The NYPD Tapes(villagevoice.com) |
The NYPD Tapes(villagevoice.com) |
I lived in the 79th precinct, adjacent to the 81st. It's less dangerous, but not much -- still Bed Stuy and very block by block. I was there for about 6 months in late 2007.
The area is tense at times -- much of New York's prosperity over the last two decades hasn't trickled down to the people living there aside from landlords selling their buildings to gentrifies or speculators. There was an incident around this time where an unstable young man was shot because he had a comb the police mistook for a weapon in the dark. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had escalated into riots. Gentrification is welcome by some, protested by some, and many are indifferent to it, I think. There are very few nice places to eat or socialize or even get groceries, but there are a ton of bodegas and fried chicken/pizza places and dollar stores. It can be a very rough place, which is too bad as I got to know some very nice people on my block.
Certainly there are institutional problems in the NYPD, but also I have the suspicion that many rookie cops eventually get rotated into areas like this -- Bushwick, Bed Stuy, East New York and this contributes to much of the stuff you will learn about in these tapes. The penis jokes, the confusion on what to report and not gracefully handling tension within the communities -- I wonder if it is inexperience.
Comparisons to The Wire are natural, but in the time I lived in Bed Stuy, the only similarity I really observed was that the NYPD guys never seemed to interact with the people of the neighborhood as if they too were part of that community. Never said hi while walking their beats, never stopped to talk to the kids or the corner boys, they mostly walked in twos or threes, chatting with each other. I think for the people that live there and the cops that work there, there is us and them and not much in between.
Some of the hostility toward the police is justified, much of it isn't. But whether it is or isn't justified, it exists, and it's hard to blame cops for not going out of their way to be sociable with people who, more likely than not, hate them because they are police.
There's no easy answer. It's depressing to hear adult police officers behaving like high-schoolers in the locker room, talking smack about the public and so forth; then again it's not so different from hackers having a laugh at userland's expense. Policing in many places is a scary and dangerous job, and good officers are frequently insulted or blamed for the actions of some others in the same uniform.
I got a first hand taste of this by accident a few years ago. I was working on a film which was being shot in a recently decommissioned jail in Oakland, and one of the actors in a small part became unavailable. I had approximately the right look and was asked to fill in for the part in between my tech duties, so I spent the day in a police costume - movie uniforms are deliberately incorrect to avoid impersonation, but not so much that it's obvious. So between setups I was out on the street a few times to smoke or whatever, and boy did I get an earful from passers-by - and from the opposite folk you'd expect, if you went by stereotypes. A few people wanted to enter the jail to visit friends or relatives who had been arrested, and I would tell them the jail had been shut down and which number to call at City Hall for information. One irate person expressed the hope that someone would drive by and shut me down too. I stayed inside after that one.
Ideally, civilians should respect the police, and attempt to make a connection with those who are employed to serve them, while at the same time, the police should be accommodating for their constituents and dignify them much as civilians should.
The animosity can easily be attributed to the lack of respect and proper protocol for both parties. Someone needs to step up.
Alas, one can only hope for a better world.
The funny thing is that sometimes cooking the numbers works. That is if you create a perception of lower crime you get gentrification and a lot of middle class people move in and crime may actually go down. But nobody should confuse the talk of politicians with actual reality, new york is much more crooked and crime ridden than any of those "tough on crime" politicians would admit. Some times that crookedness bubbles up to the surface, for example couple of summers ago when cranes started falling from the sky and killing people and destroying entire buildings.
I have to say that I feel bad for these cops. I was hoping that being a beat cop was one of those rare fields of endeavour where one could do their job well as driven by their own conscience and their own initiative and sense of self worth and not have to go by some ridiculous metric, but alas even the police departments have been invaded by modern MBA thinking. So apparently even in the police force it is all about performance metrics and making your numbers -- writing a sufficient number of tickets and stopping and frisking a sufficient number of random people, while making sure not to notice too many crimes.
Maybe in the end of the year the mayor looks at the numbers and sees -- wow, we frisked 10 million people and brought in 5 billion dollars in fines, we must truly have a fine police force.
E.g. note the item on page two of the Village Voice article on "points".
Apparently cops have their own value of kloc metrics.
Along the same lines, some book recommendations:
_Armed and Dangerous: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman_, by Gina Gallo
_Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District_, by Peter Moskos
The second title covers the real-life setting for "The Wire."
The depiction of one of today's most derelict inner-city neighborhoods is heartbreaking and disconcerting.
Born and raised in NYC, lived there until the late '90s.
Perhaps there was some number cooking (hard to believe there wouldn't be) , but Giuliani (maybe more so his Chief of Police, whose name eludes me) realized that if you start hassling people for the little shit, you have a good chance of grabbing someone with a outstanding DAT or warrant. Grab people for jumping turnstiles, hustling change, open bottles of beer, whatever, all the things Dinkins was ignoring.
Once you've got someone you can run checks on them and often hold them for something more serious.
And it was good for the city, financially at least, because if downtown/midtown was safer, or even just felt safer, more people went there and business thrived.
(Downside: Times Square seems to have become a branded theme park. Oh well.)
If you're the man with the gun, you must go out of your way to be respectable and approachable, or you will not be - you'll just be a man with a gun.