Cop arrest quotas on CCRB radar
Whistleblower cops’ allegations of race-based arrest quotas will likely be investigated by the city’s NYPD watchdog — if the cops prevail in their federal court claims that failing to meet the quota derailed their careers.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board announced the likely probe Monday in response to a Daily News report that four more police officers have come forward to back a class-action lawsuit that claims NYPD supervisors enforced an off-the-books quota system that prioritized arrests of Blacks and Latinos.
The lawsuit was filed in 2015 by NYPD Lt. Edwin Raymond and three other cops who say they were punished because they did not hit the quotas set by top commanders in the Bronx and Brooklyn. About two dozen current and former officers have filed legal papers backing the plaintiffs’ claims.
“If plaintiffs prevail in their suit, the CCRB would investigate arrests/summons made by officers under the supervision of the relevant commanders, as part of our new Charter mandate to investigate racial profiling and other forms of bias based policing,” the CCRB tweeted.
The agency was referring to a City Council rewrite of the CCRB’s mandate that added probes of systemic racial profiling to its responsibilities. In such an investigation, the agency would look at whether quota pressure from commanders was directly reflected in street encounters.
“We can really start to address— in an independent, impartial manner — the racialized policing that does indeed happen in this city,” CCRB Chairman Fred Davie said this month.
But the CCRB faces an uphill battle in pursuing racial-bias investigations unless the state Legislature passes a law giving it access to sealed police records, Davie said.
“Without access to sealed arrest records and other information, it will be extremely difficult for the CCRB to investigate racial profiling or assess patterns of bias,” Davie said at a CCRB meeting in May.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower
cops’ claims of race-based quotas could factor in a class-action suit filed in 2019 by the Legal Aid Society, a source close to the case told the Daily News.
The Legal Aid suit alleges that the NYPD illegally detains people and then runs their names through increasingly sophisticated law enforcement databases without probable cause.
The lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, Terron Belle, claims he was walking to his Harlem home in 2017 when four cops stopped and frisked him — and then detained him on the sidewalk as they ran his name through databases even though they found nothing illegal.
Legal Aid calls what happened to Belle “digital stop-and-frisk,” and says it stems from police commanders’ imposition of arrest quotas.
“As a result of the arrest quota system that has existed and continues to exist, NYPD police officers were incentivized to detain or further detain individuals for purposes of conducting warrant searches even when there was no reasonable suspicion,” the lawsuit reads.
A Law Department spokesman declined to comment.