Police officers claim they were subjected to punishment after failing to meet their "traffic ticket quotas"

Police officers claim they were subjected to punishment after failing to meet their "traffic ticket quotas"
Matarazzo v NYC Police Dept., 261 AD2d 142

Section 215-a of the State Labor Law makes it unlawful to penalize an individual who fails to meet any quota related to the issuance of tickets or summonses written within a specified period of time for traffic violations. The section further provides that any individual who is penalized may “cause to be instituted a grievance proceeding pursuant to the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement, if any, or pursuant to the provisions of section seventy-five-a of the Civil Service Law if no collective bargaining agreement exists.”

However, there is an exception that allows discipline for non-performance of duty in issuing traffic tickets, as long as the employer does not define non-performance as failure to fulfill a quota. In other words, an employer may take a “job action against an employee for failure to satisfactorily perform his or her job assignment of issuing tickets or summonses for traffic violations including parking, standing or stopping except that the employment productivity of such employee shall not be measured by such employee’s failure to satisfactorily comply with the requirement of any quota that the employer may establish.”

Louis Matarazzo and other New York City police officers put Section 215-a to the test when they sued the department for allegedly depriving the officers of meal breaks “as punishment for failure to meet a ticket writing quota.” They asked the court to compensate them for “lost meal time” and to issue a “cease and desist order.”

The Appellate Division dismissed the case because, it said, the officers failed to prove a critical element in their case -- they did not allege the existence of a quota as defined in Labor Law Section 215-a(2). The Appellate Division said that there was no indication of how many tickets the officers were required to write nor the period of time involved.

According to the decision, all that Matarazzo and the others showed was that “two supervising officers from two different precincts directed the individual petitioners to perform duties, during their meal breaks, that were likely to result in the issuance of tickets.” This, said the court, fails to support an inference that Matarazzo and other officers were punished for failure to meet a quota for issuing tickets in violation of Labor Law Section 215-a.
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