See, you lost me here. The correct punishment for turnstile-jumping is a bullet to the head.
Shortly after I moved to Harlem, two blocks from my apartment a white cop shot a black cop. Racist cops make cops less safe.
Adding to the last point in the OP, my experience is that when you give a lawyer with a massive and fundamentally unmanageable backlog a temporary respite from new things being added to that backlog, the result is not that the backlog gets reduced. It is that the lawyer goes home early. I am not sure whether this maps to the situation in New York but it seems possibly relevant.
I read a few quotes from the NYT editorial page that made it sound like the paper was taking a pretty harsh stance re: the NYPD temper tantrum. Is that true overall, or was it just the one editorial (obviously I'm too lazy to just go check for myself)?
5: By "harsh" I mean "Harshly critical of the NYPD".
Adding to the last point in the OP, my experience is that when you give a lawyer with a massive and fundamentally unmanageable backlog a temporary respite from new things being added to that backlog, the result is not that the backlog gets reduced. It is that the lawyer goes home early.
I guess it's like that "loud noises" metaphor for poverty that I saw somewhere. If someone is beset by a hundred loud and annoying noises, they will not really care whether you get rid of five of them. Still a near-infinite amount of stuff to worry about.
the result is not that the backlog gets reduced. It is that the lawyer goes home early.
Lawyers have not yet internalized the work ethic of modern societies.
5, 6: I don't know if I'd call it harsh, but the NYT has definitely not been supportive of the NYPD's expressions of displeasure.
The tone of Osborne's op-ed reminds me of those who argued that anti-war protesters were unpatriotic and didn't support the troops. He says that de Blasio "publicly signal[ed] support of anti-police protesters", but the protesters weren't "anti-police" at all—I mean, no one was arguing that we shouldn't have police.
And he concludes by supporting the policy changes that de Blasio will likely implement, but argues that "this will require a mayor with far more finesse and political savvy and credibility with law enforcement than Mr. de Blasio appears to have. " So only Nixon can go to China?
5: I know their first editorial on it was fully harsh, and I think there's been at least one since.
It's actually important, IMO, for the NYT to keep the bien pensant in line: it would be all too easy for UMC liberalish types to end up in a "the truth is in the middle, the mayor should give the cops whatever they want so I can feel safe again" position, even if there's no reason to feel unsafe. A steady drumbeat from the Times of A. the cops are being complete assholes, and B. the streets remain utterly safe, would go a long way.
Come to think of it, I wonder if the reason Steve comes across so badly here is conscious choice by the editors - not that they twisted his words, but that they gave him rope to hang himself, fully aware how it would read to their audience.
So only Nixon can go to China?
I think Osborne and Village-minded commentators would agree with this whole-heartedly. Expect "We need a new Giuliani" to start as a meme.
I assumed the "rope to hang himself" thing is what happened. And it's fair or unfair depending on whether they were rejecting less self-exposing op-eds from other voices sympathetic with the NYPD's recent actions. I'm guessing it's pretty fair, that they didn't have to nutpick their submissions to find this guy, but I don't actually know.
I think Osborne and Village-minded commentators would agree with this whole-heartedly. Expect "We need a new Giuliani" to start as a meme.
They pulled the same "This disrespecter of our brave heroes is not welcome at our funerals" BS during a labor negotiation with Giuliani! Giuliani!
Only Mayor Bo Dietl would have enough credibility to "go to China".
There's 2 ways to think about the timing of all this: one is that it has the potential to torpedo de Blasio's administration before it gains any momentum, but the other is that, assuming he navigates it with some success, this specific controversy will be old news by the next election, and he'll be inoculated against a raft of charges (unwilling to stand up for himself, unable to handle the cops*, too liberal for the job).
I'd rather have this happen now than 12 months from the next general election.
*that is, if the outcome of this is at all in his favor (crime never spikes, the NYPD stands down), the fact that the cops were/are mad at him won't be viewed as a negative except by people who never liked him
I actually don't think this is going to hurt de Blasio much. Might not do him any good, politically -- I don't think he's going to get a boost from bringing the NYPD to heel or anything -- but I don't think the NYPD has any kind of broad support on this one.
And it's fair or unfair depending on whether they were rejecting less self-exposing op-eds from other voices sympathetic with the NYPD's recent actions. I'm guessing it's pretty fair, that they didn't have to nutpick their submissions to find this guy, but I don't actually know.
The only way I'd say it's really unfair is if Osborne is unrepresentative of what's been coming in the door. For intellectual purposes, you want to face the best version of the opposing position, but for public debate purposes, I think representative versions are sufficient. Hell, if 95% of the cops feel like Osborne, but there's some rump that's unhappy for far more sophisticated reasons, why should that 5% be heard over the 95%?
And I'm honestly not seeing a more sophisticated set of arguments that Osborne left on the table. Doesn't mean they don't exist, I'm obviously biased here, but while I think Osborne humiliated himself, I really can't see how he could have taken substantially the same position (that the NYPD is acting appropriately, particularly in it's anger toward de Blasio specifically) without humiliating himself.
(Stabbing myself repeatedly for that misplaced apostrophe.)
19: If only the NYPD could be one-tenth as self-critical!
18: I don't know. There may have been a flood of op-eds coming in to the Times praising the police for their bravery in saying "Some nutcase is killing cops just because we kill people making petty arrests? No more petty arrests!" -- rather than succumbing to the obvious temptation: "Kill more people when we make petty arrests!"
21: Read this one. He actually does gesture in that direction:
Most cops I know feel tired of being pushed to do more and more, and then even more. More police productivity has meant far less crime, but at a certain point New York began to feel like, yes, a police state, and the police don't like it any more than you do. Tremendous successes were achieved in battling crime and making this city a much better place to live and work in and visit. But the time has probably come for the Police Department to ease up on the low-level "broken-windows" stuff while re-evaluating the impact it may or may not have on real, serious crime. No one will welcome this more than the average cop on the beat, who has been pressed to find crime where so much less of it exists.
That paragraph I'm (mostly) fine with, it's the rest of the op-ed that makes him sound like such an ass.
||
Tangentially related but actually irrelevant personal anecdote:
In preparation for selling my 1965 1968 Gibson SG I schlepped it down to have it appraised at a noted vintage guitar shop in lower Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. The case is covered in (mostly) stupid stickers I slapped on it when I was a stupid teenager/twentysomething: one from a long gone local dive bar; a bad AOR rock station I didn't even like back in the day but the stickers were everywhere to be had; the Police at Shea Stadium; a space shuttle sticker from the Challenger which my dad had an experiment on (he's got a patent for the equipment they tested) and which I kept on because blown up space shuttles is punk rock, man; a cool Dead Milkmen sticker which is really old and is almost coming off and a sticker from the 80s hardcore band Millions of Dead Cops that a friend whose band played some gigs with them gave to me.
It's kind of smallish but still: not exactly a good time to be walking around NYC streets and subways with that I dropped it off just after the 2 cops were murdered and picked it up around the time of the 2nd cops funeral. So I always kept it facing towards my body as I was walking and made sure to hold my hand over it when riding on the subway and kept scanning for cops like I hadn't done since I was a teenager and holding.
|>
The fact that they're angrily protesting in response to people criticizing them for a lot of petty arrests/harassment/etc. by refusing to do those things still doesn't entirely make sense to me. "How dare you criticize us for doing (x)! Apologize now or we'll stop doing it!" I mean, I guess that's not an entirely unknown interpersonal dynamic, but usually it doesn't take too long after someone has yelled "FINE how about I do ALL the DISHES EVERY NIGHT THEN?" for them to realize they've made a terrible mistake.
Although I suppose given the editorial linked there may be some sort of odd internal dynamic going on where a bunch of the lower level patrolmen are quite happy for the excuse not to walk around hassling random people and arresting people for things that really should just get them a telling off. And a bunch of the higher up people are playing to a group of wealthy white people who probably are uncomfortable about the thought of poorer minorities not getting harassed daily (and not entirely realizing, even after de Blazio's election how small of a group that is.)
Apologize now or we'll stop doing it!
The officers' point is that all of this awful shit is necessary to the normal functioning of the city.
You don't think so? Well You can't handle the truth.
24: Well, there are situations where it's not really clear. For example a wife that is always telling her husband that his clothes don't match and he should change before he goes to work. One day he's running late and he get annoyed with her for telling him to change and they have a fight and she says, "Ok! I won't ever tell you when your clothes don't match, and let you go to work looking like a fool!" and he says, "Great!"
Now it may turn out that it makes no difference to the husband that he looks like a fool, but it could also be that he does care sometimes, or that he really liked that his wife was trying to care of him.
This situation is exactly analogous to the relationship between the NYPD and the citizenry of New York, and bears absolutely no relation to peep's own marriage.
24: I don't see it as hugely perverse. The protests were most prominently about deaths - black lives matter - not as much petty overpolicing, although that's certainly a related and significant problem. So what happened is the police did the closest thing they could to a strike, not thinking through the consequences, and now there's a good opportunity to highlight overpolicing - the racist origins and implementation of Broken Windows, plus its relationship to death-by-cop.
I do feel like minor things are going to emerge that everyone does want the police to be enforcing. Is double- and other illegal parking proliferating, for example?
The protests were most prominently about deaths - black lives matter - not as much petty overpolicing
One ought avoid debates about what a movement is "about," since these things ought to speak for themselves. (Gamergate is about ethics in journalism!) But I'm going to wade in here to propose that, in fact, the protests about the deaths of black people are protests about arbitrary, racist policing. Absent the wider problem (I contend) the public incidents of police homicide wouldn't get nearly the traction they do.
Is double- and other illegal parking proliferating, for example?
Instances of double- and other illegal parking should be handled by vigilante justice.
22: Thanks. My eyes had glazed over before I reached that paragraph. I thought I'd read the whole thing, but clearly I'd just "read" it.
29: Well, there is conceptually possible petty policing that isn't racist. Garner, e.g., was breaking the law against selling cigarettes without a license, and I don't actually think that's a bad law. Ticketing him was appropriate, and at some point if you don't cooperate with being ticketed, it's appropriate for the police to arrest you. What went wrong in the interaction with Garner is that the police killed him, not exactly that they arrested him. Racist enforcement of petty infractions of law is a problem, but any enforcement of petty infractions of law isn't necessarily.
and bears absolutely no relation to peep's own marriage.
THINK AGAIN, DEAR
Continuing to ramble about that -- I'm actually kind of confused about what is a good way to enforce non-criminal regulations or really petty criminal stuff, things like regulations prohibiting drinking in public, or selling loose cigarettes, or turnstile jumping. I see the argument that the police shouldn't be enforcing them, but if the police don't, what's the enforcement mechanism at all? I come down, I think, on yes, the police should be enforcing them, no, the police shouldn't be aggro about it, but I could very easily be moved off that position if someone had an argument.
I'm not sure if it was actually established that he was selling cigarettes without a license when the officers went after him. He had a past history of doing that, but the officers were there because of a fight (between two other people, that he had helped break up). I mean, he might have been there doing that but I'm not sure there's any reason to think that that was why he was being hassled by the police that time.
29: I completely agree that they're part of the same superstructure. But if any topic was most prominent in the protests - what people said and chanted and put on signs, what events people came out after out - surely we can agree it was the deaths and their legal aftermaths. Deaths are an obvious injustice that can illuminate all the problems beneath, but work is needed to make that connection.
(Example: when John Lindsay made lead poisoning a high priority, the person he appointed correctly saw his number-one task as to prevent further deaths, and did not place nearly as much importance on preventing lower-level poisoning from the lead still in buildings.)
The double-parking question resulted in me finally getting around to looking up whether the double parking during street cleaning thing that everyone does in NYC is legal or not. Turns out no! So if the NYPD really wants to piss people off, they could start enforcing that!
How important is the lost revenue from this in the grand scheme of things? If this went on for a couple months would the city go broke, or would it not be a huge deal?
Reading 29 more closely, yes, the background of overpolicing is an important catalyst, but I think it was the deaths that brought out white people in particular.
Yeah, the para in 22 is at the core of a legit argument about the slowdown, but not the back-turning or petulance. If de Blasio weren't opposed to stop-and-frisk, then you could paint is a part of a cohesive position/argument/strategy (and hand-wave that the inciting incidents weren't really germane - lots of movements start in response to almost tangential incidents), but as it is, you've got a snit fit that also happens to have an element of legit policy debate. Except that the cops are rhetorically tied (and, from what I've read, largely in favor of) a position that says this low level harassment of poor NYers is critical to Law and Order.
Maybe if Lynch weren't such an assclown, he could have threaded this needle, but the guy's got the sophistication of a beat cop out of Central Casting.
33: Sorry everyone, I forgot to tell her about Standpipe's blog.
37.2: I just saw a piece elsewhere that threw numbers around but never seemed to get to a bottom line. It seems like the cost of enforcement is very similar to the revenues, such that NYC as a whole isn't being substantially underwritten by this petty shit. But I may have misread the numbers It seemed like the absolute numbers aren't big enough either way - IIRC it was something like a million dollars a day to enforce, less than 2 million a day brought in.
For scale, the city budget is ~$70B, so even if street enforcement netted $500M, that's less than 1%.
I think 29 is right, though: police brutality is an issue even in absence of larger harassment*, but it's the sense that the police have been harassing everyone for years (including petty abuse - a rough takedown, too-tight cuffs for long periods, etc) that resulted in an explosion of anger.
*although I highly doubt one is possible without the other - not specifically Broken Windows, but I think the vast majority of US police forces harass PoC (and poor whites) and that this results in unjustifiable him,iciness by cops. I'd like to think that enlightened dept.s (like swift's apparently) neither harass nor murder their non-white citizens.
32: What went wrong in the interaction with Garner is that the police killed him, not exactly that they arrested him.
More specifically, what went wrong was that they killed him while he was being black. Had he been a white guy, the folks at Reason might have gotten upset about it, but it woudn't have resulted in protests.
I think protesters believe - and are right to believe - that Garner's race is important to his death and the fact that the cops were hassling him in the first place.
Racist enforcement of petty infractions of law is a problem, but any enforcement of petty infractions of law isn't necessarily.
Ah, but is that actually correct? I mean, sure, in some hypothetical world of perfectly spherical petty lawbreakers, enforcement of petty infractions doesn't have to be racist. But in the multiracial parts of the US in 2015? It pretty much does have to be.
As Minivet's link in 24 shows, this stuff was conceived in a racist environment and inevitably carried out that way. And that's what people are pissed about.
Also part of it is just that now that crime is way less of a big deal, there should be some changes to policing. You can't just ratchet up when bad things happen and never ratchet down when crime goes away.
If the NYPD stuck with this for a year or something, would it ever get to the point where the city said "fuck it, we clearly don't need this many cops"?
If the revenues roughly match the expenditures, then the effective result of the petty policing is not to subsidize other things but to keep up the size and budget of the PD itself.
For scale, the city budget is ~$70B, so even if street enforcement netted $500M, that's less than 1%.
For more context, the NYPD budget is ~$5B.
45 is exactly what I'm thinking.
I wonder if de Blasio would have the balls to come right out and say that? "Our friends at the NYPD have definitively demonstrated that we don't need them in current numbers. We're going to cut personnel by 10% and apply the savings to [liberal fantasy]."
Possibly putting some lightbulbs in those housing project stairwells? That could save some lives.
You can't just ratchet up when bad things happen and never ratchet down when crime goes away.
Of course not. That's why you expand the definition of crime (and enforcement).
If you laid off a bunch of pissed off cops you'll have vigilantes roaming around who the remaining cops will refuse to contain. Awesome.
They could just fire all of them and replace them with members of the (previously) lower income people who were being constantly harassed before. Think how much more affordable housing would become in Manhattan!
Double parking during street sweeping hours is illegal and I've gotten the tickets to prove it. Once, I parked on the one and only side street in my neighborhood where double parking was not tolerated (because it was on the turnaround loop for a bus route); my argument that it's not fair to expect me to magically know where double-parking is or isn't informally allowed got zero sympathy from the judge. Another time the cop decided to start writing tickets ten minutes before the street sweeping hours were over; I got a ticket because my car was the first on the block. I don't think I bothered to contest it, but that was some bullshit.
DeBlasio basically fucked himself at having good relations with NYPD early on with things like the embrace of Al Sharpton and by extension having Sharpton's ex spokeswoman Rachel Noerdlinger be his wife's chief of staff. In the same vein, Kicy Motley, who was one of his field directors, cheered on Chris Dorner on Twitter, and after she left the field director job DeBlasio hired her as a director for community affairs for Brooklyn. Hire whoever you want there buddy, but either someone's not advising you on police relations or you're ignoring everything you're being told.
Not that the NYPD/PBA isn't doing and saying a lot of stupid shit here. Christ, admit that the stats driven stop and frisk stuff does in fact end up targeting minorities because that's where the stats are going to be found. DeBlasio did you guys a favor by getting rid of it and go ahead and acknowledge that. Also, listen to George Kelling and implement broken windows in a competent fashion.
Maybe they could retrain the cops to fix actual broken windows or something? Clean up the garbage in the subway? Help little old ladies wheel their laundry back from the laundromat? Hang out at the Automat with rolls of quarters and buy cups of coffee for bums?
People really should read that Kelling interview. He's a smart guy and a big influence on how I do my job. Broken windows is not zero tolerance, at all.
That article is great and everyone should read it, but 100% likelihood of it falling on deaf ears.
The Kelling interview is indeed quite good.
It's not reasonable in a democracy to expect DeBlasio not to have ties with Sharpton. Sharpton's got his problems, but politics requires dealing with people who can help you get votes. If ties to Sharpton are off limit I feel like that's just saying you can't be a mayor who gets the black vote and not have the NYPD hate you, and that's a big problem.
58: Oh come on. DeBlasio was the Dem with a black wife and biracial kids and no fucking way did he need Sharpton to get elected.
57 gets it right. The only part of it I'd quibble with is the last paragraph; if the lead-crime hypothesis really is true, then broken windows wasn't actually "[t]he reason New York state incarceration has dropped so much".
Not that I expect anyone to ever come out and say "oh yeah, the thing I made my name on is actually a complete sideshow". Still, a boy can dream.
There's not really an reason to have police on the street at all since we've invented the catalytic converter.
59 is uninformed. The election that mattered was the democratic primary, where being a democrat hardly helps, and having biracial kids is no guarantee of anything when one of the other leading candidates was actually black. But that's all beside the point, the point is that the way democracies work is that you have to make friends with leaders and it's just not that plausible that a NYC liberal who needed a lot of black votes and campaigners isn't going to be friends with Sharpton.
62 was definitely unnecessary but it's also worth knowing that (while I still definitely believe in a link between lead and the creation of violent crime and that it's part of the story) the strong and super-strong versions of the lead-crime hypothesis, which hold that lead was entirely responsible for the post-1960 violent crime explosion and entirely responsible for the post-1995 drop are most likely wrong.
64: Feel free to point towards some kind of polls or other numbers indicating Sharpton is some kind of kingmaker in NYC.
That aside, what DeBlasio has had with Sharpton is clearly more than some minimal necessary relationship. And, whatever, fine. Build whatever alliances you want there chief. But if you actively go out of your way to hire and reward people who are open cop haters then maybe the police aren't going to be real friendly.
then maybe the police aren't going to be real friendly
Actually, even this strikes me as childish.
67: I know, god forbid a Dem in this country have the slightest fucking clue when it comes to interacting with a working class demographic.
I think DeBlasio means well and I don't think he's a cop hater. But he's terrible at interacting with them. But he should have laid the foundation for his relationship with the cops much earlier. But unfortunately I think he might lack the basic ability to do this. It's not unique to him, I think Dems in a lot of ways have lost their way on this kind of thing. I think it's basically unthinkable for him to go to some actual NYPD patrol lineups and say, "yeah, I'm campaigning against the frisks. But come on you fuckers, you all know you hate the 250's so give me some ideas on how this shit can be done better."
Obviously de Blasio was never going to be the NYPD's best friend given his political allies and general policy priorities. The weird thing about all this, though, is that that shouldn't matter: police officers are public employees, and like all public employees they're obligated to implement policies enacted by their political leadership regardless of whether they like those leaders or agree with the policies personally. This is still the case even if the politicians in question make a point of frequently denigrating the public employees tasked with implementing their policies, which happens all the time at the state level in states with Republican governors and legislatures. The employees just have to grin and bear it; it's part of the job.
To put it another way, a lot of the discussion about de Blasio's relationship with the police has implicitly treated the NYPD as a constituency that the mayor has to manage politically. It certainly is that, but it's also an agency of the city government, of which the mayor is the chief executive officer. The cops may not like it, but they do ultimately have to do what the mayor says regardless of how they feel about him personally.
Another telling aspect of all this is how specific it is to New York. We're not seeing this sort of open dispute in other cities, even though most large cities in the US are run by liberal Democrats who aren't necessarily beloved by their police departments. There seems to be something uniquely weird about the NYPD and its relationship to the city government overall and the mayor's office in particular, dating back decades, that doesn't have a whole lot to do with de Blasio personally. As others have noted, they've pulled similar histrionics at various times over various issues with every mayor since Dinkins, including Giuliani. I presume there are deep historical and political dynamics behind all this, but I don't know enough about any of it to speculate on the details.
You make good points, but Sharpton Sharpton Sharpton talk with his son Sharpton.
69: You think that the constituency that likes Sharpton is not working class?
The idea that cops get to make an issue out of de Blasio's connections with Sharpton is absurd. Christ, when did cops become such big babies? I've worked for big bureaucracies where I thought the guy at the top was a fucking moron. But you know what? I did my goddamn job.
Yeah, as a public servant who, while my current elected boss is just fine with me, thought my prior elected boss (the one who's governor now) was a useless, corrupt, and kind of evil tool who was also a lousy, hostile manager, the idea that disapproving of him should have any impact on how I did my job is baffling. If police officers don't like de Blasio's politics, it's a democracy and they shouldn't vote for him.
70.2. Executives of all kinds have to treat their employees as constituencies. That's true in the private sector as well as the public sector. In the public sector these groups are often unionized, and unions mean they are exactly a "constituency."
And of course they are "obligated," but do you want a workforce that works grudgingly if at all, or one that's more or less happy to do their jobs?
Change "police" to "teachers" and most of the people who want them to "do what the mayor says" would be criticizing him.
None of the above should be taken to mean that the NYPD aren't acting like a bunch of brats, as is their long-term habit.
Change "police" to "teachers" and most of the people who want them to "do what the mayor says" would be criticizing him.
Oh, bullshit. I have never heard of negative interactions between a mayor and teachers on anything like this kind of level. Teachers refusing to do major portions of their job because they politically disapproved of the mayor's attitude (rather than as a contract-negotiations related labor action) is completely implausible, and wouldn't be getting knee-jerk support.
75: But what gswift is raising is not de Blasio's police policies, but his associations.
I think DeBlasio means well and I don't think he's a cop hater. But he's terrible at interacting with them. But he should have laid the foundation for his relationship with the cops much earlier. But unfortunately I think he might lack the basic ability to do this.
This really looks crazy to me. You're saying that it can be expected that police are going to take organized public action to express hostility toward their elected employer because they don't like his politics? The police don't get, and shouldn't expect, veto power over politicians they dislike. They're citizens with votes, but casting those votes and the political action available to any citizen is all the political power they're entitled to.
Members of the police force using their status as being personally involved with policing to speak out on subjects directly involved with policing, sure. But believing they have some special status to whine about how the voters of New York City elected someone they don't like, so they get to throw a hissy fit about him is way out of line.
Echo, echo. Every organized group with any savvy at all works with what it's given when the election's over and does not swoon in disgust at having to talk seriously with someone who associates with someone who said things they object to. When the Chicago teachers struck, it was over concrete issues of pay, layoffs, programs, and testing regimes, not "Rahm Emanuel said vapid things about teachers and pals around with Michelle Rhee."
I'm reminded of the Imperial Japanese bureaucracy and military, which saw itself as its own source of political legitimacy in direct association with the Emperor.
Or the Praetorian Guard. The NYPD does not decide who's mayor by lifting him into the air standing on a bagpipe.
The NYPD does not decide who's mayor by lifting him into the air standing on a bagpipe.
Feats of strength! And wheezey noises!
Interestingly the exit polls for the democratic primary had a separate question on stop and frisk, and DeBlasio's victory came entirely from the 60% of voters who opposed it. Full results here. Note that unsurprisingly DeBlasio does just fine in all income brackets. He exactly split the Black vote with Thompson which accounted almost exactly for his victory margin. Sharpton surprised people by refusing to endorse Thompson. Also here'sthe history of the race, which broke against Quinn very late and went to DeBlasio over Thompson even later.
Wrong second link.
I agree completely with Teo in 70. My fear is that the NYPD actions will be a model for other departments, but in all events you can't have a police department (or any city) function with a police union this out of control and this willing to go to the mat over slights that are pretty much external to the Department and are pure culture war isurs (but the mayor's wife used an-ex-aide of Al Sharpton isn't a good argument).
I assume Bratton (if whom I'm a long-time fan) sees his job as permanently undoing the culture that makes things like this possible, but sees the timing as wrong for an open blow-up confrontation. I hope so anyway. He did a lot to more or less permanently change the LAPD's propensity to be culture warriors (from the Darryl Gates era) but in different circumstances and a lot of the work had been done before he started. But there's no defense of the NYPD's current actions -- if you want to be treated like public servants, act like it.
70 is entirely correct. I'd spin this observation in a slightly different way than teo does, though:
Obviously de Blasio was never going to be the NYPD's best friend given his political allies and general policy priorities. The weird thing about all this, though, is that that shouldn't matter:
In fact, it doesn't matter. As teo points out, the NYPD pulled this kind of tantrum on Giuliani, too. The idea that de Blasio has made missteps that led to the police reaction is ridiculous. The NYPD is out of control.
Gswift's point about the police in 53.2 - which I take to be a sort of "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument that the cops should think harder about their own best interests - completely ignores the fact that individual white NYPD officers clearly feel very strongly about maintaining the racist status quo.
As others have noted, they've pulled similar histrionics at various times over various issues with every mayor since Dinkins, including Giuliani. I presume there are deep historical and political dynamics behind all this, but I don't know enough about any of it to speculate on the details.
I am speculating madly, and off the cuff, here, but I wonder if something long-term strange happened in the Dinkins-Giuliani election. That really was as close as you could come to Giuliani being elected by acclamation of the NYPD; there was the shameful police demonstration with racist signs about Dinkins and so on.
I wonder if the NYPD, collectively, came out of that election with a sense of itself as the kingmaker/Praetorian Guard, with the right to establish legitimacy for the mayor. So not so much having committed enemies and allies -- they weren't loyal to Giuliani -- but thinking of themselves as able to withdraw their grant of legitimacy as a political tactic. That's certainly what the current activity looks like, but tracing it back to the Dinkins election is something I just made up on the spot.
Another telling aspect of all this is how specific it is to New York. We're not seeing this sort of open dispute in other cities, even though most large cities in the US are run by liberal Democrats who aren't necessarily beloved by their police departments. There seems to be something uniquely weird about the NYPD and its relationship to the city government overall and the mayor's office in particular, dating back decades, that doesn't have a whole lot to do with de Blasio personally.
The NYPD is probably unique in there are probably tens of thousands of hours of movies and TV shows about how great they are, for one.
The police here are probably not particularly happy with the new mayor. Perhaps they aren't going to be too vocal about it because they last movie to feature them was Striking Distance.
Not that that was not among the greatest movies ever.
89: Lest we forget 1995's Sudden Death..oh. Fire marshall. Meh, close enough.
Alternately, they consider mainstream Black opinions on policing unacceptable and will throw a riot if there's a black mayor and a slowdown if there's a kind of black one. If you look at the reaction to Obama's comments on the Gates incident I think it's pretty clear that the police as a political movement want to silence any Black perspectives.
Also, in NYC there's the obvious tendency to presume that the New York [Thing] is the greatest and most prestigious [Thing] in the country. Which is often true.
But as a cop, or a fireman or teacher or whatever, you're just a cop who happens to live in New York. It's not like you were the star cop in Hagerstown, Maryland and somebody recognized your merit and called you up to the big leagues.
Kudos to 82 for bringing the facts.
88: given how shitty news about the PPD has been over the past X years, they seem to know enough to keep their heads down, which is a good thing.
91: I want to say that this isn't wrong, but it isn't exactly right -- that the police as a political movement feeling (that is, exactly what you're talking about with the response to the Gates thing), while it's racist in effect and probably racist in intent for plenty of people on that side, is on some deep level about defending a right by the police to use arbitrary force to compel respect and obedience regardless of the race of the people being subjected to that force.
Like, that bizarre conversation with the philosopher/cop at Crooked Timber defending the Gates arrest. I'm not going to say he wasn't racist at all, I don't know him personally and so on. But he was clearly the kind of educated middleclass person who is capable of keeping a lid on it and wouldn't be conspicuously racist under most plausible circumstances. What he was stuck on was that the arresting cop was plausibly justified in arresting Gates because of the need to maintain control over the situation, where the situation was that an elderly professor with a cane was angry at being questioned about getting into his house and raised his voice at the questioning police officer. The arresting officer was probably being at least somewhat racist; but the cop defending him at Crooked Timber seemed to me to be defending a police right to violence in defense of their dignity.
Race really does seem to me to be a big part of it, but I think there's a weird polcing attitude that would still be there in the absence of the racial issues.
92 is very pleasing to me.
When we're talking about NYPD self-regard, let's not fail to mention 9/11. It's sort of happenstance that cops, who do good and bad things, share in the civic esteem of firefighters, who pretty much do only good things*. Obviously there are similarities in their jobs/roles (and they're both net goods, to be clear), but I wonder how much of it is that they share similar origins and cultures (mid-19C professionalization of civic life, white ethnic, closed demographics).
*in their jobs, that is; FD unions can be just as sketchy as PD unions, and they lobby for their own interests just like any constituency
86 -- my not very informed read is that the police were the one New York municipal union/fiefdom that wasn't broken in the 80s-90s. What's happening now feels like a NYC transit or electrical strike in the 60s or 70s, where you had ultra-powerful municipal unions who overreached and brought the city to its knees, only to lose power later. The cops never cut a deal where they lost that power, but the current action feels very old-school and NY-specific, like something from the Abe Beame era.
With that said, I don't doubt that the general (and actually totally understandable if not accurate) tendency to believe that (a) the city was going to hell in a handbasket and then (b) Giuliani and better policing from the cops brought down crime and created the NYC as an affluent, serene playground we see today plays a big part in the cops' mental narrative.
defending a police right to violence in defense of their dignity
This, as much as anything else, is what disturbs me about modern American policing. So many tasings, so much casual roughing up of innocent people, so many spurious charges of resisting arrest... the entitlement is going to lead to abuses no matter the purity of soul of officers.
Huh. I don't have a concrete argument for disagreeing with that, but it doesn't feel right to me. Part of it is that you just don't miss the cops the same way you miss the MTA or the Sanitation Department -- I'm not saying they're useless, we need some kind of police, of course -- but I know there's a work stoppage on because I'm reading it in the papers, not because I'm noticing it. And what I'm reading in the papers are people being bemused about not getting traffic/parking tickets or other minor infractions, not anyone sad about the lack of enforcement. (And the work stoppage might be on net a bad thing, it's perfectly possible that it would be better if they were working at something closer to their normal pace. It's just not sufficient to create a sense of emergency.)
It just seems impossible for a leader to say something benign acknowledging black concerns about policing without the police throwing a fit. Whether or not that's driven by racism as such, it's clearly anti-democratic because politicians are supposed to tell their voters they hear their concerns. So much of it just reads as the police will try to take down anyone who has the temerity to want black people to vote for them.
I agree with others that the Kelling interview is good. Broken Windows always made sense to me, but it's pretty obvious that the way it's commonly implemented (zero tolerance is the worst aspect, but Kelling emphasizes how much of it is not traditional policing) is really far from the ideal. And I'm not convinced that badly implemented Broken Windows is better than any other policing strategy.
That said, I think that all of its advocates - smart ones like Kelling and dumb ones who equate it with zero tolerance and stop-and-frisk - overestimate its importance in bringing down crime rates, which means it becomes a shibboleth.
firefighters, who pretty much do only good things
Hey, those firehoses used against the civil rights protests had to come from somewhere.
I was under the vague impression that fire departments (or maybe just the NYC one) were way way more racist than the police.
100, anyone who sees himself as being accused of racism flies into a blind rage of defensiveness, except certain people on the internet who have spent four years in college writing papers about how problems are societal problems. NYPD officers are no different.
I think DeBlasio's only possible successful approach would be to point to cases like the Fairfax, VA carrying out massively complicated and sometimes fatal sting operations against seemingly random people, as re-described recently by Deadspin and other places. And say that the problem is that when the police decide somebody is a Bad Guy, they go way too far in trying to punish that person. And let someone else point out that one subset of this problem is when police decide that they know someone is a Bad Guy just because he looks a certain way or lives in a certain neighborhood.
103: Fire Department hiring was more racist; there was a fairly recent huge lawsuit over it and I'm not sure if it's changed much. I never heard anything particular about firefighters doing their job in a racist manner, though.
Police, pretty much the reverse -- there are certainly plenty of minority cops, but that doesn't mean that enforcement/hassling isn't disproportionately directed at minorities.
This really looks crazy to me. You're saying that it can be expected that police are going to take organized public action to express hostility toward their elected employer because they don't like his politics?
Not police in general, but NYPD? Absolutely. I'm not saying it's justified, but given the history between the pd and the mayor's office in that town it sure should have been expected.
DeBlasio came in wanting to tell the pd how to do their job in a way that he's not doing with other city departments. And I think he's largely right. But as a politician he doesn't seem to have given a lot thought as to actually making it happen.
I was under the vague impression that fire departments (or maybe just the NYC one) were way way more racist than the police.
Maybe, but there's not all that much scope for putting out fires in an aggressively racist way. Policing, on the other hand...
There, I think you're mistaken as a matter of politics. Not saying de Blasio's flawlessly skilled, but again, look at interactions between Giuliani and the NYPD. Giuliani was their guy, as much as anyone could have been their guy, and they pulled the same kind of stunts on him. I don't think being more culturally sympathetic to the NYPD would have been terribly effective in letting de Blasio influence their policing without conflict; the cultural sympathy would have helped right up until there was any concrete point of conflict.
107: Oh, there really is room for racist firefighting -- differential response times by neighborhood? But I don't think I've heard of serious complaints along those lines.
106: The cops themselves like to talk about how de Blasio hurt their fee-fees because they are so sensitive and all, but surely this is bullshit. They have substantial, substantive differences of opinion on actual police policy, but they can't come right out and say that because they can't admit they oppose making the department a less racist place.
So they complain about stuff like de Blasio committing the huge offense of warning his son about the cops:
The mayor described his son as "a good young man, [a] law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong" -- but he noted that "because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we've had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him."
De Blasio isn't doing battle with racist cops here - he's publicly capitulating to them. He's saying a biracial young man needs to tread lightly around racist cops.
But of course, that's not good enough because de Blasio is also acknowledging what everyone knows: that police racism is a thing. So as ned says in 104, that's naturally going to raise some hackles. Too fucking bad.
111: The reason it raises hackles is that often these discussions come across as a personal accusation of racism without the acknowledgement that the the police were ordered to follow a policy that was going to inevitably target minorities.
If you order me to hit certain arrest quotas I'm going go out and do that because I have kids and a mortgage and I'm no martyr. But I know where those arrests are to be found. If I'm NYPD then that's going to be poor black neighborhoods. That's where I'm going to find warrants, guns, and felony drug arrests. That's where my traffic stops are going to have a driver with no license or a suspended license and I'm going to be able to get a search on that car.
Yes, it's absolutely going to mean I'm arresting a lot of black people. But if you then make a point of telling me your kid has to take special care around me it sounds like you think I'm arresting a lot of black people because I'm a trigger happy Klan member.
And again, NYPD/PBA are handling all of this poorly and shouldn't be defending stop and frisk at all.
But it's just true that black people have to be extra careful around the police. Even the cops know it. When my brother became a cop they made sure his wife knows that if she ever has to call the police to come to her house that she has to make sure to be super clear that her husband is a large black cop so that he doesn't get shot when the police show up. Black police chiefs get harassed by the cops in New York. Black cops get shot by other cops because they have a gun. It's not a surprise or a secret. Everyone knows it, cops just don't want politicians to be allowed to acknowledge it.
112.1-3: BS--he didn't warn his kid b/c he was worried he might get a ticket, man. He was worried that he'd get his face broken for complying too slowly or shot for complying too quickly or tased for backsass.
Two points to 112:
Based on rates of use, you could easily (possibly more easily than in poor black neighborhoods) make your drug arrest quotas at the UMC white high school where I went but shockingly that never happens.
And on preview the other point is covered in 114- there are many examples when the response to a black suspect is shoot first and the response to a similar scenario with a white suspect is to exercise restraint.
115: Or lose his teeth on the curb because he says, "Do you know who my dad is?"
Here's an article where one in five black NYPD cops interviewed have had their head slammed into a car by other cops. What DeBlasio is saying is the moderate pro-police point of view among black people: be careful and respectful and don't give someone an excuse to shoot you. If that's out of bounds then you're just saying black opinions on policing are all out of bounds.
The reason it raises hackles is that often these discussions come across as a personal accusation of racism without the acknowledgement that the the police were ordered to follow a policy that was going to inevitably target minorities.
Gosh, if only there were some precedent for the NYPD refusing to follow a policy they don't like...
You know, there's a strong causation/correlation problem when it comes to saying statistics support going to poor black neighborhoods if you want to meet an arrest quota. I mean, if police decided to hassle university professors at a disproportionate rate to the rest of the population they'd find that university professors got arrested for drug violations/whatever at a higher rate too (and this would only escalate over time as feedback mechanisms started to kick in).
More importantly, the idea that DeBlasio angered up the police by his foolish love for Al Sharpton is a bit sketchy since it's not like his predecessor carefully kept him at arm's length. Pointing out his ties to someone that can reliably provoke the right wing hate machine (Race Hustler! Scary!) may be a useful rhetorical move for the NYPD what with the racial overtones of the current scandal, but the idea that he somehow provoked their aggression by being linked to Sharpton doesn't seem as strong to me as they're making it out to be.
Gswift, you are indefatigable. I'm glad you're sticking around through these discussions.
I told a story in an earlier thread about this stuff about a neighbor's kid getting handcuffed and kept at the police station for hours until his mother could come and pick him up when he was twelve. I don't recall if I mentioned that this kid specifically is at a duck/rabbit level of biracial-ness: father is very light-skinned black, mother is white, and I honestly don't know how I'd guess the kid's ethnicity if I didn't know his family (straight black hair, kind of olive skin, a verbal description sounds Middle Eastern but he doesn't really look Middle Eastern). Which means that I'm genuinely unsure if the cop who scared the hell out of him was being racist, or was just being a jerk generally.
That was a very stupid joke and it will surprise no one that I am responsible.
But if you then make a point of telling me your kid has to take special care around me it sounds like you think I'm arresting a lot of black people because I'm a trigger happy Klan member.
If you're not a racist, but exist in the circumstances you describe, then your only available option is to acknowledge the obvious fact that parents of black children are wise to counsel them to be cautious around cops.
It's possible to have sympathy for the agents of institutional racism. In fact, de Blasio made it clear that he does have sympathy - but he acknowledged the existence of institutional racism, as non-racists must. If you* are willing to stage a work slowdown because someone acknowledges institutional racism, then you are by definition a racist.
And if you want to congratulate yourself for not being "a trigger-happy Klan member," well then go ahead. But again, you're still a racist.
NYPD/PBA are handling all of this poorly and shouldn't be defending stop and frisk at all.
Well, yeah. Because stop-and-frisk is racist. If you publicly defend racist policies, then people are going to call you a racist. This is because you are a racist.
*Instances of "you" in this comment should not, of course, be read as referring to you, gswift.
Based on rates of use, you could easily (possibly more easily than in poor black neighborhoods) make your drug arrest quotas at the UMC white high school where I went but shockingly that never happens.
It doesn't happen because in areas where people pay their tickets and have valid DL's a search is much harder to come by. There's also less gang affiliation which is grounds for a Terry frisk. No DL gets me a car impound which enables me to "inventory" the vehicle. Warrants for unpaid tickets and fines gets me search incident to arrest an into their pockets. Gang affiliation gets me a Terry frisk, which on a vehicle stop means I can pat down the occupants as well as check the passenger compartment for weapons.
If you* are willing to stage a work slowdown because someone acknowledges institutional racism, then you are by definition a racist.
While agreeing with you generally, this sentence set off a nitpicking reaction. I don't think "by definition" works there, and I'd want to phrase it as "you are acting racist". I firmly believe there are cops who have as little individual racial animus going on as I do, who are nonetheless defending this shit out of solidarity/belief that the police shouldn't be questioned/maligned/managed. Is someone like that 'a racist'? Who cares, but it seems at least arguable that they aren't. Are they acting racist? Yes.
Does "Utilitarian" count as gang membership? I think it should.
But part of the issue is that the more tickets and fines that get levied the more likely you are to find warrants for unpaid tickets and fines and (etc.), the more time you spend aggressively looking for drunk drivers the more likely you are to start finding people without DLs, and so on. The extreme examples, like where the Ferguson PD were basically using the residents as ATMs, are a decent example of how this ends up working.
I mean, in practice if you started going around spending a lot of time in neighborhoods with a lot of middle class professionals in them this wouldn't work because it would get quashed pretty quickly. I mean, the fact that it's poorer and usually minority neighborhoods where this happens isn't really a surprise: you don't even really need police operating for racist reasons, you just need a generally institutionalized racism and the fact that poor minorities don't have much political clout.
124: It was a necessary counter to my distasteful sincerity.
I firmly believe there are cops who have as little individual racial animus going on as I do, who are nonetheless defending this shit out of solidarity/belief that the police shouldn't be questioned/maligned/managed. Is someone like that 'a racist'? Who cares, but it seems at least arguable that they aren't.
This is like the argument that George Wallace wasn't personally racist, he just realized that pandering to racists was the best way to get elected. At a certain point, if you support racists and racist policies, you're a racist.
128: Right. I'm opposed to this idea that we must find out what's in someone's heart to determine whether they are racists. I say it's what one does that counts, racism-wise. Charles Murray may love black people as much as he says he does. I don't care. He's still a racist. By definition.
Also poor black people not having clout isn't just something that happens on its own, it's also the result of things like the NYPD sabotaging any mayor who poor black people vote for.
No, he's pretty racist in his heart too.
131, 132: I think walking away from "are you a racist" and focusing on "is what you're doing racist" really does have the potential to clarify some conversations helpfully.
I'm envisioning a cop who's thinking "Yep, making my numbers requires some racist policing here [on an argument similar to gswift's]. Need to keep my job. Going to go hassle some minority kids now. Wish I didn't have to do that, the structural racism inherent in the system is distasteful to me. If some politician looks like they're trying to change the pressures on me, I'm all over it, and I'm donating money to her campaign." That hypothetical cop is doing racist stuff, is on some level morally culpable for doing racist stuff, but nonetheless has potential to be part of the solution.
I like drawing a distinction between him and the guy next to him who's thinking "This is the only way to keep the animals in line." Partially because it seems to me that the distinction exists, and partially because it seems as if flattering people as doing racist stuff only because they're being forced to, don't you want to jump at the chance to change things so you don't have act so racist? is one plausible route to getting some change.
Accusations of racism may not be the best way to proceed in these discussions, in light of systemic effects like those mentioned in 127.
The dreaded Lizardbreath pwn, where she makes your point far more thoroughly and cogently in less time.
I basically endorse 114, but I still don't think that "racist" is a super-productive concept in this discussion, in part because the term is so goddamn fraught in American discourse anyway, but also because (a) most cops aren't personally intentionally racist (b) a huge chunk of the NYPD is not actually white and (c) many if not most cops feel that they are actually on the front lines of protecting black and/or Latino people from harm (and, indeed, they often are). Teasing out real issues of systematic racism from the belief that some seem to have that cops are all white Bull-Connors-in-waiting who never shoot or assault white people isn't easy.
I don't think it's remotely appropriate for the PBA/NYPD to be acting based on what DiBlasio says about his own kid regardless. Even if they care (and they shouldn't) that's not even close to a good reason for a work slowdown or stoppage.
135, 136. I'm not saying that calling racists out is always useful. I'm just saying that a definition of racist that doesn't include Charles Murray isn't a very useful definition.
I'm envisioning a cop who's thinking "Yep, making my numbers requires some racist policing here [on an argument similar to gswift's]. Need to keep my job. Going to go hassle some minority kids now. Wish I didn't have to do that, the structural racism inherent in the system is distasteful to me. If some politician looks like they're trying to change the pressures on me, I'm all over it, and I'm donating money to her campaign." That hypothetical cop is doing racist stuff, is on some level morally culpable for doing racist stuff, but nonetheless has potential to be part of the solution.
Right. As I said, one can be sympathetic to the agents of racism, as I would argue that de Blasio is.
Gswift's hypothetical cop, however, is not donating to de Blasio. That cop is directly and deliberately undercutting de Blasio in direct support of racist policing policy.
There really needs to be a single word, that's not "racist," that means "participating in systemic perpetuation of oppression originally based upon racial animus, without having personal racial animus." This describes so many situations in which the word "racist" is used and then there's a gigantic fight about whether or not it's appropriate, every single time.
140: You know, while I was trying to make the same distinction, I don't think there's any profit at all to making up new words for it, because so much of the gigantic fight is bad faith ("You can't call me racist, you don't know what's in my heart!" from people who really are straight-up racist), and to the extent it's bad faith, they'll make the same fuss whatever vocabulary you use.
"participating in systemic perpetuation of oppression originally based upon racial animus, without having personal racial animus."
"Wallacing."
140: "Privilege"?
Of course like with a lot of things any attempt to create that word immediately ends up in the same situation because racists aren't (always) idiots and know enough not to get rhetorically isolated like that.
There really needs to be a single word, that's not "racist," that means "participating in systemic perpetuation of oppression originally based upon racial animus, without having personal racial animus." This describes so many situations in which the word "racist" is used and then there's a gigantic fight about whether or not it's appropriate, every single time.
I say again: The lack of racial animus is a huge red-herring. Charles Murray doesn't get let off the racist hook if he can claim honestly that he bears no racial animus.
From every racist's playbook:
1. Assert that racism only exists with racial animus.
2. Note that one cannot prove racial animus. (Charles Murray literally burned a fucking cross, but contends that he was not a racist when he did it.)
3. Therefore, anybody who calls me a racist is acting without sufficient evidence.
Once you buy into step 1, the other two follow inevitably.
I'm not talking about changing people's minds or influencing their attitudes. It's often best to avoid accurate language when those are your goals.
I'm just talking about thinking and speaking precisely when those are your goals.
Teasing out real issues of systematic racism from the belief that some seem to have that cops are all white Bull-Connors-in-waiting who never shoot or assault white people isn't easy.
Not that I know for certain that this was directed at me, but: if you think that I believe this, you haven't actually been paying attention.
141: Not only that, but it's the rare person who's willing to actually fess up to "participating in systemic perpetuation of oppression", let alone one ""originally based upon racial animus". The cognitive dissonance is just too much.
147 -- I don't think that you think that.
David Duke, not a racist. "I call myself a human rights activist."
See also: Richard Nixon, not a crook.
127: Tangential, but it reminds me of a remarkably funny law review article.
There was a longish thread about that verse.
148: It's really hard to know how to self-identify in that way. I mean, I've been a foster parent as part of a system that discriminates against poor people and people of color, among others. I can tell myself that what I was doing was trying to mitigate that to the extent I could, which is only partly true and at best only a tiny bit helpful. But what's the alternative? (This is not a question to you, particularly, and really one to me, and I don't know.)
But what's the alternative?
Suicide, of course.
Remember how the speculation of how unlikely it is that someone with not much criminal history attacks a cop? Roll the tape!
http://m.ksl.com/index/story/sid/33042457
gswift they don't teach Bayes rule in cop school, do they?
Court records show Barker's criminal history in Utah was relatively minor. He was arrested and booked into the Salt Lake County Jail in December 2013 for disturbing the peace and failing to give police his identity, according to a Salt Lake County Jail report.
In that incident, police say Barker walked into an area of a chocolate store on Main Street where customers weren't allowed and "was acting strangely" and "severely disrupting operations," according to a jail report. Barker also had a warrant out of Salt Lake City at that time for theft of services, according to the jail report.
Maybe not much, but it's something, and consistent with his weird behavior in that video. Not that anything about this situation proves or disproves anything about any other situation, of course.
156: I sense a business opportunity for some enterprising statistician.
Dude is new to our dept but has like 10 years on back in the Carolinas. Bet being attacked with a snow shovel wasn't something he was expecting.
His accent was certainly noticeable on the video.
a duck/rabbit level
Good chance everyone has seen this cartoon, but I link it here nonetheless.
And extremely tangentially on topic, I was gratified to hear an attendant at the hospital getting old guy into a wheelchair call him both "buddy" and "chief" within a couple of sentences. "You're all set now, chief."
Well sure, how many people in the Carolinas even own snow shovels?
Even if they care (and they shouldn't) that's not even close to a good reason for a work slowdown or stoppage.
Right. A good reason might be that their union is negotiating a new contract, and the current mayor is nowhere near as beholden to their membership as the old mayor was, and thus the new mayor needs to be taught a lesson about the union's political power. It seems like it's worth taking the time to remember that unions, like terrorists, aren't typically irrational; they have specific goals and are trying to achieve them using the strategies they deems most effective.
Unions and terrorists also both like parades.
Speaking of, I really should go back to my hometown this St. Patrick's Day.
164: If that's true, haven't they significantly overreached here? A one-day slow-down would have worked as a threat, but going all-in over nothing, what will they have left when negotiation-time comes around? Either de Blasio resigns, or they have nothing left when the contract is up.
gswift, why the hell did the cop push him? The doesn't seem like a very effective way to start an arrest, and backup was on the way in any case. I realize shovel dude was not quite in charge of his emotions, but it seems the cop could have bided his time until he had backup on the scene.
167: yeah, I think they badly overreached. But I don't think the overreach was born of a fit of pique.
I think the tactic you're describing is basically "throw a fit of pique" though, which can be tactically useful. But in this case it's backfiring on them and they don't seem to be interested in backing down which makes me wonder exactly how calculating they're being here.
gswift, why the hell did the cop push him?
Doesn't look like a push to me, I think he's trying to get that shovel from him.
Wait, what does any of this have to do wit Al Sharpton? Was Adolph Giuliani friends with Al Sharpton when the police were all pissed off at him?
155 is a good illustration of why somebody should be developing a fire-truck-esque nontoxic foam that can be sprayed at malefactors to immobilize them.
It wouldn't solve all such cases (certainly not the ones that escalate really rapidly), but it would add another way to handle the "This obstreperous person is failing to obey police commands" problem without getting into "and now we must handcuff/tase/stun/shoot" them."
We had to call the police on a patron not long ago. He was being horrible, mostly verbally but also lifting his walking stick at one point. I was mostly grateful that we got some calm young white men who didn't have anything to prove. They just let him rant for 20 min and then escorted him out. He certainly wasn't going to listen to any of us women.
The two propositions "nobody would have died if the cop hadn't escalated the situation" and "that dude was asking to get shot by a cop" seem equally true in this particular case.
This is weird: http://fittish.deadspin.com/why-did-the-nypd-clip-this-japanese-marathoner-1678410915
Yawnoc, are you on crack? Our guy didn't even raise his voice.
Yawnoc, are you on crack?
Typical police, assuming whoever they're interacting with is on drugs. Next it'll be "Yawnoc's hand moved toward his waistband: he must have been going for a weapon."
I recently saw Anchorman II. The scene where they smoked crack while on the air was the best part.
140 et seq: Jay Smooth's video is good on this point, linked here many times before I bet. You say "that sounds racist" because then the problem is in reception not intention. Also: criticizing actions, not hearts.
176: I see a shove (or a grab) there at the end that transitions the situation from talky/screamy to shovel-wavey.
Tangentially on topic: Still remarkable to me how many so-called "pro-police" demonstrators have a zero-sum view of the world.
Two hundred people turned out for a "Pro-Blue Rally" Saturday on Independence Mall, shivering in the cold and cheering as speakers urged the public to appreciate the dangerous work that police do every day.
Protestors at recent rallies against perceived police brutality in New York and Ferguson, Mo., "don't speak for America," U.S. Sen Pat Toomey (R. Pa.) told the crowd.
...
With a theme that "All Lives Matter," the rally was in response to numerous recent demonstrations around the country protesting the deaths of unarmed black men by white police officers.
Darn it, that last bit was supposed to be blockquoted too.
People are shouting very loudly about how much of Tomlin's success was just riding on Cowler's recruiting. I should stick to dive bars in Squirrel Hill. Shadyside is edgy.
176, 180: On that one, the cop didn't look exactly overly aggressive to me, as unskilled or having poor tactical judgment. Shovel guy was scary angry, and I would have wanted him to be not holding a shovel if I had to talk to him. But that did not look to me like a well chosen way of making him put the shovel down -- an unannounced, slowish, grab.
Backing away and verbally asking/ordering him to put it down would have been safer, or if the cop was going to physically take the shovel, being forceful enough to actually get it. The inbetween level of aggression looks to me like what went wrong.
But I wouldn't judge the cop too harshly. Again, it looks to me more like unskillful tactics dealing with a scary angry guy, rather than realky unwarranted escalation.
But I wouldn't judge the cop too harshly. Again, it looks to me more like unskillful tactics dealing with a scary angry guy
"Unskillful tactics when dealing with a scary angry person" seems like exactly the sort of thing a cop should be judged for. Skillfully de-escalating those sort if situations is part of their job.
Jay Smooth's video is good on this point, linked here many times before I bet. You say "that sounds racist" because then the problem is in reception not intention. Also: criticizing actions, not hearts.
Yeah, that came to mind immediately, but while I love Jay Smooth I think that video is mostly wishful thinking. Certainly the times (online) I've seen people say "that sounds racist" rather than "you're racist" it hasn't made a goddamned bit of difference.
184, 186: Let's not forget that in countries where police aren't traditionally armed, they aren't getting disproportionately slaughtered by shovel-wielding people. That would seem to suggest that American-style escalation-unto-death isn't as inevitable as it may sometimes seem.
186: He's got a certain amount of my sympathy because his error (assuming I'm right about what he should have done, and let me tell you that my tactical judgment about how to conduct a physical altercation with an angry man with a shovel is not actually based on a broad foundation of experience) ended up with him on the ground getting bones broken with a shovel. That's the kind of outcome that makes me credit it as honest error from someone who really wouldn't have wanted things to turn out the way they did.
The thing is, LB, I don't think it necessarily matters what the officer wanted. If she/he isn't hasn't been substantively trained and institutionally backed up in implementing face-saving de-escalation tactics, they're going to be unconsciously choosing from an impoverished set of choices to begin with.
my tactical judgment about how to conduct a physical altercation with an angry man with a shovel is not actually based on a broad foundation of experience
Same here, it is a totally different skill from knife fights at meetups.
Here's the thing: We already know from extensive research on customer service -- a much lower-stakes situation! -- that employees who are empowered to defuse situations, and can act with agency to do so, and are trained in multiple ways of doing so, can do so more easily.
And in contrast, that those who see each interaction as a zero-sum are more likely to end up in shouting matches over, say, whether they gave someone a receipt.
Police officers are just people, functioning in a human-designed system. Even granted that they have an unprecedented amount of power compared to your average customer-service agent, I think there are still some useful parallels to be drawn.
In general, I agree with you about training and learning to defuse situations. In specific in this situation, while I'm secondguessing the cop's tactics, though, he really was maintaining a calm, conciliatory tone and so on; I think he had the idea of calming things down, he just failed in the execution.
175- what do you expect, just like Brown he was in the middle of the street refusing to go on the sidewalk.
All right, one more before I stop serial posting.
This article nicely illustrates a split between two personalities in policing.
One, FOP President McNulty, literally describes anti-brutality protestors as a "lynch mob." The other, Officer Murray, eagerly embraces Twitter as a tool for getting hipsters and others on board with crimesolving.
Or take this glowing profile of our local transit police chief. Bearing in mind that the magazine publishing it has a history of deplorable racial politics, it's pretty much a valentine to community policing rather than Rizzo-style knocking heads.
We don't have a shared understanding of what good policing looks like in the US right now. We have competing agendas, each of which brings their own assumptions and priorities to the table.
One, FOP President McNulty, literally describes anti-brutality protestors as a "lynch mob." The other, Officer Murray, eagerly embraces Twitter as a tool for getting hipsters and others on board with crimesolving.
Is it wrong if I want them both fired?
It probably doesn't help if I tell you that one of them unironically uses the term "fuzz" a lot, does it?
187: Yeah, I've seen it play out (also online) where "that sounds racist" is met with "are you calling me racist?" or "you just called me a racist" and the conversation goes pretty much like it would if the person had been called a racist. Or, after some back and forth, the person saying "that sounds racist" decides the person really is racist and says so, or they thought that all along but didn't say it and now have reached a point where they figure they might as well say it.
Ironically, I wonder if that kind of call out actually has a better chance of success when there isn't much immediate dialogue about it and the person who said the thing that sounds racist can sit with it for a while. That's probably wishful thinking too.
191: I think when you write "knife fights" in that context you mean "sword fights" which is, of course, a term of art.