City cops are routinely denied overtime and vacation, demoted to menial posts and ultimately threatened with being fired for not making quotas, a scathing new class-action lawsuit charges.
The lawsuit, set to be filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court, specifically addresses minority officers allegedly being forced to make at least one arrest and issue 20 summonses a month.
The plaintiffs claim racial discrimination is at work both because the department is targeting minorities with the quotas — and because black and Hispanic officers are punished more harshly than white cops when they fail to meet their numbers.
“At this point, you either come up with the numbers or there is hell to pay,’’ Bronx Officer Adhyl Polanco told The Post on Sunday.
Polanco is one of two plaintiffs who have already testified against the city in the now-famous case that challenged the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk over discrimination issues. The other officer is Pedro Serrano.
Other officers have taken on the department over quotas, but Polanco — and Serrano’s lawyer, Emeka Nwokoro — say this is the first quota case involving alleged racial bias.
Serrano says he protested to a superior that the Puerto Ricans he was targeting for summonses in his South Bronx precinct couldn’t afford the fines, but was told it was OK because they were “animals.” The suit notes he was particularly offended because he’s Puerto Rican.
And Polanco says that, after he complained about the alleged quotas himself, he was warned, “If you think one and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you’ll be doing. You’ll be doing a lot more.”
Another supervisor even upped the ante for him, Polanco claims.
“Next week, [it’ll be] 25 and one, 35 and one, and until you decide to quit this job and go to work at Pizza Hut, this is what you are going to do until then,” the second supervisor said, according to court papers.
Another plaintiff cop, Sandy Gonzalez, gripes in the suit about allegedly being forced to work alone in a cold, dark and dangerous area after complaining. He said he was advised that “on 128th Street, you can write 100 ‘C’ [criminal] summonses any day.”
The fourth officer named in the suit, Ritchie Baez, says he was punished for not meeting his quotas by being assigned to “Sky Watch” duty, exiling him to one of the department’s mounted street “towers.”
Seven NYPD traffic cops are set to file a separate class-action federal lawsuit charging that they were denied promotions and punished with no overtime and lost vacation in retaliation for balking at quotas, too.