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In New York City, police rarely talk on the record at all, especially about a touchy subject like quotas. But Officer Adhyl Polanco is an exception.

"The culture is, you're not working unless you are writing summonses or arresting people," says Polanco.

One of the dirty secrets in law enforcement that no one likes to talk about is quotas. Police departments routinely deny requiring officers to deliver a set number of tickets or arrests. But critics say that kind of numbers-based policing is real, and corrodes the community's relationship with the police.

"I can tell my supervisors that I took three people to the hospital and I saved their lives. That the child that I helped deliver is healthy. I can tell them that. But that's not going to cut it."

- Adhyl Polanco

Polanco joined the force in 2005, and pretty quickly, he says, it became clear that his supervisors only cared about two things: tickets and arrests.

"I can tell my supervisors that I took three people to the hospital and I saved their lives. That the child that I helped deliver is healthy," says Polanco. "I can tell them that. But that's not going to cut it."

Polanco says he encountered an unwritten rule that officers are expected to bring in "20 and one." That's 20 tickets and one arrest per month. But it was tough to get anyone outside the department to believe him, because NYPD officials would always deny there were any quotas. They still do.

"There is no specific target number that we go for," said NYPD Commissioner William Bratton at a press conference in January. "There are no quotas, if you will."

Since taking over the department last year, Bratton has insisted he's more interested in the quality of arrests than the quantity. The NYPD declined to comment for this story.

Back in 2008, Officer Polanco was determined to expose the NYPD's alleged quota system. So he secretly recorded conversations inside his precinct house in the Bronx.

"Next week, it could be 25 and one. It could be 35 and one," says a man Polanco identifies as a sergeant. The man heard in the recording is pushing his officers to get their numbers up. If they don't, he threatens, it could get even worse: The quota could be 25 tickets a month, or 35.

"Until you decide you're going to quit this job and become a Pizza Hut delivery man, this is what you're going to be doing until then," the man says.

Now Polanco is suing the NYPD, one of several whistle-blower lawsuits over alleged quotas at the department. Arrest and ticket quotas are illegal in several states, including New York, Illinois, California and Florida. But even former law enforcement officials will tell you they still exist.

"Does it happen in some places? Yeah, I'm sure it does," says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. Wexler says some of the 18,000 police departments across the country probably do have quotas.

"On the one hand, there is an understandable desire to have productivity from your officers," says Wexler. "But telling them that you want to arrest x number of people, you have to cite x number of people, it just encourages bad performance on the part of officers."

Wexler says the problem can get especially bad if officers start to view the community they're policing as a source of revenue. That, according to the Justice Department, is exactly what happened in Ferguson, Mo. As NPR and others have reported, the largely white police there wrote huge numbers of tickets for the city's black residents, collecting millions of dollars in fines every year.

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"Our view is that this is not solely a Ferguson problem," says Laurie Robinson, co-chairwoman of President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She's also a former assistant attorney general and a professor at George Mason University. The task force concluded that numbers-based policing sends the wrong message to the public.

"If citizens believe that tickets are being issued or arrests are being made for reasons other than the goal of law enforcement, which is about public safety," says Robinson, "then their trust in the legitimacy of the system is really eroded."

So why does numbers-based policing seem to persist in some departments?

Maybe because it's an easy way to track officer productivity. Tim Dees, a retired Reno, Nev., police officer who has also taught criminal justice, says it's the quality of police work that counts, not the quantity.

"That's a much more difficult metric to gauge," says Dees. "The satisfaction of the citizen, very difficult to put a value on that. And it's much easier for, frankly, lazy administrators to make it into a numbers game."

But some rank-and-file officers say the numbers game can actually make their jobs harder. NYPD Officer Adhyl Polanco says that in order to be effective, he needs the trust of the community.

"Nobody in the community wants people selling drugs in their building," Polanco says. "Nobody in the community wants shootings, so if we work with the people who don't want that, together we can identify who the criminals are. But what happens when you start harassing innocent people because I have to come up with my 20 [tickets]?"

Those tickets might look like productivity on paper, says Polanco. But he argues they're not actually making anyone safer.

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Clementine Lindley says she had a great college experience, but if she had it to do over again, she probably wouldn't pick an expensive private school.

"I could actually buy a small home in Helena, Montana with the amount of debt that I graduated with," she says.

"Removing my driver's license, you just created one more barrier for me being a productive citizen in my community."

- Clementine Lindley, Montana resident

Fresh out of school, Lindley says there were times when she had to decide whether to pay rent, buy food, or make her student loan payments.

"There was a time where I defaulted on my student loans enough that, I never was sent to collections, but just long enough to, honestly, ruin my credit."

That was motivation enough for Lindley to figure out ways to make her payments. But had she defaulted longer, the state of Montana could have revoked her driver's license.

In 22 states, defaulters can have the professional licenses they need to do their jobs suspended or revoked if they fall behind in their student loan payments, licenses for things like nursing or engineering. The percentage of Americans defaulting on their student loans has more than doubled since 2003. That's putting a lot of peoples' livelihoods at risk.

But Montana, where Lindley lives, is rolling those sanctions back.

When Democratic State Rep. Moffie Funk learned that that was a potential consequence, she says she felt embarrassed.

"I think it is demeaning," she says. "I think it is unnecessarily punitive."

Not to mention, she says, counterproductive. If the goal is to get people to make loan payments, taking away their ability to drive to work just makes it harder for them to make money, especially in rural states.

"There isn't public transportation, or very little," Funk says. "You know people need cars in Montana."

So Funk wrote a bill ending the state's right to revoke professional or driver's licenses because of student loan defaults. Dustin Weeden, a policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures says a lot of states passed license revocation laws for student loan defaulters in the 1990s and early 2000s, back before the federal government started taking on a bigger role in lending to students.

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"Because states were essentially the direct lenders to students, many states had large loan portfolios," he says.

Weeden add that tying student loans to licenses which often have to be renewed every couple of years, created a process to find people when they defaulted.

"The state loan authorities would report anybody who had defaulted on loans to all the licensing entities around the state," he says. "Then it's a way for a state to identify that person and really help them get into repayment."

But some policymakers want to retain consequences for defaulting. Like Republican State Sen. Dee Brown.

"I think that this is one of the sticks that we can use over a kid who is not paying their student loans," she says. "It's a stick to get their attention. And what a better way than their driver's license?"

There are plenty of sticks already, like having your wages garnished and your credit ruined says Clementine Lindley, who's been in student loan default.

"Removing my driver's license," she adds, "you just created one more barrier for me being a productive citizen in my community."

The Montana bill to take away license revocation as a consequence for student loan default passed with bipartisan support. That wasn't the case in Iowa. An attempt to repeal a similar law there failed earlier this year.

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As Abraham Lincoln always said, "The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they're accurate."

Well, no — barring a weird rift in time, he probably didn't say that. But when it comes to the quotations of other famous figures — and, it seems, even life offline — things occasionally get far murkier.

Just ask the U.S. Postal Service.

On Tuesday, the USPS unveiled a limited-edition stamp intended to honor the late poet Maya Angelou, featuring her beaming smile and a choice quotation to fill the frame. "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer," reads the stamp, "it sings because it has a song."

A moving sentiment, to be sure, and one that gracefully dovetails with the title to Angelou's best-known work, her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Perhaps for that reason, when that famous sentence gets uttered, Angelou's name often isn't far behind. Even President Obama reinforced the link in his opening remarks at the presentation of the 2013 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal.

Cue the rain on the parade: On Monday, the day before the stamp's big reveal, The Washington Post confirmed that the quotation did not, in fact, originate with Maya Angelou. Rather, it was author Joan Walsh Anglund, whose 1967 book A Cup of Sun featured the line, only with the word "he" instead of "it."

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First lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, among other distinguished presenters, attend the unveiling of the Maya Angelou Forever Stamp on Tuesday. Jacquelyn Martin/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Jacquelyn Martin/AP

First lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, among other distinguished presenters, attend the unveiling of the Maya Angelou Forever Stamp on Tuesday.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

USPS spokesman Mark Saunders responded to The Post, noting, "Had we known about this issue beforehand, we would have used one of [Angelou's] many other works. ... The sentence held great meaning for her and she is publicly identified with its popularity."

On Tuesday, David Partenheimer, another spokesman for the Postal Service, added: "The sentence was chosen to accompany her image on the stamp to reflect her passion for the written and spoken word."

Anglund, for her part, took the news amiably.

"It's an interesting connection, and interesting it would happen and already be printed and on her stamp," she told The Post. "I love her and all she's done, and I also love my own private thinking that also comes to the public because it comes from what I've been thinking and how I've been feeling."

The Internet, meanwhile, took the news as the Internet so frequently does — with a worldwide smirk and an armada of Photoshopped images. British newspaper The Telegraph compiled a few of the choicest nuggets, but for now, here's a personal favorite — and a caution that all would-be quoters might do well to remember:

That definitely isn't a Maya Angelou quote. pic.twitter.com/07QL8WnJCF

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 7, 2015

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Most Americans don't have a clear picture of what everyday life is like in Iran for the obvious reason that that nation has been isolated from the West for more than three decades. Still, windows open occasionally. A few years ago, Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language film, A Separation, offered Western eyes a glimpse of a middle-class Iranian marriage under stress.

Now, following years in limbo due to distribution glitches, comes an earlier film by the same director — About Elly, a thriller perched right on the fault line between modern thinking and Islamic tradition.

Farhadi opens the film with the sound of pure joy: Seven adults and three kids shrieking at the top of their lungs as they head out on a weekend vacation.

They're coming through a tunnel somewhere between Tehran and the nearby Caspian Sea, and everyone's flushed with excitement, including Elly, the one stranger among them. She's a young teacher, who's been invited along by a woman who barely knows her, and who is not-too-subtly matchmaking for a recently divorced buddy.

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It's not clear that she's actually told either Elly or the divorced buddy this. But Elly's friendly, and the rest of the group has known each other since college, so there are smiles all around as the group muddles through misunderstandings about a beachfront cabin — no phone, no internet ... no beds — and settle in for games of volleyball and charades.

Through all this camaraderie, you get the sense that something's being left unsaid, but there's such good feeling among these folks, that it carries everyone along until the middle of the next day, when something happens — I shouldn't say what, exactly — and all their various ties that bind come into conflict with what amount to lies that blind. Little fibs really, nothing that seems crucial in the telling, but as the little white lies pile up, and people realize how many social taboos have been flouted during their weekend getaway, relationships are threatened. Then reputations.

Writer and director Asghar Farhadi first came to international attention with his wrenching A Separation, which dealt with the marital and — more intriguingly to Western eyes — the societal pressures that weigh on contemporary middle-class Iranians: Class and economic issues, and secular tensions with Islamic teachings.

Those also play a part in About Elly, which was made two years earlier. It's a more straightforward, less complicated movie — a younger man's film in some ways — but it's no less nuanced about how its characters reconcile the competing demands of their own modern expectations of life, and their society's less-than-flexible Islamic traditions.

"A little deception here and there," you can almost hear the characters thinking to themselves, "Who could it hurt, really?"

Everyone, as it turns out.