Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Police Quotas

In a previous post the comments turned to police quotas. One commentor (who believes police have quotas) vs a Phoenix PD Officer (who says they are illegal).

I was provided this video by the commentor. He is correct that in order to be fair I should post it and let the debate continue.



4 comments:

RamRod said...

Just because this one incident was caught on tape does not mean it is a regular practice.

Now lets break down what was on the tape. The first thing is the 20 or 25 and 1 comments. This means he wants 20to 25 tickets/misdemeanor arrests and 1 felony arrest. NYPD works five 8 hour shifts per week. Thats 20 days per month. Is one ticket per shift really asking for too much? At no point do I hear anybody's job threatened or an absolute demand for performance. I heard a supervisor chewing some ass for nobody working.

Let me explain the difference between performance reviews and quotas. Every month officers are given their monthly stats. This includes about 20 different things, such as reports completed, calls answered, tickets written, arrests, and available time (when your not doing anything). Obviously some officers are going to be more or less productive in certain areas. I always had low numbers in accident reports and calls answered, but was usually double my squad average in felony arrests and field interrogation. We had officers with no felony arrests, but wrote 200 tickets a month.

As long as you are productive, no "quota" was demanded. If you were consistantly low in every area, then yeah, you got talked to about your performance. But it was always "go to work!" not "you have to write XX# of tickets today."

I love how cops are sometimes called lazy, and then hammered when work is demanded of them. Do you really want to pay a guy in Phoenix a lot of money per year and not demand some type of work?

I googled this officer's name. I got 10 pages in response, all related to this article. If this was a regular practice, the media would obviously be all over it. And of course there is the false arrest aspect brought up in the article. I know I would risk my career, my house, my savings, and my families future in order to make my "quota", any officer would, right?.....

Any time you violate police policy and/or the law, the city does not protect you from civil prosecution/liability. That means any judgement against you comes out of your pocket. Thats why this whole quota thing pisses me off. It IS against federal law and police policy. Even in New York, as the article describes.

This idoit actually assaulted one of his supervisors. Was he arrested? Nope. I guess somebody already made there arrest quota for that month. Sounds to me like a disgruntled, lazy cop is trying to get even.

Just because something is an urban legend, doesn't make it true.

RamRod said...

By the way warthog, I love the new blog page!

Warthog said...

That was a great response with a reasonable explanation.

Cops have different preferences and there is a broad range for them to be rated by.

Ramrod likes to physically abuse the public so he is the one who beats innocents up (arrests) and waterboards (interogates) people

Another cop likes to abuse people but not get physical because he just got manicured so he rights a lot of tickets to people he most likely profiled.

I think the system works.

Anonymous said...

If there is an unwritten "quota", wouldn't an officer be risking his career, house, savings, and family by NOT doing what he could to meet it? I don't imagine it looks real good on a resume to have been let go.