excel tables.\n\nI knew we were on to something, but I had no idea how dramatic the numbers were going to be until I ran my first query.\n\nDigging in\n\nAfter a little fiddling around, I typed a query that would show how many of the tickets issued were to people whose driver's license showed them living anywhere but Atlantis.\n\nOf the 1,506 tickets analyzed, only 11 went to residents. The other 99.3 percent went to non-residents.\n\nWe had our story. The database also showed that the city's police seemed to spend a majority of their time outside the walls of their city, with all but 60 of the tickets written being for traffic stops on the three main roads framing the city's walls.\n\nAtlantis residents were also more likely to receive warnings than tickets when pulled over. About 78 percent of the Atlantis residents who where pulled over received warnings, while only 16 percent of the out-of-towners pulled over received warnings.\n\nIt was important not to stop with just the data we collected on speeding tickets. I also needed to understand how the city was able to annex the three roads that framed the city's walls.\n\nAfter nearly a month of talking to city, county and state officials, I discovered that the county and the state either didn't officially allow the annexations or didn't fully understand what the annexations meant. According to city records, Atlantis didn't have to do anything on the three newly-annexed streets, but write tickets. The county commissioner, after hearing this, quickly launched an investigation into the annexation and the city's policy of writing tickets outside of their city but not working crashes on those same streets.\n\nCrashes\n\nNext I went to the Palm Beach County traffic division to collect data on the number of crashes that occurred on the streets annexed by Atlantis.\n\nAgain, while I found the officials all too willing to comply with the sunshine law, the data was not in an electronic form. I found myself thumbing through oversized notebooks copying the data into my notepad, which I later transferred to Excel.\n\nThe spreadsheet showed that while Atlantis police spent a lot of time patrolling the streets for speeders, they hardly ever worked crashes that occurred there. Of the 733 crashes that occurred on those three roadways from 1996 to March 2000, Atlantis police worked three, but none of the five fatal ones.\n\nIn an interview, the police chief didn't admit to the over-enforcement, but simply said his residents didn't speed. He added that the department's written policy stated officers are supposed to spend only 30 minutes per eight-hour shift parked outside the city walls. He also said that the reason for the city's enforcement was because they wanted to reduce crashes and that cars passing his city were not only speeding they were going well over the limit. After getting back to the office, I ran a few quick queries to check out the chief's answers.\n\nChief's answers\n\nI found that despite the increased traffic enforcement in the area, crashes along the three roads went up about 15 percent while the amount of traffic in that area went up by only 9 percent.\n\nI also found at least four officers who broke the 30-minute rule, showing up in the database for writing tickets over as much as a five-hour period.\n\nI set up another interview with the chief. When I told him what I found he said that his officers had gotten so over-zealous in their pursuit of traffic tickets he had to issue a moratorium on writing tickets.\n\nHe also said that inside the city's limits police follow a policy that allows officers to ticket someone going only 5 to 9 mph over the limit, if they have received a prior warning.\n\nLuckily, we had created a separate Access database of all of the warnings issued over the year, so when I got back to the office I ran a query for all tickets issued inside the city to people traveling less then 10 mph over the limit and then ran that list against our database of warnings.\n\nI found 14 occasions where officers ticketed drivers who were traveling 9 mph over the speed limit but had no prior warning.\n\nAgain I met with the chief. He said that 11 of the 14 tickets were written by two officers who are no longer with the department and that the problems were anomalies.\n\nThe end result of the data entry, queries, spreadsheets, and back-and-forth interviews was a two-story package.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2000-december-race-and-tickets", "score": 0.195 }, { "slug": "1999-october-story-update", "score": 0.162 }, { "slug": "1999-julyaugust-ticket-scams-bad-drivers-fund-city", "score": 0.14 }, { "slug": "2001-januaryfebruary-parking-tickets", "score": 0.133 }, { "slug": "1990-december-taxing-investigation-in-palm-beach", "score": 0.13 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-mayjune-outside-the-gates.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-mayjune-outside-the-gates.json" }