Haven't read beyond the first page of the article yet... saving for later. But I'll share an experience of mine.
I lived in the 79th precinct, adjacent to the 81st. It's less dangerous, but not much -- still Bed Stuy and very block by block. I was there for about 6 months in late 2007.
The area is tense at times -- much of New York's prosperity over the last two decades hasn't trickled down to the people living there aside from landlords selling their buildings to gentrifies or speculators. There was an incident around this time where an unstable young man was shot because he had a comb the police mistook for a weapon in the dark. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had escalated into riots. Gentrification is welcome by some, protested by some, and many are indifferent to it, I think. There are very few nice places to eat or socialize or even get groceries, but there are a ton of bodegas and fried chicken/pizza places and dollar stores. It can be a very rough place, which is too bad as I got to know some very nice people on my block.
Certainly there are institutional problems in the NYPD, but also I have the suspicion that many rookie cops eventually get rotated into areas like this -- Bushwick, Bed Stuy, East New York and this contributes to much of the stuff you will learn about in these tapes. The penis jokes, the confusion on what to report and not gracefully handling tension within the communities -- I wonder if it is inexperience.
Comparisons to The Wire are natural, but in the time I lived in Bed Stuy, the only similarity I really observed was that the NYPD guys never seemed to interact with the people of the neighborhood as if they too were part of that community. Never said hi while walking their beats, never stopped to talk to the kids or the corner boys, they mostly walked in twos or threes, chatting with each other. I think for the people that live there and the cops that work there, there is us and them and not much in between.
It's hard to blame the cops for not interacting with the community, though. I lived in a similar neighborhood in Oakland, and saw 75 year old grandomthers calling the cops "pigs" to their face.
Some of the hostility toward the police is justified, much of it isn't. But whether it is or isn't justified, it exists, and it's hard to blame cops for not going out of their way to be sociable with people who, more likely than not, hate them because they are police.
It's a really awkward problem. I've worked with both the SFPD and Oakland PD (on IT stuff) and known some senior officers and trainers. One observed to me that the psychological profile of police officers is very similar to that of gang members. Ironically, the same officer got into a minor scrape with the motor pool for seizing the engine of a police cruiser after taking me on a high-speed joyride at 3am...
There's no easy answer. It's depressing to hear adult police officers behaving like high-schoolers in the locker room, talking smack about the public and so forth; then again it's not so different from hackers having a laugh at userland's expense. Policing in many places is a scary and dangerous job, and good officers are frequently insulted or blamed for the actions of some others in the same uniform.
I got a first hand taste of this by accident a few years ago. I was working on a film which was being shot in a recently decommissioned jail in Oakland, and one of the actors in a small part became unavailable. I had approximately the right look and was asked to fill in for the part in between my tech duties, so I spent the day in a police costume - movie uniforms are deliberately incorrect to avoid impersonation, but not so much that it's obvious. So between setups I was out on the street a few times to smoke or whatever, and boy did I get an earful from passers-by - and from the opposite folk you'd expect, if you went by stereotypes. A few people wanted to enter the jail to visit friends or relatives who had been arrested, and I would tell them the jail had been shut down and which number to call at City Hall for information. One irate person expressed the hope that someone would drive by and shut me down too. I stayed inside after that one.
It's an interesting cycle, really. The hate perpetrated by the civilian to the servant is returned by aggressive actions towards the civilians and a less hospitable attitude.
Ideally, civilians should respect the police, and attempt to make a connection with those who are employed to serve them, while at the same time, the police should be accommodating for their constituents and dignify them much as civilians should.
The animosity can easily be attributed to the lack of respect and proper protocol for both parties. Someone needs to step up.
The thing of it, to me, is that policemen carry an array of weapons. Mace, a taser, a tonfa (a nightstick), and a gun. A person that heavily armed is a force to be reckoned with. Intimidating, deserving of fear.
If you're the man with the gun, you must go out of your way to be respectable and approachable, or you will not be - you'll just be a man with a gun.
Absolutely. That is their job as our servants (civil servants, that is). The cop is supposed to be more respectful and willing, and they should be working on that. They are people though, and as such we should afford them some respect, not for the weapons they carry, but the way the act.
If it were just fear, people wouldn't hurl abuse at police officers, they would just be quiet. In fact, the amount of abuse that police take shows that most people don't fear them (not that they should).
Yeah this is the reality of police work after Guliani. Guliani discovered that the best thing for a politician to do is to reduce crime so he tells his cops "reduce crime or else" and the easiest way to do it is to cook the numbers.
The funny thing is that sometimes cooking the numbers works. That is if you create a perception of lower crime you get gentrification and a lot of middle class people move in and crime may actually go down. But nobody should confuse the talk of politicians with actual reality, new york is much more crooked and crime ridden than any of those "tough on crime" politicians would admit. Some times that crookedness bubbles up to the surface, for example couple of summers ago when cranes started falling from the sky and killing people and destroying entire buildings.
I have to say that I feel bad for these cops. I was hoping that being a beat cop was one of those rare fields of endeavour where one could do their job well as driven by their own conscience and their own initiative and sense of self worth and not have to go by some ridiculous metric, but alas even the police departments have been invaded by modern MBA thinking. So apparently even in the police force it is all about performance metrics and making your numbers -- writing a sufficient number of tickets and stopping and frisking a sufficient number of random people, while making sure not to notice too many crimes.
Maybe in the end of the year the mayor looks at the numbers and sees -- wow, we frisked 10 million people and brought in 5 billion dollars in fines, we must truly have a fine police force.
I dunno bout you, but I actually live in New York City and although the police can be heavy handed at times, ok... a lot of the time, I can assure you that new york is a lot safer than when I was growing up in Queens in the 80's and 90's. I specifically recall leaving for university in the fall of '96 and returning summer of '98 to a completely different atmosphere. And for that I tip my hat to Giuliani.
"Guliani discovered that the best thing for a politician to do is to reduce crime so he tells his cops "reduce crime or else" and the easiest way to do it is to cook the numbers."
Born and raised in NYC, lived there until the late '90s.
Perhaps there was some number cooking (hard to believe there wouldn't be) , but Giuliani (maybe more so his Chief of Police, whose name eludes me) realized that if you start hassling people for the little shit, you have a good chance of grabbing someone with a outstanding DAT or warrant. Grab people for jumping turnstiles, hustling change, open bottles of beer, whatever, all the things Dinkins was ignoring.
Once you've got someone you can run checks on them and often hold them for something more serious.
And it was good for the city, financially at least, because if downtown/midtown was safer, or even just felt safer, more people went there and business thrived.
(Downside: Times Square seems to have become a branded theme park. Oh well.)
I don't doubt what you (or the other person that responded to this thread) said. I did live in new york in the late 90's and early 00s and it did feel much safer than the movies let me believe. I was just noting that the police trying to cook the crime figures is due to political pressure, which is also pretty certain.
Indeed. And that's why when a cop harasses someone, e.g. trying to provoke them into something arrestable, it's often "nothing personal", they're just trying to get enough points to keep their superiors happy, maybe get promoted, etc.
I lived in the 79th precinct, adjacent to the 81st. It's less dangerous, but not much -- still Bed Stuy and very block by block. I was there for about 6 months in late 2007.
The area is tense at times -- much of New York's prosperity over the last two decades hasn't trickled down to the people living there aside from landlords selling their buildings to gentrifies or speculators. There was an incident around this time where an unstable young man was shot because he had a comb the police mistook for a weapon in the dark. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had escalated into riots. Gentrification is welcome by some, protested by some, and many are indifferent to it, I think. There are very few nice places to eat or socialize or even get groceries, but there are a ton of bodegas and fried chicken/pizza places and dollar stores. It can be a very rough place, which is too bad as I got to know some very nice people on my block.
Certainly there are institutional problems in the NYPD, but also I have the suspicion that many rookie cops eventually get rotated into areas like this -- Bushwick, Bed Stuy, East New York and this contributes to much of the stuff you will learn about in these tapes. The penis jokes, the confusion on what to report and not gracefully handling tension within the communities -- I wonder if it is inexperience.
Comparisons to The Wire are natural, but in the time I lived in Bed Stuy, the only similarity I really observed was that the NYPD guys never seemed to interact with the people of the neighborhood as if they too were part of that community. Never said hi while walking their beats, never stopped to talk to the kids or the corner boys, they mostly walked in twos or threes, chatting with each other. I think for the people that live there and the cops that work there, there is us and them and not much in between.