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.
