After a New York City arbitrator confirmed the existence of a ticket quota for the New York Police Department (NYPD) in a ruling Thursday, the city's mayor hit the airwaves yesterday to counter the claim that NYPD officers must issue a fixed number of parking tickets and moving violation citations.

The Office of Collective Bargaining was persuaded by the evidence that showed officers in Brooklyn's 75th Precinct were required to issue four parking tickets, three moving violation citations, three "quality-of-life" summonses, make one arrest and two stop-and-frisks each month. Arbitrator Bonnie Siber Weinstock ruled that the NYPD maintained an illegal "summons quota for traffic violations in the precinct and by penalizing officers for failing to meet the stated number of traffic citations." She ordered the city to cease and desist from the practice.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, however, dismissed the ruling as "semantics" and suggested the legislature that passed the law prohibiting quotas was "pandering" to the public.

"There are not ticket quotas, but there are performance standards," Bloomberg asserted vigorously on his weekly radio show (Listen to show at NYC.gov). "Look, the public wants a couple things. They want the laws enforced... They want the city employees to do a good job and you can't do that without having measures."

"We don't have numeric numbers," Bloomberg explained. "In fact it's the state law that prevents us from having quotas -- probably not a very smart law, but that's neither here nor there. It's a semantic term. There's nothing illegal, if I understand it, about performance standards."

"We project how much money we're going to get from enforcing the law," Bloomberg said. "You do need the money, and if at the end of the year we don't get it from fees and fines, then it comes in taxes."

The New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association filed the quota case in May of 2004.