This is one of the first things criminal reform advocates in New York are taught. The police is well-funded and powerful and strong because it's popularly supported, and the political class knows that.
And no amount of protesting is likely to change that. Not in the near term. This is why "f* the police" styled slogans are discouraged. They alienate the only responsive audience: reasonable New Yorkers, who [EDIT: by virtue of most New Yorkers supporting the NYPD] likely support the NYPD in general, and have simply not prioritized your reform policy as a talking point with their friends and elected.
This is a good point. Most protest is about priority. It isn't going to change many peoples' minds. But it will make them prioritize thinking and talking about, and maybe even voting for, your issue.
Michelangelo said "the sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Effective protest is similar. It isn't about creating a new view. It's about uncovering, and refining, instincts that were already there.
As such, a core part of effective protest is problem projection. That is, forcing people who don't have a problem to empathize with those who do. Protest should target those who have it good. To get them to empathize with those who don't. (Community organizing is about getting people who share a problem to prioritize it together.)
To be honest, the protests have actually opened up my view and forced me to think deeply and project myself as being in the same situation as many minorities. So yea, you’re right on the money here imho.
Fact is, the majority of people are generally happy with their life, attacking those people and their life just makes them hate you and support whomever is trying to stop you. I don't see why that is unreasonable or unexpected.
Agree on this. Ive seen social media post portraits the message in the lines of "if you don't support us, then you are part of them". I believe this is a bad tactics to gain support in a movement.
Excluding people will only lose support, instead they should've pushed for more social media post on explaining in an objective way why police brutality and racism exist, and how it will impact us (not only African American but POC as well as innocent civilians).
Yea my first thought is the absolutist slogans and chants can turn away those in the middle. I’d rather see facts and have smart people plan and debate. On the other token, as in politics, it’s the one liners that get spread far and wide and affect more people (positive or negatively). Obama said it best that the protests essentially make the issues front and center and in everyone’s mind, but the rubber hits the road only when electing local officials that can make permanent changes.
>I believe this is a bad tactics to gain support in a movement.
That depends on the size of the movement. "Support us or lose all your friends" is a valid tactic that has been successfully used since long before written history. Requiring members to perform an action (unfriend people, post harsh messages, etc.) also induces deeper commitment (psychologically and materially) then merely someone saying they support a movement.
If you are happy in a country built on the sweat and blood of enslaved people, and then simply not willing to listen to their suffering, you are an aweful human being.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth or throw insults at me.
I'm merely pointing out that violent rioters will elicit negative responses from people who don't want society to burn down and those who stop said rioters will elicit positive responses.
There is no faster to alienate people and get yourself off with smug superiority than to comment like this.
We can go down the path of how much has been built by slaves, what you mean by enslaved, and how I am somehow responsible for that, especially as an immigrant from a country torn apart by American imperialism.
You are not the judge of what is an aweful human being, seriously, you’re just not that free of sin or amazing.
In your smugness you no doubt increase the wealth of other such “aweful human beings” by working for them, paying them for goods, paying taxes, etc.
Unreasonable people are not a protest's priority. They are entrenched. If they're with you, you won't lose them. If they're against you, you won't win them.
Note that this bias towards the reasonable only applies at the early stages of organization. When one is building awareness, before specific policies have been mooted. Once policy fronts develop, the unreasonable play their part. They create your battering ram of a base that focusses elected leaders on ensuring your policy remains a priority.
Putting the unreasonable front and centre too early leads to each camp preaching to its choir while the masses disengage.
I think the problem he is pointing out in your statement is that you effectively just said everyone either agrees with your or is unreasonable. There is no middle ground. I can not be a reasonable person who disagrees with you.
My interpretation is reasonable not in the senses of being establishment, elite, or some other socioeconomic signifier, but as in literally amenable to being convinced by reasoned argument, based on evidence and logical relationships between premises, evidence, and conclusions.
A more charitable reading: a large subset of all reasonable New Yorkers support the police in general. Not sure if that was what they meant, but it's how I read it.
> Where you say reasonable, I think you mean to say mainstream
Able to be reasoned with?
Mainstream pertains to "ideas, attitudes or activities" [1]. A protest probably wants to appeal to those who hold mainstream views. Or bring its supporters' views into the mainstream. But the whole point of the protest is something isn't mainstream that should be.
Reasonable seems valid. With the information they had, those New Yorkers reasoned that the police were doing a good job. Likewise if you were to bring them new information, they might reason that the police are doing a bad job. And there are also reasonable people who think the police are doing a bad job, they were just exposed to a different set of information and/or different values than the people who think the police are doing a good job.
And then on the extremes are the unreasonable people. Those who will support the police regardless of any negative change, and those who will oppose the police regardless of any positive change.
Grandparent comment did not say that people who disagreed were unreasonable. It said that reformers are taught to target to target people who, reasonably, are NYPD supporters. It does imply that being a supporter is within reason, but more so indicates that set intersection exists and is both large and who can be influenced through reason (due to them being reasonable).
It does not purport to limit those who are reasonable. The phrasing could have been used in a dog whistle which does, but this particular remark isn't it. Moreover, there is little audience for such a dog whistle in the midst of a conversation about practical ways to effect meaningful reform.
This should not be a wedge between us that impedes us from working together towards justice and peace.
> target people who, reasonably, are NYPD supporters
Slight edit, to target reasonable people. Period. Reasonable people can hate the NYPD. But because an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers support the NYPD, the average reasonable New Yorker is likely to as well.
Speaking to the current environment, I believe there is overlap between support for the protestors' cause and the NYPD in general.
If you're trying to convince a majority to change its views, labelling them as "extreme" is unhelpful.
Many New Yorkers are within living memory of the Cold War-era crime peaks that almost destroyed our city. 9/11 and the Boston Bombing normalized a more-militarized police, as well as the NYPD building up an intelligence agency that rivals some countries'.
Looting isn't terrorism. And we have had zero mass violence from protesters. But there are good reasons for an island as dense as Manhattan to be hyper-sensitive to incipient lawlessness. (There are also bad ones.)
One of the big problems is that processes and tactics that might be reasonable for a huge city like NYC or LA get picked up by smaller cities that probably don't need a more militarized police force. There's no reason East Podunk Noweheresville PD needs military-grade tactical gear and armored personnel transports.
The types, frequency, and severity of crimes are different in different sized communities. The tactics and responses should be different. But somehow, policy-makers and police chiefs see something happening in NYC and think, "Yeah, we need that here to."
In tech, people say "You are not Facebook, you are not Google, you are not Amazon. The solutions that work for them and the huge scale at which they operate are going to be overkill, or flat-out not work at all, for your 10k user start-up." And yet, people expect the tactics of a PD in a city like New York to work in a city like Raleigh, NC.
When I initially read your comment, I assumed that it conflated the military and the national guard. Nope. That was a separate (and even better supported) question.
I’m curious how much this correlates to police shows on television. At best, they are romantic depictions of policing. Even the “gritty, realistic” ones like “the shield” or “the wire” don’t really convey the complexities of how policing culture (both internally and with the wider community) varies even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In all likelihood you have no clue how your community polices.
Yea I think one missing piece is that the public isn’t aware of the strategy, tactics, planning and challenges from modern policing. We just see the good and bad highlights and think it’s so simplistic.
Modern policing is full of contradiction: it should be non-violent, but it should also evict people, even from the streets. It should be anti-racist, but most prosecuted crimes are against the poor. It should protect the community from loss, but most of what is spent on policing is lost in wage theft. It should protect the community, but death by policing and incarceration are major causes of death.
> In general in America, police are very trusted and even in years with significant issues, that trust did not sharply decline
Exactly what I expect nothing will come of all this chaos. Sure on an individual level they'll sacrifice a few of their own to pacify the crowd, but Americans are too infatuated with the police for any real change to happen.
Think of all the money, real estate wealth, media presence and power that exists in NYC. This is why.
NYPD can operate with impunity, because they know they will not be exposed by local media and will be backed up by the financial power they are protecting.
Contrast this with any other city, whose police force may have unfortunate levels of systemic cover and approval, but nothing even close to NYPD.
Additionally to all of that, the militarization of police forces that many seem to be aware of nationally, seems to have occurred with NYPD as much as any other force [0][1] (9/11 being the obvious reason). So they are extremely well funded, well supported, and "well" (over) trained as far as tactics and methods.
There's also documented, but controversial [2] examples of some of this wealth and power mixing with ethnic conflict, that have resulted in shameful racist abuses of... well it isn't even police, but a sort of "private" force that a lot of people don't know about which has surprising amounts of funding and power. Fact that something like this even exists with limited coverage in media given the abuses is pretty surprising.
It should be noted that none of the men involved in the shomrim beating of the black man (he also happened to be gay and an artist, and lost one of his eyes in the attack), mentioned in the article, ultimately served out any sort of prison sentence for their roles. All of them got off on technicalities in appeals, and no one seems interested in justice for the man whose life and livelihood were threatened.
This seems like a rather odd excuse for a violent racist attack on a black man. I'm sure plenty of KKK members got off on 'legal technicalities', but that doesn't make it right.
Or employment contract clause or union contract clause or missed filing deadline or a department procedure that was incompletely followed. Not everything that gets killers set free is a constitutional violation.
> It’s the marriage of Wall Street, real estate capital, and urban planning, with politicians—self-described progressives and moderates alike—religiously supporting tax giveaways and favorable zoning policies for the for-profit developers of real estate.
I don't find this analysis - which ignores the low[1] rate of housing construction in NYC and the political role of homeowners wrt zoning and property values - remotely convincing.
It seems like pushing through massive budget cuts and busting up police unions is the next logical step. I understand this is easier said than done, but the sooner we get started on actually fighting this fight the easier it will be to get through.
That isn't a good comparison, police unions have mostly different support systems and allies than other unions. Police unions are not generally helped by other unions to put it mildly.
Also, enough public support exists for both sides to try and act so which one has more "public trust" doesn't matter at all, it's about exerting power now.
Teachers' unions don't even have the power to get budgets big enough for teachers to not have to buy their own school supplies for students. Talk to me when police unions are weak enough that we can cut police department budgets back so much that police have to buy their own bullets and riot gear.
There's a lot of bad blood between the NYPD and the mayor now, given that the NYPD arrested de Blasio's daughter and then posted Chiara's arrest report -
NYPD and the Mayor were duking even before this, and NYPD have turned their back to Mayor at the Police funeral. The stakes might have gone higher, but the bad blood was there at least few years old.
I'm getting tired of the union rep who always comes out and throws gasoline around over their non-stop political fight with the mayor. He never has anything constructive to say.
There is a real problem when the second largest police force on the planet can't get its employees to stand up and do the job they signed up for. Strategically abandoning their duty so as to win political points is a disgrace.
> I'm getting tired of the union rep who always comes out and throws gasoline around over
I'm starting to think this is actually a well crafted strategy for union leaders to go out in the middle of a killing where an officer might be in the wrong where they start throwing insults and muddy the water.
Could you help me understand a little more about the situation in NYC? From an outsiders perspective, it seems that de Blasio supports the police department, but at the same time, they arrested his daughter and tweeted details. I'm kinda just curious about whats actually happening.
The main motif of the article is that the cops had nothing to do with lowering crime under Giuliani and that their apparent withdrawal after many years of tough policing didn't cause any resurgence.
I'd say standard of proof is rather low either way.
Guiliani's crackdown on crime coincideded with a nationwide drop in crime in the 1990s, in cities that didn't implement the same tough "broken window" policies as NYC.
Between 1991 and 2000, homicide rates fell from 9.8 to about 5.5 per 100k people, which is a drop of 44%. There were probably multiple overlapping causes [1], but the most compelling explanation so far is the removal of lead from gasoline in the 1970/80s [2].
Why is the head of the police not a sheriff? Someone who is elected?
Better question: Was it ever a sheriff?
Seems like elected sheriff's work well in a local community assuming high voter participation.
Very high profile position. I'm from the tropics so I understand that elections can be rigged (see DR 1994). Would love to hear if this worked or failed in the states.
The issue may also be exacerbated if the electorate is actively okay or willing to ignore the corruption.
I believe the increasing political nature of the position is, in fact, part of the issue. The influence of politics through Mayors and the Police Unions makes running a department efficiently and effectively an impossible task if you want to hold onto your job. A chief of police either spend all of their time appeasing politicians by implementing their ideas for how to police effectively or are replaced by someone who will. At the same time they are receiving constant push-back from the Police Union. Never mind the years of experience, training, and graduate degree work almost all police chiefs have endured; they either do what politicians think they should do or are replaced. If they lose the confidence of the Union the Union will sabotage them and they will be replaced.
The second major issue, as I see it, is how we select and hire police officers, which still, almost universally, relies on the polygraph test. The polygraph is proven pseudoscience, but the actually effectiveness, I suspect, is irrelevant because the goal is to see if prospective hires can take the pressure of the test; not to detect dishonesty. You either get perfect applicants, or those who are okay and comfortable with lying.
There are many more issues, of course: the increasing militarization, some departments actively rejecting high IQ candidates, low pay and long working hours for patrol, etc.
To add on a third issue, also anecdotally, there's the nature of duties that the typical county sheriff finds themselves with.
They're not local police, they're not state police or FBI, their primary job often winds up being running corrections. Secondary job is detail work on county property. Actual job is often being a patronage network for their boss, the sheriff, help him get re-elected and keep your job.
It's actually the worst possible scenario, because we bring in all the downsides of an elected sheriff with none of the upsides -- they don't work on any of the things where being elected would add accountability. Hiring standards are low, they're based on political usefulness, and there's no downside to the sheriff because who gives a shit about a prisoner being abused.
It's possible that elected local police chiefs might improve things in a way that doesn't extrapolate from the way elected sheriffs work.
It also doesn't help that the electorate that votes in local sherriff races is a biased sampling. Heavily skewed toward older white homeowners which exist in a minority in every city, but nonetheless dictate local politics because they are the only people who vote in these races.
Perhaps, but isn't that akin to saying "Do you have any real evidence that social inequality is lower under an elected president vs a papal appointed monarch?"
I don't think so. The police commissioner serves at the pleasure of the mayor, and the mayor is democratically accountable, so the commissioner is unlikely to last long if the public really wants him gone.
tons of elected sheriffs in the US, usually at the county rather than the city level. for example in the rest of New York State outside of the city, there are elected sheriffs. but there may also be police departments associated with towns or cities. like so much of US government it's a complicated federalist mess.
i don't know how it works on average but there are a few high-profile cases of elected sheriffs seriously abusing their office. Joe Arpaio is the most famous. he had a strong base of support from people in the county, and wasn't afraid to use the powers of his office to target political opponents, which let him stay in power for many years.
Setting it up so elected officials operate at the county level sets up a level of disconnect between the sheriff and the population that cancels out the accountability that elected office supposedly abides by.
Things in NY can be very strange. If you've ever wondered why the Tappan Zee bridge is where it is, well, it mostly has to do with which of the bickering bureaucracies would be allowed to collect the tolls. Something like that.
The police union is powerful, but so are several other public sector unions in the city. I don't see any reason to create a special theory for the police only. I guarantee you the mayor will defend the teachers union from criticism as well.
Having lived in NYC, I'm amazed at the level of restraint they've been showing over the last two weeks. They're taking a vicious beating and really pretty much holding fire. Not sure I agree with that strategy, but you have to respect their discipline.
To clarify, this is in response to "Wild horses couldn't get me to do that job." It is no mystery. Joining a police force is a powerful tool of upward mobility in a country (ours) where pretty much all the others have been lost. I would hope that the people enjoying those advantages (possibly deserved but evidently rare) would want to preserve them. Sometimes that might result in the restraint you note. Other times the results might be quite different.
Granted, these are a bit old and things could have changed, but people are generally happy with them in New York.
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/03/13/poll-shows-broad-sup...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/16/yelp-for-cops
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
In general in America, police are very trusted and even in years with significant issues, that trust did not sharply decline:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/213869/confidence-police-back-h...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/236243/military-small-business-...
Even a recent poll (two days old) had trust in police to be quite high:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/axios-ipsos-coronavir...
As an institution, they are one of the most trusted in America:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...