Some states ostensibly try to prevent the implementation of quotas in policing and have laws on the books prohibiting such systems.
But it demonstrates the difficulty of piercing the veil of police misconduct. In fact, the DOJ was careful to not accuse the city of establishing quotas, despite recommending that it "prohibit the use of ticketing and arrest quotas, whether formal or informal." This awkward non-acknowledgment-cum-suggestion may have been because the DOJ did not have incontrovertible proof of a quota system.
The DOJ was clear that "Ferguson's police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias." Nevertheless, despite circumstances that suggest that the city's use of court fees and fines was buoyed by numbers-driven policing, the report mentioned the word "quota" once. The Department of Justice's Ferguson Report alludes to this interface between racial bias and quotas. Moreover, a police quota, as opposed to racial profiling, but sometimes in concert with it, can be the prelude to minorities' ensnarement in the legal system (à la Ferguson) or the beginning of a fatal police interaction. Formally, a quota is an explicit policy that is either unabashed ("Officer Winslow, get X citations a month") or masked with gentler, technocratic tropes like "goals" or "targets." Informally, a quota may be an implied prod for police officers to increase their "activity."Īcross the country, police officers' use of quotas have been investigated, litigated, and legislated against, but the perniciousness of the practice gets lost amid discussions about more imminent dangers such as fatal police shootings or the overreliance on incarceration as a punishment tool.īut this understandable prioritization is why the use of quotas is especially dangerous: It garners less attention, and like other police practices, exists behind the "blue wall of silence." This wall consists of a subculture that prohibits cops from reporting misconduct and makes exposing quota regimes difficult. By police quotas, I mean formal and informal measures that require police officers to issue a particular number of tickets or make a certain number of arrests, often within a specific time frame. They reject the idea of police bias, are bewildered at the energy minorities spend protesting police brutality (as opposed to in-group violence), and argue that the only kind of "reform" necessary should tilt toward police.ĭespite their sharp disagreements, there may be one issue on which these two groups might agree: the undesirability of quotas in police forces. On the other side are cops and their apologists. These individuals are exasperated about lethal police violence and the resultant lack of accountability.
#Police ticket creator skin#
On one side are racial minorities-often led by women-and allied whites who acknowledge that having black or brown skin can be a death-dealing hazard. Subscribe here.Ĭriminal justice reform divides into two seemingly irreconcilable camps: Black Lives Matter versus blue lives matter. This article appears in the Fall 2016 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
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