Effective at what? An occupying army can keep the streets safe with brutal tactics if it doesn't care about the consent of the governed. But that's not, or shouldn't be, the measure of effective policing in a free country. Effective means controlling crime in a way that makes witnesses from the community willing to cooperate with the police, and juries from the community willing to convict. "Tough" police tactics that violate people's rights and alienate them aren't effective by that measure.
It's not a different conversation. If police shot on sight people carrying contraband, that would be effective in a narrow sense, and I suppose you'd say that's unrelated to consent of the governed. But it's a fantasy to think you can separate "effectiveness" from legitimacy when it comes to policing, in a system that depends on witnesses cooperating and juries convicting.
It would simply mean no one carries contraband - and no one gets shot. We’d have all the good of no contraband, with none of the violence, provided we were credible enough about it.
Because heavy policing has really downsides that people needs to put up with. Setting aside that this policy doesn't seem to work, it seems reasonable to ask neighborhoods what theyre willing to put up with, with regards to fighting crime. The effects of crime seem to be very localized, sometimes clustering block by block. Why not ask people what theyre willing to deal with. Many seem to want more cops, but as de Blasio's campaign showed, stop and frisk is unpopular in many of these olaces.places
"X is used in circumstance Y; in Y, incentives are diametrically opposed to circumstance Z; therefore X should not be used in Z" is sensical, though....
True. Which is why, I support swarming the neighborhood with beat cops. All sorts of interventions that use data. I just don't support civil rights violations. There are 1000s of things we could do to prevent gun violence. We could have cops search all cars entering neighborhood. Go door to door searching houses. Stop and Frisk is not appropriate if the person hasn't committed any other crime.
You're articulating a balance test or simply that anything that cuts crime becomes acceptable?
I tend to think it should be a balance test, but those get tricky really fast. Its very easy to keep giving a little more power to the state in pursuit of safety and then you wake up and realize that China has locked up a million Uyghurs with the rationale of public safety.
You've often articulated strong state intervention to suppress crime - where would you draw a line and say "NO" this is too far?
The founding documents of our country were right on this topic: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
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 find it amazing anyone can think America is lax on violent criminals. America has by far the most brutal justice system of any Western democracy.
What needs to happen for you to think the problem isn't too little brutality? Your police kill more people in a year than other countries do in a lifetime, they are armed with a plethora of military equipment, your incarceration rate puts most dictatorships to shame.
Brutality and laxity are by no means mutually exclusive. I’ll note that Britain, for example, doesn’t offer bail to violent offenders or those accused of violent crimes.
"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
I don't know anything about bail. Conditions in UK prisons are bad. Sufficiently so the responsible government minister actually said so at one point, although he was replaced shortly afterwards
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 cop killings are the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is your police culture is closer to an occupying force than a public service.
UK police aren't even called a "police force" any more. They're a "police service".
In the US, a police union in the biggest city publicly declared war on its mayor and doxxed his daughter. Hundreds of millions in military gear. Qualified immunity. Civil asset forfeiture.
That, and the culture that supports the police in acting that way, seems to me to be the real problem. Not a shortage of brutality.
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.
A sane society react to that by restricting gun ownership. Like Australia after the Port Arthur massacre. American law creates the conditions for violence, then when violence occurs treats the people involved barbarically. Shameful.
I do wonder when Americans watch films about the Roman Empire, a technological and military superpower that treated many of its people shamefully.... look familiar at all?
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.
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.
Peruto was nuts, but the next mayoral primary is absolutely going to be a referendum on law and order. Kenney is… well, he’s less terrible than De Blasio, I guess.
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
It’s time for liberal city leaderships to show the country they can tackle homelessness, crime and public unions or continue to be exposed as ineffective platitude peddlers.
Probably depends on the city. Both seem of elevated concern in Chicago where crime now is encroaching to all parts of the city and the teachers union continues to strike or threaten strike.
I could imagine some kind of grand bargain where we simultaneously crack down on employers and landlords for things like wage theft, illegal eviction, tax evasion, etc.
Modern right-of-center ideology(since ~2016) is to make shit up, post it on Facebook, then turn whatever sticks into the party platform. Therefore it is impossible to take anything they say seriously. \s
You weren't supposed to agree with it. It isn't true of "right-of-center." Much like your assessment is untrue of "left-of-center." It is instead true of a narrow band of ideologues.
“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.
Watching Adams try to reset the city’s relationship with the effectively independent NYPD promises to be the most grimly entertaining aspect of an administration that is unlikely to be lacking in either grim _or_ entertaining. This is all going to happen against the backdrop of the leadership of the SBA going to jail for various financial grifts, just for a start.
I assume adams is mostly talking tough, but whatever he and the NYPD decide on it will end up very different than Bloomberg era street policing bc possessing small quantities of pot is now legal. Not to minimize the hassle and humiliation of a random police frisking but the chance of being caught and put through court or just given a ticket for holding a joint was a big part of the burden this imposed on non-gun carrying young men.
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.
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).
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'.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
Stop and frisk was authorized by the 1968 Supreme Court decision of Terry v. Ohio, which permitted a brief, investigatory detention when there was “articulable suspicion” that criminal activity was afoot. The officer was authorized to pat down the detainee’s outer clothing and search further of he felt any weapons or contraband. Terry never authorized indiscriminate stops or stops simply because a person was black or was present in a high crime neighborhood. For the stop to be constitutional, there had to be something more, eg loitering, appearing to case a business, suspicious hand to hand exchanges, or the like.
Police stretch the law all the time, and I’m sure many stops were based on little more than racial profiles. My point is that a “stop and frisk” occurs any time a person is detained and frisked on less than probable cause. Stop and frisk does not have to mean indiscriminate or racially motivated stops.
Yeah I think we need better terminology here. The act of "stop-and-frisk" can be justified in individual cases. The *program* of "stop-and-frisk" as it was designed under Bloomberg was no good. It's confusing.
The key question is: Which one is Adams referring to? Arguably he must be referring to the latter, since the latter is the only thing that's been banned under DeBlasio (as I understand it).
MY’s point that Adams mentioning stop and frisk opens the door to bad things is dubious. The NYPD is still conducting Terry stops. They just don’t do as many.
My gut is he means something like assigning the new academy graduates to foot patrol in high crime areas and then giving the better precinct / unit assignments (on average) to the new cops that show activity. That type of thing has been floating around since before official ‘stop and frisk’ and has been going on in the background. But it can be more or less emphasized. That would mean young mean sometimes getting stopped and frisked on less than probable cause but would not be ‘stop and frisk’ and allows the dept to disavow any embarrassing incidents as that particular cop being overzealous as opposed to the whole thing being official policy.
I’ve read that stop and frisk is a substitute for having high level street police officers on the same neighborhood detail continually so they knew who to stop because they knew what was going on, therefore their pretest probability when they stop someone is much higher than the average officer just rolling into the neighborhood?
Statistics smatistics. Frisking people for no reason is wrong. I don't care if it was very effective. My shortest post ever.
Yes, it is the tactic of an outside occupying force, not a civilian police force that's part of the community.
It's similar to the same reason I think the death penalty is wrong... the cost/risk is not worth any gain.
Effective at what? An occupying army can keep the streets safe with brutal tactics if it doesn't care about the consent of the governed. But that's not, or shouldn't be, the measure of effective policing in a free country. Effective means controlling crime in a way that makes witnesses from the community willing to cooperate with the police, and juries from the community willing to convict. "Tough" police tactics that violate people's rights and alienate them aren't effective by that measure.
It's not a different conversation. If police shot on sight people carrying contraband, that would be effective in a narrow sense, and I suppose you'd say that's unrelated to consent of the governed. But it's a fantasy to think you can separate "effectiveness" from legitimacy when it comes to policing, in a system that depends on witnesses cooperating and juries convicting.
It would simply mean no one carries contraband - and no one gets shot. We’d have all the good of no contraband, with none of the violence, provided we were credible enough about it.
Because heavy policing has really downsides that people needs to put up with. Setting aside that this policy doesn't seem to work, it seems reasonable to ask neighborhoods what theyre willing to put up with, with regards to fighting crime. The effects of crime seem to be very localized, sometimes clustering block by block. Why not ask people what theyre willing to deal with. Many seem to want more cops, but as de Blasio's campaign showed, stop and frisk is unpopular in many of these olaces.places
I don't care if say 70% (or even 99%) of the community is willing to give up their rights in the futile pursuit of safety.
I'm still not going to ok with searching people without probable cause
"X is used in circumstance Y; in Y, incentives are diametrically opposed to circumstance Z; therefore X should not be used in Z" is sensical, though....
True. Which is why, I support swarming the neighborhood with beat cops. All sorts of interventions that use data. I just don't support civil rights violations. There are 1000s of things we could do to prevent gun violence. We could have cops search all cars entering neighborhood. Go door to door searching houses. Stop and Frisk is not appropriate if the person hasn't committed any other crime.
"We could have cops search all cars entering neighborhood. Go door to door searching houses"
Those would be just as wrong and unconstitutional as stop and frisk
That's my point. It would work. Would also be unconstitutional.
Constitution. Bill of rights. I am on comfortable letting the government have too much power.
For instance the death penalty. I do not want the state to have the power to end life (except in war)
Even if it cut crime 99% I would not support it.
I’m also against unreasonable gun control and believe in the Second Amendment. Same arguments apply.
You're articulating a balance test or simply that anything that cuts crime becomes acceptable?
I tend to think it should be a balance test, but those get tricky really fast. Its very easy to keep giving a little more power to the state in pursuit of safety and then you wake up and realize that China has locked up a million Uyghurs with the rationale of public safety.
You've often articulated strong state intervention to suppress crime - where would you draw a line and say "NO" this is too far?
"If there was a "civil rights violation" that cut down crime by 99% would you still not be in favor of it?"
no
The founding documents of our country were right on this topic: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
Justice Scalia was pretty critical of Terry stops. Not everyone knows that about him.
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!
Bloomberg got around this by paying people off and we should probably all be more honest about that. It’s not very replicable.
Sure it is. Political machines pay people off with public funds to get shit done, and we need them back.
Let’s see what Adams does…
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 find it amazing anyone can think America is lax on violent criminals. America has by far the most brutal justice system of any Western democracy.
What needs to happen for you to think the problem isn't too little brutality? Your police kill more people in a year than other countries do in a lifetime, they are armed with a plethora of military equipment, your incarceration rate puts most dictatorships to shame.
SMDH.
Brutality and laxity are by no means mutually exclusive. I’ll note that Britain, for example, doesn’t offer bail to violent offenders or those accused of violent crimes.
The British justice system has plenty to be ashamed of sadly
If that’s something to be ashamed of, to your mind, I’m very, very glad that you vote on your side of the Atlantic and not mine.
Violent offenders should not be permitted to buy their way to temporary freedom, and nonviolent ones should not have to.
"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
I don't know anything about bail. Conditions in UK prisons are bad. Sufficiently so the responsible government minister actually said so at one point, although he was replaced shortly afterwards
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/23/rory-stewart-resign-prison-violence-improve
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 cop killings are the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is your police culture is closer to an occupying force than a public service.
UK police aren't even called a "police force" any more. They're a "police service".
In the US, a police union in the biggest city publicly declared war on its mayor and doxxed his daughter. Hundreds of millions in military gear. Qualified immunity. Civil asset forfeiture.
That, and the culture that supports the police in acting that way, seems to me to be the real problem. Not a shortage of brutality.
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
A sane society react to that by restricting gun ownership. Like Australia after the Port Arthur massacre. American law creates the conditions for violence, then when violence occurs treats the people involved barbarically. Shameful.
I do wonder when Americans watch films about the Roman Empire, a technological and military superpower that treated many of its people shamefully.... look familiar at all?
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.
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.
Peruto was nuts, but the next mayoral primary is absolutely going to be a referendum on law and order. Kenney is… well, he’s less terrible than De Blasio, I guess.
But that’s about it.
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.
One would *think* it would be straightforward to do away with bail entirely for nonviolent offenses, while also…
Doing away with bail entirely for violent offenses.
Just in the exact opposite sense, of “you sit in jail until trial, period.”
As noted above, Peruto was insane.
Nutter *bitch-slapped* Krasner in an Inquirer op-ed on Tuesday. It was interesting to watch.
dont we need clones of the squad
Only if you want a permanent GOP majority and no progress on any issue ever.
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
It’s time for liberal city leaderships to show the country they can tackle homelessness, crime and public unions or continue to be exposed as ineffective platitude peddlers.
Yes on the first two, but "public unions" is a hobbyhorse of the right, not a widespread concern of Joe Public.
"public TEACHERS unions" are a hobbyhorse of the right.
"public POLICE unions" are a hobbyhorse of the left.
They both (to me) have similar issues.
I am inclined to agree with you that I'm not sure that either is a wide concern of most voters.
Probably depends on the city. Both seem of elevated concern in Chicago where crime now is encroaching to all parts of the city and the teachers union continues to strike or threaten strike.
I could imagine some kind of grand bargain where we simultaneously crack down on employers and landlords for things like wage theft, illegal eviction, tax evasion, etc.
Modern right-of-center ideology(since ~2016) is to make shit up, post it on Facebook, then turn whatever sticks into the party platform. Therefore it is impossible to take anything they say seriously. \s
You weren't supposed to agree with it. It isn't true of "right-of-center." Much like your assessment is untrue of "left-of-center." It is instead true of a narrow band of ideologues.
“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.
Watching Adams try to reset the city’s relationship with the effectively independent NYPD promises to be the most grimly entertaining aspect of an administration that is unlikely to be lacking in either grim _or_ entertaining. This is all going to happen against the backdrop of the leadership of the SBA going to jail for various financial grifts, just for a start.
I assume adams is mostly talking tough, but whatever he and the NYPD decide on it will end up very different than Bloomberg era street policing bc possessing small quantities of pot is now legal. Not to minimize the hassle and humiliation of a random police frisking but the chance of being caught and put through court or just given a ticket for holding a joint was a big part of the burden this imposed on non-gun carrying young men.
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.
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).
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'.
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.
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
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.
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.
So create that world. Because I guarantee you that the residents of high-crime areas do not, in the main, agree that “presence is bad.”
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.
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.
Stop and frisk was authorized by the 1968 Supreme Court decision of Terry v. Ohio, which permitted a brief, investigatory detention when there was “articulable suspicion” that criminal activity was afoot. The officer was authorized to pat down the detainee’s outer clothing and search further of he felt any weapons or contraband. Terry never authorized indiscriminate stops or stops simply because a person was black or was present in a high crime neighborhood. For the stop to be constitutional, there had to be something more, eg loitering, appearing to case a business, suspicious hand to hand exchanges, or the like.
Police stretch the law all the time, and I’m sure many stops were based on little more than racial profiles. My point is that a “stop and frisk” occurs any time a person is detained and frisked on less than probable cause. Stop and frisk does not have to mean indiscriminate or racially motivated stops.
Yeah I think we need better terminology here. The act of "stop-and-frisk" can be justified in individual cases. The *program* of "stop-and-frisk" as it was designed under Bloomberg was no good. It's confusing.
The key question is: Which one is Adams referring to? Arguably he must be referring to the latter, since the latter is the only thing that's been banned under DeBlasio (as I understand it).
MY’s point that Adams mentioning stop and frisk opens the door to bad things is dubious. The NYPD is still conducting Terry stops. They just don’t do as many.
My gut is he means something like assigning the new academy graduates to foot patrol in high crime areas and then giving the better precinct / unit assignments (on average) to the new cops that show activity. That type of thing has been floating around since before official ‘stop and frisk’ and has been going on in the background. But it can be more or less emphasized. That would mean young mean sometimes getting stopped and frisked on less than probable cause but would not be ‘stop and frisk’ and allows the dept to disavow any embarrassing incidents as that particular cop being overzealous as opposed to the whole thing being official policy.
I’ve read that stop and frisk is a substitute for having high level street police officers on the same neighborhood detail continually so they knew who to stop because they knew what was going on, therefore their pretest probability when they stop someone is much higher than the average officer just rolling into the neighborhood?
So… deliberately cultivating ignorance to lower accountability standards? Sounds about right.