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NYPD Punishes Esteemed Black Officer Who Fights Quotas
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Feb 18, 2016
Modified Feb 18, 2016
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Michael Appleton / Mayoral Photography Office
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Feb 18, 2016
Modified Feb 18, 2016
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Broken Windows is insatiable: If the idea is to prevent big crimes by attacking little crimes, as the city gets safer, you still have to keep coming up with little crimes to prosecute. Cops have fought the NYPD over quotas before. But a galling story in this week’s New York Times Magazine shows how Commissioner Bill Bratton’s department has punished an exemplary black officer who refuses to make bogus arrests.
Officer Edwin Raymond began recording his interactions with his superiors in 2014 because despite being a model cop, he was given low marks because he wasn’t generating enough “activity.”
Lt. Wei Long, then in his first month at District 32, confronted Raymond about his relatively low ‘‘activity.’’ Like other supervisors featured in the early recordings, he expressed sympathy for Raymond, admitting that the ‘‘department is all about numbers’’ and even acknowledging that this ‘‘sucks.’’ Raymond challenged Long, as he did many of his superiors. ‘‘This is people’s lives,’’ he tells a captain on one of the tapes. ‘‘It’s not a game.’’
But in an NYPD where less than 7% of senior members are black, it wasn’t just Raymond’s refusal to chase numbers that prevented his promotion. The Times published another recorded conversation Raymond has with a superior who likes and supports him, Sergeant Martin Campbell, who is also black.
"What is the issue with me?’’ he asked Campbell. ‘‘Just the activity, the quota?’’
Campbell laughed. ‘‘What do you think, bro?’’
‘‘Man,’’ Raymond said.
‘‘Honestly, what do you think?’’
‘‘But it has to be more,’’ Raymond said, "because technically, when it comes to numbers—"
‘‘No, no, no,’’ Campbell said. ‘‘There’s not more. That’s it.’’
And yet that wasn’t it — at least, Raymond didn’t think so. There were other officers in the district, not many, but some, whose numbers were even lower than his.
‘‘You really want me to tell you what I think it is?’’ Campbell asked.
‘‘Of course, because I need to understand this.’’
‘‘You’re a young black man with dreads. Very smart, very intelligent, have a loud say, meaning your words is loud. You understand what I’m saying by that?’’
‘‘Yeah.’’
‘‘I never seen anything like this, bro,’’ Campbell said.
By late 2015, Raymond had joined a lawsuit other police officers of color had filed against the department for violating a law against quotas.
But he also had the eighth highest score on the sergeant’s exam, and was tapped to participate in seminars and brainstorming sessions to improve the department. In December he met with a group of NYPD brass, including Deputy Commissioner of Personnel, Michael Julian, to argue the case for his promotion.
‘I want to hire a thousand of you,’’ [Julian] said. He hadn’t conjured that exact number out of thin air. Julian, who is white, had recently been assigned the task of coordinating the recruitment of 1,000 black officers. That summer, the 57 black men and 25 black women who graduated from the academy represented less than 10 percent of the graduating class — the lowest percentage of black graduates in 20 years.
Along with the other executives at the hearing, Julian had already reviewed Raymond’s documents. He noted that Raymond had called in sick only once in seven years. ‘‘You don’t get sick,’’ he said, his voice rising with enthusiasm. ‘‘There’s a lot of good about you.’’
Raymond was again denied the promotion, and was reassigned to an area where two other plaintiffs in the lawsuit had been sent.
‘An officer who hides in a room, peeking through a hole in a vent, is more supervisor material than me,” Raymond later told the Times, referring to transit cops who ambush teenage farebeaters (often young men of color) instead of helping those in need on the subway. ‘‘This is the system, and it needs to change.’’
The NYPD didn’t comment on Raymond’s case for the article. Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton have denied the existence of quotas, even after cops refused to abide by them en masse last year.
"In 2015, the NYPD recorded more than a million fewer enforcement encounters compared with the highs of the previous decade," Bratton wrote in a Daily News op-ed last month. "If it ever were driven by numbers and quotas, today’s NYPD is not."
Read the entire New York Times Magazine story and see if you believe that.
Tagged
broken windows
institutional racism
quotas
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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