By A. O. Scott @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 22
Earlier this year — not long after Stephen Maing’s documentary “Crime+Punishment” won a special jury award for “social impact” at the Sundance Film Festival — the New York Police Department instituted mandatory “no quota” training for all its officers. The background and meaning of that policy is laid out in Mr. Maing’s meticulous and dismaying film, which also illuminates some of the deep, perhaps intractable problems of policing in New York City and beyond.
Not long ago, members of the force were expected to meet monthly quotas for arrests and summonses. Though the practice was outlawed in 2010, Mr. Maing amasses evidence and testimony that it persisted. He focuses on a group of officers — known as the N.Y.P.D. 12 — who said in a lawsuit that they had been pressured to meet illegal quotas and punished when they refused to comply. Supervisors are recorded threatening reprisals against the officers, some of whom are then disciplined for trivial infractions, given undesirable assignments and blocked when they seek promotion.
“Crime+Punishment” follows these officers, who are mostly Latino and African-American, as they go public with their case, holding news conferences and sitting for television interviews. One of them, Edwin Raymond, was profiled in a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The importance of the suit goes beyond the officers’ treatment by the departmental hierarchy. Quotas, to Mr. Raymond and his colleagues, are a symptom and a cause of the dysfunctional, antagonistic relationship between the police and the public, especially young, nonwhite men [....]