In a letter to Gov. Paterson, asking him to kill a measure that would make it illegal for cops to set quotas for summonses, arrests and stop-and-frisks, Mayor Bloomberg wrote: "For an employee whose function it is to issue parking tickets, a measurement clearly relevant to job performance is the number of summonses issued over the course of a reasonable period of time." (Of, course, the Mayor doesn't call 'em quotas in the letter, but we all know what he means!)
Governor Paterson ultimately signed that measure into law against Bloomberg's wishes, but the letter will live on as evidence in whistleblowing former police officer Adrian Schoolcraft's lawsuit against the city. Still, mayoral spokesman Jason Post said, "Knowing how many summonses a traffic agent writes is responsible management, not a quota," while police spokesman Paul Browne insists that this is just "good management." But, as one Gothamist commenter put it, "You can hand somebody a pile of dog poop and tell them it's a bouquet of roses, [but] it still smells like shit."
