Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities • Hacker News Board

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#161

Post by krschultz » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 7:39 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #113

krschultz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with the sentiment that police are overbuying toys, but if there is any city where the police are justified in having that kind of stuff, it's New York. The terrorists are not going to attack St Louis Missouri, but they have attacked New York multiple times. I say this having just seen the NYPD bomb squad show up to investigate a bag outside my apartment this morning.

> The terrorists are not going to attack St Louis Missouri, but they have attacked New York multiple times. Which of these attacks required armored cars to fend off?

Imagine for a second an attack in which a group of people with guns attack a news room and kill a bunch of people. I know that would be hard to believe, but something like that happened literally 12 hours ago in a city on the same level as NYC. In that case, I'd like the police to have armored cars, bullet proof vests, and assault rifles.

Or maybe you want to look at the Boston Marathon bombing that ended in a shoot out with a SWAT team.

Yes, terrorism is statistically insignificant compared to car crashes or heart disease in terms of deaths. Yes, police over use their equipment. To say that NYC or other cities like it don't have an actual need for this kind of equipment sometimes is just silly.

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#162

Post by discardorama » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

korzun wrote: post #105

discardorama wrote: post #81

All this back-turning, slowdown, etc. have more to do with the NYPD contract renewal coming up. I hate to say this, but it looks to me that the unions are politicizing the death of the two officers to gain leverage in the contract negotiations.

The slain officer lived in my neighborhood. Every single officer I know was impacted by this. They have 24/hour shifts guarding their house on their own time and thousands of officers showed up to his funeral. You sound extremely ignorant.

Were these the first officers ever killed in the line of duty? No. It was a tragedy, no doubt about it. I feel bad for the families of these officers, who died simply because of the color of their uniform.

But has the NYPD union ever expressed any sorrow for the loss of Eric Garner? How about Amadou Diallo? Or Akai Gurley? Please read this before responding: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/179-nypd-invol...

And drop the fake hyperbole.

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#163

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 8:11 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #161

ceejayoz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The terrorists are not going to attack St Louis Missouri, but they have attacked New York multiple times. Which of these attacks required armored cars to fend off?

Imagine for a second an attack in which a group of people with guns attack a news room and kill a bunch of people. I know that would be hard to believe, but something like that happened literally 12 hours ago in a city on the same level as NYC. In that case, I'd like the police to have armored cars, bullet proof vests, and assault rifles. Or maybe you want to look at the Boston Marathon bombing that ended in a shoot…

My point is not "NYC doesn't need them". It's "terrorism isn't much of an argument for them". Bank robberies and hostage situations are far more likely situations to need such a thing.

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#164

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 8:15 PM UTC

diyorgasms wrote: post #148

rayiner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NY Post has been crowing about what a disaster this is and how it's de Blasio's fault. In my opinion, they're missing a tremendous opportunity. If you're an economic conservative, public unions should be your enemy #1. They have tremendous leverage in local politics, and the fat pensions they've voted for themselves are the top economic problem facing states and municipalities. Supporting de Blasio against the po…

I think the difference is that the Post and most right-wing media in the USA support not the libertarian notion of conservatism, but a more authoritarian version.

[deleted]

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#165

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #161

ceejayoz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The terrorists are not going to attack St Louis Missouri, but they have attacked New York multiple times. Which of these attacks required armored cars to fend off?

Imagine for a second an attack in which a group of people with guns attack a news room and kill a bunch of people. I know that would be hard to believe, but something like that happened literally 12 hours ago in a city on the same level as NYC. In that case, I'd like the police to have armored cars, bullet proof vests, and assault rifles. Or maybe you want to look at the Boston Marathon bombing that ended in a shoot…

> Or maybe you want to look at the Boston Marathon bombing that ended in a shoot out with a SWAT team

In that case, poorly coordinated, heavily-armed police fired hundreds of rounds into a neighborhood of primarily wood-frame houses in Watertown, Massachusetts. That's a good case for disarming all the cops involved in that incident.

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#166

Post by pdabbadabba » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

pdabbadabba wrote: post #135

fennecfoxen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know policing is hard. And frankly, I sympathize with a police officer who finds himself more intimidated by a black man on the street than a white man. It is racist and wrong to respond that way... "Wrong" maybe, but it's also statistically sound. Police 3 to 4 times more likely to shoot a black man but black men are 5.6 times more likely to shoot a police officer. (source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/kent-osban…

There is a salient statistic that you (and the WSJ editorial) have overlooked: what are the actual odds that an officer will be shot by any given black man? They are greater, you say, than an officer's chances of being shot by a white man, but is the risk objectively large? I think the answer to this is clearly no. So while it might be rational for an officer to behave as though he is more likely to be shot, this is…

Whoa! I overlooked this from the WSJ editorial:

> police are six times as likely to be killed by black civilians than black civilians are to be killed by police. . . . . [P]police are 22 times as likely to be killed by nonblack civilians than nonblack civilians are to be killed by police.

I think this tells you everything you need to know. Police are always more likely to be killed by civilians than the other way around. This is probably as it should be, unfortunately. The police are highly trained and will typically strive for non-violent resolutions. The civilians they are interacting with, however, are sometimes criminals who are high, desperate, evil, or what have you.

Officers respond to this threat with far greater force when the threat is black, than when it is white. As the author explains, "the juxtaposition suggests that the police respond far more defensively to blacks (a 1-to-6 homicide ratio) than to whites (a 1-to-22 homicide ratio). African-Americans would correctly perceive the police as three to four times quicker to pull a lethal trigger against them than against whites."

The article goes on:

> Police officers naturally take a different perspective. While blacks are 14% of the U.S. population, they account for 47% of killings of police

But this perspective is faulty. While the 6:1, 22:1 statistics naturally take into account the frequency of police-civilian contact, the latter 14:47 comparison does not. In other words, this latter statistic is likely due to the fact that police have a disproportionate amount of contact with African americans. But the 6:1, 22:1 statistics do not have this problem.

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#167

Post by pcthrowaway » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 8:59 PM UTC

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #133

pcthrowaway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Vancouver, police appear to be fairly hands-off (of course this is coming from a white male perspective, and I don't know enough black people here to have an idea of how different their experience is). And while we have a lot of drug activity, homelessness, streetwalking, etc. I believe there is a lower rate of violent/organized crime than NYC. Of course, Canadians have a much different attitude towards gun o…

> Of course, Canadians have a much different attitude towards gun ownership than Americans... That must be why Surrey had more homicides than Seattle in 2013, despite being a couple hundred thousand people smaller, and shall-issue CCW in Seattle. Maybe, just maybe, something else is involved.

Great, but you've just picked one of Canada's most violent cities and compared it to an arbitrary American city, which is also relatively safe.

By the way, the Canadian city with the highest murder rate (Red Deer, with a murder rate of 6.4 http://www.macleans.ca/worst-cities/) has a lower murder rate than nearly every city on this list of American cities by crime statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...)

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#168

Post by saraid216 » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #154

saraid216 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't. If it doesn't, then why does the theory call for small crimes to be punished?

jerf explains it well above - the theory is that the appearance of disorder begets more disorder. Whether that disorder is deliberately caused by bad actors is significant at the micro scale but somewhat moot at the macro scale. i.e., a window broken by malicious act is a bad thing, but ultimately an accidentally broken window will also contribute to crime. The notion is that the appearance of disorder signals that s…

But punishing small crimes doesn't fix broken windows, so it doesn't actually contribute to the presumed consequence of decreasing disorder.

I mean, let's say that a vandal deliberately broke a window, and this act is witnessed by a police officer. Arresting the vandal doesn't fix the window, so why does the theory call for such an arrest?

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#169

Post by StefanKarpinski » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 9:55 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #50

gharial wrote: post #29

I work in Manhattan and visit fairly shitty areas of Brooklyn and Queens regularly. These past few weeks have been the first time since I moved here that I've felt safe in the presence of cops. I'd read about enforcement being down just after the funeral for the officers shot in the Bronx but it really didn't click until a pair of them walked down the street by me in Chelsea. They didn't look at my SO like they were…

I'm suspecting that it will eventually prove that those that don't remember history are doomed to repeat it. NYC in the '70s and '80s was not that safe. Street crime, muggings, etc. were common. In the 1990s Giuliani stepped up patrols and sarted enforcing what most people thought were petty crimes, such as loitering, graffiti, parking violations, subway-gate-jumping, etc. with the effect that more serious crimes als…

This is just not plausible. New York is not the same city today as it was then. I grew up in the East Village in the 70s and 80s and live in same place now. Having witnessed the entire process up close and personal, I'm deeply skeptical that Giuliani's policies [1] were responsible for more than a minuscule drop in crime here – it was almost entirely due economic and demographic changes. The new "relaxed" police enforcement is how enforcement morally and practically ought to be. I would be thrilled if they continue this indefinitely. Maybe the cops could feel like they actually exist to help the people who live here instead of harassing them.

[1] The culmination of those policies led to a cop trying to ticket my mother for jay walking. I say "try" because what happened instead is that she lectured him for a good 20 minutes and in the end he apologized and tore up the ticket.

Re: Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

#170

Post by everyOtherTime » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 10:09 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #134

everyOtherTime wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assuming I'm new here. Hi, I see that you have more than 500 karma, so you probably downvoted me. That's great, because I created this throw-away account specifically because of thin-skinned people like you. Did that last sentence also come across as an ad hominem attack?

The fact that you're taking the time to make an account and post comments tells me that you value the ability to influence people's minds. Posting ad hominem attacks on Hacker News is counterproductive to that goal. It will attract downvotes, which will turn your comment white and make it hard to read. Comments that are hard to read don't work very well for influencing people. Also, even if your comment weren't downv…

As a natural scofflaw, I find a special affinity for this unofficial shift in the NYPD's policies. You might notice that this personal quality also aligns with my tendency to flout other rules.