Camera vs officer traffic enforcement

Published July 2026 · Data window: MPD moving violations, 2023–2025 (36 months, pooled)

Cameras ticket wherever they are installed; officers choose where to be. In DC's majority-Black police districts (5, 6, 7), drivers received 42.3% of officer-written tickets but 51.9% of camera tickets, a smaller share of officer-written tickets than of camera tickets. Tickets carry no race, so this compares geography of discretion, not drivers.

2.61×

The largest officer-vs-camera skew of any district: its share of MPD officer-written tickets divided by its share of camera tickets. A skew of 1.00× would mean officers distribute their tickets exactly the way cameras do.

Each district shaded by its skew: darker means officers concentrate their tickets there far beyond the cameras' distribution. Click a district for its stop-representation page.

Districts are listed in numeric order. This is not a ranking: the skew compares each district's officer share to its own camera share.

District	Black pop	Camera share	Officer share	Skew	Officer tickets (N)
District 1 (1D)	25.0%	11.3%	14.6%	1.29×	11,455
District 2 (2D)	8.0%	18.9%	17.1%	0.90×	13,385
District 3 (3D)	22.0%	5.9%	15.4%	2.61×	12,043
District 4 (4D)	48.6%	11.9%	10.6%	0.89×	8,304
District 5 (5D)	56.7%	22.4%	21.5%	0.96×	16,870
District 6 (6D)	88.4%	19.2%	11.1%	0.58×	8,676
District 7 (7D)	86.5%	10.3%	9.7%	0.94×	7,568

Skew = officer share ÷ camera share. Officer tickets citywide: 78,301; camera tickets: 7,780,999.

How this number is built (and where it's soft)

No race on tickets. Moving violations carry a location, not a driver's race. This analysis compares WHERE officer discretion lands against where automated enforcement happens; it is context for the stop and arrest analyses, not a racial-disparity index of its own. The Black-population column is context, never a denominator.
Cameras are not a neutral baseline. Camera placement is itself a policy choice (often crash-corridor driven), and camera tickets concentrate on commuter arteries. The skew says officers and cameras enforce in different places; it cannot say which pattern matches actual violation rates.
Definitions. Camera = issuing-agency code 92 (Regional Operations Command-North; verified to issue exclusively automated-enforcement violation types). Officer = MPD codes 1–7 and 25 (SOD/Traffic). Both sides are assigned to districts by TICKET LOCATION (point-in-polygon against MPD district polygons), not by the issuing officer's assignment.
Exclusions (reported, not dropped quietly). Other agencies (federal police, taxi commission, etc.): 30,807 tickets. Unassignable locations (no usable coordinates, common on officer-written tickets, or outside every district polygon): camera 153,959, officer 25,471. The officer shares rest on the district-assignable subset.
Grain. Monthly counts per district per source (36 months), stored as a batch snapshot; camera counts are grouped server-side by the ~350 fixed camera sites.