By Kristine Snodgrass, Staff Writer
PLAINSBORO — The Plainsboro Township Police Department is instituting a new method of evaluating its officers’ productivity, under a system that is said not to create a ticket quota.
Chief Richard Furda said officers in the department took a seminar to learn about a new system to track officers’ performance. Its current evaluation system, he said, is “large and cumbersome,” and the administration was looking for something more oriented on officers’ workdays.
“This is a work in progress… Where we are is premature,” he said.
The department is in talks with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association to ensure the system is fair, he said.
“We’re not chasing the quota,” he said.
Reports of issues with police productivity and quota systems have surfaced in Plainsboro for the past decade. Last year, a PBA complaint was pending against the department for alleged violations of the state quota law, which bans police administration from requiring officers to hand out a certain number of traffic tickets. An officer claimed he was ordered by superior officers in the department to make more motor vehicle stops.
Chief Furda said the seminar was given at Rutgers University by Dr. D.J. Van Meter of Van Meter and Associates, Inc., a company that has given seminars to police stations on a variety of subjects since 1982.
The day-long seminar is titled the “Quota-Free Police Productivity System,” and it is advertised as teaching police management how to “establish and enforce (without establishing a quota-system, or violating state anti-quota laws) objective and fair productivity standards to ensure that every employee contributes his/her fair share of work productivity.”
Dr. Van Meter, a former state trooper from Ohio, said the system evaluates officers’ performance without instituting a quota.
“I’m dead against quotas,” he said. “They destroy the quality of an organization.”
The seminar is begun with a discussion of the state’s anti-quota law, he said. In New Jersey, the law reads, in part: “A State, county or municipal police department or force engaged in the enforcement of Title 39 of the Revised Statutes or any local ordinance adopted pursuant to this title shall not establish any quota for arrests or citations. The department or force may, however, collect, analyze and apply information concerning the number of arrests and citations in order to ensure that a particular officer or group of officers does not violate any applicable legal obligation.” “
Under Dr. Van Meter’s system, which he said he developed himself, officers’ time is divided into directed time, when responded to an accident, for example, and self-directed time, when on patrol.
An index is created for each officer, which is calculated by dividing the number of self-directed hours by the number of contacts an officer makes.
“What we’re saying is, we can’t set a number because we don’t know how many hours of enforcement time an officer had,”” he said.
This figure is then averaged across the department, and officers are expected to fall with a 20 percent range of their own index.
“We’d expect anyone with similar time to have similar output,” he said.
This is not a quota system, he said, because it’s impossible to tell an officer ahead of time how many tickets to write, because the index is a ratio of the time the officer has available, which fluctuates, he said.
“That defeats the quota system,” he said.
If an officer falls below or above the range, under the system, they are taken on a “ride and audit” with a superior officer, he said.
About a hundred police departments in the state have taken his seminar over the past seven years, he said. Departments learn about his seminar primarily through word of mouth, he said.
Police are typically skeptical going into the seminar, he said.
“I get that everywhere I go,” he said, adding that he often convinces union leaders of the effectiveness of the system. ’The office of the attorney general in New Jersey and several other states has given their stamp of approval to the program, he said.
Rachel Goemaat, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, said[jde: , however, : ] that the office had “never endorsed it.”
No other local police department employs the exact system, but each has its own method of evaluating officers.
West Windsor Police Chief Joseph Pica said his department does not currently employ the system, and has not considered it. Currently, the officers are evaluated biannually on their performance and their initiative, he said.
“It’d be something we’d be willing to take a look at,” he said.
He said he is waiting for the dust to settle around the controversial issue of measuring police productivity. Nobody in the public wants to hear that a department has a quota, but at the same time, they want officers to come to their neighborhood to write tickets, he said.
“Honestly, I’m looking for someone to win the battle,” he said. “At this point, it’s a difficult situation.”
Lt. Dave Dudeck of the Princeton Borough Police said the department has had a similar system for the past several years. Once a month, the administration meets with a sergeant of each squad and presents an overall report on his squad’s performance. This includes calls answered, types of investigations, hours on foot patrol, hours on special assignment and number of arrests made.
“It’s been great… It forces us as administrators to sit down and hear what’s going on on the street,” he said.
Officers are rarely found to be under performing, he said, but when they are, the sergeant is directed to counsel the officer.
Princeton Township Police Chief Mark Emann said the department evaluates its officers twice a year, and each officer does a self-evaluation on their performance, goals and accomplishments.
“We can’t institute quotas on our personnel, but we do want them to produce,” he said. “We found that speed enforcement has a direct relation to accidents, and our primary complaint whenever we go to town hall meetings and neighborhood meetings is traffic and speeding complaints.”
The administration looks at its officers’ statistics, and they are expected to fall within an average range, he said. However, the “big picture” is considered, he said, including the time the officer spent on patrol.
He added that he’s interested in the system Plainsboro is implementing.
“I’d like to see how they do after a year, see how they do, and look into it,” he said.
Montgomery Township Police Capt. Robert Palmer said that the department has no similar system in place.

