[Disclaimer: Due to my Department's restrictive internal disciplinary policies regarding their personnel's expression of personal opinion, certain details and aspects of my background have been intentionally redacted from this story.]
I am a New York City Police Officer.
Back in the 2000s, I was a freshly minted rookie. New equipment, shiny handcuffs; I can still recall the smell of my brand new leather gun belt. I was, as I still remain, an idealist. During my 6 months in the Police Academy, I learned about different aspects of law, psychology, and police ethics. I was shown how to properly write a summons, how to recognize an "arrest situation", and how to approach intimate family disputes that had escalated to the point of police intervention. Curiously, I was never taught about arrest and summons quotas.
At this point, I'd like to veer this discussion and incorporate some of Plato's insights from his famous masterpiece, "The Republic". Plato theorized that a society can only achieve a pure state of justice when its citizenry, whom he divided into three subsets (The Producers, The Auxiliaries, and The Guardians), work and live cohesively while simultaneously pursuing their own purposes and goals. Therefore, according to Plato, social justice is only equal to the sum of its parts. If one of these parts is missing or inadequate, social justice cannot exist.
After graduating the academy, I was assigned to a foot post in East Harlem patrolling Housing Developments. Upon walking into my assigned precinct on the first day, I was approached by the Training Officer, who said, "Two and Five". No introduction, no advice, just a quota and an expectation; two arrests and five summonses. He briskly walked away before I could even open my mouth. Immediately, I had been confronted with a moral dilemma from the most unexpected source; the very Department I had joined to "make a difference" and "help people". After officially being assigned to "Operation Impact", and having absolutely no policing experience whatsoever, I was ordered out to my nightly foot post (with my rookie partner) and ordered to write as many summonses as possible.
East Harlem was, and still is, an overwhelmingly African American Community. And, as I'm sure you've gathered from the news during the past five years, communities like this one reached an irrevocable point of being over-policed, especially when it came to petty offenses (which have a tendency to be overlooked in more affluent neighborhoods). Sixteen and seventeen year-old kids were arrested for trespassing in their own housing developments, or for drinking a beer outside without proper identification. There was even a point in the late 2000s and early 2010s when residents were being stopped daily or weekly by the police in their own buildings. Driven by the NYPD's Compstat program (1), "Operation Impact" was, in the end, a huge contributor to the current state of backlash the law enforcement community is now privy to on multiple fronts. Moreover, it was during this time of increased scrutiny on arrest and summons quotas when, I believe, the NYPD lost sight of what its mission actually was(or should have been): protecting the public and responding to emergencies.
During my time in Operation Impact, I quickly grew used to the routine harassment I'd receive from certain supervisors if I had failed to make an arrest that particular month, or failed to write the expected number of summonses. It's not that I didn't want to do my job, it's just that I refused to accept that I couldn't use my discretion to deal with petty offenses and minor infractions as I saw fit. The job wanted "activity", otherwise known as arrests and summonses. All I wanted was to do my job to the best of my ability and be able to look at myself in the mirror at the end of everyday. So I did just that.
The NYPD's leadership clearly became obsessed with quantitative policing; the concept of evaluating a Police Department's efficacy by its production of arrests and summonses. It was a system setup for failure. And fail it did. Therefore, being that we now know that quantitative policing simply does not work under most circumstances, it is therefore imperative that it be replaced by a much more qualitative approach. While arrests and summonses will always be part of the law enforcement profession, they should be much further down the list than say, community involvement, deterrence, and actual prevention of crime. I, for one, think that many Departments around the country have started to gravitate in the qualitative direction, leaving the quantitative model behind. The NYPD, being an antiquated bureaucracy with approximately 30,000 uniformed members, may take longer than most. This is not to say that the efforts currently underway do not show promise, such as the "Neighborhood Policing Program", a program that depends heavily on the community's investment in improving their own streets. Only time will tell.
This brings me back to Plato and his definition of social justice; we as a society are only as good and just as the sum of our parts. Operation Impact failed. Quantitative policing has also failed. While I am cautiously optimistic that we are heading in the right direction, there are still so many issues that need to be addressed (that will be discussed in further articles).
Credit for photographs to Antonio Bulfo. Thanks for reading.
"Let's keep this on the low-down."
"You mean the down-low."
"No doubt".
(1) Compstat Program- Conjunctive name for "Computer Statistics", adopted during the late 1990s in New York City as a way of keeping track of and attempting to combat crime throughout the five boroughs.
