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Tag: NYPD

  • White Shirts

    They’re on my mind, but probably because I’m reading Melville’s excellent White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War.

    But with regards to the protests and the NYPD… I don’t see the problem of the “white shirts.” (And before you go there, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna has been taken off the street.) This is one of the very rare times the military-like structure of a police department, usually so counter-productive, actually comes in handy.

    Do we really want every cop at a protest making independent judgments about arrest and the first amendment willy-nilly? This kind of protest isn’t an everyday occurrence. And the 1st Amendment is kind of important. Isn’t it better to have experienced supervisors, in direct conference with experienced lawyers, making such decisions?

    It’s also smart of the NYPD to release some of their own videos. Eight times out of ten, their natural inclination to secrecy does not help their cause.

  • Bad Day at the Office

    Come on, walking up to somebody you’ve penned up (for not moving?!), macing them, and walking away? Of course it’s indefensible. And it’s not fair to the officers trying to deal with the situation… the officers who weredealing with the situation, acting professionally in a stressful situation.

    This guy had a very bad day at the office. But if that’s the worst thing he’s done in 30 years, it doesn’t mean he should lose his job. Nobody died. Still, a little contrition, an apology, and a departmental reprimand are indeed in order! Maybe he should think about retiring; perhaps policing has changed a little faster than he’s been able to keep up with.

    I also find it funny that “blocking traffic” (except when it’s done by the police) is somehow such a horrible offense and justification. It’s not like traffic flows that well anyway. Causing a traffic jam? Not good. But so what? Traffic jams happens. Certainly in Manhattan. If it mattered so much, we should ban the president from visiting, police funerals, and the entire United Nations general assembly.

    But what do I know? I’m thousands of miles away, in England, closer to deer and pheasants than protesters.

  • Little Hurricane Crime in New York City

    The mayor says there were 45 arrests in New York City last night compared to 345 arrests on a normal August Saturday night. Mayor Bloomberg said, “If that doesn’t tell you about New Yorkers, I don’t know what does.” That’s sweet. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s good there wasn’t massive looting, and New York is a pretty great place. But I’d bet that the low arrest total says a lot more about bad weather in general and in particular police being told not to arrest people unless absolutely necessary (to keep officers on the street).

  • Mike Bloomberg on the potential for looting

    “This is New York, we don’t have that sort of thing.”

  • Wouldn’t it be great…

    If we were all rich enough to have our own private police force that did whatever we want?

    Police have better things to do that act as private security for rich corporations. I wonder how much Coach and Rolex (and other big-name products) have to “donate” to New York’s elected officials and police leaders to get them to care about such a pressing matter? If Coach doesn’t like people selling knock-off bags, let themhire private security.

    It reminds me of the days when the rich industrialist might “borrow” a few police officers to bust the heads of striking workers. For non-violent crimes, stores need to pay for private security (who, back in the days, were pretty good themselves at busting heads).

    I can’t for the life of me figure out why municipal tax-payer funded police waste any of their resources cracking down on copyright infringement. This all comes to mind because of the particular absurdity and stupidity of arresting a store worker at a legitimate store for selling paper replicas of luxury goods! Chinese funeral offerings.

    From the Times:

    A man in street clothes entered the store and seemed particularly interested in the handbags and loafers, obviously cardboard, that have print designs that vaguely resemble Louis Vuitton’s and Gucci’s.

    “He asked me, ‘How much is this?’ ” recalled Mr. Mak, pointing to a handbag on display. “I said $20, and he pulled out his badge and said, ‘Are you selling this to me?’ And then he arrested me.”

    He was held overnight in a local precinct house.
    …
    He was charged with two counts of copyright infringement in the third degree. Jonathan L. Stonbely, a lawyer from Legal Aid assigned to Mr. Mak, said that he was prepared to defend his client against the charges and that he had rejected an offer from prosecutors to allow Mr. Mak to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and pay a $100 fine.

    Whatever it costs to get this kind of police service, I bet it’s more than I’ll ever make.

  • Sometimes there is a cop when you need one!

    Suspect runs into police, gets arrested.

  • NYPD Officer Samuel Battle

    The Timeshas a story about Samuel Battle, one of New York’s first black police officers.

    But what is reallyinteresting is his oral history. In his own words. “They had riots. Many riots.” Worth a read:

    I went on down, and we got there, with my squad. The whites and Negroes were battling. I saw the white cops beating up the colored people, and I thought, “Here’s my chance to get even with them.” I saw them whipping black heads, and I was whipping white heads. I’ll never forget that.

    We quelled it, we didn’t make many arrests, because in those days you didn’t have to. Today you’d be forced to arrest a lot of people to prevent them from taking civil action.

    What was the cause? Just interracial conflicts. They’d sometimes start a fight over a crap game, or anything. Just some little thing like that. One will start a fight and then they’ll all get together, and you have a riot as a result

  • Reasonable Doubt

    An NYPD officer were acquitted of rape today. Did I think he’s guilty? Yeah, I do. But I’m not surprised he was acquitted. (He and his partner were found guilty of lesser charges and promptly fired.) In fact, last week I predicted this exactoutcome (but just to my class… you’ll have to take my word). Why? because even I had doubt. You might even say “reasonable doubt.” Apparently the jury thought similarly. And that’s enough to acquit.

    It’s not easy to convict in this country. Especially if the accused has a good lawyer. Whether that’s good or bad, you decide. But that’s the way it is. And one reason it’s hard to convict police officers is that police know all too well how to play this game we call justice.

    I first had doubt after I heard the whole so-called “confession” tape, a secret recording the woman made while confronting the ex-cop outside a police station [which I can’t find a link to, but I know it’s out there because I heard it… can anybody find me the link?]. It’s hardly a confession at all. In some ways, it’s consistent with an innocent man simply trying to appease a potentially hysterical woman at his place of employment. Yes, he said he wore a condom. But it was only after a longer talk where he denied, repeatedly, ever having sex. She said she was only concerned with the consequences of unprotected sex. So finally he tells her what she wants to hear: he says he wore a condom. It’s not hard to believe that any innocent man would say the same thing in the same circumstance.

    Of course a guilty man might have said likewise. But that’s the point about doubt. You don’t have to believe somebody is innocent to vote to acquit.

    Do guilty people get away with crimes? All the time. A similar but far greater travesty of justice happened when a burglar was later caught on tape admitting to rape. He too was acquitted (stupidly, the jury wasn’t allowed to know he had a history of burglary, which was a pretty key piece of evidence with regards to him being in the house!)

    And of course being convicted of something and loosing your job is hardly getting away scot-free. But it’s usually only big headline news when it happens to police (for instance, how much did you hear about the case I linked to above? Exactly). Don’t like it? Blame the criminal justice system. That’s what police do all the time.

    [Hell, you can even blame O.J. Simpson. His trial set the bar way to high in terms of conclusive “scientific” evidence.]

    [Update: Here’s a story about the jurors’ decision. I’m with this alternate juror: “I definitely thought some funny business went on…. Is it possible they raped her? Sure.” But that’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.]

  • 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.]

  • NYPD Stop and Frisks and Marijuana Arrests

    WNYC reporter Ailsa Chang reports on the curious link between stop and frisks and marijuana arrests in New York City. It’s curious because small-scale possession of marijuana in New York State isn’t a crime (it is a non-arrestable ticketable “violation”). Nor do drugs that are “immediately apparent” based on “plain-feel” during a “Terry Frisk” (for weapons) give police justification to search (this is unique to New York State based on People v. Diaz).

    I also did a little research based on the nifty map provided at the above link. There are 76 precincts in New York City. In 2010, 19 police precincts with the highest arrest rates for the lowest level marijuana-possession had 48 percent of the city’s murders and 39 percent of city’s robberies. But I’m not certain what percent of the NYC’s population lives in those 19 precincts. Anybody have data for population by precinct?

    I’m briefly quoted in the story. And you can read what I’ve already written about stop and frisks by clicking on the “stop and frisk” tag below. This story is a bit different because it focuses on illegal searches, which are never OK. Police are given so much leeway within the law that I can’t help but think that cops who conduct illegal searches are, at best, lazy and stupid.