An officer in the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Metropolitan Division has alleged in a new lawsuit that commanders have for years enforced a de facto quota system that rewarded officers who identified and arrested a lot of alleged gang members and punished those who didn’t.
“Minimums had to be met,” Officer Samantha Fiedler alleged in a lawsuit filed against the LAPD and the city of L.A. in California Superior Court this week.
Metro officers who didn’t make a gang or gun arrest or identify gang members on field interview cards for two days were told their “production” wasn’t good enough, she said. Some were reassigned to undesirable administrative jobs.
“This was part of the methodology used to send and enforce the message: Do as we say regarding our demands of arrests and [field interview card] numbers or you are done here,” Fiedler’s lawsuit alleged.
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