Hi everyone!
Welcome back to Documentary Thursdays. Hulu has been streaming a lot of great documentaries lately, both their own and others. Last week’s “Minding The Gap” (Episode #242) was particularly great, but for a couple others, check out “Augie” (Episode #165) and “Leaning Into The Wind: Andy Goldsworthy” (Episode #228). For a documentary that addresses systemic racism and quotas in police practices, check out “Whose Streets?” (Episode #172). And for a documentary that looks at lazy policing to clear cases, check out Errol Morris’ groundbreaking “The Thin Blue Line” (Episode #021). And if you have any suggestions, let me know at onemoviepunch.com.
And now...
Today’s movie is “Crime + Punishment”, the documentary from Stephen Maing. The film follows a group of NYPD officers who decide to challenge illegal quota practices, sparking the ire of the department and the FOP. The documentary explores the effects of illegal quotas, the tactics used in making those quotas, the pressure to keep silent, and the retaliation against officers who refuse to meet quotas.
Spoilers ahead.
So, I’m not a huge fan of the police, and there are multiple reasons for that. Historically, they were formed in the Southern States to hunt down runaway slaves, and were thinly-veiled mafia protection rackets in Northern States, particularly urban areas. Public police forces have also been tools for state and corporate oppression, whether that’s confronting striking workers, or kettling protestors, or establishing curfews, or enforcing martial law. We’ve lionized police forces as part of our social education, demanding unqualified respect for officers, and explaining away the obvious collusion within police organizations, the militarization of police officers, the infiltration of white supremacists and neo-nazis within the police force, and the nearly routine extrajudicial killings of people of color. It was easy to cover all this up before the Internet and smartphones made the usual counternarratives by police forces obsolete, which is why today’s documentary is so important.
“Crime + Punishment” follows the NYPD 12, a group of officers who have filed a class action lawsuit against the NYPD for continuing to enforce the quota system. Police quotas have long been an official practice of police departments, setting an expected number of summons, tickets, and arrests for officers on patrols. In fact, in New York, it wasn’t until 2012 that a law was passed specifically banning quotas for police officers, but the quotas were just buried into each officer’s performance evaluation. Multiple recordings in the documentary show the metrics were used to determine advancement, and even worse, were used to retaliate against officers who refused to meet the numbers. They also spell out the tactics used to meet their “performance metrics”, including heading to so-called “high crime” areas (based on numbers developed by meeting previous quota requirements), and charging folks to appear in court, or possibly to be detained for trial, even when the evidence isn’t there. It’s obvious if you give folks with extrajudicial powers the incentive to find crime, they will find it, and now we can see they were trained to issue summons and make arrests even when it wouldn’t hold up in court.
Stephen Maing’s documentary is groundbreaking for exposing the systemic corruption within the police, and that’s the most important part of this film. It’s focused mostly on the quota system, following both the NYPD 12 and one citizen locked up on a trumped up weapons charge, and sometimes the interplay between the two stories doesn’t always work. I also thought the social difficulties for grassroots organizations to work with police officers was underplayed, because internal reformers like the NYPD 12 and external police reform organizations will need to work together to make the necessary changes. And as you can tell from this particular review, I think the quota system is part of a much larger problem with police forces, especially the pressure placed on police officers who try to reform this corruption within the force. If we’re going to have police forces, then there’s a great deal of house cleaning we’re going to need to do, and stopping this obviously illegal and immoral quota system is just one step.
“Crime + Punishment” (2018) is all the proof we need that police forces need reform, focused on the illegal quota systems in place in multiple urban and suburban police forces. Stephen Maing, working with the NYPD 12 and their advocates, has broken the silence on this system, and already multiple cities are addressing their official and unspoken quota systems, including Chicago. Fans of documentaries that address police corruption, or who want to see how systemic racism operates within police forces, should definitely check out this film, then get involved to end quota-based policing in your area.
Rotten Tomatoes: 94%
Metacritic: 88
One Movie Punch: 8.6/10
“Crime + Punishment” (2018) is not rated and is currently streaming on Hulu and in select theaters.
