Roswell police have ‘mandatory' DUI goal

Roswell police officers who work overnight must make 25 drunken driving arrests a year or risk poor performance evaluations and a transfer to a less lucrative assignment, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.

But don't call it a quota.

A department spokesman, Lt. James McGee, told the AJC that "there is really no quota, necessarily. I think the verbiage is probably misleading."

Quotas are against department policy, McGee added.

Yet an e-mail sent on Jan. 11 to officers on the morning watch left little room for doubt about the department's expectations. Morning watch extends from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. -- prime time for drunken driving.

"The DUI goal of 25 DUI's a year is now mandatory, and your evaluations will reflect if you are meeting this goal or not," a shift supervisor wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by the AJC via an open records request.

Eleven days later, one officer who consistently averaged half the number of arrests of other officers on her shift was transferred to evening watch.  Morning watch officers get paid $1 more per hour than day watch, and 50 cents more hourly than evening watch, because it is an overnight shift.

In a memo recommending the transfer, Capt. Donald C. Moss wrote that the officer's level of "self initiated activity" was not up to par.

Roswell police say that the DUI goal is one of several benchmarks for officer productivity. The goal of 25 DUIs was set in 2009, McGee said.

"You have to have some measuring stick," McGee said. "The supervisor has discretion to establish goals and he felt that was an adequate goal. At least two DUIs a month is not unreasonable for an officer to try to get."

Between 2008 and 2009, the number of DUI stops by Roswell police dipped by 2 percent, from 709 to 693. After the e-mail informed officers that DUI goals had become mandatory in January, DUI arrests increased by 44 percent (from 151 to 217) between January and March, compared with the same time frame last year.

Defense attorneys who specialize in DUI cases say that quotas pressure officers to make cases. They also open up the department to legal challenges.

Cory Yager is a DUI lawyer who worked for the Roswell Police Department for five years between 2002 and 2007. He still has friends on the force. Yager said he is concerned that officers are now arresting people they might otherwise have let go on marginal cases.

"It's a recipe for disaster for the individual citizens," Yager told the AJC. "Just being accused of a crime can affect employment, raise insurance rates and put a societal stigma on people. If an arrest should not have been made, and that [quota] is what could tip the scale, that is not right."

DUI lawyer Ben Sessions, who often practices in Roswell, said the situation puts officers in a tough spot. There are subjective elements to every DUI stop, and much of the cases hangs on the officers' credibility in observing driver behavior.

"It calls into question right off the bat their credibility," Sessions said. "That's unquestionably going to be used against them in court."

A focus on numbers created a quota system within the Atlanta Police Department that led cops to cut corners and resulted in the fatal shooting of Kathryn Johnston, 92, in 2006. The FBI investigated the case and found that narcotics officers were pumping up their warrants and arrests to meet performance quotas of nine arrests and two search warrants a month. Officers who failed to meet their quotas risked being transferred.

Tracking officer activity in terms of arrests is a common way for police departments to determine appropriate staffing levels and measure employee performance, said Frank Rotundo, the executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police.

It's difficult to say how many other local police departments tie officer job performance to the number of arrests they make, since quotas are generally viewed by the public in a negative light.

"Many departments don't want to admit that because of the interpretation of quotas," Rotundo said. "They'd rather say we don’t have quotas. But, realistically, the officers are held to a standard."

Roswell Municipal Court Judge Maurice Hilliard, a 30-year veteran of the court, said he hadn't heard about a goal or quota for 25 DUI arrests, nor had he seen any evidence of it. He said he would oppose such rigid standards.

"If you're out there patrolling and you have not met your quota, that's my misfortune because you're going to find a way to stop me," he said.

Hilliard proposed another solution.

"If you are a police officer and you're doing your job, we should not have to worry about a quota," he said. "If you're a police officer and you're not doing your job, they oughta fire you."

FOR BOX

DUI arrests by Roswell police

year/ number of arrests

2007/ 507

2008/ 708

2009/ 693

2010*/ 217

* As of March 31, 2010.