There was an incident recently in which someone removed an obstruction from a license plate. The police ignored the illegally obscured plate but arrested the person clearing it for “criminal mischief”. The lawlessness and selective enforcement is astonishing.
Fortunately, the incident seems to only have encouraged him, and he’s continued to “fix” plate obstructions.
It’s such a familiar problem to locals that the TV show Billions had an arc where Chuck illicitly obtained a placard and was trying to trade favors for it, but couldn’t because everyone he needed favors from already had one.
I have a scar on my hip because I had to bike on a slippery surface to avoid an NYPD car obstructing a bike lane and had my rear tire slip out in the rain. So this isn’t just aesthetic for me.
So no, it's not a single news story. This one just happened to be a particularly egregious display of NYPD lawlessness.
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/11/07/update-restler-bill-t...
Rules for thee but not for me.
If it's legal it isn't vigilantism. Isn't it the law in some states that you are allowed to use force to prevent theft? I assume that's what they meant. Yes it has its drawbacks but I think the current pacifist course has us headed for 24/7 surveillance.
These are punishments after the fact. Nobody is suggesting to allow people to go around exacting punishment. We are suggesting to allow people to defend self, family, and property.
Assaulting the manager would not be allowed because it has nothing to do with physically preventing the crime from being carried out. Same with slashing tires.
Allowing people to defend themselves and their property has been done many times in history. It is, in fact, the historical standard, including in the history of your own community. If you want a practical example of how this could look, simply look into that history, just decades ago. Please dispense with these unproductive gotcha attempts.
No, I’m describing crimes in progress. If a waiter confronts their manager while they’re they’re paycheck, that isn’t a “punishment after the fact”. They are defending their property by using violence to prevent wage theft from being carried out, in exactly the same way you’re suggesting shopowners be allowed to.
I was in Singapore recently. Most people there take the subway. Yet no one gets pushed onto the tracks. Why is that?
It has nothing to do with cops — you rarely see them on the subway there. Instead, they have a wall between the platform and the tracks.
So many problems like this have non-carceral solutions. The reactionary reach for police to solve ever problem we see is inhumane. It makes society worse.
If we wanted to emulate Singapore to make our subways safer, we would have to do much, much more than put up a little wall on the subway platform.
So sure, if you post an officer every 50 feet you might actually start deterring crime. But when we’re talking about increasing police density from basically zero to basically zero it’s not gonna do much.
One method of deterring crime is the “fuck you in particular” method of ramping up the punishment crazy disproportionately to the crime but how this really works in practice is the “two americas” problem where if you’re not a group cops are targeting you’re probably not gonna get caught and made an example of. Also despite it working I think this is crazy unethical to the people caught.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723520...
https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/media/police...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/666614
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X1...
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c11849/c11849.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0032258X156127...
> Two recent studies presented evidence that prior police–crime studies were methodologically flawed and found that increased police levels reduced crime.
Look like nutrition "science".
To see when police are absent, look to CHAZ. Did CHAZ not have one of the highest murder rates in the known world?