Police quotas – mandatory numbers for nailing you with parking tickets and traffic violations – have always been one of those unconfirmed realities of urban living. But the New York Times has new proof, exposing an agenda from the top at the New York Police Department.
A secret tape recording from a Brooklyn police station, obtained by the New York Times, provides compelling evidence that quotas for summonses aren’t just real but are being pushed upon officers by their superiors. Police Captain Alex Perez encourages hunting down seatbelt and mobile phone law transgressors, among other violations, saying he expects five citations issued per week.
And those officers who don’t rake in the dough by pushing citations? They risk getting canned. “After I bounce you to a different platoon for inactivity, the next thing is to put you on paper, start rating you below standards and look to fire you,” Perez says.
The revelation won’t keep New Yorkers safe from a ticket next time they’re double-parked for five minutes to unload groceries, but this should at least affirm that they’re not simply suffering from bad luck. [NYT]
Photo by Rob Boudon
Travis New
Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 11:45 AMTo be fair though they can only fill the quotas if people are in fact breaking the law. It’s one thing to say they have quotas and imply they break the lwa to hit those targets. It’s whole other thing if you just don’t break the law you cannot be booked. Simple.
And if you shady cops booking you anyway I would move.
matt
Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 9:25 PMyeah, meanwhile they come up with more and more ridiculous ‘laws’ and slap unreasonably high penalties on them.
in short, the laws are shit. and punishment and policing of these pointless laws are not proportional to the attention given to REAL CRIMES.
as for quotas, its not surprising, you start off one day just genuinely trying to punish people for doing wrong things, and then it gets to the end of the financial year, and the suits go “oh great, you made 200 million dollars, we’ll put that into the budget, so you’ll have to make that next year too!”. then the worse (or best) year you have becomes the benchmark that you have to match for every year after that.
it should have to go to charity, or something else, or all be BURNED, I don’t really care… but it becomes a massive conflict of interest, (or at very least, a TERRIBLE arrangement of priorities) by focusing on “revenue”