Apparently Los Angeles is no longer the only place where the police force employs corruption. Despite Police Department and union regulations, police commanders in Chicago mandated quotas for groups of officers patrolling the Northwest Side of the city. The directive, entitled the “Mandatory Minimum Activity Plan” listed the number of quotas that had to be written for different categories.
It really inspires confidence in the police force when their enforcement techniques are designed like a multiple choice test. Every day, you must cite three moving violations, two parking tickets and either one gang dispersal or traffic violation. This system is and should remain outlawed for several reasons.
First of all, it discredits the authority of police officers when the citizens they seek to supervise realize that they could simply be a check on a “to do” list for any given violation. It gives people even more of a reason to disrespect a police officer’s authority and roll their eyes every time they get pulled over, etc. Additionally, if citizens feel like they are being unfairly regulated by a statistic requirement, it may make them more likely to rebel in defense, only behaving when the fuzz makes an appearance.
Secondly, the hope within the legal system is, or should be one of improvement. The role of police officers within any given community is to regulate the behavior of its inhabitants, and their presence should inspire people to live within the limits of the law. By keeping a quota, the police therefore admit that they are never going to be able to stop people from breaking the law, but should instead catch a minimum amount of people in the act throughout any given day. Again, knowledge by the citizens this pessimism allows them to lower their own standards.
Another important point comes from the point of view of the police force. If an individual police officer is forced to write a certain amount of citations per day, his sensitivity to lawbreaking becomes heightened. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it may cause overreaction to minor infractions, tying up time and efforts. While an officer deals with a driver going five miles per hour over the speed limit, a drunk driver could speed past, unbeknownst to the occupied policeman. While the possibility of this happening remains slim, it only takes once for a police officer to miss out on something important while he’s trying to make progress on his daily checklist.
The police commanders responsible for this mandate supplied this mandate in order to motivate police officers to become more active. It may be one answer, but it is reminiscent of a grade school teacher who gives her students busy work in order to get them to do “something.” Enforcing a quota may “motivate” officers, but the quality of the motivation is what’s important. Fulfilling this quota will not make an officer more dedicated to anything other than finishing so he can go back to being unmotivated. Motivation comes from within, it cannot be enforced, and particularly in the adult world, employers can assign more work, but cannot ensure that it is done well, a particularly important characteristic of police work.
Lastly, but certainly not least, the most important reason a police quota is inappropriate, particularly in a city setting, concerns racial profiling. There is already widespread suspicion of the police force in this department, and when officers are faced with this requirement, they are more likely to conduct searches without reason and pull people over for no cause. In a city, where minority population is statistically higher, this logically means more reasonless action against minorities, thus exacerbating the racial profiling issue.