The problem, the plaintiffs say, is that police commanders will often try to appease the department’s top brass by pushing their officers to make more arrests in poorer, minority neighborhoods. While there are often higher rates of serious crime in these areas, a quantitative approach means that police face pressure to respond to such crimes by arresting people for trivial reasons—or for no reason at all. If the cops don’t fulfill their quotas, according to the plaintiffs, their superiors penalize them, denying their vacation requests, assigning them to midnight shifts, or limiting their hopes of getting promoted.

The plaintiffs, all of them minorities themselves, have been arguing that it’s tough to make a decent living and advance in their jobs without engaging in this aggressive, numbers-based style of policing. They complain that this means-to-an-end, results-based mentality can put them in a bind. Sandy Gonzalez, an officer in the Bronx and the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, described the dynamic to me by imagining what he’d say to a hypothetical offender: “When it comes to the end of the month, and I need that number … dude, it’s your neck or mine.”

If penalties such as denied vacation requests do indeed exist, it’s easy to see why some cops might do whatever they can to avoid them. In a city and a country where blue-collar jobs are harder and harder to come by, law enforcement still offers a clear path to the middle class and the nice things that come with it—the house in Staten Island, the two cars in the driveway, college tuition for the kids. Cops who receive positive evaluations can join specialized units and eventually rise to the coveted rank of detective, earning as much as six figures a year.

But when officers fail to deliver the desired numbers, that path can close up quickly, some officers say. Gonzalez, for example, says he received a failing grade on an important evaluation because he hadn’t met a monthly quota. Another cop I talked to said the temptation to make unnecessary arrests can be overwhelming. The NYPD, she said, puts its own cops in “financial handcuffs.”

NYPD officials have long denied that there’s a quota system in the department, even as, over the years, a series of lawsuits have challenged that claim. Most recently, an attorney filed documents in Manhattan Federal Court charging the NYPD with engaging in a “stunning pattern” of evidence destruction to cover up the quota system, as The New York Daily News recently reported. (The NYPD didn’t respond to my requests for comment about these allegations or the other claims made by those mentioned in this article.)

According to whistleblower cops such as Gonzalez, supervisors in the NYPD often try to euphemistically maneuver around the quota ban by pressuring cops to generate more “activity.” If supervisors don’t apply enough pressure, they themselves might risk punishment or humiliation at the hands of their higher-ups.