"Harass people for non-crimes while brushing off actual crimes, and the people are eventually going to lose trust in law enforcement." - Done.

Oh, You Mean Those Quotas - Reason Magazine:

"In March, I wrote a column detailing a number of credible accusations made against the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for instituting a quota system for arrests and for stop-and-frisk searches. At the same time, additional allegations charged higher-ups in the department with actively discouraging crime victims from reporting crimes—as well as downgrading felonies to misdemeanors—in order to make the city's crime statistics look better. Taken together, these allegations painted an ugly picture of New Yorkers being stopped, hassled, and frisked for either petty offenses or for no offense at all, while the victims of acutal crimes faced unsympathetic law enforcement officials.

...Now comes another set of recordings from another New York precinct that validates both the Molloy study and Polanco's allegations. Earlier this month, the Village Voice obtained over 100 recordings of roll call meetings in Brooklyn's 81st precinct made by Officer Adrian Schoolcraft. They're damning.

...In other words, the statistical manipulation extends beyond property crimes. Journalist Debbie Nathan, who was sexually assaulted in a city park last February, says that she was shocked to learn that the officers who wrote up her report classified the crime as a misdemeanor. It was later upgraded to a felony, but only after Nathan went to the district attorney. And according to the DA's investigation, the six officers who responded to Nathan's attack admitted leaving key portions of her story out of the report. As Nathan told the Village Voice, rape crisis centers throughout New York City have documented similar complaints from victims of sexual assault.

...Officers were instructed to arrest people for "blocking the sidewalk," for not possessing ID (even while just feet from their homes), even for no reason at all (cops were told to "articulate" a charge at a later time). The cops were told to make arrests even if they knew they'd be voiding the charge at the end of their shifts. As a sergeant implores in one recording, "Again, it's all about the numbers."

...This is the natural progression of two related policing trends in New York: Broken Windows, which posits that cracking down on petty crime leads to a reduction in more serious crime, and COMPSTAT, a data-driven method of policing. There's debate over the effectiveness of both policies, but even if they do work to drive down crime, it's important to understand the political realities of the institutions that are using them.

Politicians want lower crime rates. This is the demand they make of the police officials who report to them. If your policing philosophy is Broken Windows, and your method of accountability is COMPSTAT, over time there will be a natural pull on the police department to enforce increasingly petty offenses and to manipulate data on more serious crimes...

In addition to the obvious civil liberties concerns about stopping, arresting, and holding people for non-crimes, these practices also poison police-community relations, particularly among minority groups. Harass people for non-crimes while brushing off actual crimes, and the people are eventually going to lose trust in law enforcement."