This week, a dozen black and Latino New York Police Department officers filed a lawsuit against the department and Commissioner Bill Bratton alleging that not only is the city’s quota system for tickets, summons and arrests still in place, but that they are being penalized for challenging it. In the suit, the officers say they have been harassed, given poor evaluations, denied benefits, transferred to undesirable posts and threatened with termination because they are “unwilling to perform racially discriminatory and unwarranted enforcement actions against the minority community.” 

Among the plaintiffs is Pedro Serrano, a Puerto Rican officer who testified against the department in 2013. Serrano says he has received poor performance evaluations and when he commented on profiling in his largely Puerto Rican precinct, he was told that the residents were "animals.”

The city’s stop-and-frisk quota program was revealed in a 2013 class action suit, and records proved that from 2002 to 2011, 90 percent of the stops involved Latino and black people. According to a statement issued by Deputy Commissioner Stephen Davis, “There are no numerical enforcement quotas established by the NYPD. Performance evaluations are conducted for all department employees based on an assessment of their duties, responsibilities and specific conditions of their assignments.”

But this week’s suit paints another picture: “The reality is that one year later, quotas remain alive and well and the NYPD is aggressively pursuing a numbers driven agenda with regard to arrests, tickets and summonses.”