Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/14/nypd-captain-taped-complaining.html
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And the NYPD can’t understand all this mistrust towards them…
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Given the whole Stop and Frisk thing, and from various stories about NYPD brass pressuring officers to stop more black males, this isn’t at all surprising.
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And now we’ll get to see what happens to a good cop.
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There are lot cops out there who are frustrated and who are upset. We are definitely doing our part to make sure that we weed out those who are good apples and make sure that they are not serving in our Police Department.
eta:
Consider a building with a few unbroken windows. If the windows are not smashed, the tendency is for human beings to repair a few more windows.
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Why isn’t this happening more.
Bein’ charitable (not that they’ve deserved it), it sounds like the CO here is being graded on how many TABs pop, and he wants to see more pops.
A “pop” is when a summons leads to an arrest because the person you summoned happened to have a warrant against them.
I think we can all agree that there’s legitimate uses of warrants to arrest legitimate criminals and that generally speaking hauling someone in because they jumped a turnstile and finding out there is a warrant out for their arrest is good news! So there’s some sound logic underpinning that.
Of course, this is also part of systemic racism. Guess which people have warrants out against them? Mostly young black and hispanic males. Because mostly black and hispanic males get arrested. Because of profiling.
So if you’re looking to issue summons for people who are going to “pop,” you’re going to profile black and hispanic males.
The poor design decision here is in trying to incentivize “popping.” Look, if someone who jumps a turnstile or whatever happens to be someone with a warrant out for their arrest, that’s great, but that’s not your primary responsibility here. You’re looking for people who are breaking the law right now. Like Birch says, everyone he is stopping is committing violations in front of him. That SHOULD be the main metric. He’s doing his job - and he’s doing it BETTER than someone who is looking for pops. If a little old white woman jumps the turnstile, she should be stopped, even if she’s probably not a wanted felon! I mean, part of the reason she may NOT be a wanted felon is because the cops who could’ve busted her were busy paying attention to young black and hispanic males!
This is the racism of systemic design, the racism of Big Data, where it just reinforces the status quo without thinking.
The officer was doing his job, and the CO should let that job be done, because it is an important job. It’s not his job to discern who may or may not have warrants out. That isn’t ANYONE’s job. Maybe if you want to find people that are evading warrants, you fund the police better and hire people who can make it their jobs. You don’t put that on your patrol officers.
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I only called NYPD once, after my apartment had been broken into. They subtly implied I was a drug dealer who didn’t know how to keep quiet. They were very polite about it.
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Let’s check back in on the story in six months and see if the officer is A) still living in New York state, B) has gainful employment of any kind.
I think that will answer your question.
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What the fuck. We’re not in New York, and didn’t have anything menacing like that, but the officer’s response when we were burglarized? “Well, what do you expect?” No clarification as to why we should expect that; I took it more as shrugged shoulder case closed sort of comment.
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When my girlfriend’s purse was stolen it was made abundantly clear to us that filing a police report would put us on the cops’ shit list for giving them bad metrics, as they had no intention of doing anything about it. Maybe they were overworked with more serious crimes! Given their aggressive prosecution of important offenses like jay walking I kind of doubt it, but it was a pretty good window into how they decided to solve problems.
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A couple of years ago I read the story of a good ex-cop who quit because he couldn’t take all the corruption anymore. He wanted to serve the public, but was unable to as a police officer.
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Long ago we taught our child that police are people wearing a uniform; and like all folks, some are good, some bad, most a mix that’s mostly good. I refuse to stop believing this, but damn some days it’s hard.
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What I find strange about the intense demand for ‘pops’ is that it seems to suggest that the police are treating “hope they do something else that will provide legal cover for stopping them” as the best strategy for picking up people with outstanding arrest warrants.
That seems weird: Obviously some criminals genuinely go ‘on the run’ because whatever they’ve done is serious enough that getting caught would be Bad; and people with outstanding warrants are probably more likely than average to be of no fixed address, informally employed, etc. but for all the stories of our surveillance dystopia, is “Hope they jump the turnstile” really the mechanism for locating people with outstanding warrants?
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what i suspect is that this enables them to raise the violation of jumping the stile ( jumping with style? ) into a crime. you have a warrant and you did this ticketable offense, so now i’m going to arrest you. even if they wouldn’t for either one alone. maybe there aren’t quotas for stop-and-frisk, but there are probably for some sort of higher level crimes.
i also think this stuff is how – when a black man gets shot – people look back and say, oh yeah: but he was a “criminal”, “with a record.”
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Well, to be technically accurate, they’re not criminals until they’re convicted and warrants aren’t convictions, so the good news is only if they pop and the warrant is…warranted and the evidence is solid and the conviction is secured against them in a fair trial in which they’re given adequate council. But statistically, they’re more likely to plea bargain so you never really know if they’re really guilty or just want to get out of jail sooner or serve a prison sentence rather than fight in court with an overworked public defender and possibly battle systemic racial bias or possible false testimony from police and face an even longer sentence for a harsher charge.
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