When I worked in NYC (mid 2010s) we were on the top floor of our building and one day a service guy came through needing access to the roof from our suite.
Turns out he was there to update some cameras on the roof that pointed out to Union Square. I talked to him for a while, and while he wouldn't specifically say who owned them, he did say "they could read a business card from 300 yards away."
This was probably before there was much facial recognition going on, but it stuck with me that we were only one of many buildings with these set ups. I always heard about London being over-surveilled, I guess the NYPD did a much better job of keeping quiet about it.
> I always heard about London being over-surveilled
In London it's not the government that's spying on you. The reason there are so many cameras is that it was established policy for insurance companies give discounts if you have comprehensive camera coverage, and then digital cameras got so cheap that it's simply a great deal for any business owner to acquire enough cameras to surveil the entirety of their business and all the surroundings. And since there's often no co-ordination, if you are walking in Central London you are always in the field of view of at least half a dozen cameras with different owners.
Of course, it did turn out to be very convenient to the police that if something happens, it almost certainly happened on video and they just have to go talk to all nearby business owners to get a copy of it.
Sounds nice if the police doesn't have direct access to all cameras, but instead needs to talk with the nearby buildings. Some balance between capturing crime on camera, and not having a surveillance state -- from the so-many-cameras point of view.
But I suppose there are things I don't know (and wouldn't like), related to this
If the cops can demand, rather than request, the video, that's not really a check or a balance on the surveillance state. All it functionally means is that collecting footage is not automated, and there is some small back flow of information about what is being looked at.
The stasi didn't need that much information, or automation tech, to suppress dissent and ruin lives. I'm not complaining that those checks exist, but I am saying we definitely need more than that to protect us from a surveillance state.
Stasi had like 200 000 informants and we're drowning in the shear weight of their paper archives. There was a practical limit on how much they could surveil even with total commitment.
Which is relevant to my point that the police should have some work to gather data to keep down the scale.
Obviously, Stasi did persecute people in far worse way than Google et al. do right now.
> secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country ... Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs), who report suspicious activity or behavior ... each TLO must sign a nondisclosure agreement with ARIC, including those not working in law enforcement, essentially creating secret citizen officers. These informants, known as For Official Use Only TLOs, are able to access the fusion centers' national intelligence database (excluding personal identifying information). The FOUO TLOs include private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies.
Those may not be adequate checks, but they are checks, and personally I think it's worth worrying that the day could come when we'll look back with nostalgia on "not automated, and there is some small back flow of information about what is being looked at."
Living in London, if anything the police lean towards not looking at enough surveillance video rather than too much. There are not many police doing this compared to the number or crimes. I had my phone snatched in central London and mistakenly ran to the nearest police station thinking they might go after them. But no - sit and wait an hour or two, fill a form. I said it was outside a business with a camera but they wouldn't apply to the owner and go through the vids because it was too much work.
Funnily enough they did have a look at bus footage - apparently all London busses have cameras - in spite of me saying there wasn't a bus near at the time. Guess that was easier for them to get.
They can request and 99% of the time people just give it to them - all completely legal. However you can also legally refuse and then they need a warrant from magistrate's court.
I believe they can demand you don't destroy it though as that will be a criminal offence once they've told you.
Reminds me of doing a site survey at a somewhat remote cell tower, prior to performing some expansion work. Was told there was sensitive, classified military communications equipment inside the shack at the base of the tower, and had to perform work carefully around it lest we damage something.
Couldn't tell me what kind of vibrations etc I had to keep my equipment under, as those details were classified. While I was there, I watched a Verizon tech show up to fiddle with their equipment inside the shack, which happened to have the door frame somewhat out of square. The tech's solution to getting through the tight security door? Unlock it, then smash on it with a sledge hammer until it came loose and swung in.
I guess the fragility memo hadn't gotten down the line to the service techs.
The wild aspect of this is that nothing seems to have come of it.
If you had told me 20 years ago that eventually every single house would have cameras on their front door I'd have guessed that certain types of crime would drastically drop off in response. But in my neighborhood all the cameras mean is that there's video of the package theft or car break-in to post to the neighborhood group so that everybody can complain about it. It doesn't prevent the crime. It doesn't generate more arrests.
It doesn't, as far as I can tell, do much of anything.
I've heard two differing explanations of this (all the cameras having no effect), one of them from a cop:
1. The police can't do anything with your home surveillance videos mainly because of the trustworthiness of the evidence, most of the videos don't clearly show the crook. But there's also the issue of authenticity, which will be a major issue in any court case.
2. Cops are lazy and arrogant. They don't want more work. They don't want a higher expectation of catching crooks. And they certainly don't want people telling them how to do their jobs.
Yeah, the thing I've heard from a cop is to always say "oh, that looks like me, but that's not me". Apparently it's very difficult to prove a person in a video (particularly a grainy surveillance cam video) is a specific person. They apparently tend to rely on the person admitting it's them, and if they refuse, it's a real uphill battle and the footage is borderline useless. Dunno how accurate that is, just what I have heard from a police officer.
Part of that is that it seems the police are very reluctant to do their job. That is from secondhand anecdote, I'll give you, but I've seen several stories that people have related of bringing Find My results or video to the police only to have the police refuse to follow up on it.
> he did say "they could read a business card from 300 yards away."
Almost certainly made that up. You'd need a telescope mounted there to accomplish that. The mid-2010s video output would still be pretty bad, and you'd only be monitoring a FOV of maybe the width of a doorway or two, not anything like street-wide monitoring.
Maybe this is why the NYPD's clearance rate is so low? Hyper advanced surveillance, as long as the criminal stands exactly where we're already looking?
> Almost certainly made that up. You'd need a telescope mounted there to accomplish that.
Which they very well might have had. Surveillance setups often pair a wide field of view "situational awareness" camera with an extremely high level optical zoom PTZ camera for getting things like license plates or seeing handoffs of items.
Normal zoom levels aren’t that useful from the top of a ~30 story buying. Looking down you’ll just see the top of people’s heads, and looking sideways means an even longer distance.
Back in ~2002 I lived in San Jose, and my neighbor across from me was a satellite designer at Loral Space Systems...
We often had the same "wash car in driveway" schedule - and I would ask him a bunch of questions about his work, which he couldnt talk about...
But we had a system - I would ask yes/no questions and he would just wash his car - btu if he "waxed left" it was a yes, and if he "waxed right" it was a no...
Now, I dont know how truthful he was, but I would ask about the resolution and size of the spy satts... and he indicated that, yes, they did in-fact have satellites that could read your license plate from space.
When I was in college before Hubble was launched, my astronomy professor told me that the original design for the Hubble space telescope was for a smaller mirror, but got upgraded because the larger one would be cheaper to make the larger mirror, because larger mirror size was already being made. Also the Space Shuttle was sized for the larger mirror diameter. The strong inference is that the US DOD was already making that size, so existing tooling could be used. Consider Hubble pointed at a target only 200-3mmkm away...
the NRO is the craziest US government agency. iirc all their workers are contracted and all their expenses are highly classified. About the KH-11, trump accidentally tweeted an image from one of them (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/01/t...) and its resolution was an international incident. This technology was developed in the 70s. The NRO has sci-fi technology.
I actually asked this question multiple times on HN and other places, asking "what if we take hubble and point it at earth? Now that you have that thought, dont you think there are many objects that are "micro hubbles" that are already pointed at earth? MIC bots downed me to heck.
Lets just imagine, in a sci-fi/Black-Mirror sense, that all the constellation class of satts (starlink, the EU one, the chinese/russian one) have additional sensors for 'ocular-patt-downs-from-sattelites' -- Lets get our hands on some of these units and inspect?
> dont you think there are many objects that are "micro hubbles"
you reply to a comment about the size of the mirror, and then ask if there are "micro hubbles". no, there literally cannot be a micro hubble, because the mirror is enormous.
the mirror in hubble alone is larger than a starlink satellite
It could be done, you could make a virtual image from many small sats. Since you see from different angles, if you timestamp data with high resolution you could even cancel out a lot of atmosphere.
Reading newspaper headlines from satellite imagery was possible in the late 1960s. Source: my father, who worked at Kodak and Hughes Aircraft on such systems.
With due respect, everybody's got a story. Stamp "Classified" on something and you can bet your ass the tall tales are going to flow.
From orbit, no it wasn't and still isn't for that matter. It's beyond the diffraction limit of any real or made up lens or mirror we have ever put in space to do this. As far as I am aware, synthetic aperture optical techniques aren't there yet either.
IMINT satellites are never GEO (if only because GEO is so far), so they don't "sit above" some area but fly over it at high speed, so it can get a 45° or 30° picture and the only issue is the target is a bit further than when you're straight above it.
I'd imagine spy satellites don't always look directly down on their targets. Especially if they want to look at something not directly under its ground track, the satellite would need the ability to look at things off to the side. So that'd enable reading something vertical. Still would need to look at it from the _correct_ angle though.
There is no license plate reading from space. It is physically impossible to achieve such resolutions from LEO with atmosphere in the way. It gets worse with off axis viewing through a longer column of air.
Given the quality of unclassified photos released to the public at times [1], it's not unreasonable to assume the classified stuff is an order of magnitude better (or more). Note the angle of some of the photos!
adaptive optics cant change the diffraction limit. The only way to overcome that is with a bigger lens or synthetic aperture post-processing. SAR at optical wavelengths from orbital distances and velocities? Yeah, good luck
Doesn’t surprise me. Maxar sells CNN photos where you can make out with reasonable clarity what is going on at the surface of the earth. The stuff the government has probably makes that look like a child’s attempt at satellite imagery.
If only you'd taught him wax on, wax off instead, now he'd know karate, instead of getting questioned by stern-looking people next week about security practices.
I live in Portland and watching the Portland Police planes circle downtown all night with their data hidden on https://www.flightradar24.com/, (but visible on https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ (for now)) is a little unnerving. I have no clue what tech they have onboard, but I assume high res + night vision.
It was every night last summer and I think most residents are completely unware that they're up there.
You can find the auditor’s report and learn more about how the ASU works. The cameras are 90s tech and not suitable for identifying individuals - just good enough to track the movement of someone they already know about.
The plane is particularly useful for reducing the need for car chases.
It's quite likely they had no idea.
Easy to imagine a scenario where there is a company owning the building, one owning the cameras and maintenance, one owning the data/recording, all wrapped up in management partners mergers shells etc.
With government, unless it's an organization mature enough to do something deliberately covert, it's more likely theres so much bureaucracy to deal with that everybody knows who they are working for.
The NYPD has covert operations not only all over the country but in many foreign countries so I'd say they're operating at a pretty high level of sophistication in that sense.
I was curious about this so I did some Googling. Apparently it's called the International Liaison Program, a subdivision of the Department Intelligence Bureau. More info here. [1]
Apparently referring to the “International Liaison Program” run by the “NYPD Intelligence Bureau“ which has only executive oversight and is funded by the “New York City Police Foundation” instead of the city itself.
Exactly. Why would you let a random person into your building if there was no answer who they worked for? Was it because they claimed to work for business and you blindly trusted they were doing what they said or did you have some heads up from your boss saying let them in? There must be more to this story or maybe op just didn’t care about random people entering and accessing equipment.
It wasn't their building, it was clearly a building they rented a suite in. And, at a guess, the tech was let in because the landlord called and asked them to let the tech in.
What are you talking about? Small cities are just as rife with corruption. The nationwide "cash for kids" scandal occurred in a small city in Philadelphia. Pasco County, whose largest city is less than 20,000 in populace, literally collected lists of children's names and families for extra surveillance under the assumption they would be future criminals regardless of actual criminal history. Sundown Towns, a notion where hate crimes are effectively legal after dark, were enforced by local law enforcement (i.e. the law enforcement were lynching black people).
There's no reason not to believe that law enforcement everywhere can and does turn dangerous to the local population without stringent education, repercussions for bad behavior, and transparency.
Again: I don't think you're accurate here. The Pasco County case kept heavy surveillance of children by trawling every school in the county and systemically categorizing every child in the county by GPA, Attendance, credit count, etc. to identify which children to put under heavy specific surveillance (e.g. showing up dozens of times at family members workplaces unprompted and with no suspicion of crime) effectively harassing entire whole families out of the county.
I would 100% consider screening every child to identify future criminals and then cracking down on their families, including unprompted visits to workplaces dozens of times, to be police state stuff.
In a small community where everyone knows everyone you don't need equipment to run a surveillance state.
What about medium communities? Tech is very scalable, federal antiterror funds are significant, and surveillance is a profit center for police forces. Many medium police forces fund the majority of their budget through fines and fees.
Most? Corrupt county sheriffs are a tale as old as time. I don't know why people try to give a pass to non-big city policing with a brush off like this.
I doubt that. They do have higher levels of relative power within their tight-knit communities. And for the most part, their instances of corruption would be investigated much less often, simply because there's no one there to investigate them.
Small town cops would literally get shot if they behaved the way NYPD officers behave towards citizens. Their accrual of power depends on being nice to the 30,000 people in the town. In turn, they get away with a lot of bad stuff.
The NYPD also needs to be nice to about 30,000 people to accrue power too, but that is wielded against a city of 40 million, with industrial scale.
Nope. Look at the "Ending the Criminalization of Poverty" section of https://civilrightscorps.org/our-work/. It's full of successful lawsuits against small town police departments that turned around 40% of the population into a cash cow they ruthlessly exploited for unconstitutional fines and fees.
If anyone shot the cops the entire system would rush resources in and teach them a lesson. This is why the idea the second amendment protects against tyranny is silly.
> Their accrual of power depends on being nice to the 30,000 people in the town
No it doesn't. Small town cops get their power from their lack of having anything to do and the blind support of the community.
The small town I grew up in had a cop murder four people because he broke chase policy and even left his jurisdiction. The town newspaper wrote a weeks worth of articles talking about what a great guy he was and how all the youths in the town loved him.
Don't piss off a small town cop. They have literally nothing to do and can/will pull you over every single time they see you.
Edit* I have to edit this due to this forums anti-discussion features
Sorry, most police departments have rules about how far/fast you can chase someone in a vehicle who is fleeing. They have these in place so cowboy cops don't engage in dangerous behavior for low value.
This cowboy pulled into a cul-de-sac and some kids who had some weed on them got spooked a pulled out. He started to chase them, it turned into a high-speed chase on rural roads. They flew through a stop sign and t-boned a car with four people inside of it. Killed them all. Over some weed.
That's why the policies exist in the first place, he violated it, and four people paid the price.
One of the local cops around here got the Dick Cheney special at about "across the room" range a couple years back.
Of course the guy that shot him got railroaded but they never did tell the public what he and the guy with them were doing on that guy's property two towns out of their jurisdiction without a warrant...
I can see why the cop was feeling cockey though. This state has just about the lowest rate of firearms ownership in the country. They're not used to getting shot back at.
I suspect that the difference in views is at least partially related to location - pclmulqdq sound's like something that I've heard from people in the Appalachians before, while your experience very much matches what I've observed in small town TX.
No actual data to back this suspicion of course, it's just anecdotal based on what I've seen and heard. Would be interested in data if anyone can provide it.
I have to give it to you, you're sticking to your preconceived notions. However, that's not a good trait with the preponderance of evidence against your notion. Maybe you're not from a smaller community to be able to understand how much control someone can actually have. Whether it is the local law enforcement, a coach, or a minister, history is full of examples where smaller communities have been kowtowed to those in positions of authority. To me, it's even easier as the smaller community doesn't have the numbers to support each other to fight against the oppressor. There's a reason there are so so many 80s films where the out of town tough guy comes in to rescue the local community.
I have a friend who lives in Republic, WA - if you're not from hereabouts, you might have heard about that place from national news in the context of Loren Culp. She's an old leftie from the bygone era (used to be active in anti-war movement during Vietnam etc) and her politics are not exactly a secret there. At some point, one of her neighbors placed signs on their property saying things like "liberals and communists not welcome", "get out while you can" etc, angled specifically towards her driveway. The local cops - then still under Culp - not only didn't see any problem with that, but they actually told her it's good neighborly advice.
Police in the rest of the country behaves in worse ways, it just that they don't usually get put under a microscope unless they kill a sufficiently photogenic person.
The system of checks and balances between police and the people they are supposed to be accountable to is completely broken.
(Even if by some miracle, you do manage to hold a small-town cop accountable for something he did, he can make it his life's goal to personally make yours a living hell. At least in a big city, you're not going to be driving past any particular cop, every day, on your way to work.)
Did you miss the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina? Might want to review that the murderer's family was in charge of basically the entire justice system in a wide swath of that state. For the last 100 years.
As a police officer, you swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution. If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it. I know, that kind of autonomy and trust is foreign to non-USAers, but that's why this country is great.
This sort of thinking is, I think, pretty important. It is good if people feel responsible for following their oaths and professional obligations. This obviously depends on a personal interpretation of those obligations, so it will have to be performed by all us laymen. I don’t think, as some of the other comments here have pointed out, that the lack of legal training is a huge problem.
But that’s a personal obligation. And the obligation is not to simply not comply, it is to blow the whistle. You very well may be wrong about your interpretation of that oath, so the only answer is to, basically, bounce it to the populace and see what the people’s interpretation of that document is (might have to go through the news, courts, and politics to ultimately get the public’s opinion). This will likely be a career killer—it wouldn’t be an obligation, if following it was easy and cost-free!
This is not really what has happened here. In the NYC example: The police department is not an individual with an oath, it is a bureaucratic and legal entity that exists within a defined chain of command, it is supposed to comply with the laws that the government passes. In fact, if the department is asking individual officers to do something unethical by not following the law, the officers have an individual obligation to blow the whistle and not comply with the department.
In the SF strike: The police union is a labor entity, it exists to represent the interests of the members. The officers were not saying they were asked as police officers to do something unconstitutional, they were saying that the order to not strike or protest was unconstitutional. That has nothing to do with their oath.
>> If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it.
This is so funny because police overwhelmingly do not seek any form of higher education & are given guns to kill people in weeks-months of training they’re essentially babied & coddled through.
Not a singular new police officer on the force in my small Ohio hometown took a singular advanced class in high school, and most of them legitimately got D’s and shit in basic US history class. These were my peers, some my friends. I know the level of their education and intellectual pursuits fairly well.
If we live in a nation where people have a developed world 6th-8th grade level education at best enforcing what they think is unconstitutional, we’re utterly unbelievably fucked.
Actually, it stems from the Nuremberg Trials, and actually having a goddamn moral compass.
If you're looking for something a bit more internal to the U.S., look no further than the original Declaration of Independence. While it may scare the bajeezus out of many, the responsibility for calling out governmental bullshit is vested solely with the People, and law enforcers are still People to.
Welcome to why the United States is "Home of the Brave". It takes courage to stick around in a melting pot of crazy, and you never really know who is coming to dinner, or how long the civility is going to hold out.
The issue here is that these departments are not complying with elected officials and laws. The individual has an obligation to not-comply a with an illegal order and blow the whistle so the public can weigh in. The department should faithfully implement the instructions of the public.
For example if the whole department really thinks that the requirement for the police to report their surveillance equipment is unconstitutional, they they should all quit and tell the public about this apparent grand violation of their right as police officers to secretly spy on the public.
>Actually, it stems from the Nuremberg Trials, and actually having a goddamn moral compass
It doesn't 'stem' from anywhere. It's just a right-wing thing to pretend that police have some unwritten ability to decide the legality of laws.
> While it may scare the bajeezus out of many, the responsibility for calling out governmental bullshit is vested solely with the People, and law enforcers are still People to.
Calling out 'governmental bullshit' is something they can do on their own time by practicing their 1st amendment rights. Choosing to not enforce a law because you don't like it is not free speech. It's job abandonment and should be treated as such.
If you think part of your job is morally wrong, you should quit.
>Calling out 'governmental bullshit' is something they can do on their own time by practicing their 1st amendment rights. Choosing to not enforce a law because you don't like it is not free speech. It's job abandonment and should be treated as such.
>If you think part of your job is morally wrong, you should quit.
Sometimes, quitting is just setting the stage for the next unscrupulous individual to come in and really muck things up where at least if you are still there, there's a brake, and a voice in the room. See the head of the Boston Office of the FBI. Those dead set on abusing power would prefer that all those principled people would just get out of the way to let them steamroll the populace or enact their designs.
>It doesn't 'stem' from anywhere. It's just a right-wing thing to pretend that police have some unwritten ability to decide the legality of laws.
It isn't a right wing thing. It's a fact of life. Lets say every cop isn't fine with law X. You say you'll dismiss every cop who won't enforce it. You start doing it. You fire cops in droves. You'll very quickly start running out of candidates for the job, or you'll find yourself having to make concessions elsewhere. In fact, if it's a lot of cops you get rid of, you may find yourself short of any degree of law enforcement. Anyone who has ever found themselves running a Department of a large organization will be familiar with the phenomena by which work to be done requires people to do it; and whereby if you don't have enough bodies to do it, it doesn't get done or is otherwise "pocket veto'd".
In reality, everyone has limited bandwidth to effect things in proximity to themselves every day. No one person can be everywhere at once. So you have to delegate. Ergo everyone you delegate to is a potential filter on what things actually get done. If they don't do it, and you can't, it ain't getting done.
As much as anyone wants to believe police are cogs... Really take the time to think on the fact that if they fon't do it, it doesn't get done. They are as much a part of setting what the law really is as the judges, juries, DA's that close the loop. I don't care what the law is on paper. I care about what the cop in closest proximity to me thinks about it.
And as far as policing the police? Internal Affairs, much like Quality Assurance in software, is a bitch. No one likes it when you're really doing your job, friends are few, and the politics and potential for undermining is ungodly. You alone are tasked with handling the banality of your own group objectively every damn day, and it wears on you.
>Sometimes, quitting is just setting the stage for the next unscrupulous individual to come in and really muck things up where at least if you are still there, there's a brake, and a voice in the room
Then don't quit and do your job. Simply not doing the job you are paid to do isn't an option. There are parts of my job that I do that I don't agree with. Its called life.
>Those dead set on abusing power would prefer that all those principled people would just get out of the way to let them steamroll the populace or enact their designs.
This is rich. The NYPD is abusing their power. This isn't some valient cops sticking up for us. It's criminals who want to continue to act in a criminal manner.
>It isn't a right wing thing.
Yes it is
>Lets say every cop isn't fine with law X. You say you'll dismiss every cop who won't enforce it. You start doing it. You fire cops in droves. You'll very quickly start running out of candidates for the job, or you'll find yourself having to make concessions elsewhere. In fact, if it's a lot of cops you get rid of, you may find yourself short of any degree of law enforcement.
I mean yes, you are just describing how police hold the public hostage to avoid accountability. That doesn't make it okay for them to do it.
>Then don't quit and do your job. Simply not doing the job you are paid to do isn't an option. There are parts of my job that I do that I don't agree with. Its called life.
Nope. To hell with that. Paying me buys my time. It does not buy unthinking compliance. It does not get you my integrity. It gets my sense of right and wrong, my knowledge, my skills oriented on furthering whatever it is you're doing as long as you're keeping it clean. Cross the line, and as the best equipped person to dig in and drag your ass back, you will find yourself square in my sights. "Go lynch the darkies." "Go do some transparently corrupt BS." I will not follow those orders, and I won't get out of the way to let you find someone else more willing to do it for you. You want to do it anyway? Good. Fire me. The ensuing scandal will amuse me greatly. You think you can weather it? Good for you. Maybe you can, but it won't be at the expense of turning my back on what I know to be right. You don't get to cherry pick for the next unscrupled piece of meat while I'm around. Evil is that which is left in the void created by the inaction of Good people.
>This is rich. The NYPD is abusing their power. This isn't some valient cops sticking up for us. It's criminals who want to continue to act in a criminal manner.
Yes. They are. Arguably because either all the principled cops followed ypur advice/caved to the pressure to make their Brothers in Blue's lives easier and have stopped fighting to keep the PD above board, or you've made the job so impossible to reconcile or do in a legit manner, that the only ones attracted to it anymore are more into the power fantasy in the first place, and not genuinely in there to keep the peace or serve the cause of Justice.
>Yes it is
>I mean yes, you are just describing how police hold the Public hostage to avoid accountability.
That's cute, but no, wrong. The police are part of the Public. Posse comitatus, remember? Who do you think you're hiring from, huh? You can't force squat beyond the capabilities of convincing a group of prople to do violence on your behalf. Whether that is the police force in question, or some other group; coercion and capitulation happens only at the tip of a weapon used in anger, no matter the form. If you put them in opposition to you; you have no position of legitimacy or power when the people expected to be the instrumentality of that authority do not align with you. They are the ones willing to even attempt to do the damn job.
So again. You want it done, but nobody is willing to do it. This isn't their problem, this is your problem. You can shout and curse, and deny that all you want. You aren't, at the end of the day, entitled to anyone else to put their skin on the line to provide you a Police force tailored to your liking. No one owes you that. We've run and organized them out of a common interest and recognition that not making them causes more strife in the long run. That still doesn't mean anyone is beholden to them (the Police), or that they (those making up the Force) are beholden to anyone beyond their own sense of obligation. They are fundamentally volunteers.
What are you going to do anyway, make Police unions illegal? Oh wait... I mean, the Federal government thinks that making collective bargaining by anyone inconvenient illegal is going to work out for them in the long run. All it does is prove to more and more people that Leadership is completely out of touch with reality, though.
>Right wing thinking
If you think that something that can be extrapolated simply by observing the mechanics of how human beings collectively organize to get things done is "right wing"; well, I guess that's on you. Tell ya what though. See an awful lot of rich people evading taxes, and not a whole lot of skilled IRS agents to go after them. See an awful lot of "less than legal" decisions made in many tech businesses, but hardly any prosecution. I see a heck of a lot of drug crimes leading to convictions... But golly gee, it seems the investigators responsible for handling police misconduct are frequently blue-balled, limp wristed, under-funded, and not exactly generating the highest rate of evicting corrupt actors from the force.
Sure seems to me like there is indeed, a difference between the law as written, and the law as enforced. Note, I'm not saying they align with me, or I align with them. I'm simply stating de facto law is the law only in so much as the rank and file, the boots on the ground, enforce it; period. If that weren't the case, you'd never see things like Sanctuary cities.
Life is not black and white. Politics encompasses all that gray in between, and as much as it may frustrate you, not one cop on the force is there without their oen unique prioritization about what is worth enforcing and what isn't. If you think you can do a better job, with a group of like-minded people to yourself, then do it. Start up a competitor to the NYPD. Challenge them. Shake them up. Until you are angry enough to do so, nothing will change. Even if you do, nothing will fundamentally change about any of my points though; because each of your group of Big Apple PD will prioritize your particular umwelts of law enforcement, and let the rest slide as unable to be enforced, or not ultimately worth it, just like the NYPD ultimately does.
Welcome to life. You only have one, and ultimately, you are the one responsible for everything you do in it. Employed or not. You don't get to dodge respondibility for you deciding to do something fucked up because someone else told you to, and happened to be paying you at the time. Your responsibility to be a decent, morally upstanding person comes first. Your failure to do so is no one else's fault but your own. No one said it was easy, or that the battles would be fun, or come at a convenient time, or that any of us will see all of what we want to see done, done. What gets done, generally does so because a lot of people made the best tradeoffs they knew/felt they could make to do the right thing to them at time. We can have a lively argument about the relative merits of one view vs. another; that's politics. I'm pretty sure though, that unless you're willing to take the reins from those you're dissatisfied with the performance of without sacrificing the performance of any other duties you have in life, then the amount of change you're going to realize trends toward whatever everyone else is willing to throw you a bone in terms of making happen in your stead.
As a police officer you also typically have a high school education, and your idea of whether or not something is constitutional carries little to no weight.
Not to poopoo your train of thought but I wouldn't put any faith in someone that's college educated having a better understanding of constitutionality either. Most college degrees are useless now, with the majority of college grads being roughly as educated as the average high school grad a couple of decades ago. And the majority of the ones that do actually hold any value don't give you much expertise on Constitutional law.
That would have been relevant if they were at least consistent about it. But, somehow, stuff like asset forfeiture or stop and frisk is never "unconstitutional" as far as cops are concerned, while stuff like publishing reports on their activities or removing qualified immunity suddenly is.
After watching the NYPD's response to Black Lives Matter, nobody should be terribly surprised about this sort of thing. The organization's leadership pretty clearly considers the organization to be a power unto itself that is only partially regulated by civilian authority.
There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it, and the public as a whole there don't really look like they care.
This is anecdotal, but most New Yorkers I know care, there's just not much they can do. The NYPD is effectively a military force and they have de facto veto power over the city government.
This is correct, and to elaborate: the NYPD (1) is largely staffed by employees who live outside of the city, and (2) has an openly revanchist attitude towards the citizens they ostensibly protect and serve.
Under the current scheme, there is no incentive structure that "fixes" the NYPD; the NYPD is functioning as intended, and in broad conflict with the roles that constrain every other NYC civil servant (e.g., around living in the city).
Indeed.com reports an average salary of 82k a year for NYPD officers, 49% above what it considers the average annual income in the US.
I recently looked into moving to NYC and was shocked to see prices similar to my middle of nowhere, significantly lower quality city. I could work in a pizzeria and live in NYC, this "it's too expensive" is really a suburban view of the sqft.
So why don't the civil servants making four times as much armed with lethal weapons live there?
Frankly, I'm amazed they consider it worth the commute to live outside the city.
It seems to be a policy thing across the nation to have police not live in the communities they police. Part of it I'm sure is some amount of fear of retribution but I think it's really to avoid the officers from developing empathy towards the community members. I recall years ago my roommate working at a fast food restaurant and he advanced to manager level and they immediately moved him from the store he worked at to another to make sure he was more detached with his underlings and it seems like a similar tactic.
It's more a reflection of the general trend for middle-class folks in the US to flee to the suburbs, plus the fact that a cop job generally makes one middle-class (in both directions: the weeding process of getting hired tends to exclude the lower classes, and the pay scale tends to make one able to afford a middle-class dwelling arrangement).
> I could work in a pizzeria and live in NYC, this "it's too expensive" is really a suburban view of the sqft.
Not everyone enjoys living in a shoe box or having a dozen roommates, for instance, and not everyone enjoys living in big cities either. Suburbs are amazing, despite what all the big city folks will tell you.
$82k a year in NYC is not amazing by any stretch. Could you realistically work in a pizzeria ($30k-$50k) and have a fulfilled life? Of course - but you will not be living well. There is a difference.
> 49% above what it considers the average annual income in the US.
You're comparing one of the highest cost of living areas with a national average. That's a very wrong comparison, and conclusion to make.
Yes[1]. Millions of people survive in this city on salaries far below the average (and even starting) NYPD salaries, even before you factor in overtime.
yeah they get paid a decent middle class salary. Can they afford a nice apartment in the West Village? No. Can they afford a nice 3BR/2BA in a decent neighborhood in Brooklyn/Queens/Bronx/Staten Island if their partner is also a civil servant like a teacher? I think so yes.
(not that teachers shouldn't get paid more, they should)
Many NYPD officers own super cars and have unusually high salaries. They leech money off the communities they lord over. They are an organized gang of criminals.
This is not unique to the NYPD. Without dox'ing myself I have first-hand experience working with a police officer who drove a GT-R worth more than they made in a year on paper. Maybe he had family money, maybe he had saved a bunch of money from earlier in his career getting overtime on the street. But it certainly wasn't a good look regardless.
Revanchism doesn't require physical territory, only a sense of loss and a corresponding drive for revenge.
The NYPD sees itself as an occupying force in a hostile city. What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives; rather than questioning why that is, they've decided that the appropriate course of action is to extract all the value they can from the city while diminishing the natives' qualities of life to the greatest extent possible. Revanchism is the appropriate descriptor.
Even if taken as a general "sense of loss" what did they lose? They didn't lose anything. They weren't "defunded", there was no structural reform or consents decrees. The protests stopped and it went back to business as usual for them. In fact as of last week they exceeded their already notorious annual overtime budget by 100 million dollars![1]][2]
I'm sorry but "the natives"? That's a hollow cliche. What does that mean? Just native New Yorkers? Because it's a city of transplants and immigrants. Tense relations between citizens and NYPD is not new. See Amodou Diallo, the 2004 Republican National Convention protests, "Stop and Frisk", Eric Garner, the list spans many decades. People also realize that realize that crime and public safety are a concern and that police have an important job. The tension between police and residents has been a near constant for decades. It ebbs and flows and there's fundamentally no more or and no less respect now.
I don't know why you're performing such a hostile reading: it can be simultaneously true that tension for police and residents has been present for decades, and that the police have shed a degree of respect and baseline approval that they've historically held[1], regardless of whether that approval was ever actually justified.
There's nothing euphemistic about it at all. It bizarre to me that you seem to be going out of your way for specific word selection but then you go on to use those words incorrectly. It makes for confusing reading which is where my original question came. There's nothing "hostile" about asking for clarification.
The very people who were in charge of investigating police conduct reported him to his superiors. And then his own colleagues raided his house and forced him into involuntary confinement as an "emotionally disturbed person", handcuffs and all. The cops who delivered him to the psychiatric ward intentionally lied and misrepresented the whole thing to make sure that he remained confined and restrained.
Luckily, the guy had two recorders running during the raid, and the cops only found one, so there was ample evidence. I actually wonder if he'd still be in psych ward if not for that.
They voted for an NYPD Captain as mayor so it would seem if they do care, then it's supportive, desiring more NYPD power over government not less. Which seems insane to me...
> They voted for an NYPD Captain as mayor so it would seem if they do care, then it's supportive, desiring more NYPD power over government not less. Which seems insane to me...
It's actually very difficult to argue that peope wanted more NYPD power over government rather than less if you look at the full story of the 2021 elections in NYC.
Eric Adams only barely squeaked through the primary, and even that was after literally four other forerunners either dropped out of the race or became embroiled in their own personal scandals.
As further evidence that the mayoral race was somewhat of a fluke, the same ballot also included many other citywide and local races, and more progressive candidates swept those races citywide, many of whom ran on platforms that explicitly promised to take on the NYPD. That's a trend that was pretty consistent in districts across the city, as opposed to looking at one single race that had a particularly unusually large number of scandals (even by NYC standards).
Eric Adams didn't win because people wanted more NYPD power in city government; he won because he happened to be in the right place at the right time.
tbf to Adams, he did really well in the primary in some areas, driven at least partly by his hard on crime image. His success in Brooklyn could possibly be attributed to his connection to the borough, but the Bronx? Adams was the overwhelming choice in the Bronx, and from speaking to many Bronxites, they absolutely wanted to see more cops on the streets and cops on the subways.
> His success in Brooklyn could possibly be attributed to his connection to the borough, but the Bronx? Adams was the overwhelming choice in the Bronx,
Compared to who - Garcia? Sure, but that's not surprising. The point is that the top four frontrunners were already eliminated, figuratively or literally, by the time the primary happened.
> and from speaking to many Bronxites, they absolutely wanted to see more cops on the streets and cops on the subways
It's easy to find anecdotes, but the facts show how people voted, and with the exception of the mayoral race, they consistently and overwhelming voted for candidates who promised to reign in the NYPD.
> Compared to who - Garcia? Sure, but that's not surprising.
Nope, Adams's closest competitor in the Bronx was Wiley, but he still did about twice as well as she did in the first round. Adams was the first choice candidate for 45% of voters in the Bronx, the highest of any borough.
> It's easy to find anecdotes, but the facts show how people voted, and with the exception of the mayoral race, they consistently and overwhelming voted for candidates who promised to reign in the NYPD.
... which suggests to me that people are capable of voting for different candidates for different things, and that people have different expectations out of each. My district overwhelmingly sent AOC to Congress - and Adams to City Hall, beating out AOC endorsed Wiley 2:1.
> the facts show how people voted, and with the exception of the mayoral race, they consistently and overwhelming voted for candidates who promised to reign in the NYPD.
I don't see it quite the same way. People have different priorities and can pick and choose candidates accordingly. AOC's views on Congressional matters aligns with voters in my district, and they overwhelmingly supported her for Congress. Her views on the NYPD do not align with voters in my district, but they're not under her purview, so it doesn't matter. I can say that in my district when it comes to local matters, public safety is the number one priority, and that they look to the cops for support. At every public town hall meeting I've been to in my neighborhood, there have been demands for increased police presence, not less. I should also point out that a majority of the district is black/hispanic.
Most New Yorkers didn’t vote for him in any real sense - he barely won a crowded Democratic primary in which the progressive vote split widely, and then in the general election the main vote was that he was better than the pretty far out there Republican candidate.
> the public as a whole there don't really look like they care
Really? The George Floyd protests were the largest protests in US history. That summer in NYC was extremely tense between the NYPD and regular residents (I have plenty of stories). Maybe I lived in an NYC bubble, but nearly everyone I knew was extremely upset with the NYPD, and remains upset.
We're commenting on an article about how the NYPD aren't accountable and aren't even following NYC laws. It is well-known that they don't follow the law in general.
There's very little power for the citizens to actually do anything. The NYPD holds tremendous political power, and wields it aggressively. They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor.
This doesn't seem to support any allegation that the NYPD "publicly threatened" DeBlasio's "children". What did happen is that the NYPD Sergeants' union inappropriately tweeted details about her arrest, after she was arrested. That's one child, for those keeping score, not "children", and it's also not a "threat" of any identifiable kind. It is definitely inappropriate, though.
So it would appear that Business Insider's headline was sensationalist and not well supported.
> There's very little power for the citizens to actually do anything.
How much effort did you expend before declaring that change is futile? The NYPD has political power because they worked to establish relationships with politicians and spent money to hire lobbyists that keep these these politicians accountable to their interests. On the other hand, most people would have trouble to name a single city councilor.
Because the various police unions hold enormous power over city council, the DAs and the mayor.
There's nobody in the city that seems to dare hold them accountable, because past experience has thought them they will get completely owned by Pat Lynch.
Quite frankly we lost. We were beaten and tear gassed and arrested and called rioters & looters on the news. Public figures called for more violence against us in major mainstream liberal publications. Many of us are still in jail with six figure bails, some of us are facing terrorism charges.
The entire system came down hard on those protests, from nearly every angle. The democrats refused to endorse or support the goal, and the risks & costs of continuing or escalating were too high. So it stopped, failed.
What are you talking about? The media and Democrats were heavily in favor of the protesters to the extent of denying its part in enabling rioters and looters.
One of the greatest disservices in American education is how they teach about activism. The narrative goes that if you can get a million people to complain on the streets, this will magically drive political reform. What doesn't get talked about are the intense lobbying and legal challenges that actually kept the government accountable.
I would say it's equally hard to sympathize with the cops that pushed down an elderly man, then left him bleeding from the head on the street, marching over his unmoving body towards protestors, in broad daylight.
It's important to remember that it's the cops with the deadly weapons, its the cops with the chemical weapons, and its the cops depriving access to medicine when they hurt protestors.
I'm not claiming protests were or should be necessarily peaceful. Those protests started because of murder and disempowerment, and a context of decades of it.
Making it hard to sympathize with protestors is an important role of the news, and a significant part of why those protests failed.
I've seen astounding violence from police, before during and after those protests. Look at the thread we're in! Look at the one yesterday about them smuggling fentanyl! Look at the one from last week about the LA county sheriff gangs! Protesters don't carry a responsibility to uphold the law, they are a reaction to the police refusing to do so.
Floyd had traces of fentanyl and meth in his blood and had used them in the last several days. He did not have enough to be "on" them at the time of death.
The police aren't supposed to execute drug users either I don't think we have a different system for that. Or people with covid (??).
And it's actually ok to be upset by people being killed. Good even. If it doesn't bother you your soul is weak and cowardly, as much as you might try to frame it as some inevitable result of objective facts or whatever.
Most cities that started to follow through on either scrapping their police force or cutting their funding saw a massive spike in crime, and even those mayors and city councillors who were adamantly defund-the-police types are now begging for more money for the police and for police officers to come back out of retirement or from the other cities they moved to.
The public turned on the movement when the movement turned on the public. Minneapolis neighborhoods were faced with turning into food deserts after looting caused enough damage to force the grocery stores to close for nearly a year (smoke and water damage).
Some stores partner with non-governmental community peace organizations (i.e. civilized gangs) to reduce the need for police presence, and it is slowly working.
Others haven't been so lucky. A Walmart recent closed in a suburb because it needed to call police nearly 6,500 times over the course of 5 years. That was after other local retail outlets had also closed.
Social fabric in some areas is just fundamentally torn, and there's nobody with a good solution.
Which cities were those, that started to follow through on defunding?
Cities that increased funding are also experiencing the crime spike. It's a national phenomenon. Also one that apparently police can't prevent because, again, more police haven't prevented it.
> Over 20 major cities cut or moved funding in some way by 2021
That's a misleading way of talking about those numbers, and in fact the source linked within the article shows the exact opposite.
For example, it cites New York as an example of a city which "reduced" police funding. Except New York famously didn't - they simply moved SROs to the Department of Education instead. Total funding for police actually increased. It just was reported on a different line in the budget.
> Most cities that started to follow through on either scrapping their police force or cutting their funding saw a massive spike in crime
This is factually incorrect. Every major city in the country increased funding for police between 2019-2021. None defunded the police. Some made temporary adjustments in 2020 due to pandemic changes, but every single one was reversed by a subsequent increase over baseline levels for the 202-2021 or 2021-2022 cycle, depending on when the city's fiscal year falls.
Minneapolis is the only one which even voted to permanently defunded the police, but that was reversed before it went into effect.
New York, remember? The State that looks at the Second Amendment as an aspirational guideline. To be frank, I think the current problem may be a symptom of the other.
(Unarmed populace -> Corrupt cops)
Power dynamic changes a bit, taking one down a few pegs when everyone else in the room is packing iron without having to get a blessing from the Police.
Not even a bit. If the officer is never held accountable, they can threaten with their gun and the civilian who wants to pull theirs in response is just going to be legally shot by the threatening officer (and if not, found guilty of murder by a vengeful police department). This really is a problem of accountability, which guns don't bring except in a revolution.
because those large protests were mainly young people. Most New Yorkers, especially the middle-aged and older white liberals, are pro-cop. New York city, the supposed bastion of progressivity and human rights, has the most segregated school system of any big city in the nation. Walk around liberal brooklyn and look at the color of the people being served and those doing the service, and you will see a caste system no better than anywhere in the South.
Adams won the Democratic primary by less than one percent, despite aggressive campaigning on his behalf by, among other organizations, the Police Benevolent Association. (I am discarding the general election because his Republican opponent was, let's say, a less-than-serious candidate.)
He also had police reform as a key part of his platform, although at this point his dedication to that seems questionable at best.
I wouldn't exactly call his win a mandate for policing.
> Adams won the Democratic primary by less than one percent, despite aggressive campaigning on his behalf by, among other organizations, the Police Benevolent Association. (I am discarding the general election because his Republican opponent was, let's say, a less-than-serious candidate.)
Adams barely won the primary, and that was only after literally four other forerunners all either dropped out for personal reasons or became embroiled in campaign-ending personal scandals (e.g. sexual harassment allegations).
> I wouldn't exactly call his win a mandate for policing.
The media reported it as if it were one, but that was an incredibly lazy and dishonest interpretation of the election results. There were many other citywide and local races on the same ballot, and more progressive candidates pretty consistently swept all of those races. The mayoral race was the one exception, making it quite obvious that was an accident of circumstance rather than an affirmation of Adams specifically.
If anything, the 2021 NYC elections were a clear mandate for reigning in the NYPD: when given the option of a candidate who wanted to reign in NYPD power and didn't have objectively disqualifying personal behavior, voters pretty consistently chose that candidate for nearly every single race in every single level of government and in every district.
Unfortunately, because of the series of scandals that marred the mayoral primary, it made it easy for national media to ignore the entire context and focus entirely on the end result of one single race, rather than the causes of that race, or the many other candidates that people voted for on literally the exact same ballot.
This has been the case for over a century. The history of the NYPD is actually wild: it was originally two different police organizations who would regularly get into fights with one another. This was itself the result of a power struggle between the city and the state.
The public do care, though - in fact, it's why the Democratic Party base was more or less calling for a total purge of police departments. It wasn't because they want to be able to crime with impunity or because they want The Purge IRL. It's because a good chunk of them live in a city where the police force is a only few steps away from being the deep state.
A personnel purge without enacting any structural changes is not particularly useful, and it is often the action of a group who wishes to capture the corruption for themselves, rather than actually fixing it.
Yes, but the people calling for outright purges were also calling for significant structural changes.
The real problem is that they blindly copypasted a conservative slogan and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation. That would require increasing police budgets[0], not slashing them. But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work.
The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense. There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department[1]. Underfunded PDs are perfectly willing to hire them because they are the perfect candidate "on paper": they work for cheap and fix the problem, as long as the problem is "people that we don't want being able to live in our city".
[0] Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system.
[1] The slang term for it is "gypsy cops", which is offensive in Europe.
> and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation.
I think you are amalgamating the separate actions of several different groups and attempting to attach a single coherent narrative to their collective actions in an effort to excuse everyone involved.
> But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work.
"Defund the police" has a single obvious interpretation, and there many individual groups that were calling for this precise interpretation.
> The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense.
Can you explain this more thoroughly?
> There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department
And to what extent is this the source of the problems of modern policing?
> Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system.
We used to just call this "Police Reform." So this all seems like a huge unforced error, then.
I don't have a source, it's just an educated guess. "Defund Planned Parenthood" was a huge conservative slogan in America. It's possible that the people who coined "Defund the Police" had never heard the other slogan in their entire lives, but they'd have to be living under a rock to do that, because they're left-wing and liberal political activists.
> Can you explain this more thoroughly? (in regards to "paying their own way")
Increasing town revenues through more aggressive enforcement. i.e. you increase the ticket quotas so that cops nail more speeders. In America it's so normalized to break the speed limit that, for example, Tesla self-driving systems let you configure how much your self-driving car will break the speed limit by. So you can reliably increase town revenues by issuing more speeding citations, because everybody does it.
This isn't the only lever you can pull to squeeze money out of your citizens, but it's the most common one.
> I think you are amalgamating the separate actions of several different groups and attempting to attach a single coherent narrative to their collective actions in an effort to excuse everyone involved.
Amalgamating yes, excusing no. Consider it a post-mortem report - "How did we fuck this up".
> We used to just call this "Police Reform." So this all seems like a huge unforced error, then.
I think the public has seen the dramatic increase in violent crime and other major crimes since the pandemic and want NYPD to fix it and they don't really care how they do that. Adams ran on a platform of exactly this and now the public expects results.
Tbh, in my circles there’s already deep resentment for Adam’s not actually addressing this. Instead we have cops lining up to ticket bike riders for no bells or turning on a red, while bike lanes themselves are notoriously unprotected from cars parking in/driving through them and pedestrians are getting killed in hit and runs that go ignored. The general sentiment is that police presence will always make a situation worse and don’t have incentives aligned with actually improving the lives of people.
The perception that crime has skyrocketed since the pandemic is propaganda, fueled by a police department afraid of being defunded, media outlets desperate for clicks, and a cop running for mayor.
Reality doesn't back it up. The murder rate in NYC is roughly where it was in 2009, and still five times less than it was in the 90s.
Your stats don't back up your claim. Crime _has_ skyrocketed since the pandemic as both of your links show. Your first links subtitle states: "Violent incidents are up since the pandemic began" and the second link shows a graph with a quite large spike starting around 2020.
That there existed a time in history when the murder rate was a higher than it is now is completely irrelevant.
That is not skyrocketing. It's just an "increase". Crime is back to where it was 10 years ago, when NYC was still considered one of the safest cities in the country.
Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting, or did you just read first half of the subtitle (conveniently omitting "But widespread anxiety obscures the fact that crime is still at decades-long lows.")
Do you think there was this much fear around crime in 2009 when the crime rate was exactly the same?
> That is not skyrocketing, by any definition of skyrocketing
Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially.
> Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting
This is not surprising or damning. Crime rates have been dropping for 30+ years and this was the first major reversal of that trend. We lost 10 years of progress in one year. Such a highly abnormal event deserves outsized news coverage. There's no reason why news coverage must rise and fall in perfect proportion to the absolute value of the events being reported on.
If median household income fell in one year from current highs to 2009 levels, I'd expect a lot of news coverage– more news coverage than it would have received in 2009. Likewise, I'm positive there's a lot more stories about interest rates now than the last time they were at the same levels. The background context is important to the newsworthiness of any particular statistic.
> Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially.
You said the data don't back up my claim. My claim was that they did not "skyrocket". Now the goalposts have been moved to "rise substantially," which can mean anything. Even the increase in 2006 from 539 to 596 murders (more than 10%) could be considered "substantial," it's a meaningless term.
If you don't think the media and the public outcry about this has been extremely overinflated (including comparing crime rates to the 90s), then I don't think we have much to discuss here. The graphs in the sources I link make it pretty clear that the bump in crime is insignificant compared to the historical crime rates in NYC. And based on your comment history, you're clearly pretty partisan to one side of the issue, so I don't think there's much to be gained for either of us by continuing this. I find it particularly ironic that you complain about mainstream media coverage of Trump, but find it impossible to believe the media could be exaggerating crime rates.
Don't think either of us are interested in a debate on the definition of the word "skyrocketing."
I'd be interested in a survey of New Yorkers on how much they think the murder rate rose from 2019-2020. I suspect they'd be pretty close to the right answer (48%), you think it'd be much higher (if I read you correctly) but without that data we will just have to agree to disagree.
> I find it particularly ironic that you complain about mainstream media coverage of Trump, but find it impossible to believe the media could be exaggerating crime rates.
This is a good example of the type of statement that passes as meaningful in partisan debates but is actually incoherent. I'm allowed to believe the media fairly reported one thing but not some other unrelated thing. There's no logical connection between the two that demands a consistent treatment. I haven't been caught in some epic contradiction.
...but if you have caught me in a contradiction, and you believe the exact opposite, then aren't we both in the same boat? If x and y cannot both be true then neither can ~x and ~y.
This is why police reform is so hard to achieve. When crime spikes, people are far less committed to police reform.
Even when crime isn't spiking, police can just sit on their hands whenever reforms are pushed and instantly change the narrative. This happened in SF with the AG recall and has happened in numerous municipalities. Local politicians can't afford to anger the police union because all the police has to do is stop enforcing the law aggressively and a local politician is done for.
So New Yorkers may want police reforms but the NYPD union has a lot of leverage to resist it. And voters generally dont' have the stomach to oppose police union backlash.
Except the police aren’t fixing it and are also still walking around like they are untouchable gods. It’s one thing to be a thug that runs the trains on time and another to be a thug that doesn’t.
> There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it
We were recently discussing police accountability in Vancouver, Canada. Different city, different country, but the same issue. Our police chief openly stated that he is not accountable to the city, or anyone at all, and he and the VPD will continue to do as they please.
I know who made the law happen, but it seems odd to me to ask police depts to run statistical analysis of their own work. Not only they are not a neutral party, but thats not their mission. Thats for qualified data scientists and researchers to do.
The NYPD has more than a few data scientists on staff, as they should. At their scale (40k officers policing a population of 8.5 million), small biases have effects that are large in absolute terms.
This country was founded on the principle of checks and balances. There are no checks on the police. Without adversarial oversight, police will always be above the law. This is a bad place for our country to be.
Yes. In theory justice checks the police. But if the DA and/or judge goes after the police, then the police stop cooperating with them on cases. Even good police in the department who want change will get no leverage that way. I'd love to read a long-form, probably anonymous piece by an NYPD IA officer about their experiences. I'm sure it would be suitably horrifying.
Public Defenders are supposed to be a check on the DA, but we can all see how well that turns out funding-wise.
I can only assume the media was assumed to be a check on the police, as they're the only professionally investigative edifice that isn't government funded. Again though, there is a notable asymmetry there. Particularly nowadays.
>Demand Justice is a politically progressive American 501(c)(4) legal advocacy organization. It focuses on motivating left-leaning voters based on its goal of changing the composition of the American federal judiciary, as well as encouraging the United States Senate to confirm progressive nominees to judicial positions and to expand the United States Supreme Court.
I honestly don't care in this specific case. It could be the head of the Union of Public Defenders everywhere. The fact is if you look at the funds allocated to support the police/prosecution, then look at the dollars spent maintaining the Public Defenders office (which should arguably be at parity), and given the unavailibility of "stealing from the populace" (civil asset forfeiture or fine assessment) to level the budgetary playing field, the resulting fiscal asymmetry would and should make any bookkeeper blush.
Our system is no justice system without parity between the prosecution and defense. That is nowhere near the case. It is an undeniable fact.
> But if the DA and/or judge goes after the police, then the police stop cooperating with them on cases.
I don't think that procedural issue is really the root. Judges have wide authority to issue contempt of court charges (including for refusing to appear/testify/cooperate). Police officers are not immune to those, and could bear significant fines or imprisonment as a result.
The issue underlying that solution is who enforces those charges? The police department sure isn't. I don't know if a judge could ask US marshals to effect the arrest or not. The judiciary relies on the executive branch to provide the muscle, and doesn't have any real means to enforce its own judgements.
In Czechia, we have a special agency that just investigates possible criminal activity of the police and similar agencies (such as the prison service or customs service).
They seem to be doing a sort-of OK job. There are quite a few cops in prison.
This is a bad reading of the case. The ruling on appeal was that the police in that case had no special duty to that particular person, but still had a duty to the public at large.
Specifically, "the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."[0]
People like to extrapolate from that, saying that if no specific legal duty exists toward individual 1, and no specific legal duty exists toward individual 2, and so on, then ultimately, no specific legal duty exists toward any individuals at all, but again, the first part of that sentence restates that there is a duty to provide services to the public.
I mean, look, the story of the crime itself is horrifying, but if the ruling had gone the other way, the concern was that cops would essentially be held to a standard of perfection, and any cop who ever didn't investigate any crime aggressively enough would be liable in court for their lack of aggressiveness.
I think it's a bad ruling, but it doesn't say what people claim it does, and it also doesn't seem to apply particularly strongly outside of the District of Columbia.
> The ruling on appeal was that the police in that case had no special duty to that particular person, but still had a duty to the public at large.
But "duty to the public at large" doesn't mean anything, right? Duty to an individual can be litigated when the police fail to perform it. There's no way to hold the police accountable to "the public at large."
I agree that, taken to its extreme, it would be problematic to hold the police responsible to serving every single call perfectly. But we seem to be nowhere near that standard.
> Duty to an individual can be litigated when the police fail to perform it.
It actually can't. Castle Rock v. Gonzales is the relevant ruling here, not Warren v. DC.
In the majority opinion for Castle Rock, Scalia wrote that not only do police not have any special duty, but states cannot establish such a duty even through legislative means. (It also says that even though any such duty would be unconstitutional, if it somehow were established, the aggrieved parties would still have zero recourse under the constitution for other reasons).
It's a fantastically broad ruling, preempting pretty much every conceivable attempt for states to work around it even if they want to.
Could one use statistical means to show that the police are not providing adequate service to the public at large, and could therefore be prosecuted/held accountable?
> I think it's a bad ruling, but it doesn't say what people claim it does, and it also doesn't seem to apply particularly strongly outside of the District of Columbia.
Unfortunately Castle Rock v. Gonzalez was a SCOTUS ruling, which is binding nationwide, and it did in fact rule that the police have no duty to protect the public. Worse, the ruling decided that because police have "always" enjoyed broad freedoma (in Scalia's mind), any law which attempts to curtail police freedoms is impermissible. (If that sounds tautological to you, that's because it is.)
That ruling has been used as precedent by lower courts across the country to determine that police do not, in fact, have any duty to protect or serve the public, to prevent crime, or even to halt a crime in progress.
IMO this is the right decision, because the duty to protect the public should arise from the contractual duty to the municipality of performing the job they were hired to do. If we want police reform in general, then police need to be legally treated just like every other citizen, rather than being given special exceptions that exempt them from the legal system. Legally there should be very little difference between a police officer and a random citizen that stops a crime in good faith.
> IMO this is the right decision, because the duty to protect the public should arise from the contractual duty to the municipality of performing the job they were hired to do.
Castle Rock explicitly prohibits states and municipalities from placing these sorts of restrictions on the police. It's a very broad ruling.
I haven't read the decision, but the case seems to revolve around Gonzales wanting to legally compel the town / its police to perform their advertised jobs. While the actions of Castle Rock do seem highly unreasonable, trying to legally compel performance would seem untenable in general - would this right also apply to a person in an area with an understaffed or nonexistentant police department?
Whereas the duty I was talking about was just the basic standard of performing every job - when you don't do your job to the satisfaction of whomever is paying you, then you get fired or otherwise let go. (Of course this is modulo needing to get rid of police unions, or at least needing to seriously reform them so that bad employees will indeed be fired).
Furthermore Gonzales's argument would seem to rely on the idea that police are a special type of citizen that carries specific responsibilities/capabilities, which runs contrary to removing the privileges they abuse.
You're making a lot of assumptions about the facts of the case and the opinions, and they're simply... factually incorrect.
> but the case seems to revolve around Gonzales wanting to legally compel the town / its police to perform their advertised jobs
That is incorrect. It's about a specific law which required the police to perform a specific task, which they repeatedly refused to do.
> Furthermore Gonzales's argument would seem to rely on the idea that police are a special type of citizen that carries certain intrinsic responsibilities
I skimmed the majority opinion and I don't see how I'm off here -
1. The case revolves around Gonzales arguing that police were legally compelled to attempt enforcement of the restraining order.
2. The opinion says nothing about the ability of Castle Rock to fire the involved officers for being derelict in their employment duties (like any other employee).
> The opinion says nothing about the ability of Castle Rock to fire the involved officers for being derelict in their employment duties (like any other employee).
I mean, it literally does. The ruling overturns the law which gives them the basis to do so, and additionally establishes that states cannot pass laws imposing such requirements (as well as prohibiting a number of other things as well).
I'd suggest actually reading the opinion and dissents before discussing this further.
Okay, I've done so - at least the version at [0] claiming to be a copy. The dissent lays out a compelling chain of arguments, to the point that I'll retract my initial assertion of "the right decision".
However, I still cannot figure out what you are referencing when you say "Castle Rock explicitly prohibits states and municipalities from placing these sorts of restrictions [contractual employment requirements] on the police". Is this something from one of the earlier decisions, or what am I missing? I'd appreciate a quote or other reference.
To the extent that municipalities may need some explicit legal justification to fire individual police officers (as you seem to be implying), then that is its own problem. But I'd say it's unrelated to this case which is ultimately about whether the town itself is legally liable to Gonzales.
I had read the Wikipedia summary, which gave me a decent idea of the general shape of the case.
Having now read the opinion, I don't think my initial estimate of the case from Wikipedia was far off. Modulo the specific details of Colorado law (and similar must-arrest laws across many states), for which down thread I do say the dissent makes a convincing case on those merits. But that doesn't have much bearing on my original main point, but rather just how I might have made that point.
BTW what prompted you to chime in this way instead of continuing to read the thread and seeing I did go on to read the primary source?
What this means in practice is that you can have a crazy guy actively trying to stab you in full sight of several cops, who refuse to get involved due to concern for their own safety until you subdue the guy with the knife yourself. And, somehow, that's perfectly legal.
Plus if they try to “help” and shoot & kill a bystander the stabber will get the heat for “felony murder” and the cop will not even be sent back to practice their aim.
This applies to constitutional law only. Any state or municipality can legislate more specific requirements for policing if they choose, because that’s how federalism works.
> This applies to constitutional law only. Any state or municipality can legislate more specific requirements for policing if they choose, because that’s how federalism works.
When it comes to restricting police powers, they actually cannot. That was a key determination in Scalia's majority opinion in Castle Rock v. Gonzalez.
People are always shocked by this, because it goes against how they understand the legal system to work. And they're right to be surprised, because it is a truly incomprehensible ruling when you pick it apart. But it's right there in the text of the ruling. And it has been treated as binding precedent and applied as such by lower courts in the years since.
I don't think that's what Castle Rock v. Gonzalez means. It pretty narrowly addresses "legitimate claim of entitlement" related to enforcement of a restraining order. Scalia specifically held that "enforcement of the restraining order was not mandatory under Colorado law," which means that a state COULD mandate enforcement, but that Colorado had not.
That said, I still think it was a shitty way to slice due process law.
> I don't think that's what Castle Rock v. Gonzalez means. It pretty narrowly addresses "legitimate claim of entitlement" related to enforcement of a restraining order. Scalia specifically held that "enforcement of the restraining order was not mandatory under Colorado law," which means that a state COULD mandate enforcement, but that Colorado had not.
That's actually not true! Read the ruling itself and you'll see. Or if you can't read the ruling, read the legal analysis of it.
The ruling is incredibly broad and exhaustive. It basically said "Colorado didn't, but even if they had, they couldn't because that would be unconstitutional, and even if it weren't, the Due Process clause wouldn't apply, and even if it did, the value would be $0".
It basically preempted five levels of rebuttals to the law, making it difficult or impossible to overturn it without directly abandoning stare decisis.
Scalia'a argument for why the law was unconstitutional basically boils down to "police have always enjoyed near-unlimited freedom, and this law is too recent in the scale of US history, so it contradicts historical precedent". Which is another way of saying that states can't pass laws to restrict police discretion, because any law that is passed is by definition... "recent".
The ruling did that because the Colorado law was quite explicit in how it mandated a right to enforcement, so there was no other way to overturn the law.
And as if that's not enough, the precedent applied is quite clear: courts including in New York City have specifically used Castle Rock to rule that police do not have a duty to protect, serve, prevent crime, or intervene in a crime that is taking place, even if they were specifically dispatched to arrest that particular criminal for that particular crime. (Yes, that last part was an NYC court ruling that cited Castle Rock as precedent).
Great. Get rid of 'Police' departments and create a new form of community protection with no long history and none of that baggage :) problem solved. Thanks Scalia for encouraging 'defund the Police' as the ONLY solution to the problem!
That's interesting. I've read a few summaries of the decision but not the original text. I'd be curious to see how the court would respond to a state like Texas or Arizona challenging Castle Rock on something like immigration enforcement.
Court found that if there’s a crime in progress, police aware of it don’t need to do anything about it. They aren’t crime stoppers. The court case was from when police were alerted to an ongoing break in and rape/battery against several women, the police arrived and left after the attackers told them it was ok (with the women tied up upstairs). One of the women had called the police, which then alerted the attackers that there was another woman in the house they hadn’t known about, who they then found and attacked as well. Court found the police had done nothing wrong by trusting the men and leaving without entering the home or doing anything else, after the woman’s 911 call. The ruling said that the police have no obligation to follow up on reported and active crimes, even if they’re already present at the scene - it’s simply not their purpose.
They are talking about "Warren v. District of Columbia" court case.
To quote from wikipedia: "Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a District of Columbia Court of Appeals case that held that the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine."
It kinda means (very loosely): If you call the police to help you, but they don't show up, tough luck. You can't sue them over that.
"Protect and serve" is a slogan not backed up by anything. Police can observe, e.g., a mass shooter, and take no action. They have no responsibility to take any action.
It always amazes me there isn’t a publicly accountable oversight committee that comes with every major privacy violating power. The courts alone aren’t sufficent. And secret courts like FISA that are only selectively required are doubly insufficient.
When I was a teenager I worked with a city council member in my hometown to help establish an independent oversight committee for the local police department. Within a month, the council member was pulled over and given a ticket, and her teenage daughter was pulled over and given a ticket. They don't say ACAB just because it's catchy.
I understand the objections to "abolish the police" sloganeering because I think the alternatives of "restorative justice" and all that are pretty poorly defined (I say this as someone pretty involved in left wing politics).
However, it's increasingly clear that city police departments in many cities basically operate as unaccountable gangs that extort city government. LA Sheriff's Department has quite a few actual, traditional gangs operating within it. The NYPD routinely breaks the law when they feel like it. In Austin, the Police Academy training was found to be discriminatory and militaristic so the City Council created an oversight board, and the Police Department just doesn't let the board view trainings that they are supposed to.
Not to mention the constant police violence that they are rarely held accountable for, including the stuff from 2020 where we watched NYPD officers running their vehicles into protestors.
I don't know what the solution is but the status quo feels unsustainable.
I wish the defunding movement had instead focused on moving monetary liability from the city instead to the police union. Let the officers pay higher dues to protect their problematic colleagues from million dollar judgements. I feel like that change would be much more politically viable and also have a strong ripple effect. Right now the solidarity of the thin blue line is free, and I don’t think it would stand up to internalizing that cost.
Hey, citizen’s arrest is a thing. We just need the proponents of this law to surround the chief on their way to work (or maybe a police station), then call the feds.
This actually worked reasonably well in the US a century or so ago. It’s one of the few use cases for the 2nd amendment that made any sense (other than hunting for food).
> Makes me wonder if anyone has ever been charged with resisting a citizen’s arrest.
Citizen's arrest is a state phenomenon, meaning that there it's not one single law but rather a function of a variety of laws in states and which differ between states.
That said, most modern citizen's arrest systems in the US trace their origins back to the Civil War era, to provide a way to arrest alleged escaped slaves (emphasis on "alleged").
“Call the Feds” is that sarcasm? If you haven’t read of late the way the federal government uses law enforcement for their own agenda regardless of the US constitution than I will assume calling the feds was made in parody.
What are some specific examples of the "federal government using law enforcement for their own agenda" and what is that specific agenda that they are using law enforcement for?
I believe that equitable sharing of civil forfeiture counts. Locals make a law preventing local cops from seizing cash and property that is not part of a criminal investigation. Local cops bypass that law by working with the Feds. Profit!
What it says right on the tin, man. To bypass local laws that prevent local cops from using civil forfeiture to seize cash and property. Confused by your question.
I will restate it. The agenda here is not complicated.
A federal LE agency wants to pad their budget. That's it. That's the agenda.
A state or municipality forbids their own LEOs from employing civil forfeiture. The Feds see an opportunity and collude with the local LEOs to convert local civil forfeiture seizures to Federal seizures thus bypassing the wishes of the locals.
This is an example of the Federal government using law enforcement for their own agenda. I don't know if that's the kind of thing that GP meant, but that was an example that came to my mind.
Ok so you’re asserting that federal law enforcement agencies have an agenda (probably either a formal or informal process) to co-opt local law enforcement agencies to leverage the power of civil forfeiture to pad their own budgets.
What percentage of a federal law enforcement agency’s budget is padded using this practice? Does this apply to all federal law enforcement agencies or only some? How can we tell the difference between matters of coincidence and matters of an agenda? Any suggestions?
Politicians of bigger metropolitan areas tend to learn quickly that cops are a fairly important power center ( usually come a bigger unrest ). For example, in Chicago, both Lightfoot and her predecessor faced those issues.
You have to understand. The relationship is not nearly as straightforward as you make it out to be.
Defunding is the dumbest possible move. You have to align the incentives of the police with those of the middle middle-upper class, anything else is disfunctional will only get worse.
Anyone who has been watching cops over the past few decades shouldn't find this at all surprising. Cops consistently believe themselves to be above the law and above oversight -- especially the NYPD, but the problem is in every precinct around the country.
It’s interesting because I’ve been to many countries all over the world and of very different cultures and they all had police and prisons. Crazy that that are all just remnants of slave patrols I guess.
Uniformed police are a relatively recent invention.
In the US and England, the police evolved predominantly out of a desire to socialize the costs of protect the capital interests of the wealthy. This was protecting warehouses and such for the north/Europe, and slave patrols in the south. (As, at that point in history, the slaves were considered property, not people.)
Over time, the police merged -- some from slave patrol origins and some from protecting trade -- into uniformed organizations per city. Some directly trace their origins to slave patrols for sure though.
Other parts of the world saw police evolve from things like shire reeves, the night watch, etc. All of which were considered pretty unpleasant responsibilities -- people would be required to put in a portion of their time as night watchmen, however the wealthy could pay others to take over their shifts. The evolution from "I'll pay you to take my shift because I'm too rich to work the night watch" to "I'll pay for the night watch to protect my stuff" to "wait, what if we had everyone pay for the watch to protect my stuff" is typically the path things went outside of slave owning societies.
Edit: Responding to the Rome post here, because I apparently cannot create more posts right now:
The Romans had a few police organizations, but they were either slaves (who in turn acted as slave patrols) called the Vigiles. Those weren't widespread across Roman cities. They were a small one time thing, eventually absorbed into the military. Mostly they were firefighters.
The Cohortes Urbanae were a similar unit, explicitly part of the military that policed the city of Rome. They were more like riot cops than crime fighters though.
Otherwise, in Roman populations they had night watches like most other European cities. A group of people who were charged with keeping the peace overnight. This was considered a deeply unpopular job in Rome, and was typically given to slaves to perform. The Triumiviri Nocturni, if you want to search for more information.
But none of these are police forces -- they are either night watches pushed to those who had no other choice or they were military units. Using a military to keep the peace is very different from a police force.
what we once called slave-patrols-and-plantations and which we now call police-and-prisons
There’s been a huge resurgence across Reddit and HN today to resurrect Defund the Police and ACAB but implying police and prisons were invented after 1865 surely takes the cake.
The first uniformed police force came about in the 1850s. Prior to that, police forces weren't the central utility they are today. Yes, there were guards, but their roles, responsibilities, and behaviors were quite different.
I posted a bit of history in a sibling comment, but it's not technically wrong to say that the 1800s was the century in which we got the police forces we have today. (But yes, obviously there were other institutions that predated them.)
I believe the poster is talking more specifically, about the history and development of policing in the United States.
> but implying police and prisons were invented after 1865 surely takes the cake
I don't think they, nor anyone, is making this assertion.
There is a direct lineage from modern day police departments to slave patrols. If it helps to understand it, think about Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. This set of laws criminalized being Black and were enforced by police.
> most of them are very decent people and don’t do nasty things.
That's not really the bar though. Police officers have exemplary powers, being the manifestation of the violence of the state. They must be held to a standard above "decent people".
And being personable and friendly is not the mark of a good cop. A good cop needs to be willing to stand up for the right thing even if their peers are doing something wrong. That has been documented to be exceptionally rare in the police.
Friendly, approachable police officers are still involved in systematic injustices too -- as long as the justice system punishes the poor and minorities more than others, the police are part of the problem. The police intake people into the justice system, and knowing this if they are targeting poor or minority people they are engaged in systematic problems.
So a friendly "nice guy" cop can still be a problem.
1) Let me ask you, should I have respect for a cop because of the uniform, allowance to carry a gun, has a badge etc? I'm asking, because I really don't know how high the vetting standards are for cops. Are they that high?
2) Also, do cops respect other cops because they also wear a uniform, carry a badge, etc? In my second-hand experience, no. Some cops think other cops are a piece of shit, regardless of them being cops.
3) Here's a way to piss a cop off and get a ticket: say, "If you wanted to serve your community, you could have been a fireman."
Being a cop is a shitty job that many cops I've met end up hating and they obsess over all the retirement mechanisms all the time - they talk about it incessantly. They also talk about how much people piss them off, how much other cops in their dept piss them off, etc. They hate the world to some degree, are very self-righteous as if they have some respect narcissism complex, and act like the only thing that keeps them from shooting or beating somebody is one more day closer to a full retirement and buying dogecoin to get rich.
Ok, so to circle back around, anybody still believe in this cop respect sacred cow? Do you really feel completely safe from a cop when you're pulled over and you tell the cop you aren't rolling the window down all the way?
It is all cops. What are the chances that the “decent people you know” would actually report on their fellow police officers if they saw then doing something illegal?
How do you know nothing is ever done with it? You definitionally would never hear if it were.
Same goes for all judges, congresspeople, etc. Those in a position to surveil the mobile network know every mistress, every drug dealer, every bag man for every powerful person in the country.
cant imagine why a police department where thousands of their employees park their personal vehicles each day all over sidewalks illegally as a matter of course might be slow-walking some annoying rule about surveillance.
They also regularly use their lights and sirens just to get through traffic. Those constant little violations of the law have a cumulative effect, like how broken windows and other minor violations make a neighborhood feel less safe.
This is a very succinct way to describe the problem. This is "Broken Windows" by our government/law enforcement.
The constant skirting of the law public servants in NYC, be it the illegal parking, the using of sirens to push their way through traffic, the "I won't wear a mask but will fine you for not wearing one", NYPD officers not paying subway fares but fining the average joe, the special treatment (private spaces for NYPD families and adjacents in what are supposed to be public events)...
All of that shit culminates in the lack of trust in institutions and the degradation of OUR city.
I'm a firm believer that law enforcement should be held to a higher standard when it comes to breaking the law. For instance, a person in law enforcement for any crime should have the punishment doubled after sentencing.
In my mind, we don't even need to go that far, we just need to reasonably apply the actual laws that we have today. I don't expect police officers to be paragons of virtue, I just expect them to follow the same laws that everyone else has to follow.
If I park on the sidewalk, I will get a ticket. If a police officer parks on the sidewalk, there is no check on their ability to say "It was necessary for police business", even if it wasn't. Adding a method to track and prosecute that abuse is all I care about; police aren't being held accountable today, but I also don't see any need to hold them extra accountable -- just the same amount as everyone else is fine by me.
Yes. When you join the force, the deal should be made clear: you get extra physical power over the people around you. In return, they get to hold you to a higher standard of conduct.
Now the deal is: you get extra physical power over the people around you, the public is grateful for your 'sacrifice' and protection, such that if you screw up you'll get away with it. You will, like most humans, behave in a way that maximizes your pleasure and minimizes your pain, to the extent you can get away with it, and you'll quickly find that you can get away with almost anything. Just don't be too good, or piss off the wrong people in the department, and after 20 years you get to retire on a fat pension. Let's just get you tested to make sure you aren't too intelligent, and then you'll get your 6 weeks of training, and boom, you'll be on the street with a gun, ready "to protect and to serve"!
Sometimes I think we'd be better off with AI cops.
It is mostly the consistency, not so much the severity, of punishment which fixes the behavior.
People don’t know the exact charges and likely punishments before they commit a crime, so they don’t game out exactly the risk-reward tradeoff.
However, cops generally know the likelihood of avoiding prosecution before they commit a crime. Fixing the disincentive to prosecute police officers for any small crime is 1000x better than doubling the theoretical punishment that is so rarely applied.
Remember on July 4th when they made a private fireworks viewing section in a prime area for only police and their families, while the public areas were overcrowded?
Not in Canada, though. They use the metric system.
On a more serious note, I am surprised parking on sidewalks is a thing over there. It really is a massive problem here in Bulgaria. Has been for decades at this point
I've actually heard that this is a gang surveillance tactic. The police will act in car pairs to shadow a gang's car from a block over. And not use their sirens or lights to not alert the criminals.
What you describe sounds like an amateur hour Keystone cops level of surveillance. Or some dirty cops doing some shady stuff. A real surveillance would be so much more professional. Depending on the budget/case/interest, they use multiple cars in the pursuit. Some cars are in front, some are behind the subject. They rotate positions so that the same car isn't in the same position all the time. There are so so many other techniques available as well that isn't just conjecture.
They went out of fashion as police departments transitioned from "visible deterrent presence" to "haha gocthca, now pay up you filthy peasant" business model over the course of the war on drugs.
I think Hawaii and Connecticut still do them though.
Reminds me of the stories I'd heard about Toronto cops using their lights and sirens to clear a path to Tim Horton's. Which I found mildly surprising in Toronto's case, not at all surprising in NYC's.
Not another illegality story but I remember in the first weeks of Toronto lockdown walking past a few unmasked police who laughed at me for putting my mask on as their group came near me, with one saying “Too late!” to me with a gleeful grin.
1) as you said they seem to be, as a group, vaccine adverse. Maybe because they see themselves as the ones that 'should be giving the orders not taking them'
2) Similarly, perhaps in macho alignment with point 1, their masking discipline was poor
3) .. and this is one in their favor, they were perhaps one of of the largest groups of 'essential workers' that still had to interact with many people even during the height of whatever we want to call that period early on where we were 'locked down'.
I've seen this in Seattle. My friend took me to some famous ice cream shop. As we are walking in, firefighters nonchalantly come out with their ice creams, get into their truck and start blasting the siren for people to make way.
Honestly anything I hear about NYPD sounds like they are beyond being fixable and
need to be dissolved and recreated from scratch with anyone in power of the recreation needing to be unrelated to the original NYPD.
But then what I hear about it is very limited an done-sided.
well here's the thing. shut down the NYPD, fire all the cops, they all go back home to Suffolk County.
Now let's recreate the NYPD as something new! Let's hire all new cops. All 36000 of them.
Who's going to apply for those jobs? Seems likely most of that original 36000 would be in line.
that is, if you have cops, someone has to do that job. It seems like the job as practiced in the US naturally gravitates towards the kind of policing we seem to have. I think that all extends from the fact that guns are basically fully legal and ubiquitous throughout the US which puts it on police departments to be hyper aggressive, highly armed and dangerous, and generally mistrustful of the public; it also does not help that the educational background requirements for cops in the US are very low.
Georgia (the country) did this exact thing with their traffic police that was notoriously corrupt. After firing literally everyone, they recreated the force from scratch with much more stringent hiring standards and correspondingly higher pay. Most of those old cops didn't even try to get rehired. They ended up having no traffic police at all for about one month before the new force was staffed enough to start running things. Sky didn't fall.
As far as why US cops specifically are like that - it's because they're literally trained to be like that. Look up Dave Grossman and his "killology" nuttery (if you ever heard people talking about "sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs", that's from there). You'd think that would be some kind of fringe stuff, but no - there are police departments where the leadership paid for the entire force to attend one of his seminars.
Does this law have any teeth? OIG-NYPD’s only reasonable conclusion is that the NYPD’s use of all the surveillance technologies bundled into the noncompliant report is unlawful. (Due to lack of correct record keeping and reporting.)
This should be easy enough to prosecute, e.g., via internal affairs.
Turns out he was there to update some cameras on the roof that pointed out to Union Square. I talked to him for a while, and while he wouldn't specifically say who owned them, he did say "they could read a business card from 300 yards away."
This was probably before there was much facial recognition going on, but it stuck with me that we were only one of many buildings with these set ups. I always heard about London being over-surveilled, I guess the NYPD did a much better job of keeping quiet about it.