I work in law enforcement. In fact I am sitting in my crappy rental car with lights that my department chose to call a police car (05 Impala) as I write this.
We don't have a quota. I wrote a total of 48 tickets last year, of which 80% came from crashes. My car doesn't have a radar and in fact my calibrated speedometer didn't work for 3 months, but it didn't really matter because I don't like writing tickets.
Now some officers like to write tickets and will write five to ten a night. They normally end up as traffic units. They don't have quotas either but if you populate your traffic units with people who are overzealous and like writing tickets you don't need them.
The previous statement about making your Sarge and LT happy is pretty much spot on. The thing is they know if you are working without counting tickets or reports etc.
For the most part I stay pretty busy babysitting the ignorant people who populate my beat... It is amazing how some people live. I never would have belived it until I had this job.