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Tag: crime prevention

  • The Ray Kelly Smackdown Hour

    Except this time it was Ray Kelly who was doing the smacking down. He gave it back good to the New York City Council on the subject of stop and frisks and violence among minority youths. From the New York Times:

    “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities — people are upset about being stopped, yet what is the answer?” Mr. Kelly asked Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, who had been asking the commissioner to acknowledge that the department’s practice of street stops in minority communities left many people “feeling under siege.”

    “What have you said about how do we stop this violence?” Mr. Kelly asked, asserting that violence among minority youth is “something that the government has an obligation to try to solve.”

    Ms. Mark-Viverito, whose district includes East Harlem and part of the South Bronx, was now pressed for an answer.

    “There needs to be prevention and deeper community-based tactics and strategy” she offered. “Yeah, what is that?” he asked in a dismissive manner.

    Ms. Mark-Viverito spent the next few moments trying to exit the debate over police tactics that she had sought, eventually saying, “I think I’ve made my point.”

    To that, Mr. Kelly shot back: “I’m not certain what your point is.”

    Dammmmmmn.

    Of course there is a better solution: smarter stop and frisks, based not on “productivity goals” but on actions of intelligent police officers who have discretion and can distinguish between criminal and non-criminal black man.

    But Kelly has a point. It’s too easy to criticize the police. It would also help if you actually had some ideas as to how to make police better. And it isthe government’s obligation to try and solve the problem of violence in minority neighborhoods. It’s not that the police are without blame… but don’t justblame the police.

    Update: Some of the video can be seen here.

  • Police versus Disciples in Chicago

    There’s some good reporting by Frank Main of the Chicago Sun-Times. He goes beyond Police Supt. Garry McCarthy’s bombast (“We’re going to obliterate that gang,” he told police brass in a meeting in June. “Every one of their locations has to get blown up until they cease to exist.”) to talk to actual gang members. I’m generally tempted to dismiss “get tough” language as ineffective bombastic bravado, but I have faith in Superintendent McCarthy. And so far what police in Chicago are actually doingseems to be working.

    “Maniac Latin Disciples members are now under gang orders to keep violence to a minimum because of the police crackdown, the ranking member said.”

    Well now, isn’t that the idea? The gang member continues, talking about their cars:

    “Most of the shorties don’t have licenses or insurance,” the ranking member said. “They’re easy to pick off.”

    He said a lot of them aren’t reclaiming their seized cars because they don’t have the money. Some of the seized cars contained hidden guns the police didn’t find, he added.

    Asked if he thinks the police will let up, the gang member acknowledged, “Stopping the violence is the only way. They know we’ll always be selling drugs. The cops will tell you, ‘I won’t trip out about you having weed in your pocket to feed your kids.’ But when you start shooting across schoolyards and shooting little innocent kids and s— like that, they’re not going to tolerate that. I get mad. I’ve told the mother-f—— shorties in our mob to stop doing that f—— b——-. How do you think the parents feel? That’s our neighborhood.”
    …
    Surprisingly, the gang member said he didn’t know police Supt. Garry McCarthy’s name — even though the superintendent is the source of the Maniac Latin Disciples’ recent troubles.

    But he does know McCarthy’s face from the TV news as the “top dog who gives the orders to the foot soldiers.”

    “All I know is that people are hiding under rocks because of him,” the gang member said.
    …
    Between Jan. 9 and Feb. 5, for example, there weren’t any shootings in the district, compared to seven for the same period of 2011, police said.
    …
    Beat 1423 saw calls for police service drop from 127 for the last six months of 2010 to 56 for the last six months of 2011.

    Let’s keep an eye on this and see whether it lasts. That’s what separates a dumb crackdown from smart policing. You can always flood an area with cops, and that will reduce crime. But you can’t afford to keep an area flooding with cops. And what happens after police leave is the real test. Violence stays down when police patrol and police intel and the DA and probation and patrol all get on the same page.

    I mention this because there’s a tendency among academics to fail to notice the key moment when police do something right. If violence does stay down, in a few year’s time the SPSS set will say, “Correlation doesn’t equal causation. We can’t say police were the cause because there was no proper control-group study (or any study at all).” And then later, looking back, you’ll hear, “well, the neighborhood got better” and “there were a multitude of factors” and “community efficacy really coalesced.” Sociologists will look at the community and might credit the positive transformation of gang culture; economists will notice a greater involvement of gang members in the legal workforce; teacher will credit themselves; preachers will credit God. Well, yes, but sometimes it all starts with the good, smart, aggressive policing.

    In effect, academics assert that if we can’t prove (to a level of 95-percent statistical certainty) that police are the cause of a crime drop, then it would be misguided (at best) to give police (or, God forbid, an individual police chief) credit. Think about it… we use our own ineptitude and short-sightedness to justify our dismissal of effective policing. That’s a nice little trick!

    The time to do research isn’t after the fact, from your office, but right now, on the streets around Humboldt Park, Chicago.

    Maybe what’s going on in Chicago isjust a few months of police overtime and a few extra arrests. Maybe next year everything will be back to normal and cops will be sitting in their cars waiting for the next shooting. But maybe not. It would be nice to know.

  • Jeffrey Goldberg on the crime drop in DC

    And talking to Washington’s police chief, Cathy Lanier. Bloomberg.com:

    Lanier outlined some of the changes in the way her department does its job — procedural, technological and investigative changes that I suspect have more to do with the drop in homicides than sociologists might credit.

    I suspect the same.

  • Alphabet City Memoirs

    When I re-posted those pics of a Baltimore crack house, I found one of the comments so interesting I asked the commenter to turn it into a guest post. Eddie Nadal, retired NYPD, graciously agreed. These are his words:

    I recently visited the Lower East Side in New York, the same LES where I was born, where my grandma lived for over fifty years, and where I worked as a cop for seven years in the 1980s. I felt like I’d stepped into an alternate universe. The Lower East Side that I knew back then was, to put it plainly, a drug-infested hellhole.

    At the first “feeding time” (the early morning hours when junkies venture out to get their first fix of the day), the streets looked like an open-air market. Drugs were openly bought and sold, and hundreds of people congregated on the four corners of Avenue B and 2nd street. The neighborhood was overwhelmingly Hispanic — the only time you saw a white person down there was if they were on their way to cop or leaving after copping.

    The city’s leaders announced that they’d had enough of the lawlessness and crime of the area, and to clean up the neighborhood, the NYPD started Operation Pressure Point in early 1984. The LES was flooded with cops who were given carte blanche to kick-ass first, take names later. I was one of those officers.

    Maybe I was just young and naive, but I truly believed that we were cleaning up the neighborhood for the benefit of the people who lived there, people like my grandma, people who were just trying to get by and live a decent life among so much squalor. Because despite the crime, junkies, and dealers on every corner, there was still life on those streets. There were still the corner bodegas, the panaderias with their delicious cafe con leche, the salsa music coming from open windows.

    Now those bodegas and panaderias are mostly gone, replaced with organic wine bars and trendy art galleries. As it turned out, real estate developers had had their eye on the area long before we moved in to clean it up, buying up properties at bargain basement prices and waiting for the moment when the neighborhood became safe enough to be profitable. Millions upon millions of dollars were made in the following years. The city had no intention of cleaning up the neighborhood for the decent people who lived there — there was too much money to be made by forcing out the poor and working class residents and instead turning those buildings into luxury apartments renting for $3,500 a month. Rent control and rent stabilization did exist, but not nearly enough to keep the neighborhood intact.

    The risks we took and the sacrifices we made back then were not to benefit the community I knew — a community that no longer really exists — they were to make money for the city and for the developers. Ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gift’s hard not to feel a bit resentful of that on some level. And to me personally, it’s upsetting to see that the neighborhood and culture I knew has more or less disappeared.

    Eddie Nadal has a new blog, 10-66 Unusual Incident. (Hmmm, 10-66 must be another one of them fancy NYPD terms I hear around town, like “perp,” “skell,” and “RMP”.)

    [update: here’s an article from the New York Timeswith a bit of the same theme.]

  • Why you’ll never be Batman

    By your second week, you’re unhappy that 90% of the crimes you’ve even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to support his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad, homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid when you saw him punch a lady and take her purse, but you can’t really pursue that kind of thing by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk… in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep there’s a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it’s YOU he’s after.
    …
    The police draw their guns and order you to stop. You turn and grab for the smoke pellet on your belt to help hide your getaway, but unfortunately for you the cops see you reaching for something and open fire… and you suit’s armor is already a mess from the shotgun blast earlier. Uh oh.

    From Mark Hughes [and thanks to a comment by Simmmons].

  • Camden brings back some police, firefighters

    The AP story.

  • Fewer Cops = More Crime

    That’s the news from Camden.

    Though I should point out that were it not for the layoffs (almost half the department!), the chief would probably be boasting that homicides are down. But everything else is up, including shootings. Hmmm, maybe there’s a correlation between fewer cops and bad aim?

  • WWJD? The death penalty and Jesus

    Texas just executed its 466th murderer in the last three decades (not surprisingly, the guy being executed was black. Black murderers are much more likely to be executed than are white murderers.)

    But I’m not here to defend murderers. I’m not even really even against the death penalty. (As long as we can be certain the person is guilty… which too often we’re not certain of… which does make me kind of against the death penalty. Can’t there be a legal standard even beyond “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”? Like “caught-red-handed-we-know-he-did-it guilty”?)

    But I want to mention two seemingly obvious facts:

    1) Jesus Christ would not support the death penalty. I’m not religious, so you might ask why I bring this up. Because I think it’s very strange that many people who claim to believe Jesus Christ was the Son of God also support the death penalty. Hey, support the death penalty for whatever reason you want. But please don’t do it in Jesus’s name. He was more of a forgiveness kind of guy: “Let he who is without sin…” and “Go, and sin no more.” New Testament trumps Old! Isn’t that the basis of Christianity?

    2) The death penalty does not deter crime. The average murder rate of death penalty states is higher than in states without the death penalty. The murder rate in execution-central Texas is 5.4, also higher than the national average. Now maybe if Texas wasn’t so execution happy, the murder rate would be even higher… but do you really believe that?

    Now you may think it’s right to kill killers for reasons that have nothing to do with God or crime. Maybe they simply deserve it as punishment. Frankly, personally, I don’t give a damn if murderers live or die. But I would like to think that I and we are better than them. But please stop the nonsense that execution is somehow linked to crime prevention or is compatible with the teachings of Jesus.

  • Seattle Police Union to Cops: Lay Low

    Seattle Timescolumnist Danny Westneat has a worrisome article in the paper:

    “You are paid to use your discretion and there are many ways to do police work. Recent events should show us that many in the city really don’t want aggressive officers who generate on-view incidents. They want officers who avoid controversy and simply respond when summoned by 911.”

    …

    What the union head is suggesting here is that the scrutiny of police is so severe right now, and so lopsided, that cops should mostly just respond, not initiate.

    “If there’s borderline criminal or suspicious activity, I say let it go,” O’Neill said when I asked him to elaborate. “Don’t go out on a limb. It’s not worth it.”

    …

    Won’t crime go up?

    “That might be a consequence,” O’Neill said. “But the leaders of this city need to decide how they want it around here.”

    Like I said: Uh-oh.

    [thanks to Sgt T]

  • Guardian Angels foil ‘L’ Robbery in Chicago

    Even since I felt safer after seeing them on the ‘L’ growing up in Chicago, I’ve always been pro-Guardian Angels. But they’ve never so popular among police, or at least police unions, who don’t like to see other people keeping the city safe… and doing it for free. Their founder, Curtis Sliwa, certainly has some tales to tell, and sometimes those tales have been told a little tall. But interestingly, after all these years, I’ve never heard about a scandal among the rand-and-file Guardian Angels. That’s impressive discipline.

    Here’s a story of Angels in action, from today’s Sun-Times.