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Tag: NYPD

  • Crime isn’t up

    Crime isn’t up

    Man, if you read the NY Post, you might think the city is going to hell. And all because a liberal is mayor and cops’ hands are tied: “The attack raised fears of a new wave of anti-cop violence — with a police union president blaming the assault on Mayor Bill de Blasio and his crackdown on stop-and-frisk.”

    I don’t want to minimize the danger of “air mail,” people throwing things from high above. It can indeed kill. But I doubt this potential murderer threw a bike at cops because police no longer make quota/productivity-goal based stops.

    I also don’t want to minimize the unfairness of potential lawsuits brought against individual police officers who are, in good faith, trying to do their jobs.

    Even my old sergeant from Baltimore couldn’t resist telling me how New York was not longer safe without all those stops, not to mention a liberal Sharpton-loving mayor in charge!

    But there’s one problem with crime-is-up-because-stops-are-down theory. Crime isn’t up! So until crime actually does increase, can we all just stop talking about the rise in crime so matter of factly?

    Here’s my theory: Cops have, are, and always will stop people when they have reasonable suspicion. Why? Because that’s what cops do! Call it doing your job or professional pride or whatever. Cops want to stop crime and catch criminals.

    But what cops are not doing much of making stops just to meet some perceived quota. This means that literally hundreds of thousands of guys a year are not being stopped because they’re wearing baggy pants in a high-crime neighborhood.

    I understand that logic of why massive stop-and-frisks could have a deterrent effect on crime. And yes, school is now out, the summer is hot, and stops have been way down for almost a year.

    Now this chart only goes to last year. This year stops are down, murders are down a bit, and shootings are up a bit. Overall, according to the stats, crime is basically unchanged (down 3%). But I make it habit not to rely on any crime numbers other than shootings and murders.

    So stops are down and crime is still down. Yes, crime is up in some places, but it’s down in other and overall constant. In the 75, stop are down 90% and shootings are up 30%. And leave it to a real news source to find local residents saying police need to start up those stops again!

    As somebody just put it (I forget where I just heard this), “what we have now isn’t a crime problem but a newspaper-selling problem.” I might also add there’s a bit of a problem with an ideology that believes the only effective policing is repressive policing.

    Is there a correlation there between police inaction and more shootings in East New York? Almost certainly. But we can deal with that without going back to blanket (and now illegal) police of massive stops and frisks.

    People feel safe when they see police and normal life functions. Police presence is key. Police getting out of their car is key. Police need to know the people — good and bad — in their area. Police need to stay in one area for a long time so that knowledge isn’t wasted. But 600,000 stops a year? That’s too many. And zero? That’s too few. But somewhere in between the two — and toward the lower end — it’s going to be just right.

  • Bratton tweak Operation Impact…

    …By putting rookie officers with more veteran officers. This should have been a no-brainer years ago. Partnering dumb with dumber — both right out of the police academy, both sometimes clueless white boys from Long Island — was never a brilliant idea (though even then it did help reduce crime). Rookie cops faced with quota pressure who could not distinguish class differences in the ghetto led to a lot of unwarranted stops, questionably legal marijuana arrests, and political backlash that hurt the NYPD. It also reinforcing the idea that foot patrol was just something to be endured before you got to become real police.

    The story in the Daily News.

  • Look good. Shoot good.

    Look good. Shoot good.

    Just your standard issue 1943 NYPD combo gun holster and make-up kit. On display at the NYPD Museum.

  • The jury has spoken

    I wasn’t there; I didn’t attend the trial; so far be it from me to assert “the truth” of what happened at an Occupy Wall Street gathering in March, 2012.

    From the video, she sure looks guilty as sin (bottom left of the frame, at 22 seconds):

    A jury of 12 thought similarly, and found Cecily McMillan guild of felony assault on a police officer, which is a pretty serious offense.

    Can’t you be pro-Occupy and also not pro-elbowing cops?

    Like all trials, the problem, if it is problem, is the trial isn’t about greater issues. It’s about the person on trial and the single criminal act they are being tried for. That’s it. Despite the efforts of Cecily’s supporters, this trial wasn’t about Occupy or the police.

    From the Times:

    A video corroborated Officer Bovell’s account. Ms. McMillan is seen bending her knees, then throwing her right elbow into the officer’s eye. She lurches forward, runs a few steps, then is tackled by several officers.

    Ms. McMillan testified she had no recollection of hitting the officer, but recalled what she thought was someone trying to grope her. “All of a sudden I feel somebody grab me from behind, from my right breast, and pull me backward,” she said.

    …

    Erin Choi, an assistant district attorney, in her summation accused Ms. McMillan of lying about Officer Bovell groping her for the sake of publicity. She showed stills from the onlooker’s video, and called Ms. McMillan a manipulator “constantly scheming” to gain attention…. “That’s how she benefited from this nonsense. She wanted to become the face of Occupy Wall Street.”

    …

    She was one of the few protesters arrested during three months of Occupy Wall Street protests who opted for a trial. She said she did so because the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., would not agree to let her plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and a felony conviction would linger on her record, hampering her career for the rest of her life.

  • That damn liberal media (for real!… sort of)

    That damn liberal media (for real!… sort of)

    It hasn’t been a bad week for off-duty NYPD officers. There was the drunk cop who shot himself or his partner in the wrist (actually he was on-duty, but whatever). Then there was the cop in the car who f*cking tried to kill the guy in the car next to him. And perhaps a few other incidents… who can say? Whatever (hey, I’m sure you can google any of this).

    You take any population of 35,000 mostly young males and you will get many stories of bad and amusingly bad behavior. But that’s not my point.

    It’s this headline from the Times that I find strange: “Former New York Police Officer Charged With Painting Anti-Semitic Graffiti.”

    “Former New York Police Officer”?

    It’s crap like this why cops hate “the liberal media.”

    The story actually isn’t so bad. But the headline editor? Shame on you!

    It’s like if I got arrested for something — tax charges or pedophilia or whatever (just hypothetically speaking, of course) — and they were like “former Baltimore City Police Officer arrested!” I’ve been off the friggin’ job since 2001!

    Except this is much worse. Because I wasn’t kicked out of the police department. Had I wanted to (God willing), I could now have 14+ years on the job (poor me). This guy, best I can tell, was basically fired, perhaps while on probation. Why? Because he’s a hate-filled schmuck!

    This guy is obviously crazy because not only did he spray paint “Jews suck cock” but he did so right under a camera.

    Why can’t the headline read, “Crazy Guy Arrested for Anti-Semitic Graffiti.” Or, because the cop thing is news, “Crazy guy NYPD fired is, in fact, crazy.” Or “NYPD thought this guy is crazy. Turns out the NYPD was right!”

    From the same story that calls him police:

    Mr. Setiawan, of Bellerose, Queens, was a police officer for two years before resigning in 2007…. The reason he left the department was not immediately clear. In the years since, the police said, Mr. Setiawan has been arrested six times.

    He isn’t a “former police officer.” He is a “fired police officer”!

    And don’t just blame liberals. The conservative press, the New York Post, made the same mistake. But, as usual (or at least since the Times moved Al Baker, who was a great police reporter, for “being too close to police”), other papers captured a better story. Why is the Queens Courier better with police reporting than the venerable Grey Lady?

    It’s actually not because of any political or liberal/conservative bias. It’s all about the reporters. The Times often hires upper-middle class “nice” people out of journalism school. These are the educated folks, like me, who correctly or not, are perceived as never having worked a blue-collar day in their lives. The hostility of police is very class based. Do you learn that in J-school? I don’t know. But I didn’t learn that at Princeton or Harvard.

    The Queens Courier, on the other hand, is now edited by a former police officer. I suspect their crime coverage is going to be pretty effing good! At least for this story they use “ex” and not “former.” You may not get the difference. But I do. Beat that, Grey Lady.

    To be honest, by far the best coverage of this story was in the Daily News.

  • Common Sense from the NYPD (X2!)

    Common Sense from the NYPD (X2!)

    I love any memothat instructs police officers to “use discretion and common sense” and the arrest “as a last resort.”

    This is the type of common sense one would expect from Bratton because jaywalking in NYC is not a “broken window.”

    It’s actually quite poetic. Whoever wrote this should be promoted to editor of Spring-3100!

    The second bit of common sense to come out of the NYPD is the decision to give 200 cops in Staten Island naloxone (aka: narcan). This saves the lives of people ODing on heroine. From the Times: “the initiative went straight to the heart of ‘what we want to do, save lives.’”

    According to the Times, paramedics have saved 42 people on Staten Island this year, and police in one precinct 3 people.

    Administering a life-saving drug to people about to die should be a no-brainer, but not much about the war on drugs involves brains. So unless you’re a paramedic, saving the life of a addict is considered controversial, even when the alternative is certain death.

    When I was a cop, this was an injection (and cops didn’t give it). Now it’s a nasal spray. From my experience, watching somebody get this drug come back to life is a great spectator sport… but not for the reason you’d think. He or she whose life was saved wakes up really pissed off! It’s ha-larious, in a you-had-to-be-there kind of way.

  • Is the sky falling?

    Not yet. But the sky did get a little lower in NYC last month. Over the 28-day period ending 4/6/14, compared to 2013, the number of people shot increased 40 percent (101 vs 72). The increases were found, not surprisingly, in the Bronx (27 vs 18), Brooklyn North (28 vs 17) and Queens South (12 vs 6).

    Cause for alarm? I don’t know. But my eyebrow is raised…

    Still, for the year, shooting and murders are a bit lower than last year.

  • RIP Officer Dennis Guerra

    RIP Officer Dennis Guerra

    From the NYT:

  • Crime in NYC is going to go up, unless it doesn’t

    I’ve never heard such uniformity in belief from police officers that crime is going to go up in New York City. Why with stop, question, and frisks down and a liberal mayor in charge, it’s almost like they want crime to go up just so they can say, “we told you so” and reminisce about the good ol’ days of Giuliani (when crime was, by the way — though going down rapidly — much higher).

    Perhaps a level of fear and oppression is lifting from parts of the city… I don’t know. Perhaps that is good. Perhaps it will lead to wilding and chaos. I don’t know. But until crime does go up… when the next Compstat report is publicly released it will show it was a bad week in NYC, with 9 murders. This will negate much of the year’s improvement over last year. And winter was indeed very cold.

    So it would be nice to get through a long hot summer before stating with confidence that crime isn’t going up. And if crime does go up in New York, let’s keep the focus on police tactics and police citizen interaction and not blame the usual gobbledygook of liberal “root causes.” (If the crime drop in the 1990s showed anything, it’s that crime can plummet independently of improved social and economic conditions. Poverty can make you miserable; it does not turn you into a mugger.).

    Regardless, right now crime is not going up. So until it does, it seems silly to run around like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling.

  • Ghetto Culture, Hockey Fights, or Stuff White People Like

    This may be the best argument for a residency requirement I’ve ever seen.

    You know what “ghetto” is? When two groups who are oh-so similar — really with everything in common, objectively, and perhaps a bit misunderstood by society — forgot their brotherhood and trade blows with each other because of some perceived slight.

    Or maybe it’s just in “their” nature to like a good scrap. And the spectators in said ghetto? Brother, sisters, wives, baby’s mommas and the like? They cheer on the fighters because they’re, I don’t know, “animals.”

    This was in Nassau County, but I haven’t seen such a good brawl since I was on 700 N. Port. Or the 1700 block of Crystal.

    Look, I love a hockey fight as much as the next guy. But this embarrassment was at a f*cking-charity-hockey-game! I only point this out because if this event were a basketball game with black folk fighting, countless people and The Blazewould be filled with racist comments about “their” culture.

    Idiots do in fact come in all races. But this hits home because I actually live on Long Island (geographically, at least) and these guys police my city.

    Oh well, fools fighting does make a great spectator sport! Too bad my taxes pay for their dental plan.

    Hell, the Finest and Bravest haven’t had such a good slug-fest since they were on the pile of the WTC together after Set 11th.