Police officers rely on citizens’ support to do the increasingly difficult and important policing job they do each day. This applies not only to on-duty activities. We saw dramatically in the last round of contract negotiations how important citizens are in our fight for fair pay. When the PERB panel issued a draft decision calling for ten extra appearances, our members were joined in Times Square by thousands of ordinary citizens. This turnout helped beat back that unfair award. In this round, all the voices from various citizen quarters heightened the awareness of the poor compensation system for police officers. Citizen support in contract negotiations is invaluable and has been increasingly so since police officers and superior officers began leaving the electorate of the city for the suburbs decades ago. (Sixty percent of our members still reside in the five boroughs and relatively fewer superior officers are city residents.)

Finally, and perhaps most crucially, when officers need assistance and information, citizens often furnish the information and actively aid, or make the calls in aid of, officers in need. The most valuable tool for an effective police officer is a respectful and supportive public. We’re not saying arrests should not be made when required or necessary. However, in a job that inherently produces negative police-citizen contacts of its own force, such contacts should not be multiplied unnecessarily or magnified by pressures flowing from quotas.

Management will suggest that the lack of arrest quotas will lead to increased crime or that those who don’t make a certain number of arrests are slackers, as it appears was being suggested by the commander in the page-4 PMP article. We disagree. Police officers, like everybody, have various aptitudes. Some senior commanders have spent an entire career, or a great portion of it, in non-patrol functions and no one in the department has ever questioned whether they’ve been of service to the department and the city. (Parenthetically, we are unaware of any officer headquartered in One Police Plaza who is in the Performance Monitoring Program.) Patrol officers have always been a group made up of people who like to make collars and have the skill-set for it and of people who, for a variety of reasons, can police differently and effectively, providing the city valuable service while making relatively fewer arrests. This is particularly true in an era when patrol strength has shrunk by thousands, forcing those who remain to pick up the workload.

By way of illustration, an experienced and articulate police officer assigned to a busy patrol command came to see us recently and complained of being the subject of retaliation for failing to meet the “number” of required “C summonses.” With respect to C summonses, which are often issued in lieu of arrest and are not covered by anti-quota law, the principle is largely the same. This officer had a difficult foot post. When pressed by supervisors to issue C summonses, the officer reacted: I should be afforded the discretion to police the area in the manner I choose, provided that crime and conditions are being kept in check. His view was that he was not going to go out of his way to write decent, otherwise law-abiding citizens C or quality-of-life summonses for minor violations. He needed the support of those citizens to do the job he had to do on his post and believed that such heavy-handed summonsing could undermine community support and curtail information that was helpful in getting his job done. As for the criminal or disruptive element, he believed that such summonses were largely ineffective and that there were other, more effective ways to deal with them. This view echoes the sentiments of other police officers we speak to on a regular basis.

According to officers with an historical perspective, the high crime rate in this city in the 1980’s was not the product of police officers not making enough arrests or taking appropriate enforcement action, but it was the result of uniformed officers being largely discouraged from taking enforcement action against visible and known conditions in the commands, particularly drug conditions. The result was the explosion of drug and collateral crime seen in the late 1980s. Adding to the problem, the department model at the time was largely reactive, rather than proactive. When the cuffs were taken off police officers, they rose to the occasion in the early 1990s to take on the serious threats facing the city and made historic strides in bringing down crime. Officers feel that while that fight resulted in numbers being produced, outputs were problem- or condition-driven, rather than numbers-driven. Now, members believe that numbers, whether for traffic violations or crime, are being generated for the sake of numbers, or to fill the city coffers, or to appease community groups complaining about reduced police staffing. Policing is a job, unlike others in significant ways, that is not always subject to meaningful numerical evaluation. Meeting a number is not necessarily a sign that a problem is being addressed.

What is the union doing to address the issue? On the legislative front, the PBA is supporting legislation to strengthen and supplement an existing quota law that now deals only with vehicular and traffic summons quotas to include arrest quotas. The existing law is considered largely ineffective by anyone who has to litigate under it. Better statutory law would allow stronger enforcement by the union. Second, as far back as 1999, the union had put together a summons-quota affidavit that can be filled out in aid of a proceeding under the existing statute alleging an unlawful quota. The form may also be found on the PBA Web Site. Based on numerous quota affidavits received from police officers, the PBA is currently prosecuting a group grievance on behalf of patrol officers arising out of a C.O.’s alleged maintenance of summons quotas.

Finally, recognizing that arrest quotas are, amazingly, not currently unlawful under state statute, the PBA is investigating the possibility of bringing a court proceeding to have declared void as violating public policy the department’s arrest-quotas practice. In aid of this proceeding, the union is looking to gather documentary evidence that would supplement what officers are communicating to us verbally so as to demonstrate more effectively in court what most working officers know to be the case — that arrest quotas are a department practice and policy. After evaluating that evidence, we hope to proceed in state court with a lawsuit. We ask anyone who has written evidence of this practice, or who has had his or her conditions of employment changed for not meeting an arrest quota, to contact his or her union delegate, trustee or the PBA office directly.