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Comment by brosinante | Hacker News Reader

Ha, publicly paid police officers making sure an office move of a private company goes well.

They'd be the one investigating a high profile case if anything went wrong, paying huge overtime and having everyone breathing down their necks... why wouldn't you want them to work on a preventative / preactive approach to security at given those stakes? It could have saved the tax payer millions.

They could be preventing murders in the South Bronx. Aren't lives more valuable? Tiffany has enough funds to cover security of moving 50 feet.

>Aren't lives more valuable?

Surprisingly, not always. Ask your actuary or an economist.

On a more individual scale, many of us are not spending their every waking moment doing their utmost to save lives - did you have a lunchbreak today ? - showing through revealed preferences that lives are not as valuable as commonly claimed in public speech.

NYC murder rates are at all time lows. They are preventing murders in the South Bronx.

Is it police work that’s lowering the murder rate? Or is it something else like a demographic shift?

I'm sure it's a lot of things. I'm just saying that whatever minor resources spent on securing moving some jewelry weren't taking away from larger police priorities.

Sounds like police are only about preventing murders? What if a robbery at Tiffany's (perhaps even during the move) would end in a murder?

Appeal to emotion. That's entirely a different kind of policing and cannot be prevented by a single, organised, intervention.

And policing jewellery districts reduces the crime statistics :-)

In London "Hatton garden" has the highest crime rate due to all the jewellers and smash and grab raids using scooters.

With that logic, there is no need for any private security firms anywhere, because all should be covered by police since in case of an issue they have to investigate it.

They probably had to pay for the service.

Should police only protect public property?

Ideally, they should not protect anything that is not exceptional. As soon as you need police to protect someone/something regular on a regular basis, you admit that your community has become dysfunctional.

IMO, protecting extraordinary events is fine. And it is in our public interest to have safe extraordinary events, like big sports events, concerts, protests, etc.

So it's ok for police to guard a NFL game, but not the movement of millions of dollars of goods?

How does the police draw the line on what work to accept?, do you apply and then a committee decides?

Can a police officer do this after his/her regular job?

Laws for "peace officers" don't have a start time and end time (ie 9-5), they are police 24/7.

Or let's just avoid all these stickey edge cases and say "if you can pay xyz / officer / hour they will guard your event,stuff etc.

> So it's ok for police to guard a NFL game, but not the movement of millions of dollars of goods?

The difference between the NFL game and the movement of goods is the number of benefactors. Many, many people want to see the game, thus it is easier to argue it lies in the public interest (public interest is not only a majority, btw.). If that movement of goods happens as often as an NFL game, I would argue it should be paid by the companies that profit from said moving. Now, if that company acts in the public interest (e.g., the goods are meant to supply the residdents of the city), things might change again.

Whoa; that seems to imply police shouldn’t protect any single individual targeted by a large mob?

Keeping the peace at an event which has 50,000 members of the public seems like a good use of the public police service

I’d bet protecting regular thing on a regular basis is rather what staves off “dysfunction”.

Not allowing police to protect it might get you some real dysfunction.

Depends if you want to go back to the 1920's when private security guards could carry tommy guns

They should be protecting everyone equally by patrolling the city. Security guards protect specific places and things, such as museums.

That would be laughably ineffective. Police would be off protecting garbage dumps and book club meetings while banks get robbed and protests devolve into violence.

What about high-risk areas? And one-time highg risk events, like this one?

Considering the amount of jewelry in the Diamond District, there isn't a full time turret installed by the NYPD. I've walked through there in the middle of the night and it was dead like most other midtown streets around it.

Probably cheaper to do that then have to follow up on any robbery. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Companies/event organizers ( this is treated as an event ) pay for this at the half day or day rate per police officer involved. The rate is different for patrol, sergant, lieutenant, captain, etc. There's a minimum number of s/l/c that must be present based on the number of patrolmen.

What's wrong with that in circumstances where it might be in the public interest? I have no opinion on whether that's valid in this particular case.

Does NYC have the concept of "paid duty"? Where a private company can pay for police to cover their event?

Yes, it does. It's commonly done for things like this/events and almost certainly what Tiffany did here.

(PDF) - http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_informatio...

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