Officer Rafael Lora was trying to do his job. Now he has no job and is looking at prison. The story in the New York Times and the Post.
I wasn’t there. But I believe the officer. Why? Because why else would have Lora shot the driver?
This is one case where even an NYPD officer should have trusted a Bronx jury.
I’ve always wondered and never knew how much police-related lawsuits cost the city. Last year it was $35 million for settlements related to NYPD action. That up 40% over the previous year.
The headline in the Daily News calls the $35 million figure “staggering.” It doesn’t strike me as that high. $8 a resident or $1,000 per officer? I got $8.
I was actually kind of hoping the number would be much higher. Then I could use the figure to justify higher police pay as saving money if it could reduce lawsuits.
Besides, for all agencies the city paid out $568 million in settlements and judgments last year. Now that’s too high.
“So I killed someone,” Keith Phoenix, 28, told New York police detectives who found him hiding in the bathroom of a Yonkers apartment, the police said. “That makes me a bad guy?”
Er, uh… yeah. It does.
The story is in the Times.
If they want to get you, they can always find a way.
“A patrol car’s $221 side-view mirror could wind up costing an NYPD captain his career. A story about a double-parked cruiser and a minor fender bender has snowballed into allegations of conspiracy and coverup.” The whole storyis in the Daily News.
This is compstat pressure. Or traffic-stat or whatever it’s called in this case. See, the captain was worried about getting himself chewed out a new assh*le because traffic accidents in his precinct were up 3.5%. So, the story says, he wanted an accident reclassified as vandalism. Did he do wrong? Yes. Should his career be ruined? No.
I feel sorry for the captain. Of course if he had told meto file a false report, I wouldn’t feel sorry for him at all. I don’t know. At some point it’s a matter of “he-said she-said.” It’s a messed up situation that now becomes a matter of internal department politics in a micro-managed department. And that’s f*cked up.
Compstat has done a lot of good for the NYPD and for New York. And I can’t imagine a police world today that didn’t use the timely compilation of statistics to allocate resources and identify problems. Really… what’s the alternative?
But…
For stats to matter, they need to accurately represent what they claim to. If you judge performance and crime on stats, it is inevitable that the numbers–and not the incidents they’re supposed to represent–become more and more important.
When the pressure to produce stats becomes too great, and when the people held responsible for the stats control the stats, then playing with the numbers becomes too tempting and too easy.
I’m not defending fuzzy math, not by any means (plus there’s always the problem that once the books are cooked, you need to keepcooking them). I’m just saying it should come as no prize when people living in a stat-based world play with the numbers.
Police Officer Pogan, who tackled a bicyclist in Times Square, has been fired.
Here’s the the story in the Times.
A friend of mine has claimed that there’s “more to the story” and that the officer was specifically trying to stop thisbicyclist. I don’t buy it. If that had been the case, he would have said something about it in his arrest report.
Here’s the officer’s lie-filled arrest report, from The Smoking Gun.
Officially, the NYPD stopped and frisked 531,000 people last year. That’s a lot. They resulted in 31,665 arrests and 34,081 summonses.
Because of the 4th Amendment, you need “probable cause” for a search or arrest. A search happens once you go inside pockets or look for anything accept weapons (drugs do come to mind).
Because of a Terry v. Ohio, you need “reasonable suspicion” to stop and/or frisk a suspect. Afrisk is a pat down of the outer closing for weapons in the interest of officer safety. Sounds benign, but a frisk is aggressive, hands on, and personal. Ask anybody who has been frisked. It’s not fun. (I should mention it’s not fun to frisk, either. But similar to being hit by a car or hitting someone while driving a car, I’d prefer to be the “frisker” rather than the “friskee.”)
Now half a million frisks a year is a lot. In NYC it’s part of a strategy to disarm criminals. There’s debate as to its effectiveness, but personally I think it’s likely that aggressive stop and frisks did and do play some role in reducing crime in NYC.
But that’s easy for me to say. It’s not me they’re frisking. I’m white, professional, getting to middle age, and know how to talk to police. Though I have been stopped twice by the NYPD, both times while on my bike.
I ask my undergrad students how many have been frisked. About half the hands go up. Most have darker skin (though there are white hands, too).
Maybe the first time you’re frisked and innocent you say, “Fine. OK. I want a safer city, too.” But the fifth time your frisked on your way to work or school? I don’t know about you, but I’d be pissed off.
So what level of frisking is acceptable? If there were 500,000 frisks and 500,000 illegal guns found, I don’t think anybody would have a real problem with frisks.
If there were 500,000 frisks and no guns were found (though it could be argued that frisks still served some deterrent value), nobody would argue it was a good policy.
So what “hit rate” justifies the frisks? 50%? 10%? 5%? I don’t have the answer.
Also, consider these:
1) Most police tell me that the vast majority of frisks in NYC are officially counted (that certainly was not the case for me in Baltimore). But still, there is certainly some undercount.
2) If officers make an arrest, many don’t fill out the stop and frisk form. In other words, for some, the form is only filled out when nothing is found. So the hit rate may be somewhat higher that official stats indicate.
3) To argue, based on the stats, that 88% of those frisked did nothing wrong is absurd. If there’s a corner of active drug dealers and you stop and frisk eight people. You find a gun! Well the stats, seven out of eight (88%) were innocent and doing nothing wrong. Bullshit. In this case, all eight of those frisks were justified. Even if no gone was found (this time)!
4) On the other hand, if you’re frisking walking to work with a small bag of weed, that counts as a hit but I’d say isn’t justified. You frisk for weapons, not drugs. And in New York State you can’t use plain feel from a frisk to prosecute for drugs. but many NYPD don’t know this.
5) Does a 21-year-old white rookie cop out of Long Island have any knowledge regarding the nuances in street behavior and dress that distinguish between hip street-look and criminal thug?
6) Is it fair to disproportionately discover marijuana on urban minorities (found during a frisk) when the equivalent risk of discover for suburban whites is virtually zero?
So let’s say frisks do lower crime. Let’s say they also pisses off a lot of the non-criminal public. Is it worth it?
Fewer police is not a good option. If anything is “shovel ready,” the next NYPD academy class sure is! Too bad it’s not going to happen.
The New York Daily News has a story about police raids in the Queensbridge Homes.
59 people arrested in a “lengthy undercover probe” that “brought down an extensive drug-dealing operation.
Interesting, I thought. And not just because I live nearby and often ride my bike past The Bridge. No, it rang a bell. Ah, yes, here it is… a headline from 2005: Long Island City Drug Sting Rounds Up 37 Suspects.
The drug dealing started every day at 7 a.m., the police said, and was centered in a shopping area known as the Hill, at the heart of the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City.
Drug dealers divided up the 26-building public housing development — the city’s largest — and agreed to buy their crack and cocaine solely from a group of seven wholesalers and enforcers affiliated with the Bloods street gang, who called themselves the Dream Team, the police said.
But the enterprise, which the police say has been entrenched in the housing project for years, came to an end yesterday as the police and prosecutors announced the arrests of 37 people on state and federal drug charges.
The arrests, made over the past few days, ended an 11-month sting operation in which undercover officers bought 500 grams of cocaine from dealers and conducted surveillance at the project, the police said. The police are still seeking at least a dozen other suspects in the case, officials said.
Flash forward to 2009. There are still drugs. Still violence. Same homes. Same deal.
Back in 2005, Danny Jackson had it right: “‘It’ll cool down a bit, but the next generation will come,’ said Danny Jackson, 27, a rap artist who works in warehouses for $6.50 an hour to support himself, his mother and his year-old daughter.”
And in four more years we’ll do it all again, spending more money, risking more police lives, and throwing more people in prison for no real long-term gain.
We need to stop this nonsense and legalize it all. Otherwise how can we regulate it?
It turns out you can fight City Hall. In 1857 they did. And won. It turns out that if you’re City Hall, you can’t fight the State House.
The winner of this brawl at City Hall between two competing police departments got to be New York’s Finest!
The mayor was arrested and New York State took over the police (before giving them back a few years later).
I just got the image from wikipediato use in class and thought I’d share.
Hey, guys, check the violence at the door. Or at least don’t take it out on police.
The story in the Times.
And the Daily News.