A lot of New York cops live outside the areas they patrol. The ones who live in the city are overrepresented on Staten Island. That said, for every peaceful protest last summer there were unprovoked nighttime riots which seemed to occur more when the cops were somewhere else.
The cops were deliberately ignoring the rioters while strong arming the largely peaceful protestors.
She has videos of 50 cops standing while someone broke into a store (by throwing a rock through the glass window), picked up a POS system, and runs, with not a single cop twitching, while just a few hours earlier you had their lieutenant or whatever come kneel with the protesters and as soon as the higher ups left, cops attack 100 lb women from behind as they were walking away.
They were deliberately attacking peaceful protestors and deliberately ignoring looters and rioters.
You could also see on the signal app which was tracking these gangs of kids who were looting major stores like Macy’s, as well as protestors, and the cops were always where the protestors were and never where the rioters, who were only a few blocks behind, were.
It was a very blatant attempt by the NYPD to make the protests appear violent by encouraging looting while discouraging peaceful protesting.
Perhaps they were too busy deploying their sleep deprivation tactics[1] on sleeping citizens by lazily driving around the target neighborhood with the sirens on at 3 am, for no legitimate policing reason.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/comments/hduu3h...
During the occupy wall street protests, I saw the cops a few times (I was working in a nearby building). The amount of serious gear they had, it was insane. I bet they are better armed than most militaries.
All I can say is they are super scary.
With that, I will say they need to learn how to use less than lethal tactics and force to apprehend a violent person. Firearms should be very the last resort as a result of non-confrontation. In other words, the police at times provoke more violence by the way they address an issue. A violent drunk. Instead of getting up close so they lunge with a knife, get far back, get people to move away and then corral the drunk in or use alternate methods of subduction and use lethal violence only when the perp makes it necessary.
investigation, forensics, traffic control, etc etc dont need weapons and tactical training. Let the armed police be like fire fighters and be specifically called in when needed.
This has some interesting consequences. The police effectively can’t position themselves in opposition to “the people of the street”. Two police officers against a rowdy pub is poor chances for the law.
As a result, the training emphasises deescalation, talking people down from stupid ideas etc. This part seems particularly effective.
Most days I still think it’s crazy the police here are effectively unarmed, but it does seem to work.
I know from a police officer friend of mine that on badly-staffed nights, Oxford (an affluent city of about 180k people) only had 2-4 officers on call. For anything from a bar fight to murder. You don’t get these American-style 10 police car buildups, unless it is literally a national emergency.
This is in reference to American standards of care, other countries may be different.
You would just have to answer for what percentage of those call did the responding parties (dispatch, the officer responding and the person calling it in) thought there was a need for armed police.
I am willing to be that while only 5% turn out to need armed police, most of those 5% where uncertain, and a % far greater than that where armed police weren't needed, where very uncertain.
It's just not possible to predict when you need to be armed.
However, if you go down this line it is also not possible to predict when having a gun on your hip is going to make it more difficult to resolve the issue.
There is a tradeoff here that is very hard to make policy around. Something that is being tried is for there to be unarmed medical oriented mental health response units available for calls that don't seem uncertain. I think the data coming out of these changes will change the way big cities operate their departments one day.
> This is in reference to American standards of care, other countries may be different.
When I moved from NYC to San Francisco I was genuinely surprised how much I missed & appreciated the NYPD.
And don't tell me how crime in SF is so terrible. It's at historic lows, and in comparison to a lot of cities, the amount of crime is essentially non-existent.
The police don't reduce crime, from what I can tell, in any city, using the tactics that they do. Crime seems to correlate more with poverty and ability to afford basic necessities more than anything.
When I was a kid, people told me, it’s important to have an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. SF attitude toward street crime is well past that point.
Most of what you describe here isn't going to be helped by increase police presence (the areas you're describing have the highest police presence in the city, and it's been like this since forever). These things are primarily related to poverty and the hate of the homeless.
Want less shit on the streets? Give the homeless access to bathrooms. Want less needles on the streets? Implement needle exchanges. Want less car break-ins and bike theft? Have fewer poor people by making sure they're paid enough, the rents are low enough to pay, and by providing housing to the homeless (most homeless people in SF were living in SF and housed in the past).
Putting poor people and drug users in jail hasn't solved the problem in the past, and won't make them better in the future. The police spend all day taking all their shit away, making them even poorer.
Also, get out of here with "destruction of this city". The city hasn't changed since I moved to it, and the locals I know say that in comparison to the past, the city is cleaner, and less violent than it ever has been. The crime stats in just the 10 years I've lived here have also dropped considerably.
Maybe the issue here is that you're a coward?
I am one of these residents you claim say things are improving. They are not improving. I live in one of these benighted areas, have for many years, and in the last few it has been getting worse every year.
Maybe the issue is that you’re more concerned with the comfort of people who feel entitled do whatever they please - shit in the street, assault people, rob businesses, consume drugs in public - than with the safety of contributing members of society.
It is not cowardly to want to be able to walk down the street at night safely. It is not cowardly to want to not have my business robbed or my vehicle broken into. It is not cowardly to not want to step in human waste or to have to dodge used syringes on the sidewalk. It is not cowardly to want to not have to change my route to work almost every day to avoid a mentally ill person who is screaming and hitting themselves or passers-by in the head. This is not a high bar. Living without these travesties is the baseline in virtually every other city in the first world.
San Francisco is a city that spends tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person per year, a city that has shelters, needle exchanges, and one of the most liberal attitudes toward homelessness in the country. A city that has refused to enforce the law against street crime, and that has one of the highest per capita property crime rate in the nation. Anyone who can look at the abject failure of these policies and say, the problem is that we need to just give these people more free stuff and more services and less law enforcement is delusional.
I also want homeless people off the street, but the police can't do that. All they can do is move them around, which makes everyone's life worse. If you want them off the street, you need to put them into homes (not shelters).
Also, please show stats that prove your point, because historical data simply doesn't support your argument. You decided to move into a high crime area, and you're pissed that "the streets aren't being cleaned up". The area you're living in used to be a lot worse than it is, but if you're in the tenderloin, or SOMA, you need to realize those areas have always been bad, and the bar to make them better is extremely high.
Maybe chose the location of your next home more reasonably next time? The part of the city I'm in is really nice (the richmond neighborhoods), maybe take the commute hit and move?
So most of the city is not a reasonable location?
But you are so right, everyone should just live on top of a hill and have private security.
Only because they decided to decriminalize homelessness. That was a willful choice.
Yes I do. And the most ridiculous thin is that they will not always arrest the perpetrator because the courts don't find these crimes a priority.
With the exception of select violent crimes, the police don't investigate crimes. For those select violent crimes, the percentage they solve is extremely low.
Also, please don't confuse home invasion for burglary. I know this is some weird propaganda point for you Chesa recallers, but there's a massive difference between the two, and the former the courts do care about. I think they should take burglary more seriously, but even if the courts did, the police still wouldn't.
Multiple instances of police openly threatening citizens. Phones ripped out of hands and smashed onto the ground, for the mere crime of filming an interaction. During the BLM protests, every single act of instigation and provocation that I witnessed was started by the police.
I don't know what the answer is. But it is very clear the police here are a paramilitary jackboot squad, and that the city and the strength of their union protects them. They have almost complete impunity, and they see normal, everyday citizens as the enemy. I fear that we're in for more trouble now that we've elected an ex-cop Mayor of the city.
(For background, I'm a tall, white man. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I wasn't.)