For two straight weeks, New York City police officers have sharply cut back on making arrests and issuing summonses throughout the five boroughs, magnifying the growing divide between the city’s police force and its mayor, Bill de Blasio.And this:
Dozens of New York City police officers turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio during services Sunday to honor and remember a police officer who was killed while on the job last month. The protest defied a request from the city’s police chief not to use the funeral to protest the mayor.For the last few months, a lot of cops and their political apologists have been saying things such as "if you respect our authoritah, none of this bad shit would have happened."
But when it comes time for them to respect the authority of the elected official who is their boss, nope, not gonna happen.
I believe that people largely get that police officers have jobs that can be stressful at times, boring at other times, and downright dangerous at times. I think that people understand that most cops do good work each day.
But the fact cannot be denied that there are bad cops. (Rampart Division, anyone?) There are bad procedures (NYPD's "stop and frisk", for one). There are questionable shootings. There are rotten departments (NOPD, for one). The paramilitarization of law enforcement is a problem that has impacted those who are poor and are minorities for a long time, and is now becoming apparent to all but the most entitled citizens. The reality that prosecutors routinely rubber-stamp all but the most egregious (or videoed) abuses by police officers is hardly debatable. There are towns, cities and counties that use their police and the local court systems for revenue generation.
Yet to point any or all of that out is considered by the cops to be "anti-police". Apparently, anything other than applauding them when they shoot unarmed suspects full of holes or shoot newspaper delivery women is "anti-police".
Reform will happen. There is a consensus building. The police can either be part of the process or, at the end of the day, reform will be jammed down their throats by the courts and by the politicians who ran and won on a platform of reforming the goons with guns.
3 comments:
The mayor of NYC got elected by the majority of citizens of the city.
The NYPD got elected by, err, nobody. And polls show that not even a majority of New York City residents think they're doing their job anymore. Yep, only 49% of NYC residents think the NYPD is doing their job of crime prevention.
A decade ago they could revolt and lead mobs against Mayor Dinkens because they had the majority of New Yorkers behind them. Today... not so much.
It's certainly not hard to find the comment, "There are lots of good cops," and I agree. I have some in my family.
But the best cops appear to be covering the tracks of the absolute worst.
How would cops treat me if I hid the crimes of a friend, and lied to protect him?
The interesting thing that no one seems to be mentioning is that despite the 'slowdown' or whatever they choose to call it, arrests and tickets down by double digits..NYC hasn't turned into a live action Warriors larp. Which leads one to wonder-just how much of the 'arrests' and 'summonses' they haven't been writing, were purely for revenue generation.
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