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What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

nickfarr.org

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Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#51

Post by TwoBit »

chimeracoder wrote: post #7

> “Is that a Muslim or Hipster beard?” by a crew of three NYPD officers in Times Square. I'm very curious to hear the full story behind this one. On a separate note - I used to work in Chelsea[0]. Two or three days of the week, as I was leaving the subway, I would see NYPD questioning and/or frisking a young, black man or women. I saw this happen for months, and never once was the person being questioned/frisked whit…

I'm going to guess that your friend didn't go to prison for 18 months solely for asking an officer for their badge number.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#52

Post by baby »

TwoBit wrote: post #51
chimeracoder wrote: post #7

> “Is that a Muslim or Hipster beard?” by a crew of three NYPD officers in Times Square. I'm very curious to hear the full story behind this one. On a separate note - I used to work in Chelsea[0]. Two or three days of the week, as I was leaving the subway, I would see NYPD questioning and/or frisking a young, black man or women. I saw this happen for months, and never once was the person being questioned/frisked whit…

I'm going to guess that your friend didn't go to prison for 18 months solely for asking an officer for their badge number.

I went to court for eating a sandwich in the street. I'm pretty sure this could have happened.

EDIT: here's the full story: http://p1x3l.com/article/121/cowboy-america/

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#53

Post by baddox »

TwoBit wrote: post #51
chimeracoder wrote: post #7

> “Is that a Muslim or Hipster beard?” by a crew of three NYPD officers in Times Square. I'm very curious to hear the full story behind this one. On a separate note - I used to work in Chelsea[0]. Two or three days of the week, as I was leaving the subway, I would see NYPD questioning and/or frisking a young, black man or women. I saw this happen for months, and never once was the person being questioned/frisked whit…

I'm going to guess that your friend didn't go to prison for 18 months solely for asking an officer for their badge number.

Do you mean that this wasn't the official charge? Because I'm sure the official charge was something else.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#54

Post by joe_the_user »

chimeracoder wrote: post #7

> “Is that a Muslim or Hipster beard?” by a crew of three NYPD officers in Times Square. I'm very curious to hear the full story behind this one. On a separate note - I used to work in Chelsea[0]. Two or three days of the week, as I was leaving the subway, I would see NYPD questioning and/or frisking a young, black man or women. I saw this happen for months, and never once was the person being questioned/frisked whit…

NEVER ask a police officer for his/her badge number.

I can believe that this is good advice.

But I also have to mention that "get the officer's badge number" has been the generic advise given to people protesting/aiming-to-stop police misbehavior. And back twenty years ago, it might have been good advice (for all I know).

But here we have the quandary of every legal action people to resist the system within the system.

The poor people who passively take the punishment meted out to them have learned over a long, painful period that standing out and resisting gets them problems. And the cops learn ways to teach them this if behavior X becomes a serious impediment to their standard way of operating.

I know for serious charges, where the courts feel a need to keep the "plea bargaining" racket going, pleading not guilty is an invitation to an absurdly disproportionate sentence. It may be that people could actually get a chance at fairness if many began to plead not guilty (as the article suggests) but it seems likely the courts would begin "kicking butt and naming names" if such behavior slowed it down and that pleading guilty might become a similar invitation to abuse that asking an officer for his badge number seems to be now.

Which is a long way to say we need systemic reform that individual protest isn't enough to get.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#55

Post by arg01 »

Glyptodon wrote: post #32
harryh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35k officers / 468 square miles ~= 75 officers per square mile.

Just as a comparison, Albuquerque has ~8 police per sq. mile, and Tucson has ~4.5 police per sq. mile. However, New York has ~27000 people/sq. mile, while Tucson has ~2800 and Albuquerque about ~3000. So NY has about ~9x the population density, but ~12x the police. Now what I'm also curious about - would you expect high population density to increase or decrease the number of police needed per capita? Off hand, I wou…

I also have your intuition but after thinking about a couple of the police's jobs I do understand how it could easily go the other way.

You have the somewhat obvious want of a visible police officer ranging an area to deter criminal activity such as shoplifting/vandalism/mugging.

But you also want the police in an area to deal with domestic dispute type crimes which you'd expect to increase at least linearly with density, possibly more so as the closer you are to your neighbors the more you may see them and the more their behavior may impact you. Which may mean that you need several more cops to respond to concurrent incidents even if the average rate of incidents is lower than what a single cop could deal with.

That's without getting in to any other issues such as bureaucracy needs/wants of larger departments. Or the odds of more dense areas being more culturally diverse/allowing higher differentials in income against distance.

So after that I think it would be quite hard to judge what would be required.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#56

Post by nickfarr »

baddox wrote: post #53
TwoBit wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that your friend didn't go to prison for 18 months solely for asking an officer for their badge number.

Do you mean that this wasn't the official charge? Because I'm sure the official charge was something else.

There was no official charge in the Stop-and-Frisk incident. I'm comparing that to a very professional (almost apologetic) Central Park trespassing ticket that ended up getting thrown out, as most of them do.

I'm assuming I was not charged with anything after the stop-and-frisk because they figured out I was probably a lot more trouble for them than I was worth. In this case, appearances were deceiving...what I was wearing at that time, due to the weather, screamed "punk kid/hipster" far more than the "Privileged Accountant who passes for White" clothing I had on underneath.

I believe everyone who's saying a person of color or otherwise underprivileged person would have had a much different outcome is 100% correct.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#57

Post by WildUtah »

balls187 wrote: post #41
cup wrote: post #12

This has been the third article on HN recently about the police. Historically it has been minority groups that only see this side of police activity. Now that upper middle class white individuals have experienced it though Its interesting to read the comments people are leaving. For the record: I believe his advice is terrible for any person of lower socio economic background and especially for a person of colour. Th…

I wonder why that middle class, and upper middle class white individuals are now experiencing an increase in police. Perhaps it's resentment of the widening income gap between 20-30 somethings in the tech industry and those in the service industry? Another HN article referenced a Bay Area police officer making a remark about being a "wannabe billionaire."

"Perhaps it's resentment of the widening income gap between 20-30 somethings in the tech industry and those in the service industry?"

Maybe. Because of the billionaire big winner image, people outside the industry see techies as very well off.

In fact, cops make a lot more on average -- benefits included -- than techies or programmers or engineers. In big American cities, cops are paid similar total compensation to doctors. The usual breakdown is 125k or so salary plus gold plated health care, various fancy bonuses and discounts and a pension plan that's worth more actuarially than all of the salary. Totals above $400k are not uncommon.

NYPD, as mentioned in op, is considered much more stingy than suburban NY departments so the cops in question may not be making quite that much.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#58

Post by nickfarr »

balls187 wrote: post #41
cup wrote: post #12

This has been the third article on HN recently about the police. Historically it has been minority groups that only see this side of police activity. Now that upper middle class white individuals have experienced it though Its interesting to read the comments people are leaving. For the record: I believe his advice is terrible for any person of lower socio economic background and especially for a person of colour. Th…

I wonder why that middle class, and upper middle class white individuals are now experiencing an increase in police. Perhaps it's resentment of the widening income gap between 20-30 somethings in the tech industry and those in the service industry? Another HN article referenced a Bay Area police officer making a remark about being a "wannabe billionaire."

In my case, it was a freak occurrence. I chose to wear my admittedly ratty looking but thrift-store looking hat along with a Century 21 snowboarding jacket.

Had it been a slightly warmer day, this incident would have likely never occurred.

That being said, I think what's happening on the left coast is the widening income gap coupled with a context switch that the cops are still catching up to. There are a lot of kids who bleed entitlement, some of whom are quite wealthy and some of whom are dirt poor.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#59

Post by nickfarr »

amagumori wrote: post #48

i'm inclined to agree with the first comment on the article. if the author was not a privileged, professional-looking white guy, his outcome could have quite likely been much worse. i disagree with his naive conclusion (based on a sample size of one instance of getting arrested for an extremely minor infraction) that the NYPD are largely "good people charged with bad policing tactics". the treatment of minority group…

I'm actually going to take you to task on this once, precisely because the NYPD is set to become a "minority majority" force if current hiring trends continue. I've had many, many more interactions with the police than these two incidents in a variety of different contexts and I believe they're decent human beings who want to do the right thing. The systematic mistreatment of all underprivileged groups (including poor whites and the mentally ill, btw.) is, when you look at it, the bad cops getting the outsized share of attention. There are lots of cops who do the right thing when they can, I see it happening all the time even beyond the patina of the blue line of intimidation.

Re: What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

#60

Post by nickfarr »

rdl wrote: post #45
paulannesley wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” — http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Then again; “Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, […]”

I posted it because it's Sunday and there wasn't much going on. I wouldn't put it up as one of the finest HN submissions ever, but I think there's some value in "this could happen to you" and "this is what you should do if". The piece itself was well written and relatively apolitical and non-threatening. The "tech" aspect is the "fsck the police" part -- I think Nick is going to go into some ways to use technology to…

I didn't put it in the article precisely because I didn't want the shift in focus--but this incident made me think a lot harder about wearing my Google Glass again.

That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a camera on them at all times. It's more for their benefit than ours.

As far as technologies that reliably work, the stop-and-frisk app is actually quite good, but requires practice like anything else.

I'd also be all for photographing cops out of habit. I stopped short of recommending that...but, hell, there's plenty of fodder here for a good month's worth of posts.

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