Of the various functions that a municipal government performs operating a police force is one of the most basic. Municipalities derive their police powers from the state government which issues their charter. People are seldom in complete agreement about what they are willing to pay taxes for, but most would agree that some form of police force is necessary and we think of it as being entirely funded by taxes. The trend toward a more neoliberal approach to government that has developed over the past 30-40 years has made some shifts in these long standing assumptions. There has been a trend to focus police activities on things that will actually bring in money to the municipal coffers. With the pressure to cut taxes many state and local governments have made increasing use of charging fees for the use of previously tax supported services such as parks and other facilities. Citizens can make a choice as to whether they will use these services. When it comes to police revenue generation, fee paying in entirely involuntary.
This is the main street of the town of Normal Illinois.
It is a very quiet little college town that is both geographically and culturally removed from major urban areas. Yet they too have a crime problem. The cops have had a hard time finding enough of it to meet their "performance standards".
Three officers from Normal say setting mandatory minimum targets in their low-crime town means innocent people’s rights may be violated
The three officers contend that because their shift was so quiet, filling their quotas required potential violations of citizens’ constitutional rights – specifically, the fourth amendment right to probable cause, and the 14th amendment right to due process of law, as well as protections under the Illinois state constitution against unlawful restraint and official misconduct.
In a little more than a month, the argument in Normal over whether police quotas are constitutional will recede, when a new state law comes into effect banning the practice.
Nonetheless, when the Guardian spoke to Rick Bleichner, the police chief of Normal, he did not deny that officers were given quotas. He said they “don’t call them quotas”, though. Instead, he said, they call them “work performance standards”.
The fact that the state of Illinois has found it necessary to address the issue with legislation and other states are also debating it, indicates that this has become a widespread trend. Such laws can stop formal written policies, but the approach is likely to continue in practice. Shifting to the nation's largest city New York we find that similar performance standards are the primary motivating factor for the wave of stop and frisk incidents.
An NYT article reporting on the federal civil rights case reveals the wide spread use of a quota system to force police to produce more arrest.
The two whistle-blowing officers have offered testimony that is crucial to the plaintiffs’ claim that the department relies on a quota system to force officers to generate more “activity” — a category that includes arrests, tickets and street stops. According to the civil rights lawyers who brought the stop-and-frisk class action lawsuit, the number of street stops has soared over the last decade because police officers, under pressure to make the quota, have resorted to stopping people whom they have no reason to suspect of wrongdoing.
The trial’s focus on quotas and productivity goals has illuminated the labor-management tensions that run deep through the Police Department, with 15,000 rank-and-file officers on the patrol force. “I think we’re charged with trying to get the police officers to work, do the things that they’re getting paid for,” the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for labor relations, John Beirne, testified.
The term revenue sharing used to refer to the notion of the federal government using tax receipts to make grants to local government. In the wake of 9/11 and the creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security it has taken on a new twist. They have been working to increase the power of local law enforcement on a broad front all in the name of fighting terrorism. They have provided vast amounts of military equipment to local police and their network of fusion centers serve to integrate the operations of multiple law enforcement agencies. They have also made aggressive use of the
cash seizure programs which were first established as part of the war on drugs.
Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.
The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.
This article discloses cases of people who were in legitimate possession of cash who had it seized during a "routine" traffic stop and then experienced great difficulty and legal expense in trying to get it back. The primary way in which police take advantage of this "financial opportunity" is by the highway counterpart of stop and frisk. The stop cars on "suspicion" and then conduct a search.
The reality in American society is that police services like wealth have never been distributed equally. Upscale neighborhoods get the most police patrols. When police are placed under pressure to make more arrest and generate more fines they aren't likely to make them in gated communities. People there would complain and they have political clout. The easiest course is to look for people who can't fight back. Black Americans become the targets of opportunity. Most of them stand out visually and most of them lack political clout. Let's take a look at the data on arrest for marijuana simple possession.
How do you find out that someone is in possession of a bit of weed? They don't usually go around publicly announcing it. They have to be searched. It really doesn't seem plausible that blacks are three times more likely to use marijuana than whites. Here is
one survey of drug use. It estimates that the number of blacks using marijuana is about 10% of total users, roughly equivalent to their presence in the general population. This does not support the huge disparity in arrest rates. One thing that these disparities reflect is the frequency with which black people are stopped as pedestrians or drivers and searched simply because they are black. The difference is just too extreme to write off as anything other than deliberate bias. It generates police collars and fines that until recently cost them nothing in terms of political push back.