The NYPD Tapes
villagevoice.com
The NYPD Tapes
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#2Highly recommended reading in conjunction with this article: http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-A...
E.g. note the item on page two of the Village Voice article on "points".
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#3Anyone else thinking "The Wire"?
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#4the true value of this "activity," the tapes indicate, was that it offered proof that the precinct commander and his officers were doing their jobs
Apparently cops have their own value of kloc metrics.
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#5I didn't read the full article but I imagine this illustrates the darker side of CompStat.
Along the same lines, some book recommendations:
_Armed and Dangerous: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman_, by Gina Gallo
_Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District_, by Peter Moskos
The second title covers the real-life setting for "The Wire."
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#6the true value of this "activity," the tapes indicate, was that it offered proof that the precinct commander and his officers were doing their jobs Apparently cops have their own value of kloc metrics.
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.
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#7Welcome To The New World Police State
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#8I didn't read the full article but I imagine this illustrates the darker side of CompStat. Along the same lines, some book recommendations: _Armed and Dangerous: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman_, by Gina Gallo _Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District_, by Peter Moskos The second title covers the real-life setting for "The Wire."
If you want the real setting for "The Wire", read " The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood" by David Simon and Ed Burns.
The depiction of one of today's most derelict inner-city neighborhoods is heartbreaking and disconcerting.
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#9Haven'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.
Re: The NYPD Tapes
#10Yeah 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.