Another week, another commanding officer is caught confirming that the NYPD uses illegal quotas: NYPD transit Lt. Janice Williams was secretly recorded by another officer telling cops to make more arrests to appease higher-ups. "All they care about is...summonses and arrests and 250s [referring to the NYPD Stop, Question and Frisk reports]. The bottom line is everybody's individual activity is being looked at," she said. This does beg the question: is every decent cop carrying around a tape recorder nowadays?
Williams, who was recorded in Transit District 34 in Coney Island, is also heard saying that only officers with "good productivity" will get the opportunity to work overtime, and that Capt. James Sheerin wanted every cop to make at least one arrest per month because crime had spiked and arrest totals were lower than other transit districts: "He wants everyone to get in the mindset that there's no more collar a quarter," Williams said.
The recordings were obtained by Jon Norinsberg, the lawyer for Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, who has publicly accused the NYPD of manipulating crime stats and forcing cops to meet quotas. He is now suing the NYPD for $50 million for trying to discredit and silence him by throwing him in a psych ward unwillingly. Adding more fuel to the fire, a jury in a separate case recently ruled that quotas are real, and they motivate and affect NYPD cops's arrests.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne called Williams "a crime fighter who was appropriately instructing officers at roll call to do the same." But Norinsberg challenged his defintion of crime fighter, and the NYPD's doublespeak usage of the term "productivity goals": "The NYPD can use code words such as "productivity" and "activity" all they want, but when officers are told that they have to hit certain numbers every month - or face the consequences - that's a quota. Period. When a captain tells police officers that they have to arrest someone every month, that's a quota, no matter what the NYPD says."