Pedro Hernandez in Crime+Punishment (Mud Horse Pictures/Hulu)

 In good faith, everyone trusts that justice will be defended by capable and fair-minded individuals who want to serve their community. That’s why cops exist, ideally. They are in charge of maintaining order and guaranteeing safety for citizens. Reality is another matter. Some innocent people are punished by the so-called hands of justice, even if a crime never happened.

This frightening scenario is exposed by Stephen Maing in Crime + Punishment, a valuable documentary about the illegal practice of arrest quotas by the New York Police Department, in which officers were pressured to make arrests. Otherwise, cops felt their careers would be obstructed and they would not receive good evaluations but run the risk of being discharged. According to the film, the department’s main goal was to achieve impressive numbers by focusing specifically on the black and Latino communities. The arrests earned the city millions of dollars in revenue through fees and bail money, no matter the merits of the case. (Quotas were made illegal by the state legislature in 2010.)

Cops are the first victims of this system that propels them to become more aggressors than defenders. The main narrative focuses on 12 cops who filed a lawsuit in 2014 accusing the NYPD of requesting arrest quotas and retaliating when they refused to comply. They are mostly African American and Latino. Their case captured media attention, and the media exposure and the lawsuit uncovered facts of a longtime problem that affected so many people arrested without evidence against them.

The implementation of quotas was a direct command from commanding officers, and Maing exposes the transparent nature of the problem not only through the cop’s testimonies but also thanks to recorded phone calls from the officers’ superiors. The 12 learn a hard lesson, which explains why some of them don’t get a deserved promotion, as in the case of Edwin Raymond, a black cop who receives a harsh evaluation that states he has a low IQ and has no merits to ascend, which is totally false according to his experience.

The cops fear that the controversy will pass and be forgotten, resulting in more revenge against their actions from the police department (one has to patrol empty streets, another finds a photo of a rat in his locker). Along the way, there is a second story line that intersects with the main narrative: Pedro Hernandez, a Bronx teen, fights to prove he was arrested on shooting and assault charges only to fill a quota.

A minor flaw of the film is the way the secondary plot line is inserted while the stories of the cops and their lawsuit are still the main focus, although it provides a necessary look at the actual consequences that these quotas have on everyday people. Both threads are compelling enough to sustain their own movie. Other than that, Crime+Punishment works effectively as a succinct exposé of a relevant problem that demands to be acknowledged—and not only in New York. Its purpose is honorable and rousing.