Sergeant Edwin Raymond is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by a group of New York City police officers who have become famous as “the N.Y.P.D.-12.” They claim that, despite a 2010 statewide ban, officers are forced to meet monthly quotas for arrests and summonses—and that those quotas are enforced disproportionately on people of color. “They can't enforce [quotas] in Park Slope, predominantly white areas,” Raymond says. “But yet here they are in Flatbush, in Crown Heights, in Harlem, Mott Haven, South Side of Jamaica, enforcing these things.” He walks Jennifer Gonnerman through the process by which so-called quality-of-life or broken-windows policing—advocated forcefully by former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton—led to a form of systemic racism in policing. Although he was concerned about what blowing the whistle would do to his own career, Raymond was promoted to sergeant, and he continues to hear from people around the world concerned about the spread of quota policing—which he calls “Bratton’s cancer.”

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.