Lee Camp on the NYPD slowdown: "I bet there are now PLENTY of police available to respond to REAL crime or REAL emergencies"

As dimwitted, dishonest, or peer-intimidated NYC cops dishonor their ranks, Lee Camp notes about the current slowdown: "Has all hell broken loose? Has there been a crime spree across Gotham worse than anything seen in the Batman movies, with catwomen throwing people out of windows? . . . Well, no. There's been . . . um . . . peace and quiet."

by Ken

We haven't touched base in a while with crusading comic Lee Camp, whose uproarious maximum-voltage performing style often masks what pops out at you when you read him in print: that he's one of the most lucid real-world commentators around.

As you've probably heard -- and if you haven't, you're hearing about it now -- here in New York City we're in the grip of a police slowdown that the cop-union boss says isn't one (apparently unconcerned about the spectacle of the head of the police union standing up for the media and lying his silly-billy guts out). The cops, you see, are madder than wet hens at Mayor Bill de Blasio, for reasons , . . well, we'll come to that. For now let's just say they're so mad, they could turn their backs on him at public events and even boo him. Okay, it's not that they "could," they did. (See Howie's post last week "The Next Generation Of NYPD Looks To Be About As Rotten As The Current One.")

First let's take a look at this missive Lee Camp has sent out to his e-mail list, with the subject line "Something I noticed recently":

Hey Fighters,

Because they're mad at NYC's mayor, the NYPD decided to largely stop working over the past couple weeks. (Yes, really.)¹

They decided to only arrest people "when they needed to be arrested," rather than arresting people all day simply to keep our backdoor class system in place and make money for the state.² Arrests are down 66% and traffic violations are down a whopping 94%.

And WHAT HAPPENED? Has all hell broken loose? Has there been a crime spree across Gotham worse than anything seen in the Batman movies, with catwomen throwing people out of windows?

...Well, no.

There's been... um...peace and quiet.

Turns out that NOT arresting every Black person because they got annoyed with you after you threw them up against a wall for having the nerve to walk down the street does NOT bring about Armageddon.

Turns out that NOT giving out thousands of parking tickets and hundreds of summonses for riding a bicycle the wrong way down an empty street does NOT turn NYC into a Mad Maxx world of mob rule.

And on top of that I bet there are now PLENTY of police available to respond to REAL crime or REAL emergencies. Perhaps arresting people only when they "need to be arrested" is a better plan, and the NYPD just accidentally proved it to the nation.³

We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. So either you need to believe that we are a uniquely criminal society OR that we have a uniquely fucked up criminal justice system.

I'm going with option B.

Thank you -- and as always...

Keep fighting,
Lee

Citations for the above stories/claims:
1. New York Magazine, NYPD Continues That Whole ‘Not Really Arresting Anyone’ Thing
2. Rolling Stone, The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal
3. Think Progress, How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage

NOW IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE --

about the police slowdown, and what exactly their grievances might be (they don't seem very clear about this, or at least not very honest), the sources Lee cites above happen to be excellent.

The ThinkProgress piece, called "How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage," by Kira Lerner and Igor Volsky, has some interesting things to say about this business of the police being used as what the old cartoons might have called "revenooers" for municipal government, apparently now forced to drum up a significant portion of the city budget (links onsite):

Although it’s not the intended goal of the work stoppage, the decline in arrests could save New Yorkers money. The city residents who are normally hit with tickets for minor violations tend to be low income individuals who are forced to pay up a hefty portion of their paychecks.

The city began following the broken-windows style of policing in the early 1980s, a strategy championed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton which focuses on eliminating low-level crime to prevent more violent offenses in the city’s neighborhoods. But a report earlier this year by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan found that the NYPD’s practice of arresting more people for minor offenses since 1980 has disproportionately affected young black and Latino men.

While de Blasio and Bratton have followed through on their promise to reform the city’s stop and frisk practices and the mayor announced in November that police would stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possessions, there are still racial biases in police practices throughout the city that result in a tougher financial burden on those already struggling to make ends meet.
And New Yorkers of all income levels are also saving money on one of the most consistent ways the city can slam people with tickets— parking violations are down by 92 percent, from 14,699 to just 1,241 this year.

NYPD officers have long spoken about quotas which require them to issue a certain number of summons per month to maintain statistics showing a reduction of crime in the city’s neighborhoods. Although Bratton promised an end to arrest quotas when he took office in January, the city’s police are still operating under a quota system which is illegal under state law, according to a recent report by the Police Reform Organizing Project. The group called on Bratton and de Blasio to end the quota system in its October report, which described how police are still using the quota system, as evidenced by the number of misdemeanor arrests and the poor quality of those arrests under Bratton.

The Rolling Stone citation is a piece by Matt Taibbi called "The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal," and naturally you should read in its entirety, because it's, you know, Matt Taibbi. Let's focus on what Matt has to say about the cops' enforced revenue-generating activities (again, links onsite):

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 constituencies 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.

NOW IF THE COPS WERE BITCHING ABOUT THIS --

they'd have not only a point but a fair amount of deserved sympathy in the metropolis. Instead they're claiming that what they're really steamed about is the fact that Mayor de Blasio has this crazy idea that the cops who are charged with enforcing the law also have certain obligations to follow the law. This is apparently an intolerable departure from the practice of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani and, in particular, Emperor-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who treated the cops as his personal imperial guard, and a law unto themselves -- except, of course, for all that revenue-raising he forced them to do, which apparently matters less in memory than their implicit 007-style License to Kill. Or rather more-than-007-style, since James Bond, after all, had to listen to M natter on about all those guys he killed who he was supposed to bring in alive -- and listen without so much as talking back, let alone going on strike.

Instead our cops are either dimwitted enough or dishonest enough or intimidated enough by their brethren to scream about blood on the mayor for the recent murders of the two ambushed cops, which is bullshit. And alas, they probably are garnering public sympathy, for dangerously wrong reasons, among similarly dimwitted or dishonest or peer-intimidated New Yorkers. This will only make it harder for the city and its residents to find real ways of dealing with our real problems.

Of course, if the cops did make a federal case, or at least a union-rulebook-slowdown case, out of this whole business of their forced participation in the city's revenue-raising rackets, they probably wouldn't get a much happier response from city government. And this has nothing to do with this particular mayor, because he inherited this fiscal from predecessors who didn't get backs-turned-on or booed by New York's Finest.

Which brings us to the sad reality that for us New Yorkers to maintain this gaudy lifestyle we're accustomed to, the municipal treasury is dependent on: (a) taxes paid from the bloated wages and bonuses paid to the Wall Street moguls and stooges, and (b) the racket revenues raised this way, with the burden falling on New Yorkers least able to pay.

Sheesh! I wish there was somebody I could turn my back on and boo.


FOR MORE ON LEE CAMP --

and his ever-growing assortment of offerings and activities, visit his website, leecamp.net.

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