“The way I think about it, is, say a fireman is told by a supervisor, we need you to put out 15 fires this month. And if you don’t put out 15 fires you’re gonna get penalized for it. So if he doesn’t find 15 fires to put out, is that his fault? It’s not. But the fireman might even go out there and start setting fires, causing fires, just so he’s not penalized or looks bad... And that’s kind of what the police officers are doing.”
—Anonymous NYPD officer on the department’s policy of setting arrest and summons quotas. New audio obtained by The Nation reveals that New York City’s police union has cooperated with the NYPD in setting arrest quotas for the department’s officers, a practice that plays a direct role in increasing the number of stop-and-frisk encounters.
Read the full story here.
Judge Criticizes ‘High Error Rate’ of New York Police Stops
nytimes.comObserving that only about 12 percent of police stops resulted in an arrest or summons, Judge Scheindlin, who is hearing the case without a jury, focused her remarks on Monday on the other 88 percent of stops, in which the police did not find evidence of criminality after a stop. She characterized that as “a high error rate” and remarked to a lawyer representing the city, “You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90 percent of the time.”
