It’s rather amazing how much access Maing gets to the NYPD. In footage shot between 2014 and 2017, he captures two academy commencement exercises, plays numerous recordings of employee review meetings and always seems to have his camera in the right place at the right time while observing his subjects at work. Maing also finds several regular citizens who are willing to speak on camera about their NYPD experiences. Their recounting of arrests is especially harrowing. But to be clear, this isn’t an anti-police documentary; it’s an anti-corruption documentary. The primary subjects of this film are Black and Latinx police officers who are suing the NYPD over the quotas in the stop-and-frisk program. We are told that quotas have not been implemented since 2010, but as the film progresses, we learn that not only is this untrue, but that they exist under a different, more politically correct-sounding name.
“Crime + Punishment” follows two main stories: the lawsuit and a separate court case involving Jessica Perez’s son, Pedro Hernandez, who has been imprisoned in Rikers Island over a year for a crime he did not commit. Both stories feature Manuel Gomez, an ex-NYPD officer turned private investigator. Gomez is the kind of larger-than-life New York City character that every actor in Hollywood wants to play. He’s no-nonsense but not without a genial sense of humor. He’s completely devoted to his quest for justice and reform, and his knowledge of the police force and the court system helps us understand what’s going on throughout the movie.
Hernandez reaches out to him for advice, as assisting victims of stop-and-frisk arrests is one of Gomez’s missions. Hernandez had been stopped 25 times by cops, resulting in summonses that the film depicts as primarily useless from a crime-fighting standpoint. This relentless ticketing is instead part of a hustle designed to get an officer’s numbers up so the department can commend them—the officer who constantly ticketed Hernandez had been promoted for doing three times the required number of stop-and-frisks. Yet more often than not, summonses resulting from these interactions are later dismissed.
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