You make a vital distinction that I’ve been trying to figure out. Having worked on legislative issues, I’ve talked to so many Black community leaders who see better policing not in conflict with policing without abuse. As usual the most level-headed r those closest to issue not the professional activists, media or talking heads. So surge well-trained police into problem areas on large enough numbers that the criminals literally can’t hide. Stay until it’s cleaned up. What’s so hard about that?
But, I struggle to accept the finding that a substantial reduction in the chance someone will get caught with an illegal weapon is unconnected to whether that someone chooses to carry or use an illegal weapon. Sentences for getting caught with an illegal firearm are harsh. Is it really the case that eliminating the chance of getting frisked had no impact on whether people carried illegal weapons?
Seems better to just say we shouldn't treat people like criminals until we have evidence they are a criminal. (i.e. no baseless frisking).
Or is it possible that there was a delay between the end of stop and frisk and increased shootings? Perhaps it may take a while for people who carry illegal weapons (and who are unlikely to read the NYT or listen to de Blasio's platform and political promises) to learn that the NYPD no longer is frisking people.
One factor, for sure, in NYC, is that the police are no longer catching and frisking fare-beaters at subway turnstiles. The police picked up a lot of illegal guns that way, also identified a lot of people with outstanding warrants. Much easier to catch criminals that way, than trying to chase them down on the platforms and tracks. It's much more than just the $2.75.
Stop and searching someone without probable cause should never be constitutional. And any judge that says otherwise should be removed from the bench for violating his oath to the constitution.
The 4th amendment is very clear. You need probable cause. You see someone coming out of a broken window, go ahead. But stopping people on the street and searching them will NEVER be ok.
I think you are talking past each other. Almost any officer is going to say that they are searching for a reason. The real question is what is acceptable as probably cause. And that's not an easy question to answer in many situations. For example, does matching the description of a crime suspect create probably cause?
The distinction you are trying to draw about statistical discrimination doesn't work. If you put more police on the streets in high poverty black communities you are going to end up with more stops and more arrests of young black men. Some of them will be completely innocent and the experience will be very bad for them. But the reason you put more police in those areas is that that's where the crime is, putting police on the streets reduces that crime and the policy, on net, is beneficial for the community.
The problem with stop-and-frisk is not the statistical discrimination. The problem is that, first, it doesn't work and reducing crime and, second, it is particularly harmful to the police-community relationship.
You can make the argument that any kind of profiling is not allowed (which is also what hot spot based policing is), but you have to be consistent about it. And you're going to have to give up a lot of highly effective and efficient policy approaches. I don't think it's a good idea or ethically demanded, but I think you have to squarely face this fact.
You are really going to have to make up your mind about something. Yesterday in your piece on investing in preventing pandemics you remarked, quite accurately in my opinion, that it is hard to take credit for preventing a pandemic that does not occur. Today we must consider to what degree stop and frisk prevented events that did not occur because the risk of carrying concealed handguns through stop and frisk was increased. It is really hard to generate statistics on things that don't happen.
I quite agree with your arguments on discriminatory stop and frisk. You just have a difficult job of proving it didn't work. How many of those relatively rare street shootouts didn't occur because of stop and frisk? Who the hell knows?
"When John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller looked in detail at Operation Impact, they found that 100% of the local-level crime reduction was attributable to the presence of additional officers and zero percent to the practice of doing stop and frisks without probable cause."
That is, stop and frisk empirically does not appear to have stopped any shootouts that simply having more police around didn't stop.
(Caveat: I haven't researched to see if there are complaints about flaws in the study, just that Matt did address the issue of proof)
It doesn't seem like Mr Yglesias reads these comments after 9AM EST, so maybe this is a pointless question, but I didn't understand this part:
"In my personal circumstance, getting frisked was a hassle but a little bit of a funny story. For young Black and Latino men — especially ones living in low-income neighborhoods where they’d be stopped a lot — it was humiliation on top of an inconvenience"
For him getting stopped and frisked was a funny story but for Black and Latino men it was humiliating. I'm not sure how he could know that? And if he's assuming, why does he assume other people have a totally different response?
If I was personally stopped and frisked and blew the whole thing off as a funny story I'd be more inclined to assume other people thought about the same. Likewise if it was a public humiliation I'd project the same. Or it might have made sense to say that suffering the same hassle repeatedly would likely make it much less funny. But it just strikes me as weird for someone to describe the experience as one way for themselves but totally different for others.
I've been stopped and frisked and its a pretty funny story years later. Because it happened once and I don't expect it to happen again unless I do something as stupid as I did when it happened the first time. (Hopefully I'm wiser now). If every time I went out in my neighborhood I needed to leave early to get somewhere because I expected to get stopped and frisked a good portion of the time, it would be incredibly inconvenient and needing to explain that I'm late because the police stopped and frisked me for the 20th time would be incredibly humiliating.
No doubt horribly inconvenient and it probably wasn't funny at the time. Would be less funny the more it happens and the inconvenience would be more bothersome if it happened again and again.
But I don't buy humiliating is typical. I've been stopped and questioned accusingly by the police a few times while minding my own business driving, biking or walking. It's always been a nerve-racking hassle, but never once humiliating. No one I've ever met, including many blue collar and minority people, has ever described a police interaction to me as embarrassing. They're mostly very quick to complain about the experience.
I can imagine of course there are some people who have felt humiliated, but it doesn't seem typical. If someone tells me they personally felt humiliated being stopped that would be a persuasive anecdote. It would be more persuasive as "I've personally never gotten stopped and frisked but I can imagine it would be humiliating". But I don't get this "it wasn't humiliating for me but it would be for other people" train of thought.
What if we made you wear something that detailed your political affiliation and then stopped and frisked you based on that. None of the people without your particular blend of political views were searched. Your neighbors would walk by unmolested. But you would be stopped, day after day.
Might it be humiliating then? (Presumably there weren't only black and hispanic people in that neighborhood.)
If I was embarrassed by my political affiliations then it would be, but if not, it wouldn't be. But I think I'm in the majority when I say that I'm not especially embarrassed by my political affiliations.
It certainly COULD be embarrassing to be stopped and searched by the police (and as I said - it's safe to guess it's usually either annoying, frightening or enraging for many people). But I suspect it's not humiliating for most people.
But who cares about my speculation on that point because I don't know. And neither does MY. Which is why I found his statement "for me it was funny and not humiliating, but for others it's humiliating and not funny" a strange turn of logic. It's like he's arguing against his own point.
I was stopped and searched specifically for a political bumper sticker (and yes, I was told that was the reason I was being stopped). It was harrowing and not fun.
I'm a little leary of just so stories like - it's terrible and it doesn't work. I think it more likely that it's terrible and it does work. Which obviously complicates matters.
I mean that's not how social science is supposed to work. I've seen plenty of studies saying that stop-and-frisk doesn't add any value to police presence, and not really any contradicting that. Now you can nitpick these studies, and I'm sure there are weaknesses or some way of looking at the data to tease out some small effects somewhere. Maybe there's a way to do something that we'd recognize as stop-and-frisk somewhere that has a large impact on crime. However, the balance of evidence, including the NYC experience, seems to show that there are just a lot of better things that we can be doing that don't involve widespread harassment of residents by police. Everything has an opportunity cost, and no significant impact across multiple studies just tells me that the juice is just not worth the squeeze here.
Mood affiliation only explains so much. Where are these studies showing stop and frisk work? Why are the dif-in-difs used to show that the impact on crime was at most tiny bad. It's easy to throw pot-shots, but you need more than that. Crime was declining everywhere in NYC, and neighborhoods that no longer had stop-and-frisk didn't see the decline lessen, relative to other neighborhoods. That should tell us that at best stop-and-frisk wasn't very useful for NYC.
Also, these are studies on publicly available data. That the people who decided to do the study might have been liberal, is irrelevant. Anyone can go back and confirm its validity(or prove it is untrue). Anyone who is pointing figures at the political bent of the researchers is essentially admitting they are incapable of investigating the study or they are admitting it's validity.
I don't think scf0101 knows what percentage of people are 3 std dev left of the mean. Certainly all of the "social science" researchers aren't from that very narrow slice of pie(nor even 2 sigma).
Just finished Bill Bratton's book, and he describes, in depth, the positive and negative impacts of stop, question, frisk. He says, among other things, that at the time of its original implementation, when crime was extremely high in NYC, that a broad brush approach was needed as a turn-around. Times changed; the strategy was reworked into more precision policing. Think I'm summarizing that somewhat accurately but it's a long, complicated book... one that is worth reading. This is partly true because we are listening to an intelligent, pragmatic representative of the police who understands these issues on more than a surface level. I'd suggest referencing this information.
What do we know about the channel between higher policing levels and crime? Is it just by reducing 911 response times and the perception of response times, thereby increasing deterrence? Or is it something murkier than that?
I can see how having cops around reminds people that they can provide a service to them. That can have a useful deterrent and norm-setting effect, but if they're just harassing people, regardless of their actions, that won't do anything to make people go to the police with their problems.
Adams is a former cop and a long-time resident of the most impacted neighborhoods, so it’s possible he understands the politics at play here at lot better than the rest of us. Like many things Eric Adams, this strikes me as more symbolic direction setting than detailed policy proposal
But yes, stop-and-frisk is a bad policy, should not be reinstated, and there are alternatives that are both more just and more effective.
Yeah I think there's very little chance they return to the Bloomberg era rate of Terry stops. I believe that Adams will be sure to prevent that in part because as Adams notes in the op-ed, he testified in federal court about how those stops were unconstitutional! He repeated this during the campaign - he has been both consistent and precise in what he means.
I can't say I have any insight into how he thinks the politics play here, but I trust his intuition over my own
“You could say the police have been demoralized or under-supported by elected officials if you want to sound critical of reformers, or you could say the police are malingering and refusing to work if you want to sound critical of the cops.”
Both of those things can be true within the same police force.
As an aside it find it really weird that police pullback after protests is used as a cudgel against reform-types. The proximate cause of these protests are from perceptions of misuse of force. A force that "just wants to do its job" would benefit from judicious use of force.
What if your boss threatened to fire you when you next make a mistake? Would you stick your neck out to do what needs to be done, without being 'safely' told exactly what to do?
Well I'm glad you're a super hero. But most people become demoralized and when they notice people in their organizations being thrown under the bus for things that are not their fault or mistakes that arise as a normal part of doing a job properly. They'll either leave for greener pastures or learn to avoid any semblance of the situation that could be seen as a "mistake".
You seem unable to see how there could be 2 sides to the story. Yes sometimes inexcusable things happen like the Chauvin/Floyd story. Other times you have situations like Michael Brown, where the story of "hands up don't shoot" turned out to be a lie and the cop had to be on TV explaining that he actually was threatened for his life and wasn't going around looking for children to shoot in cold blood.
It's natural for many people to be outraged by Chauvin/Floyd, but it's also natural for the police to be concerned about situation 2, which resulted in several people arrested for making death threats to the officer.
Btw - I'm glad professional feedback works out well for you at your job. At my last job it didn't take to long to identify a pattern, which was you could oppose the CEO's decision, but if it turned out to be a mistake, you would be fired. If you went with his decision, and it turned out to be a mistake, nothing would happen. If it wasn't a mistake he would take credit either way.
I'm not talking about strategic, CEO-level decisions, I'm talking about run of the mill, middle manager stuff he would insert himself into despite having no idea what was going on. Most people left, or they stayed and learned not to challenge his thinking. Because it turns out it's impossible to never make a mistake at a job of any complexity
That sounds reasonable. I'm sure there's been pullbacks that have been childish and I'd criticize them, too, if that's the case. But I think it's one-sided to say that's the only thing going on.
Yeah, that seems likely. They'll tell you that they do use force judiciously, except for the "few bad apples" that they of course have no power to screen for. What I don't get is why BLM people don't bring it up more. They just seem to sweep the problem under the rug, which is counter to a lot of other activism on the policing issue.
It always makes me laugh when an institution reaches for that 'few bad apples' cliche. The actual proverb is 'a few bad apples spoils the barrel', notably it's *not* short for 'you don't need to worry about a few bad apples'.
My basic take is that "preventative" policing is bad and illegitimate. The correct fundamental role of police is to respond to and investigate crime reported by citizens. If they're not being called, is not their job.
Preventative policing is popular because it's relatively cheap and easy and it disproportionately advantages politically favored groups at the expense of others.
The proper metrics of good policing are 911 response times and clearance rates. These are relatively difficult and expensive metrics to improve. It requires better training, better funding and most of all, better laws on the books. As long as PDs have these pretextual statutes that are foundational to the "preventative" policing regime, nothing will change.
Ok. What is your idea of the mechanism for actually reducing crime (as opposed to catching and punishing those who already committed a crime)? How do "better training, better funding, better laws" actually *work* to do that? Why is it that the word "police officer" is not in this paragraph?
High clearance rates deter crime, but that's mostly a fringe benefit of having good police. The overall crime rate itself is largely a function of socio-economic factors, not policing.
You want sustainable reductions in criminality? Implement policy that reduces concentrated poverty(Housing/Education), especially childhood poverty, and promote the success sequence. Legalize black markets and disrupt the carceral state feedback loop. Reduce barriers to entry/occupational licensing. Promote economic and geographic mobility.
And you know, have police officers prioritize arresting and convicting people who commit actual crimes instead of speculatively prosecuting the pretextually criminal.
I asked about a mechanism, instead I'm getting abstractions and unsupportable assertions. How do you think the higher clearance rates happen? Do you think criminals stand around with signs on them waiting for the police to "prioritize" their arrest? How do you think the police find them and arrest them, absent the power to detect and confirm their status?
How do you get clearance rates up? Time and resource intensive investigation. Also not having a community that despises the police helps.
You prioritize by taking police resources off of traffic enforcement and other such petty bullshit and directing it to collecting evidence of specific crimes.
So more cops. Of the right kind. But are traffic cops are not the right kind of cops to solve murders. And what happens to the accident rate and road rage incidents when people figure out that nobody is enforcing the traffic laws?
Probably goes too far. I think I agree with Matt that preventative policing is fine if it just means hiring more cops so they prevent crime by walking/biking around. That form of preventative policing is certainly not cheap, nor does it necessarily advantage politically favored groups. Preventative policing is bad only if it's invasive.
In a world where we successfully get a bunch of pretextual nonsense off the books, police presence can be non-invasive. As it is, presence is bad, responsiveness is good.
It is entirely possible to suppress crime through a vast, abusive, technocratic authoritarian, police state, but that would be bad. We should not do that.
It can plausibly to the extent it improve response times, but you really have to look at the role of patrol officers in "preventative" policing regimes.
In major American metros the standard for "prevention" is to use "articulable suspicion" of ticky-tacky, pretextual, traffic/regulatory/selling loosies/etc type violations to launch fishing expedition searches intended to secure charges on unrelated possession "offenses".
The officers tasked with these duties lack the training, priorities and skills to do proper investigations.
Raising the threshold really requires taking statutes off the books. Wading into judicial "reasonableness" standards is a dead end, especially when it comes to cops.
As a Democrat, we need to clone Eric Adams and run him everywhere. (Not for his stop and frisk talk) but for his understanding that used to exist that being lax on violent criminals is not "liberal."
We have passed the record in Philadelphia of murders in a year. It is higher than the height of the crack wars.
We need to end the massive nationwide Ferguson effect, and people like Adams can do it.
I wanted Garcia to win and I am apprehensive about Adams on a lot of issues. But if he succeeds in improving the relationship between police and the public while bringing back a baseline of order, including in public spaces, that would be huge. Replaying the 70s would be terrible for cities and the people who live in them. If Adams can show a way through this, he will deserve the acclaim and national profile it would earn him.
Maybe! I think she would have been stronger and more pragmatic than that. I’ve always seen her as someone who can get things done. But maybe I’m just projecting my hopes and dreams!
I think the challenge with this idea is that in practice progressive institutional capture IS what’s left of the machine. So you have to build an alternative while still paying those folks off. Bloomberg filled in with personal wealth. We’ll see if Adams can duplicate with just public funds.
I would love it if we could dramatically reduce gun ownership and make arming police un-necessary for the most part. But what is the chance of that?
The chance of getting killed by a police officer when not armed is pretty darn small. It is nothing compared to the explosion of violence over the past year and a half in cities.
Everyone cares when George Floyd is killed.
Nobody cares about the black 2 year old killed in the cross-fire in Philadelphia by black gang members in a shoot-out.
Nobody is marching shouting, "Say his name! Say his name!"
People couldn't care less. Nor do they care about Timothy Timpa, the white man who was killed by cops kneeling on his back and neck, the same way they did to George Floyd. This is not to excuse Chauvin. But the risk factor of getting killed by a cop is infinitesimally less than being killed by civilians with guns and that does not drive clicks.
The problem is, the police are working in high-crime communities where the public writ essentially does not run. Until we can figure out how to establish the rule of law in those places, the police will (have) to be an "occupying force." This is a consequence, not a cause.
My take - from Chicago - the real problems are far below our police. The police culture is downstream of the crippling poverty and this reactionary ever escalating violence.
Last month there was a daylight shootout on the west side with ~70 rounds fired, one dead, two stolen cars, one later found burned, all five arrested were later released without charges as it's unclear who fired first and the expected "mutual combat" defense would hold for either side charged. It's a fucking mess.
Did you miss the part where all involved were released without charges? The brutality is being inflicted within the communities. The trajectory is towards lawlessness not an overreach of the justice system. I imagine Chicago is not unique here.
"Violent offenders should not be permitted to buy their way to temporary freedom"
Sure- once they're afforded due process, including an attorney to represent them, and are convicted in a court of law. You can't just..... detain potentially innocent people in prison for months & months because a cop with a GED & a bad attitude felt like arresting them that day. Cops are wrong a lot of the time! It would also give them even more astonishing power, if you're stuck in a prison until trial because a cop says committed a crime (or they framed you for one). That's like a full-on Russian or Chinese legal system, astonished to see people arguing for that on SB
"I don't think that denying bail to people suspected of violent crimes is a bad thing"
....what? They could be innocent- you can't have the state just detaining people in prison based on a police officer's say-so, this is like basic Enlightenment stuff. You need to have a person found actually guilty of a crime to take away their liberty, you can't just lock up a bunch of potentially innocent people accused but not convicted yet for months & months
When a writer writes "Stop and Frisk", the writer is being dishonest. The correct form is "Stop, Question and Frisk".
And if you do not know the difference between those two statements, it shows how you have been misleaded.
You make a vital distinction that I’ve been trying to figure out. Having worked on legislative issues, I’ve talked to so many Black community leaders who see better policing not in conflict with policing without abuse. As usual the most level-headed r those closest to issue not the professional activists, media or talking heads. So surge well-trained police into problem areas on large enough numbers that the criminals literally can’t hide. Stay until it’s cleaned up. What’s so hard about that?
Agree with the reasoning, and the conclusion.
But, I struggle to accept the finding that a substantial reduction in the chance someone will get caught with an illegal weapon is unconnected to whether that someone chooses to carry or use an illegal weapon. Sentences for getting caught with an illegal firearm are harsh. Is it really the case that eliminating the chance of getting frisked had no impact on whether people carried illegal weapons?
Seems better to just say we shouldn't treat people like criminals until we have evidence they are a criminal. (i.e. no baseless frisking).
Or is it possible that there was a delay between the end of stop and frisk and increased shootings? Perhaps it may take a while for people who carry illegal weapons (and who are unlikely to read the NYT or listen to de Blasio's platform and political promises) to learn that the NYPD no longer is frisking people.
One factor, for sure, in NYC, is that the police are no longer catching and frisking fare-beaters at subway turnstiles. The police picked up a lot of illegal guns that way, also identified a lot of people with outstanding warrants. Much easier to catch criminals that way, than trying to chase them down on the platforms and tracks. It's much more than just the $2.75.
It seems like using traffic stops as an investigation tool is similar and although not as embarrassing, it should be reconsidered similarly.
Stop and searching someone without probable cause should never be constitutional. And any judge that says otherwise should be removed from the bench for violating his oath to the constitution.
The 4th amendment is very clear. You need probable cause. You see someone coming out of a broken window, go ahead. But stopping people on the street and searching them will NEVER be ok.
The warrant is for the search. You need probable cause for the warrant.
No probable cause no search. This isn't hard
I think you are talking past each other. Almost any officer is going to say that they are searching for a reason. The real question is what is acceptable as probably cause. And that's not an easy question to answer in many situations. For example, does matching the description of a crime suspect create probably cause?
Fair enough. No I don't think matching a description would be enough
Though matching a description and being in a vehicle with a matching license plate number would be
The distinction you are trying to draw about statistical discrimination doesn't work. If you put more police on the streets in high poverty black communities you are going to end up with more stops and more arrests of young black men. Some of them will be completely innocent and the experience will be very bad for them. But the reason you put more police in those areas is that that's where the crime is, putting police on the streets reduces that crime and the policy, on net, is beneficial for the community.
The problem with stop-and-frisk is not the statistical discrimination. The problem is that, first, it doesn't work and reducing crime and, second, it is particularly harmful to the police-community relationship.
You can make the argument that any kind of profiling is not allowed (which is also what hot spot based policing is), but you have to be consistent about it. And you're going to have to give up a lot of highly effective and efficient policy approaches. I don't think it's a good idea or ethically demanded, but I think you have to squarely face this fact.
You are really going to have to make up your mind about something. Yesterday in your piece on investing in preventing pandemics you remarked, quite accurately in my opinion, that it is hard to take credit for preventing a pandemic that does not occur. Today we must consider to what degree stop and frisk prevented events that did not occur because the risk of carrying concealed handguns through stop and frisk was increased. It is really hard to generate statistics on things that don't happen.
I quite agree with your arguments on discriminatory stop and frisk. You just have a difficult job of proving it didn't work. How many of those relatively rare street shootouts didn't occur because of stop and frisk? Who the hell knows?
Matt specifically addresses this:
"When John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller looked in detail at Operation Impact, they found that 100% of the local-level crime reduction was attributable to the presence of additional officers and zero percent to the practice of doing stop and frisks without probable cause."
That is, stop and frisk empirically does not appear to have stopped any shootouts that simply having more police around didn't stop.
(Caveat: I haven't researched to see if there are complaints about flaws in the study, just that Matt did address the issue of proof)
What, in the wikipedia entry, suggests he is biased? (or is this _not_ sarcasm?)
I assume he means:
"he is an outspoken critic of stop-and-frisk in New York City,"
But, that could be because he did the research first.
Or that predisposition could have lead him to want to do the research and these are his(and others) accurate findings.
edit: I assume they mean:
I do believe that scf0101 _strongly_ prefers "they." \s
It doesn't seem like Mr Yglesias reads these comments after 9AM EST, so maybe this is a pointless question, but I didn't understand this part:
"In my personal circumstance, getting frisked was a hassle but a little bit of a funny story. For young Black and Latino men — especially ones living in low-income neighborhoods where they’d be stopped a lot — it was humiliation on top of an inconvenience"
For him getting stopped and frisked was a funny story but for Black and Latino men it was humiliating. I'm not sure how he could know that? And if he's assuming, why does he assume other people have a totally different response?
If I was personally stopped and frisked and blew the whole thing off as a funny story I'd be more inclined to assume other people thought about the same. Likewise if it was a public humiliation I'd project the same. Or it might have made sense to say that suffering the same hassle repeatedly would likely make it much less funny. But it just strikes me as weird for someone to describe the experience as one way for themselves but totally different for others.
I've been stopped and frisked and its a pretty funny story years later. Because it happened once and I don't expect it to happen again unless I do something as stupid as I did when it happened the first time. (Hopefully I'm wiser now). If every time I went out in my neighborhood I needed to leave early to get somewhere because I expected to get stopped and frisked a good portion of the time, it would be incredibly inconvenient and needing to explain that I'm late because the police stopped and frisked me for the 20th time would be incredibly humiliating.
No doubt horribly inconvenient and it probably wasn't funny at the time. Would be less funny the more it happens and the inconvenience would be more bothersome if it happened again and again.
But I don't buy humiliating is typical. I've been stopped and questioned accusingly by the police a few times while minding my own business driving, biking or walking. It's always been a nerve-racking hassle, but never once humiliating. No one I've ever met, including many blue collar and minority people, has ever described a police interaction to me as embarrassing. They're mostly very quick to complain about the experience.
I can imagine of course there are some people who have felt humiliated, but it doesn't seem typical. If someone tells me they personally felt humiliated being stopped that would be a persuasive anecdote. It would be more persuasive as "I've personally never gotten stopped and frisked but I can imagine it would be humiliating". But I don't get this "it wasn't humiliating for me but it would be for other people" train of thought.
What if we made you wear something that detailed your political affiliation and then stopped and frisked you based on that. None of the people without your particular blend of political views were searched. Your neighbors would walk by unmolested. But you would be stopped, day after day.
Might it be humiliating then? (Presumably there weren't only black and hispanic people in that neighborhood.)
If I was embarrassed by my political affiliations then it would be, but if not, it wouldn't be. But I think I'm in the majority when I say that I'm not especially embarrassed by my political affiliations.
It certainly COULD be embarrassing to be stopped and searched by the police (and as I said - it's safe to guess it's usually either annoying, frightening or enraging for many people). But I suspect it's not humiliating for most people.
But who cares about my speculation on that point because I don't know. And neither does MY. Which is why I found his statement "for me it was funny and not humiliating, but for others it's humiliating and not funny" a strange turn of logic. It's like he's arguing against his own point.
I was stopped and searched specifically for a political bumper sticker (and yes, I was told that was the reason I was being stopped). It was harrowing and not fun.
I'm a little leary of just so stories like - it's terrible and it doesn't work. I think it more likely that it's terrible and it does work. Which obviously complicates matters.
I mean that's not how social science is supposed to work. I've seen plenty of studies saying that stop-and-frisk doesn't add any value to police presence, and not really any contradicting that. Now you can nitpick these studies, and I'm sure there are weaknesses or some way of looking at the data to tease out some small effects somewhere. Maybe there's a way to do something that we'd recognize as stop-and-frisk somewhere that has a large impact on crime. However, the balance of evidence, including the NYC experience, seems to show that there are just a lot of better things that we can be doing that don't involve widespread harassment of residents by police. Everything has an opportunity cost, and no significant impact across multiple studies just tells me that the juice is just not worth the squeeze here.
Mood affiliation only explains so much. Where are these studies showing stop and frisk work? Why are the dif-in-difs used to show that the impact on crime was at most tiny bad. It's easy to throw pot-shots, but you need more than that. Crime was declining everywhere in NYC, and neighborhoods that no longer had stop-and-frisk didn't see the decline lessen, relative to other neighborhoods. That should tell us that at best stop-and-frisk wasn't very useful for NYC.
Also, these are studies on publicly available data. That the people who decided to do the study might have been liberal, is irrelevant. Anyone can go back and confirm its validity(or prove it is untrue). Anyone who is pointing figures at the political bent of the researchers is essentially admitting they are incapable of investigating the study or they are admitting it's validity.
I don't think scf0101 knows what percentage of people are 3 std dev left of the mean. Certainly all of the "social science" researchers aren't from that very narrow slice of pie(nor even 2 sigma).
Just finished Bill Bratton's book, and he describes, in depth, the positive and negative impacts of stop, question, frisk. He says, among other things, that at the time of its original implementation, when crime was extremely high in NYC, that a broad brush approach was needed as a turn-around. Times changed; the strategy was reworked into more precision policing. Think I'm summarizing that somewhat accurately but it's a long, complicated book... one that is worth reading. This is partly true because we are listening to an intelligent, pragmatic representative of the police who understands these issues on more than a surface level. I'd suggest referencing this information.
What do we know about the channel between higher policing levels and crime? Is it just by reducing 911 response times and the perception of response times, thereby increasing deterrence? Or is it something murkier than that?
I can see how having cops around reminds people that they can provide a service to them. That can have a useful deterrent and norm-setting effect, but if they're just harassing people, regardless of their actions, that won't do anything to make people go to the police with their problems.
Adams is a former cop and a long-time resident of the most impacted neighborhoods, so it’s possible he understands the politics at play here at lot better than the rest of us. Like many things Eric Adams, this strikes me as more symbolic direction setting than detailed policy proposal
But yes, stop-and-frisk is a bad policy, should not be reinstated, and there are alternatives that are both more just and more effective.
Yeah I think there's very little chance they return to the Bloomberg era rate of Terry stops. I believe that Adams will be sure to prevent that in part because as Adams notes in the op-ed, he testified in federal court about how those stops were unconstitutional! He repeated this during the campaign - he has been both consistent and precise in what he means.
I can't say I have any insight into how he thinks the politics play here, but I trust his intuition over my own
“You could say the police have been demoralized or under-supported by elected officials if you want to sound critical of reformers, or you could say the police are malingering and refusing to work if you want to sound critical of the cops.”
Both of those things can be true within the same police force.
As an aside it find it really weird that police pullback after protests is used as a cudgel against reform-types. The proximate cause of these protests are from perceptions of misuse of force. A force that "just wants to do its job" would benefit from judicious use of force.
What if your boss threatened to fire you when you next make a mistake? Would you stick your neck out to do what needs to be done, without being 'safely' told exactly what to do?
I'd like to think I'd do that too. But we are all human. Anyway its hard to argue that riots count as "professional feedback"
Well I'm glad you're a super hero. But most people become demoralized and when they notice people in their organizations being thrown under the bus for things that are not their fault or mistakes that arise as a normal part of doing a job properly. They'll either leave for greener pastures or learn to avoid any semblance of the situation that could be seen as a "mistake".
You seem unable to see how there could be 2 sides to the story. Yes sometimes inexcusable things happen like the Chauvin/Floyd story. Other times you have situations like Michael Brown, where the story of "hands up don't shoot" turned out to be a lie and the cop had to be on TV explaining that he actually was threatened for his life and wasn't going around looking for children to shoot in cold blood.
It's natural for many people to be outraged by Chauvin/Floyd, but it's also natural for the police to be concerned about situation 2, which resulted in several people arrested for making death threats to the officer.
Btw - I'm glad professional feedback works out well for you at your job. At my last job it didn't take to long to identify a pattern, which was you could oppose the CEO's decision, but if it turned out to be a mistake, you would be fired. If you went with his decision, and it turned out to be a mistake, nothing would happen. If it wasn't a mistake he would take credit either way.
I'm not talking about strategic, CEO-level decisions, I'm talking about run of the mill, middle manager stuff he would insert himself into despite having no idea what was going on. Most people left, or they stayed and learned not to challenge his thinking. Because it turns out it's impossible to never make a mistake at a job of any complexity
That sounds reasonable. I'm sure there's been pullbacks that have been childish and I'd criticize them, too, if that's the case. But I think it's one-sided to say that's the only thing going on.
Yeah, that seems likely. They'll tell you that they do use force judiciously, except for the "few bad apples" that they of course have no power to screen for. What I don't get is why BLM people don't bring it up more. They just seem to sweep the problem under the rug, which is counter to a lot of other activism on the policing issue.
It always makes me laugh when an institution reaches for that 'few bad apples' cliche. The actual proverb is 'a few bad apples spoils the barrel', notably it's *not* short for 'you don't need to worry about a few bad apples'.
My basic take is that "preventative" policing is bad and illegitimate. The correct fundamental role of police is to respond to and investigate crime reported by citizens. If they're not being called, is not their job.
Preventative policing is popular because it's relatively cheap and easy and it disproportionately advantages politically favored groups at the expense of others.
The proper metrics of good policing are 911 response times and clearance rates. These are relatively difficult and expensive metrics to improve. It requires better training, better funding and most of all, better laws on the books. As long as PDs have these pretextual statutes that are foundational to the "preventative" policing regime, nothing will change.
Ok. What is your idea of the mechanism for actually reducing crime (as opposed to catching and punishing those who already committed a crime)? How do "better training, better funding, better laws" actually *work* to do that? Why is it that the word "police officer" is not in this paragraph?
High clearance rates deter crime, but that's mostly a fringe benefit of having good police. The overall crime rate itself is largely a function of socio-economic factors, not policing.
You want sustainable reductions in criminality? Implement policy that reduces concentrated poverty(Housing/Education), especially childhood poverty, and promote the success sequence. Legalize black markets and disrupt the carceral state feedback loop. Reduce barriers to entry/occupational licensing. Promote economic and geographic mobility.
And you know, have police officers prioritize arresting and convicting people who commit actual crimes instead of speculatively prosecuting the pretextually criminal.
I asked about a mechanism, instead I'm getting abstractions and unsupportable assertions. How do you think the higher clearance rates happen? Do you think criminals stand around with signs on them waiting for the police to "prioritize" their arrest? How do you think the police find them and arrest them, absent the power to detect and confirm their status?
How do you get clearance rates up? Time and resource intensive investigation. Also not having a community that despises the police helps.
You prioritize by taking police resources off of traffic enforcement and other such petty bullshit and directing it to collecting evidence of specific crimes.
So more cops. Of the right kind. But are traffic cops are not the right kind of cops to solve murders. And what happens to the accident rate and road rage incidents when people figure out that nobody is enforcing the traffic laws?
The real fundamental problem with stop and frisk is that it's entirely based on pretextual "possession" crimes instead of actual criminal behavior.
Probably goes too far. I think I agree with Matt that preventative policing is fine if it just means hiring more cops so they prevent crime by walking/biking around. That form of preventative policing is certainly not cheap, nor does it necessarily advantage politically favored groups. Preventative policing is bad only if it's invasive.
In a world where we successfully get a bunch of pretextual nonsense off the books, police presence can be non-invasive. As it is, presence is bad, responsiveness is good.
It is entirely possible to suppress crime through a vast, abusive, technocratic authoritarian, police state, but that would be bad. We should not do that.
The locally perceived tolerability of oppressive authoritarianism certainly varies depending on the make up of the affected populace.
Japan is an oppressive authoritarian state?
It can plausibly to the extent it improve response times, but you really have to look at the role of patrol officers in "preventative" policing regimes.
In major American metros the standard for "prevention" is to use "articulable suspicion" of ticky-tacky, pretextual, traffic/regulatory/selling loosies/etc type violations to launch fishing expedition searches intended to secure charges on unrelated possession "offenses".
The officers tasked with these duties lack the training, priorities and skills to do proper investigations.
Raising the threshold really requires taking statutes off the books. Wading into judicial "reasonableness" standards is a dead end, especially when it comes to cops.
As a Democrat, we need to clone Eric Adams and run him everywhere. (Not for his stop and frisk talk) but for his understanding that used to exist that being lax on violent criminals is not "liberal."
We have passed the record in Philadelphia of murders in a year. It is higher than the height of the crack wars.
We need to end the massive nationwide Ferguson effect, and people like Adams can do it.
dont we need clones of the squad
Only if you want a permanent GOP majority and no progress on any issue ever.
I wanted Garcia to win and I am apprehensive about Adams on a lot of issues. But if he succeeds in improving the relationship between police and the public while bringing back a baseline of order, including in public spaces, that would be huge. Replaying the 70s would be terrible for cities and the people who live in them. If Adams can show a way through this, he will deserve the acclaim and national profile it would earn him.
Maybe! I think she would have been stronger and more pragmatic than that. I’ve always seen her as someone who can get things done. But maybe I’m just projecting my hopes and dreams!
Bloomberg got around this by paying people off and we should probably all be more honest about that. It’s not very replicable.
I think the challenge with this idea is that in practice progressive institutional capture IS what’s left of the machine. So you have to build an alternative while still paying those folks off. Bloomberg filled in with personal wealth. We’ll see if Adams can duplicate with just public funds.
I would love it if we could dramatically reduce gun ownership and make arming police un-necessary for the most part. But what is the chance of that?
The chance of getting killed by a police officer when not armed is pretty darn small. It is nothing compared to the explosion of violence over the past year and a half in cities.
Everyone cares when George Floyd is killed.
Nobody cares about the black 2 year old killed in the cross-fire in Philadelphia by black gang members in a shoot-out.
Nobody is marching shouting, "Say his name! Say his name!"
People couldn't care less. Nor do they care about Timothy Timpa, the white man who was killed by cops kneeling on his back and neck, the same way they did to George Floyd. This is not to excuse Chauvin. But the risk factor of getting killed by a cop is infinitesimally less than being killed by civilians with guns and that does not drive clicks.
The problem is, the police are working in high-crime communities where the public writ essentially does not run. Until we can figure out how to establish the rule of law in those places, the police will (have) to be an "occupying force." This is a consequence, not a cause.
My take - from Chicago - the real problems are far below our police. The police culture is downstream of the crippling poverty and this reactionary ever escalating violence.
Last month there was a daylight shootout on the west side with ~70 rounds fired, one dead, two stolen cars, one later found burned, all five arrested were later released without charges as it's unclear who fired first and the expected "mutual combat" defense would hold for either side charged. It's a fucking mess.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/10/15/22722600/kim-foxx-lori-lightfoot-austin-charges-shootout-jack-boys-prosecutors-police-meeting
Did you miss the part where all involved were released without charges? The brutality is being inflicted within the communities. The trajectory is towards lawlessness not an overreach of the justice system. I imagine Chicago is not unique here.
"Violent offenders should not be permitted to buy their way to temporary freedom"
Sure- once they're afforded due process, including an attorney to represent them, and are convicted in a court of law. You can't just..... detain potentially innocent people in prison for months & months because a cop with a GED & a bad attitude felt like arresting them that day. Cops are wrong a lot of the time! It would also give them even more astonishing power, if you're stuck in a prison until trial because a cop says committed a crime (or they framed you for one). That's like a full-on Russian or Chinese legal system, astonished to see people arguing for that on SB
"I don't think that denying bail to people suspected of violent crimes is a bad thing"
....what? They could be innocent- you can't have the state just detaining people in prison based on a police officer's say-so, this is like basic Enlightenment stuff. You need to have a person found actually guilty of a crime to take away their liberty, you can't just lock up a bunch of potentially innocent people accused but not convicted yet for months & months
Progressive hard-left DAs have been a disaster.
Just like extreme wokeness and DEI leftism has been a disaster in schools.
And normie Dems are paying the price.