Today’s
stupid question: Do Arrest Quotas Encourage Police Officers to Break the Law?
On Monday, Baltimore police officer Kendell Richburg pleaded
guilty to drug conspiracy charges that could earn him a maximum sentence of
life in prison. Looking at the actions that Justin Fenton detailed in his
Baltimore Sun article about the case—distributing drugs to be sold on the
street, facilitating robberies, planning to frame innocent people—it seems
clear that Richburg was a bad cop.
And yet, oddly, it seems like this was actually a case of a
bad cop who was trying to be a good cop—at least at the outset. Richburg did
these things not for personal gain, but to benefit a confidential informant who
fed him information that helped him make arrests. In order to keep his
confidential informant on the street, Richburg gave him drugs that he could
sell. Richburg tipped off the informant to police activity, helping him avoid
arrest. But eventually, their arrangement took a more sinister turn. “As
Richburg conspired with the informant, the two discussed plans to set up
innocent people,” writes Fenton. “In another instance, Richburg helped the
informant plot a robbery.”
Richburg was part of a plainclothes police unit known as the
Violent Crimes Impact Section. The VCIS was charged with getting guns and drug
dealers off the streets of Baltimore. (The unit was renamed and effectively
disbanded last December by new police commissioner Anthony Batts, in the wake
of citizen and City Council criticism that its tactics were too aggressive.)
Lots of urban police departments have employed specialty units like these,
tasked with moving into high-crime areas and rapidly lowering crime rates.
These units persist because they work. They make a lot of arrests, seize a lot
of guns and drugs, and generally produce the kind of statistics that police
officials can proudly tout to politicians and the press. They are blunt
objects, and sometimes you need a blunt object if you want to make a dent.
But look closely at incidents of police brutality or
corruption and you’ll often see them connected to these “jump-out boys,” so
named because the officers tend to jump out of cars and aggressively pursue
their targets. In 2011, the city of Chicago disbanded its extremely effective
Mobile Strike Force unit, in part because citizens complained that its members
played too rough. (In a 2012 Chicago magazine story about the city’s new police
chief, Noah Isackson mentioned the 2006 revelations that “some officers robbed
and kidnapped residents, and the accusations a year later that one officer
plotted to murder another.”) In 2002, New York City disbanded its Street Crimes
Unit, three years after four plainclothes officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed
man named Amadou Diallo, killing him on the steps of his apartment. (The
proximate cause of the unit’s downfall was the lawsuit Daniels , et al. v. the
City of New York, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in the wake
of the Diallo shooting, alleging racial profiling in the Street Crimes Unit and
the NYPD at large.)
One of the main problems with these units is that they are
often disconnected from the communities they serve. Since they’re not walking
beats or attending community meetings like ordinary cops, they don’t always
have to directly reckon with the wrath of the law-abiding people they offend.
Officers in plainclothes units have been accused of acting indiscriminately and
assuming criminal behavior from everyone they encounter. They make arrests, and
then move on to the next hot spot.
These units are instruments of the “at any cost” school of
policing, where success is measured by the number of arrests made or amount of
contraband seized—by meeting often-unrealistic statistical targets imposed from
on high. According to Richburg’s attorney, Warren Brown, tactics like those his
client employed were common in the VCIS among officers worried about making
their arrest quotas. “ ‘[I]f the curtain was pulled back, you would see that
his M.O. was standard operating procedure,’ ” Brown told theSun—which isn’t
really a defense for conspiring to commit robbery, but is maybe an explanation
for why a certain type of police officer might think that helping an informant
commit a robbery is defensible if it encourages that informant to keep feeding
him actionable information.
Baltimore’s police department obviously isn’t the only one
that allegedly instructs its officers to meet various quotas. In a 1999 New
York Times article, for instance, an anonymous member of the NYPD’s Street
Crimes Unit told David Kocieniewski that the officers were oppressed by
stat-driven police tactics, and that they worked under a quota system that said
they had to seize at least one illegal firearm per month:
"There are guys who are willing to toss anyone who's
walking with his hands in his pockets," said an officer, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. "We frisk 20, maybe 30 people a day. Are they all
by the book? Of course not; it's safer and easier to just toss people. And if
it's the 25th of the month and you haven't got your gun yet? Things can get a
little desperate."
If cops are under pressure to make numbers, then it follows
that they’ll try hard to make those numbers, even if it means bending some
rules in the process. So if a confidential informant is giving an officer good,
actionable information, it’s to that officer’s benefit to keep that informant
on the streets, even if it means giving that informant drugs to sell. And it
makes sense that commanding officers, under pressure from superiors to reduce
crime, might look the other way and give their subordinates room to operate
however they see fit.
There’s no point in being too idealistic about the mechanics
of urban police work. It’s a game of compromises, of weighing relative evils.
But so many of these compromises seem to sacrifice long-term progress in favor
of short-term rewards. Units like the Street Crimes Unit and the VCIS are an
answer, yes, but they’re an answer to an incomplete question: "How do we
fix the crime problem right now?" The second half of that question—“What
do we do after that?”—is hard to answer with rule-bending shortcuts. I don’t
want to imply that it’s not important to make arrests and get criminals off the
streets. But it matters how you do it, and doing so in a way that destroys
community trust, engenders resentment, inhibits cooperation, and incentivizes
bad cop behavior will only make the good cops’ jobs harder—and the streets more
dangerous—in the long run.