With few exceptions, most people think I’m ridiculous to not implicitly trust the police. So it’s good to have evidence on your side (again…):
Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.
They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.
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The pressure is the worst at the end of the month and at the end of every quarter, because that’s when the precinct has to file activity reports on each officer with the borough command and police headquarters. (Put another way: If you want to avoid getting a ticket, stay away from police officers during the last few days of the month, when the pressure for numbers is the highest.)
And then there are bits straight out of The Wire:
During a September 12, 2009, roll call, a fellow cop tells Schoolcraft: “A lot of 61s—if it’s a robbery, they’ll make it a petty larceny. I saw a 61, at T/P/O [time and place of occurrence], a civilian punched in the face, menaced with a gun, and his wallet was removed, and they wrote ‘lost property.’ ”
The practice of downgrading crimes has been the NYPD’s scandal-in-waiting for years. The NYPD claims that downgrading happens only rarely, but in the course of reporting this story, the Voice was told anecdotally of burglaries rejected if the victim didn’t have receipts for the items stolen; of felony thefts turned into misdemeanor thefts by lowballing the value of the property; of robberies turned into assaults; of assaults turned into harassments.
…Curiously, after questions were raised earlier this year about the 81st Precinct statistics, crime there jumped by 13 percent.
That increase has remained steady, fueled chiefly by a huge 76 percent jump in felony assaults. That jump in assaults is far ahead of the citywide increase of 4.6 percent.
Remember, police are people, and they respond to the same incentives the rest of us do.
Update: HT to Longform.org, which I mentioned earlier. The gay-straight conversion camp article is really tragicomic (amount of comedy dependent on your ability to see the cosmic humor in other people’s pain).
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