Collars for dollars: how the drug war sacrifices real policing for easy arrests.

• Author: Moskos, Peter

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When I was a police officer in Baltimore, one sergeant would sometimes motivate his troops in the middle of a shift change by joyfully shouting, "All right, you maggots! Let's lock people up! They don't pay you to stand around. I want production! I want lockups!" He said this while standing in front of a small sign he most likely authored: "Unlike the citizens of the Eastern District, you a re required to work for your government check."

In the police world, there are good arrests and better arrests, but there is no such thing as a bad arrest. In recent years, measures of "productivity" have achieved an almost totemic significance. And because they are so easy to count, arrests have come to outweigh more important but harder-to-quantify variables such as crimes prevented, fights mitigated, or public fears assuaged.

There's an argument that putting pressure on rank-and-file officers to make lots of arrests is a good thing. After all, we pay police to arrest criminals. But there's a difference between quantity and quality. Quantity is easy to influence, and the rank and file can easily increase their output of discretionary arrests for minor offenses like loitering, disorderly conduct, and possession of marijuana. They are also influenced by what is known in New York as "collars for dollars": Arrest numbers are influenced by the incentive of overtime pay for finishing up paperwork and appearing in court.

Police would love to arrest only "real" criminals, but that isn't easy. It's difficult to find a good criminal. There's never a felon around when you need one. Fishing for low-level drug arrests is a far easier way to generate overtime.

When I worked in Baltimore, officers would pull up on a drug corner and stop the slowest addict walking away. While conducting a perfectly legal "Terry Frisk"--a cursory search nominally conducted for officer safety--cops would feel some drugs in a pocket. That easy arrest and lockup likely meant two hours of overtime pay.

In some cities, like New York, it's trickier. Overtime for court testimony is harder to get, and the state's highest court has ruled--precisely to prevent the Baltimore-style approach--that feeling drugs during a Terry Frisk does not allow an officer to search that pocket and remove those drugs. The court reasoned that the drugs are not a threat to the officer's safety, and safety is the only justification for these sorts of frisks.

In New York state, small-scale...