About three weeks ago, a bill was signed into law that may have a long-term impact on the culture of policing in New York State and New York City. The state's labor law has been amended so that no employer shall penalize an employee who is a police officer solely because of the employee's failure to meet a quota of tickets or summonses, arrests or stops of individuals suspected of criminal activity within a specified period of time.
The new law was sponsored by Senator Eric Adams (D, WF-District 20), a retired NYPD Captain. "My legislation (S2956A) to address ticket quotas by expanding the current quota provision to include every ticket, summons, and arrest in the state of New York has been signed into law," said Sen. Adams. "Significantly, the provisions of my bill protect employees from punishment (including reassignment, scheduling change and any other penalty) as a result of an unmet quota."
According to Adams, ticket quotas pressure officers to issue tickets regardless of the appropriateness of the situation, and S2956A expands the quota ban beyond traffic tickets to eliminate quotas for any state, local, or general violation or crime for which a ticket or summons would be issued. It prohibits penalties for failing to meet arbitrary quota requirements.
Further, it has the benefit of reducing the number of citizens unfairly ticketed for small violations. The bill helps both law enforcement and the general public by reducing arbitrary and inappropriate enforcement of minor offenses. "We believe the pressure to bring in numbers compelled some officers to show a level of creativity when they were writing summonses," Adams said.
Rank-and-file police officers approached Adams and asked him to sponsor the bill. "They felt that it was no longer a way to police in this city – giving middle class or low-income New Yorkers summonses to try to balance the budget on the backs of these low-income or middle-income New Yorkers," Adams said. "They approached me to look into the possibility of sponsoring the bill." Predictably, Commissioner Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg "didn't like the bill because it stops a quota system," he said.
Adams was not deterred by Bloomberg or Kelly. "Police officers should not be told a predetermined number of summonses they should write," he said. Adams explained working conditions for police officers.
"When they get near the end of the month, if they haven't met that quota, now they go out and are basically pressured not to use discretion, but to write summonses just to fill a number," Adams said. According to Adams, sometimes the discretionary power of a police officer admonishing a person is enough to correct a problem. "To give someone a $115.00 summons for double parking or some other large amount for an act is really taxing New Yorkers with a thousand taxes, he said. "It is almost like death by a thousand taxes."
From Adams' point of view, the city had an economic rationale for mandating officers to write a required amount of summonses before the law changed. "Each officer was responsible for putting X-amount of dollars into the city coffers by being required to write a predetermined number of tickets," Adams said. "That is what they used to do their economic forecasts, based on the expectation of how much money was going to come in through police officers writing summonses or traffic enforcement agents writing X-amount of summonses or other methods of towing vehicles, and use those as part of their expectation of how to forecast how much money is going to come in from those activities."
Traffic enforcement was one method the city used to issue summonses and the attendant revenue. A person could get a summons as a result of stop-and-frisk, or they could get a summons merely because a police officer was walking down the block and observed them doing something, like a double-parked car, or a car parked at a meter that expired, or parking in a no-standing zone.
Adams said, "There are many ways a person can get a summons. The disproportionate amount that comes from stop-and-frisk is in our communities."
Summonses generated via stop-and-frisks are particularly troubling for Adams. Regarding the millions of stop-and-frisks documented over the past few years, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found more than 10 percent resulted in police actions – approximately 6 percent arrests and 6 percent summonses.
Adams said, "If you look at the 10 percent that does result in a police action, when you are talking about 2 to 3 million people, you are talking about several hundreds of thousands. When you break down that 10 percent, it is overwhelmingly summonses. And the summonses that are issued have nothing to do with the stop-and-frisk at all – just police officers out doing a summons. For the most part, that activity is used to judge the police officer's ability to do the job. We say that is wrong."
From Adams' perspective, when a person is making minimum wage and then has to pay a $115.00 summons, that has a "devastating impact" on that person. But the situation can and does get worse. "If you don't pay the summons – a lot of our young people would get a summons and put it in their back pocket and forget all about it – now it becomes a warrant. It goes from a summons to a warrant if they didn't show up in court or didn't pay the summons. This person is subject to be arrested. Now they have a something on their record indicating they were arrested for a warrant," Adams said. "Later in life, you can't really distinguish between not paying a beer drinking summons or jumping the turnstile summons, or sitting in the park after dark. That is our concern."
Sen. Adams said there is a period where the police department has to send out a memo explaining the new policy. "It is going to take about a month before you start seeing the instructions coming down to the rank and file what is the proper procedure now," said Adams. He predicts within the next six months we should see whether the law is being followed and the impact of the law, not just on the officers but on the communities some believe are targeted, as well as the city's financial expectations.
Adams warns, "Nothing in this law stops an officer from writing a summons. It stops the police department from compelling the officer to write a summons based on a quota. The power of discretion for violations is up to a police officer. He has the right to utilize discretion. We are not taking that away from him. If you have an officer that is overly aggressive, enjoys writing summonses to the public, nothing is going to stop him from doing that. He still has that discretion. But if you have an officer who is conscientious and realizes that he can correct the situation not only by writing the summons, sometimes he can correct a situation by not writing a summons.
"When officers understand that the law now protects them," Adams said, "they will understand they will no longer have to write a predetermined number of summonses. Now they can use the power of discretion, and use other methods to correct the situation. We looked at how we could make our police police better, how we make our police department operate better, but not to the extent of harming the public."
