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Call it whatever you like, but it is increasingly obvious that NY city police are on a de-policing strike. The New York Times reports that arrests across the city are down for the second week in a row. This is not an accident. Police in the ranks were very upset with the mayor, de Blasio, when he said that he had cautioned his own son, a mixed race young man with darker skin, about encounters with police and, de Blasio said, he worries about what might happen to him in the city.
Coming at a time when police from coast to coast are under the spotlight because of police killings of unarmed black men, the mayor hit a nerve. This, in turn, led some officers to shun the mayor at the various memorials and funerals for the two officers killed by an apparently insane person from Maryland. They were not happy, to say the least.
De-policing is a tactic to force mayors and other officials to go along with what the police want and say they need: unconditional support. They don’t want to be facing the high risk of indictment and trial if they shoot someone in the course of their work. They want to walk and, also, to be applauded as heroes for facing down criminals.
We have seen a recent probable example of de-policing in Ferguson, Missouri where the police withdrew to staging areas and, in effect, let the city burn. The same thing happened in Los Angeles in 1992 where hundreds of police and police cars drove into a staging area, but waited, and waited, and waited, to come out. The rioting was full blown by the time they did emerge.
This is a kind of black mail and it should not be tolerated by the mayor of New York or anywhere else. What can he do, though? It is very difficult to prove that someone is deliberately ignoring doing their job.** They are not required to make arrests every time they go out, of course. De Blasio could start by letting the police know he will not put up with it and, further, that he and the police supervisors will be looking for opportunities to crackdown. Absent that, some mass firings would likely be in order.
Doug Terry, 1.5.15
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Officers made half as many arrests in the seven days through Sunday as in the same week a year ago. In the entire city, 347 criminal summonses were written, down from 4,077 a year ago, according to police statistics. Parking and traffic tickets also dropped by more than 90 percent.
Most precincts’ weekly tallies for criminal infractions were close to zero: In Coney Island, the precinct covering that neighborhood did not record a single parking ticket, traffic summons or ticket for a low-level crime like public urination or drinking, the statistics showed.
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**Proving that police are intentionally not arresting people is very difficult, almost impossible. If they are driving past the scene of a minor crime, they can simply say they didn’t see anything. No one is going to admit that they aren’t doing their jobs and putting the citizens are risk. Yet, it is so easy to take 8 minutes instead of 4 to get to the scene of something. Just go slow.
This seems to be a situation where a judgment has to be made on the appearance of things, because if you wait for proof, it could likely take years. The statistics seem to speak for themselves: the police in New York are on strike. Again, however, this is nearly impossible to prove.
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