{"id":177495,"date":"2019-09-05T18:53:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T23:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/09\/05\/support-your-local-police-12\/"},"modified":"2019-09-05T18:53:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T23:53:00","slug":"support-your-local-police-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/09\/05\/support-your-local-police-12\/","title":{"rendered":"Support Your Local Police"},"content":{"rendered":"
In response to being deprived of their constitutional right to strangle black men to death, the New York Police Department is engaging in a slowdown.<\/div>\n

It turns out that in most cases, the the result of this is the opposite of what one would expect: Serious crimes drop.<\/p>\n

There are a number of theories as to why this happens, but the most likely one is that police disrupt the community less, and focus more intently on major crimes when they aren’t busy writing traffic tickets and hassling buskers.<\/p>\n

This is exactly what has happened in New York City<\/a>:<\/p>\n

While progressives and reformers wax poetic about reducing low-level arrests, one group is making it happen: the NYPD. Not out of some newfound understanding about the moral and practical dangers of bringing the full might of the state down on people suspected of loitering, but rather as part of a coordinated hissy fit borne of a profound misunderstanding about the value New Yorkers place on these low-level arrests. <\/p>\n

Last month, after Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner, was fired, the president of the city\u2019s largest police union encouraged<\/a> his 24,000 rank-and-file members to do less policing. \u201cWe are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed \u2018reckless\u2019 just for doing their job,\u201d Patrick Lynch, the longtime president of the Police Benevolent Association, said. \u201cWe will uphold our oath, but we cannot and will not do so by needlessly jeopardizing our careers or personal safety.\u201d It was a warning to the public as well, criminologists say, but one predicated on the idea that the public wants low-level arrests. The truth is, the slowdown has been pretty good for everyone. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The Daily Appeal spoke to Alice Fontier, the managing director of the criminal defense practice at The Bronx Defenders. I asked Fontier about how the slowdown has played out in criminal court in the Bronx, one of the most heavily policed counties in the country. Over the last few months, Fontier said, there had been at least 100 people at any given time who have been arrested and are waiting to be arraigned. During the slowdown, that number dropped to somewhere between 30 and 40 people. \u201cI was in arraignments, and most of the misdemeanors that came through were ones with actual complainants, like assaults or petit larceny from a store, not the police observation ones, like driving on a suspended license and trespassing,\u201d she said. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen a single person arrested for resisting arrest or obstructing government administration.\u201d <\/p>\n

Fontier pointed out that during the last slowdown, the PBA urged its members not to make arrests \u201cunless absolutely necessary,\u201d which indicated to many that police were making plenty of unnecessary arrests. \u201cThat\u2019s the reality. They really are unnecessary. There are far too many police officers doing far too many things all of the time.\u201d She added, \u201cIt\u2019s incredible, because nothing is happening [during this slowdown], things aren\u2019t exploding, there are no waves of violent crime, they just aren\u2019t making so many silly arrests that they shouldn\u2019t be making in the first place.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

As Matt Ford wrote<\/a> in The Atlantic about the 2014 slowdown, \u201cthe police union\u2019s phrasing\u2014officers shouldn\u2019t make arrests \u2018unless absolutely necessary\u2019\u2014begs the question: How many unnecessary arrests was the NYPD making before now?\u201d Ford posits that the slowdown \u201cchallenges the fundamental tenets\u201d of broken-windows policing. \u201cIf the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why haven\u2019t they done it before?\u201d <\/p>\n

One empirical study<\/a> published in the journal Nature presented evidence that \u201cproactive policing\u2014which involves systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations\u2014is positively related to reports of major crime.\u201d The authors examined the halt to proactive policing in late 2014 and early 2015, analyzing several years of unique data obtained from the NYPD, and found that \u201ccivilian complaints of major crimes (such as burglary, felony assault and grand larceny) decreased during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. The results challenge prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on authority and legal compliance, as they imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.\u201d <\/p>\n

Data from the latest slowdown seems to indicate a similar result.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is a downside to all of this, which is that revenues from fines and traffic tickets, but I’ve always felt that turning peace officers into revenue collection agents is a profoundly corrosive thing, so it’s all good for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to being deprived of their constitutional right to strangle black men to death, the New York Police Department is engaging in a slowdown. It turns out that in most cases, the the result of this is the opposite of what one would expect: Serious crimes drop. There are a number of theories as …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[435,526,494],"class_list":["post-177495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-crimes","tag-law-enforcement-misconduct","tag-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177495"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}