NYPD's police union worked with the NYPD to set arrest quotas.
Audio obtained by The Nation confirms an instance of New York City’s police union cooperating with the NYPD in setting arrest quotas for the department’s officers. According to some officers and critics of quotas, the practice has played a direct role in increasing the number of stop-and-frisk encounters since Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to office.
Patrolmen who spoke to The Nation explained that the pressure from superiors to meet quota goals has caused some officers to seek out or even manufacture arrests to avoid department retaliation.
The audio makes up part of the prosecution's case in the landmark federal class action lawsuit Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., which opened yesterday in US District Court for New York’s Southern District and which was brought forward by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The audio, recorded in 2009 by officer Adhyl Polanco, is part of a series of recordings originally released to the media that year, and a selection first aired on WABC-TV in 2010. But WABC-TV used only a small portion of the recordings, and did not air the union representative’s explosive admission.
“I spoke to the CO(commanding officer) for about an hour-and-a-half,” the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association delegate says in the audio recording, captured at a Bronx precinct roll call meeting. “twenty-and-one. Twenty-and-one is what the union is backing up…. They spoke to the Union trustees. And that’s what they want, they want 20-and-1.”
“Twenty-and-one means twenty summonses and one arrest a month,” says a veteran NYPD officer who listened to the recording, and who spoke to The Nation on the condition of anonymity. Summonses can range from parking violations, to moving violations, to criminal court summonses for infractions such as open container or public urination.
“It’s a quota, and they the Union agreed to it,” says the officer. “It’s crazy.”
“Many officers feel pressure to meet their numbers to get the rewards that their commanding officer is giving out,” says John Eterno, a former police captain and co-author of The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation. But if an officer’s union delegate is also pushing the numbers, “this puts inordinate pressure on officers, getting it from the top down and getting it from the union.”
The plaintiffs in the Floyd case allege that the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy results in unconstitutional stops based on racial-profiling. The department’s emphasis on bringing in arrest and summons numbers has caused officers to carry out suspicion-less stops in communities of color.
As Polanco explained in court today, his superiors would often push him to carry out this specific number of summons and arrest stops per month: "20-and-1, they were very clear,
it's non-negotiable, you're gonna do it, or you're gonna become a Pizza Hut delivery man."
Listen to the full audio here.
“There’s always been some pressure to get arrests and summonses,” says Eterno. “But now it’s become the overwhelming management style of the department. It has become a numbers game. They have lost the ability to see that communities are dissatisfied with this type of policing, especially minority communities. They are the ones being overly burdened for doing the same sorts of things that kids in middle-class neighborhoods are doing-only they’re getting records because officers have to make these arrests.”
When asked for comment, Al O'Leary, a spokesperson for the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, said: "The PBA has been consistently and firmly opposed to quotas for police activities including arrests, summonses and stop-and-frisks. These are all effective tools for maintaining order when they are left to the discretion of individual police officers but become problematic when officers are forced to meet quotas. This union has sought and obtained changes to state law making quotas for all police activities illegal. We have sued and forced an individual commanding officer to stop the use of illegal quotas and will continue to be vigilant and vocal in our opposition to police activity quotas.”
Physical evidence has periodically surfaced of the existence of numerical arrest targets for NYPD officers, though arrest and summons quotas for police have been illegal in New York State since 2010. Precinct commanders defend their right to set productivity goals for their staff—but what the department defines as productivity goals can have the force of quotas when officers are subject to retaliation for not meeting them.
Cops who have spoken to The Nation say that retaliation can take many forms, including denied overtime; change of squads and days off that can disrupt family obligations like taking children to school or daycare; transfers to boroughs far from home in order to increase their commute and the amount they’ll have to pay in tolls; and low evaluation scores.
Officers even reported being forced to carry out unwarranted stops to fulfill the summons and arrest numbers. In a second recording obtained by The Nation, a captain addressing a roll call in the same Bronx precinct illustrated how such retaliation plays out.
“When the chief came in…he said: ‘you know what, you really can’t reduce crime much more, the guys are doing a great job,’” the captain can be heard saying in the rough audio. “He said that we can…get some of our people who aren’t chipping in to go to some locations where we are having problems, and give them the area’s residents the business…”
The recording continues: “That’s all we’re asking you to do, that’s all, that’s all. And if we do that, everyone chips in, it’s fine. It’s really nonnegotiable. ’Cause if you don’t do it now, I’m gonna have you work with the boss to make sure it happens.”
“If you don’t meet the quota, they will find activity for you,” another veteran officer explained to The Nation. “The sergeant will put you in his car and drive you around until whatever he sees he will stop and tell you to make an arrest or write a summons, even if you didn’t observe what he said it was.”
Sometimes these are legitimate stops, but other times, they’re bogus: “The sergeant told me to write two minorities for blocking pedestrian traffic,” the anonymous officer said, “but they were not blocking pedestrian traffic.”
The pressure for numbers, say cops, is unrelenting, and it’s leading to high anxiety and low morale. And that the union, an organization that is supposed to have officers’ interests at heart, is involved in the setting of quotas is mystifying, says one cop.
It’s all the more problematic given the union’s very vocal and public stance against quotas, such as in their ad campaign, “Don’t Blame The Cop,” which tries to engender sympathy for the officers who are pressured to write tickets and arrest motorists. “Blame NYPD management,” it says.
This development also signals to officers that there is one fewer place they can go to register their concern about departmental policy and practice. “I feel foolish for having gone to my union delegate with my complaints,” says one officer who has been unsettled by the continued pressure to meet quotas.
Adhyl Polanco, the officer who recorded the audio and first brought it to the attention of the press, has since had charges brought against him by the department for writing false reports—the same false reports he pointed out to the department’s Internal Affairs office as evidence of the quota system. Polanco maintains these and other charges against him and other officers who have spoken out are evidence that the department is retaliating against him and others for blowing the whistle.
Polanco maintains these and other charges against him and other officers who have spoken out are evidence that the department is retaliating against him and others for blowing the whistle.
The NYPD has just surpassed 5 million stop-and-frisks during the Bloomberg era. Most stops have been of people of color, and the overwhelming majority were found innocent of any wrongdoing, according to the department’s own statistics. And though the number of stops may have gone down recently—as pressure on the department and increased awareness of the policy has officers and supervisors thinking twice about how they employ the practice-the existence of quotas ensures that New Yorkers will continue to be harassed unnecessarily by the NYPD.
“The way I think about it,” says a patrolman, “is, say a fireman is told by a supervisor, we need you to put out fifteen fires this month. And if you don’t put out fifteen fires you’re gonna get penalized for it. So if he doesn’t find fifteen fires to put out, is that his fault? It’s not. But the fireman might even go out there and start setting fires, causing fires, just so he’s not penalized or looks bad…. And that’s kind of what the police officers are doing.”
What are the plaintiffs in the Floyd v. City of New York case fighting against? Watch the exclusive video of a stop-and-frisk encounter gone wrong.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173397/audio-new-yorks-police-union-worked-nypd-set-arrest-and-summons-quotas
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/03/20/55872.htm
"Stop & Frisk" trial turns to claim of arrest quotas:
For the first two days, the trial focused on sidewalks and street corners from Harlem to Flatbush, as African-American men testified about how they were stopped by the police.
But by the third day, the testimony had veered indoors, as a New York City police officer described scenes from a station house in the South Bronx. There, during the roll call at the start of each shift, a commander addressed the officers, handing out assignments and occasional words of lukewarm encouragement.
It was during those speeches, the police officer testified on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, that supervisors and union delegates stressed the need for officers to write more summonses, make arrests, and make stop-and-frisk encounters.
“They want 20 and 1,” Officer Adhyl Polanco of the 41st Precinct testified, explaining that meant “20 summons and one arrest per month.”
Officer Polanco appeared as a witness in a class-action suit that claims that the police routinely stop minority men on the street without a legal reason to do so. But his testimony was directed at proving the existence of quotas, a contention that has emerged unexpectedly at the center of the stop-and-frisk trial, which is one of the most significant legal challenges of a major Bloomberg administration policy.
In their opening arguments, lawyers for the city dismissed all talk of quotas as a sideshow, saying that the average officer stops only a handful of people a month. But the plaintiffs have insisted that quotas put officers under pressure to make unconstitutional stops as they seek people to arrest or issue tickets to.
“We were handcuffing kids for no reason,” Officer Polanco said.
He described how he once wrote a summons to a man for not having a dog license, after being directed to do so by his commander. “I did not see the dog,” Officer Polanco said. He later told Internal Affairs Bureau investigators about that episode and others.
After a confrontation with a lieutenant, he was stripped of his gun and badge and faced disciplinary proceedings.
Mr. Polanco is among a handful of officers who have taken to covertly tape-recording station house conversations, and he came to court prepared to discuss recordings that he made nearly three years ago.
In one speech played at the trial, a voice that Officer Polanco said was that of Donald McHugh, the precinct commander at the time, spoke about writing summonses. The commander warned that some people were not “chipping in” and said that those officers were going to be paired with supervisors “to make sure it happens.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-trial-focuses-on-claim-of-arrest-quotas.html?ref=nyregion&_r=0
Do arrest quotas encourage police officers to break the law?
Look closely at incidents of police brutality or corruption and you’ll often see them connected to these “jump-out boys,” so named because the officers tend to jump out of cars and aggressively pursue their targets. In 2011, the city of Chicago disbanded its extremely effective Mobile Strike Force unit, in part because citizens complained that its members played too rough. (In a 2012 Chicago magazine story about the city’s new police chief, Noah Isackson mentioned the 2006 revelations that “some officers robbed and kidnapped residents, and the accusations a year later that one officer plotted to murder another.”) In 2002, New York City disbanded its Street Crimes Unit, three years after four plainclothes officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo, killing him on the steps of his apartment. (The proximate cause of the unit’s downfall was the lawsuit Daniels , et al. v. the City of New York, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in the wake of the Diallo shooting, alleging racial profiling in the Street Crimes Unit and the NYPD at large.)
One of the main problems with these units is that they are often disconnected from the communities they serve. Since they’re not walking beats or attending community meetings like ordinary cops, they don’t always have to directly reckon with the wrath of the law-abiding people they offend. Officers in plainclothes units have been accused of acting indiscriminately and assuming criminal behavior from everyone they encounter. They make arrests, and then move on to the next hot spot.
These units are instruments of the “at any cost” school of policing, where success is measured by the number of arrests made or amount of contraband seized—by meeting often-unrealistic statistical targets imposed from on high. According to Richburg’s attorney, Warren Brown, tactics like those his client employed were common in the VCIS among officers worried about making their arrest quotas. “ ‘[I]f the curtain was pulled back, you would see that his M.O. was standard operating procedure,’ ” Brown told the Sun—which isn’t really a defense for conspiring to commit robbery, but is maybe an explanation for why a certain type of police officer might think that helping an informant commit a robbery is defensible if it encourages that informant to keep feeding him actionable information.
Baltimore’s police department obviously isn’t the only one that allegedly instructs its officers to meet various quotas. In a 1999 New York Times article, for instance, an anonymous member of the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit told David Kocieniewski that the officers were oppressed by stat-driven police tactics, and that they worked under a quota system that said they had to seize at least one illegal firearm per month:
"There are guys who are willing to toss anyone who's walking with his hands in his pockets," said an officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We frisk 20, maybe 30 people a day. Are they all by the book? Of course not; it's safer and easier to just toss people. And if it's the 25th of the month and you haven't got your gun yet? Things can get a little desperate."
If cops are under pressure to make numbers, then it follows that they’ll try hard to make those numbers, even if it means bending some rules in the process. So if a confidential informant is giving an officer good, actionable information, it’s to that officer’s benefit to keep that informant on the streets, even if it means giving that informant drugs to sell. And it makes sense that commanding officers, under pressure from superiors to reduce crime, might look the other way and give their subordinates room to operate however they see fit.
There’s no point in being too idealistic about the mechanics of urban police work. It’s a game of compromises, of weighing relative evils. But so many of these compromises seem to sacrifice long-term progress in favor of short-term rewards. Units like the Street Crimes Unit and the VCIS are an answer, yes, but they’re an answer to an incomplete question: "How do we fix the crime problem right now?" The second half of that question—“What do we do after that?”—is hard to answer with rule-bending shortcuts. I don’t want to imply that it’s not important to make arrests and get criminals off the streets. But it matters how you do it, and doing so in a way that destroys community trust, engenders resentment, inhibits cooperation, and incentivizes bad cop behavior will only make the good cops’ jobs harder—and the streets more dangerous—in the long run.