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Police department activity quotas reduce police officer discretion and promote the use of enforcement activity for reasons outside of law enforcement's legitimate goals. States across the country have recognized these issues, as well as activity quotas' negative effects on the criminal justice system and community-police relations, and have passed anti-quota legislation to address these problems. But despite this legislation, critics claim that police departments still employ management devices that similarly reduce police officer discretion and reward police officers for enforcement activity that does not further a legitimate law enforcement goal, with the same negative effects on the criminal justice system and community-police relations. This Note analyzes New York State's anti-quota statute and its effectiveness at combating the evils it attempted to outlaw - reduced police officer discretion, enforcement activity that does not further a legitimate law enforcement goal, decreased community-police relations, and negative impacts on the criminal justice system - using the New York City Police Department's legal, non-quota-based management policies as a case study. These management policies and their effects will be determined in part by interviewing former New York City Police Department uniformed members of the service.**
I. Introduction
The New York City Police Department ("NYPD") is no stranger to quotas or the scandals that follow them. In 1957, the Brooklyn Supreme Court directed Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy to testify as a witness in a malicious prosecution lawsuit filed against the City of New York concerning allegations of a department-wide traffic summons quota.* 1 In 1972, a summons quota created by Manhattan's Twenty-Fourth Precinct Commanding Officer, Deputy Inspector Norman H. Andersson, led his police officers to write 1294 parking tickets in a single day.2 The New York Times published the scandal on its front page, leading Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy to declare, "quotas do not solve problems."3
Quotas made front-page news again during the Knapp Commission investigations into NYPD corruption. The Commission blamed narcotics unit arrest quotas for aiding corruption and preventing officers and detectives from successfully attacking the heroin trade,4 and linked gambling-unit arrest quotas to corruption.5 The Commission also created an NYPD slang dictionary to help corruption investigators interpret police officer testimony that included the word "flake," defined as "[t]he planting of evidence on a person who...