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blast from the past:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/17/ny...ir-target.html
This is what activism can accomplish: Look at the drop in NYC stop-and-frisks
Stop-and-frisk numbers are down 90 percent in New York City from the peak in early 2012. Ninety percent. In Harlem, they are down 96 percent in the same period.
Misdemeanor arrests for drugs shot up when stop-and-frisk numbers jumped during the 2000s, but are now lower than they've been since before 2003.
What about violent crime in the city? It's been going down drastically for over twenty years (in New York and nationally, even if people don't necessarily know it), and has continued to drop since 2013—both overall and in the neighborhoods with the most stop-and-frisk encounters.
Lest anyone forget, stop-and-frisk was a terrible scourge on the lives of poor, young black men in particular, many of whom were stopped over and over again, despite having done nothing wrong. Since 2002, almost 90 percent of all stops resulted neither in an arrest or even a fine. And things are by no means perfect now. People in many neighborhoods remain scarred by the old stop-and-frisk policy.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...8Daily+Kos%29#
Pure, RACIST harassment, intimidation by the out-of-control, insubordinate militarized police state.
blast from the past:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/17/ny...ir-target.html
NYPD Chief Defends Mayor de Blasio and Criticizes Police Funeral Protest
http://www.alternet.org/nypd-chief-d...uneral-protest
He also said De Blasio needs to man up and apologize for making it seem like he was siding with the protesters. If he doesn't have the balls to do that, then he shouldn't expect respect from the NYPD, tbh.
de Blasio had the balls to show that Garner was choked illegally, then left to die while cops and EMS stood around.
Much better than de Blasio supporting the murderous cops with statements showing "black lives don't matter. I support the cops, right or wrong (which is what the cops want to hear)", as surely Julie Annie would have done.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/30/nypd-punishes-city-by-not-citing-arrestiRight now in New York City, guys selling black market cigarettes are much, much less likely to be harassed and arrested (or worse) by the New York Police Department. Apparently, or at least in the eyes of the New York Post, we’re supposed to see this as a bad thing (people not getting arrested is certainly a bad thing for the New York Post's reporting, anyway):
They provide an info box showing, in addition to the huge drop in minor offense summonses, a 94 percent drop in citations for traffic violations, a 92 percent drop in parking violation citations, and a 66 percent drop in overall arrests.It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage.
NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.
The dramatic drop comes as Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio plan to hold an emergency summit on Tuesday with the heads of the five police unions to try to close the widening rift between cops and the administration.
And there’s this paragraph:
Well, we can only hope the NYPD unions and de Blasio settle their differences soon so that the police can go back to arresting people for reasons other than "when they have to."The Post obtained the numbers hours after revealing that cops were turning a blind eye to some minor crimes and making arrests only "when they have to" since the execution-style shootings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
if NYPD doesn't meet their quotas, aren't REALLY NEEDED, LIFE GOES w/o their harassments, then fire their sorry asses.
Taibbi with a similar take...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...rreal-20141231
Brace yourselves for a weird night. There might be a little extra drama when the ball drops in Times Square, thanks to one of the more confusing political protests in recent memory.
On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most densely-populated city blocks in America, all eyes will be on the city cops stuck with holiday duty.
Why? Because the New York City Police are in the middle of a slowdown. The New York Post is going so far as to call it a "virtual work stoppage."
Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a "hostile anti-police environment in the city," the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.
If you're wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests "only when they have to." (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).
Substantively that mostly means a steep drop-off in parking tickets, but also a major drop in tickets for quality-of-life offenses like carrying open containers of alcohol or public urination.
My first response to this news was confusion. I get why the police are protesting – they're pissed at Mayor de Blasio, and more on that in a minute – but this sort of "protest" pulls this story out of the standard left-right culture war script it had been following and into surreal territory.
I don't know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.
So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different cons uencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.
First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there's the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don't "have to."
It's incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it's precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called "hot spot" neighborhoods.
In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn't the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.
But that's not what's going on here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I'm sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.
I've met more than a few police in the last few years who've complained vigorously about things like the "empty the pad" policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.
It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people "when they have to."
Because it's wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it's even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.
Both policies make people pissed off at police for the most basic and understandable of reasons: if you're running into one, there's a pretty good chance you're going to end up opening your wallet.
Your average summons for a QOL offense costs more than an ordinary working person makes in a day driving a bus, waiting tables, or sweeping floors. So every time you nail somebody, you're literally ruining their whole day.
If I were a police officer, I'd hate to be taking money from people all day long, too. Christ, that's worse than being a dentist. So under normal cir stances, this slowdown wouldn't just make sense, it would be heroic.
Unfortunately, this protest is not about police refusing to shake people down for money on principle.
For one thing, it's simply another public union using its essential services leverage to hold the executive (and by extension, the taxpayer) hostage in a negotiation. In this case the public union doesn't want higher pay or better benefits (in which case it wouldn't have the support from the political right it has now – just the opposite), it merely wants "support" from the Mayor.
On another level, however, this is just the latest salvo in an ongoing and increasingly vicious culture-war mess that is showing no signs of abating.
Most everyone across the country knows the background by now. The police in New York are justifiably furious about the Saturday, December 20th ambush murder/assassination of two of their officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, at the hands of a rampage-killer from Baltimore named Ismaaiyl Brinsley.
Brinsley, who shot his girlfriend and promised on Instagram to put "wings on pigs" before coming to New York and doing the evil deed, had cited the killing of Eric Garner in his rants, saying among other things, "They took 1 of ours…let's take 2 of theirs."
According to the transitive theory of culpability so popular in our left-right media echo chamber, Brinsley's monstrous act put de Blasio in the political jackpot, since both had expressed dismay about the death of Garner, an African-American man from Staten Island who died this past summer in a struggle with police over a 75-cent cigarette.
De Blasio of course never urged anyone to put "wings on pigs." And his comment about the actual grand jury decision – that it was something "many in our city did not want" – was really just a simple statement of fact.
But de Blasio also clumsily personalized the incident, talking about his own half-black son Dante, saying that he and his wife Chirlane had had to "talk to Dante. . .about the dangers that he may face." Then he added, "It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say that black lives matter."
As maximally uncontroversial as that sounds, the local tabloids went nuts over de Blasio's remarks, bashing the boss of the nation's biggest police force for quoting a globally-surging protest hashtag and talking about how he has to teach his own son to be wary of police.
And then Ramos and Liu were murdered in a horrible tragedy that will have lasting implications for people on all sides of the political spectrum.
The thing is, there are really two things going on here. One is an ongoing bitter argument about race and blame that won't be resolved in this country anytime soon, if ever. Dig a millimeter under the surface of the Garner case, Ferguson, the Liu-Ramos murders, and you'll find vicious race-soaked debates about who's to blame for urban poverty, black crime, police violence, immigration, overloaded prisons and a dozen other nightmare issues.
But the other thing is a highly specific debate over a very resolvable controversy not about police as people, but about how police are deployed. Most people, and police most of all, agree that the best use of police officers is police work. They shouldn't be collecting backdoor taxes because politicians are too cowardly to raise them, and they shouldn't be pre-emptively busting people in poor neighborhoods because voters don't have the patience to figure out some other way to deal with our dying cities.
This police protest, ironically, could have shined a light on all of that. Instead, it's just more fodder for our ongoing hate-a-thon. Happy New Year, America.
did the Repugs, Fox, and right-wing hate media got nuts and condemn the entire right-wing extremist militia wingnuts when a WHITE right-winger, try to foment REVOLUTION against guvmint, murdered 2 white cops in Nevada?
no.
http://qz.com/317338/the-nyc-police-...ing-city-hall/For many New Yorkers, this was a grotesque overreaction to the horrifying act of a single mentally ill gunman, an exploitation of a double murder to make a political point in a feud with the mayor. But it did not come as a shock to anyone familiar with the P.B.A.’s long history of bullying any critic of the police. Whether the issue is the department’s relationship with minorities, its endless fight against internal corruption, or its excessive demands in contract negotiations, the police unions have attacked and often slandered every recent mayor, even those who prided themselves on being crime fighters.
In June of 1966, when complaints of increasing police brutality against minorities prompted Mayor John Lindsay to propose a civilian review board, an unauthorized voice came over the police radio: “Everybody to City Hall!” More than 5,000 off-duty cops mustered outside the building, the largest police gathering up to that time, to protest the possibility of outside scrutiny into the way officers conducted business.
“I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups, with their whims and their gripes and shouting,” said John Cassese, then president of the P.B.A. “Any review board with civilians on it is detrimental to the operations of the police department.”
The police unions conducted a huge public relations campaign that defeated the review board in a referendum that year. As always they resorted to their most effective cudgel, public fear of crime, and the explicit suggestion that urban violence could increase if police officers were not given their way. In advertisements, the unions told voters that killing the review board was so important that “your life may depend on it.”
The board was revived 20 years later by Mayor Ed Koch, who generally had a friendly relationship with the police unions. But that warmth didn’t stop the unions from staging a work slowdown in 1985 after a white officer, Stephen Sullivan, was indicted for manslaughter after shooting to death Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly and mentally ill black woman. The unions pressured the Koch administration into restoring Sullivan to the force even while he was under indictment. (He was later acquitted.)
The lowest moment for the police unions occurred in 1992, when the P.B.A. organized another City Hall rally to protest the strengthening of the review board by Mayor David Dinkins. This time the crowd surged to 10,000 officers, with union members hurtling barricades, jumping on cars, blocking the Brooklyn Bridge, and kicking reporters. Some members carried signs showing Dinkins with a bushy Afro haircut and swollen lips, with slogans that ridiculed him as a “washroom attendant.”
Rudolph Giuliani, who would run for mayor the next year on a crime-fighting platform, was present throughout the rally and led the crowd in denouncing Dinkins. But though he eventually became the mayor most closely identified with a stronger police force, he lost the union’s favor within a few years by refusing to agree to demands for a police contract far more generous than the ones reached with other municipal unions. By 1997, union members distributed a flier demanding that Giuliani be excluded from their funerals because his attendance “would only bring disgrace to my memory.” That’s almost exactly the same language now being used by P.B.A. members against de Blasio, who is also threatened with exclusion from their funerals.
In pursuit of higher raises, the P.B.A. also held noisy protests outside the townhouse of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and threatened to go on strike during the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.
Damon Linker weighs in on the NYPD's dangerous temper tantrum:
http://theweek.com/article/index/274...sgraceful-gameAfter weeks of loud and angry protests, with large numbers of law-abiding citizens (including some politicians, and myself) raising tough questions about whether cops are shown too much deference in our culture and legal system, tension were running high. Which is why the cold-blooded murder of officers Ramos and Liu was especially shocking. When news of the shooting first broke, it was perfectly understandable for cops to wonder in their grief and fear if it had now become open season on the police.
What is not understandable — or justifiable — is for officers days later to show outright and repeated disrespect to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by turning their backs on him at public events. Or for them to engage in a dramatic two-weeks-and-running work slowdown that has led to a 50 percent drop in arrests, and a 90 percent decline in parking and traffic tickets, from the same period a year ago.
Such actions are unjustifiable for several reasons.
First, because Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who gunned down Ramos and Liu after shooting his girlfriend and before killing himself, was a lunatic. His crime was not an act of politics; it was an act of madness, however he may have rationalized it to himself in the midst of his homicidal-suicidal rage. In case there is any doubt of this, we have the additional fact that no one in the protest movement views Brinsley as a hero advancing its aims. Far from it. The expressions of anguish, outrage, and disgust at the shooting have been nearly universal and entirely sincere.
That much is obvious to anyone who’s paying attention.
Which means that the cops who are acting out in counter-protest are either behaving like children throwing an irrational temper tantrum or cynically using a tragedy to forestall public criticism and browbeat protesters into silence.
Either way, their actions are disgraceful.
They’re also dangerous.
Liberal democratic government depends on several norms and ins utions, including rights to free speech, worship, and assembly, free and fair elections, private property rights, an independent judiciary — and civilian control of the military. Make no mistake about it: the NYPD — with roughly 35,000 uniformed officers, as well as a well-funded and well-armed counterterrorism bureau — is a modestly sized military force deployed on the streets of the city.
It is absolutely essential, in New York City but also in communities around the country, that citizens and public officials make it at all times unambiguously clear that the police work for us. In repeatedly turning their backs on the man elected mayor by the citizens of New York, in refusing to abide by the police commissioner’s requests to cease their protests, in engaging in a work slowdown that could lead to a breakdown in the public order they are sworn to uphold — with all of these acts, the NYPD has demonstrated that it does not understand that the residents of New York City, and not the members of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association or its demagogic leader Patrick Lynch, are the ones in charge.
When police officers engage in acts of insubordination against civilian leadership, they should expect to be punished. Just like insubordinate soldiers.
The principle of civilian control of the military and police depends on it.
"When police officers engage in acts of insubordination against civilian leadership, they should expect to be punished. Just like insubordinate soldiers."
... and just like flight attendants
United Airlines attendants fired for refusing to fly in plane with 'BYE BYE' scrawled on tail
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-...rawled-on-tail
and just like air traffic controllers
As Video Exposes Walter Scott Police Killing, Why Is the Man Who Filmed Eric Garner's Death in Jail?
While no police officers were indicted for Garner's death, the man who filmed the attack, Ramsey Orta, is now locked up in jail after facing what he described as harassment by local police. Orta was first arrested on an unrelated gun charge the day after the Staten Island coroner declared Garner's death to be a homicide.
He was later arrested and jailed on a drug charge.
His mother, brother and wife have all been arrested too.
Supporters have accused the New York City Police Department of targeting Orta's family for releasing the Garner video.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...death-in-jail#
it was like 3 good articles in a row and then boutox chimes in with goofy equivalences. oh well.
civil rights lawsuit Eric Garner filed against the NYPD in 2007
On September 1st, 2007, seven years before NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo would choke Eric Garner to death in a video watched all over the world, he filed a heartbreaking civil complaint against NYPD Officer William Owens, the City of New York, and the NYPD over an awful incident in which
he was illegally strip searched near his home.
In the complaint, Eric describes how
Officer William Owens, in the middle of the street, inserted his fingers up Eric Garner's rectum and made Eric pull his underwear completely down while he "searched" around Eric's testicles.
In the section where it asks Eric what injuries he sustained, he details what the humiliating encounter did to injure his "manhood". See the entire complaint below.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...8Daily+Kos%29#
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