When Edwin Raymond joined the NYPD in 2008, he was hopeful that he could take part in its mission “to enhance the quality of life in New York City by working in partnership with the community” in Brooklyn.
What he found instead was a police force that he claims prioritized arrest quotas over public safety, and was full of implicit bias.
For years, Edwin thought he could change things from within the system by refusing to go out of his way to arrest people for fare jumping or other minor infractions that could haunt someone for years, especially since he was only being encouraged to do so in primarily Black neighborhoods.
But he was passed up for a promotion to sergeant even after finishing eighth on the test out of 932 people, ostensibly because he wasn’t meeting the arrest quotas expected of him.
So Raymond began recording interactions with superior officers, and even all the way up to some top brass. Those recordings became a key part of a bombshell New York Times Magazine piece: “A Black Officer’s Fight Against the NYPD.”
Raymond also became a plaintiff alongside 11 other officers of color in a lawsuit alleging that supervising officers encouraged cops to meet arrest quotas and the policy targeted people of color.
Raymond retired from the force, ran for the City Council and has now written a new memoir with Jon Sternfeld, titled “An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing in America.”
He joined WNYC’s Alison Stewart on “All of It” to discuss his new book, what he thinks is wrong with policing in the city, and what he thinks of Mayor Eric Adams. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation. You can listen to their conversation here.
Stewart: You write, “the Brooklyn of my youth was a dangerous place.” You grew up in East Flatbush. What did you bear witness to as a kid?
Raymond: It was gunshots almost every night. Crack cocaine was still very prevalent, and everything that came with it: from the shootouts that would happen for…
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