Whenever it gets towards the end of the month, my parents always remind me to drive carefully since the police are required to fill their quotas for the month. I was a bit confused if the whole idea was to lower crime, why would the police be instructed to purposefully pull someone over in order to fill quotas? After searching on Google, I found that because of budget cuts for city police departments, the revenue has to go up, which means issuing more tickets. Although ticket quotas are illegal in 20 states, the pressure is still put on police officers to bring in the cash. While a quota may not be enforced, officers who make more arrests tend to be given more bonuses and rewarded by their supervisors. This brings the questions if quotas encourage discrimination when cops are out as well as institutionalized racism.
The Hulu documentary, Crime + Punishment, sheds light on the ticket quota policy for NYPD officers. Officer Sandy Gonzalez had failed to meet his quota so his boss gave him the “foot tour” and taken from his squad car. Gonzalez was joined by 11 other NYPD officers in a lawsuit against the NYPD for their use of ticket quotas. Sadly, they didn’t win because they did not have enough evidence. Another key aspect of this is that the officers given punishments for not meeting quotas were all minority cops. Raymond Edwin, one of the twelve, played a tape recording of his supervisor, in short, telling him “[he] is drawing a lot of attention to himself,” so that was why he was given low assessment numbers. Throughout this semester we’ve learned the discrimination police officers put on the public but not much about the internal discrimination and racism in police departments.
If quotas only seem to encourage the negative aspects of the justice and legal system, why hasn’t there been more activism? If more attention was put on ticket and arrest quotas, would it make any changes towards people’s attitudes about the police?
Sources:
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