HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) — The Connecticut State Police Union said that an audit revealing troopers wrote thousands of fake tickets was released prematurely.

The Connecticut State Police Union is asking residents to remember the cardinal rule of law that people are innocent until proven guilty following the traffic ticket scandal.

The Connecticut State Police Union said that 27 of the 130 troopers accused of writing fake tickets have been exonerated.

“Before you release damaging, inflaming, suggestive comments about how people falsified records, may you ask command and troopers in the field that do the job every day, why this might be,” said Andy Matthews, executive director of the Connecticut State Police Union.

The audit came after an internal investigation found four Connecticut troopers fabricated tickets for their benefit.

The audit says the 130 troopers in the audit had data consisting of the same pattern as those four troopers.

Matthews said there is a possibility more troopers are involved.

“If you are intentionally deceptive and provide false public records, you do not deserve to wear the badge of a state trooper,” Matthews said.

Statistical evidence in the audit found that over 26,000 records from the last decade may have skewed racial information.

The UConn Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy had seven researchers conduct the audit over nine months.

The analysts emphasize their report shows patterns in data and does not determine whether this information was intentionally entered incorrectly or was a human error.

“We ultimately identified 110,000 unreliable records introduced into the racial profiling system from the state police,” said Ken Barone, associate director of UConn Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy. “We want the public to know how much care and diligence went into this and how much we tried to consider.”

Barone said 17, not 27, troopers have been exonerated because the state police found at times more than one officer was assigned to the same badge number.

The Office of Governor Ned Lamont sent News 8 the following statement on Wednesday.

“Governor Lamont has great faith in the overwhelming majority of our state troopers, and to protect public confidence in them we must get to the bottom of this and learn how it happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from ever happening again.”

The governor has commissioned an independent investigation by former U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly into this matter.