The NYPD operates by its own rules (as too often happens in our country), but its particular criminality is staggering. A handful of officers, from the tens of thousands employed by the city, have come out over the last few years, to expose the corruption. This should be one of the biggest stories of this country this year, if not decade. And yet...
Just three days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, New York City agreed to something that is so scandalous, so huge, that only the incoming presidency of Donald Trump could’ve outshined it. New York City agreed to pay $75 million (that’s $75,000,000) out in a police corruption case that should’ve rocked the city and the nation to its core. They likely chose that date and time on purpose. The case had been in litigation for years and years, but the city chose one of the most fragile, news heavy times in the history of modern American media to drop an absolute bomb. The city admitted that it was forced to dismiss over 900,000 arrests and summonses because they simply didn’t have the evidence to back them. These weren’t 900,000 stops that were made, but 900,000 legal actions accusing people of crimes that they did not commit. They were all bogus. Not 9,000. Not 90,000 — which seems like an outrageous number, but 900,000. Not only that, but the case actually had its very own deleted email scandal, where almost every single email Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly ever sent was deleted — never to be found again. Yeah, really.
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To understand the misconduct, brutality, forced pleas, false witnesses, and corruption that I am about to share, you must first understand the unjust system that police officers themselves have bravely identified as being the root source of it all — arrest quotas. Yes, racism and bigotry and white supremacy, conscious or otherwise, are all essential underlying problems with policing in America, but arrest quotas, or the departmental demand that each officer has a certain number of arrests, preferably with certain types of crimes, on the backs of certain types of people, are the vehicle that allows America’s worst instincts to wreck havoc on the lives of everyday people in New York. Gentrification has essentially pushed these horrible practices out of the eyesight of New York’s privileged class and the victory of Stop and Frisk being cut down gave the both city and the NYPD cover for something that is arguably far worse.
The systemic foundation of the next four parts of this series was not set by me, but by heroic, award-winning officers within the NYPD who believed with all of their heart that arrest quotas, imposed on everyday cops by their supervisors, were not only deeply unjust for the hundreds of thousands of New York City residents affected by these quotas who are frequently targeted and arrested without cause, but that the system is poisonous for officers themselves — actually breeding the worst instincts of racism, brutality, and corruption from the top down.