More Officers Getting Sick Of Quotas, Threaten Boycott

Quota memo from Brooklyn's 77th Precinct (via Daily News)

The Bloomberg administration and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly have continually shrugged off any concerns about police quotas, referring to them as "productivity goals," among other things. This comes despite the fact that the existence of them has been proven again and again, thanks to the efforts of officers such as Adrian Schoolcraft. But now, even more police officers have become fed-up with the double-speech: "We've talked about it. Nobody feels this is right, asking us to write summonses just to meet a quota," one police source connected with the 79th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant told the News.

The 79th Precinct have started a quiet revolt against quotas, and are considering a day-long summons boycott to express their disdain. Another source told the News that six weeks ago, some officers did not write summonses for one shift to protest shift changes targeted at low-performing cops; those changes were nixed thereafter. Officers are frustrated that their supervisors have been imposing illegal quota pressure of them in order to churn out revenue for the city and impress the higher-ups. For their part, management are angry that officers are not giving out enough "C" summonses, which are for so-called "quality of life" violations, like public drinking. In the 79th Precinct, the number of C summonses issued this year compared to the same period last year has dropped 22.5 percent, from 20,521 to 15,906.

That drop off has made Deputy Inspector Peter Bartoszek, the precinct's commanding officer, quite agitated. He wrote a particularly aggrieved note to one officer who wouldn't write the C summonses, which read, "In 4 months, and after 70 tours on patrol, P.O. Denis has not written any C summons? How is that possible?...[I'll] stop here before my blood pressure gets raised higher than it already is." The officer in question, Jeanmarc Denis, told the News, "I guess he's feeling the pressure from Compstat. He feels the pressure and it goes down [to the officers]."

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By Ben Yakas in News on December 12, 2010 6:25 PM

Comments [rss]

danny.12345

Go to any Latino neighborhood, especially during the summer. I'm sure the popo can issue noise summones, especially with all that mariachi music blasting.

itsbananas

The problem with that is when the cops try to arrest the mariachi bands their guns turn into maracas.

OSN!

I think you mean reggaeton and rap blasting from car stereos with blown out subwoofers. And of course double and triple parked cars.

The joys of living in a Latino neighborhood.

RevWaldo

Oblig:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

robingee

Latino neighborhoods and their roving Mariachi bands! What is this, Chi-Chi's?

Chazz1918

What a tempest in a teapot. It's not like there aren't huge amounts of these violations everywhere you look. Cops don't have to conjure up spurious violations, they are everywhere. I could stand on one street corner in manhattan and give out hundreds of tickets every day. Cops just don't see them as "important" enough so they turn a blind eye. Next time you are stuck behind a double parked car as traffic slows to a grind - think about having higher quotas then police have now. If cops are not involved in fighting crime, they should be enforcing traffic and quality of life violations. It would be a nicer place to live in.

moonbeam

ITA. Give me a ticket book. I could easily meet their quotas on my 10 minute walk to work.

Mr Mel

If the Administration had the cops enforce the traffic laws as written, the city budget wouldn't have the existing shortfall. It has to be the NYPD though, not the Traffic people. Guns will be needed.

CaptainMXC

Bravo to the police officers. I knew there were good people among them.

ides_of_march

People aren't as stupid as the politicians and bureaucrats think. Call it what you want, productivity goal or whatever, it's a quota, it's a tax, it's deciding x amount of people are guilty of something before the day has even begun.

ANGRYGOD11

Its also illegal as New York State laws prohibit such quotas. Thats why the bosses cannot use the word quota, although everyone knows quotas are being ordered.

jaycjay

"New York State laws prohibit such quotas."

Plenty of people say that, including plenty of presumably reliable media sources, but it's an inaccurate statement.

Nothing in NYS law prohibits quotas. The "prohibition" that's talked about is in the state Labor Law; it prohibits penalizing an police officer for failing to meet any quota based on the number of traffic tickets written over a specific period.

So, if an NYPD supervisor tells a cop that he must write a certain number of traffic tickets in a certain shift, week, or whatever, no law is being broken -- so far. As long as there are no repercussions in the workplace, nothing in the state law applies.

If, though, that cop fails to meet the quota and as a result is reassigned or punished in some other way, the cop has a labor grievance. The law specifies that he can get his former position back, receive any pay differential that was lost as a result, etc. -- typical labor law stuff. The supervisor can't be arrested or anything like that; this is labor law.

And again, it applies only to traffic tickets including parking and similar violations. The "quality of life" C-Summonses being talked about here aren't covered, because they're not traffic violations. Nothing in NYS law addresses quotas on writing those summonses.