Though he found the FDNY's hiring practices racist, saying they discriminated against black and Hispanic firefighter candidates, federal judge Nicholas Garaufis offered the city a compromise to allow the FDNY to hire 300 more recruits from the Fire Academy. Here are his suggested approaches, via the Post: "Randomly selecting enrollees from the top 2,500 scorers on the last test. To increase the pool of black and Hispanic candidates, the city would eliminate the lowest-scoring whites in the group and add the highest-scoring minorities who did not make the top 2,500..." more ›

Backing up longstanding rumors of NYPD quotas, a cop claims police officers are required to issue 20 summonses and make 1 arrest per month so commanding officers appear to maintain low crime rates in their precincts. "At the end of the night you have to come back with something," Officer Adil Polanco told ABC. "You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number's there. So our choice is to come up with the number." more ›

NYPD tow truck drivers say they're being pressured to meet a quota of four tows per shift—or else they're punished with less overtime, assigned undesirable shifts, or have their time-off requests delayed. One veteran driver tells the Post, "You have to get your number. That's it. If you don't get that number, you know that when you roll into the pound, the bosses will be all over you." Another source says, "If it's a judgment call, we'll frequently go against the driver for that reason. It's screw them or screw me. Either way, someone's getting screwed." As of early July, 69,419 cars were towed this year, putting the NYPD on track to impound 138,838 vehicles by year's end. There was a 13 percent increase in tows between 2007 and 2008, for a grand total of 136,632. At the Manhattan tow lot, incensed driver Elizabeth Gillies of the Upper West Side tells the Post, "It's disgusting, absolutely beyond disgusting. It's been getting bad lately. They have no respect for people." But an NYPD spokesman Ed Mullens insists it "is absolutely not true" that there is four-car per driver quota, and denied any policy of screw or get screwed. more ›