NYC major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’
latimes.com
latimes.com
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.)
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.
1. Why call the cops if you know they won't do anything?
2. Relatedly, why "snitch" when you know there won't be any cops around?
Even looking through articles in 2014 and 2015 doesn't provide me with any evidence that police weren't showing up to crime scenes... just that they weren't doing the "proactive policing" thing.
Am I missing something here?
I think there was a documentary about this a few years ago called Minority Report.
County police who took an hour or more to show up finally told my dad to get a gun and explained how we should move the body to make it look like we were being attacked. So that we didn’t get arrested.
So yea we moved promptly.
Neighbors knew family had gone vacation and saw movement at night. Jumpy cop, dark house, sudden movement, dead kid...
Family got big payout, City dismantled the police department.
Paywalled, I didn’t read the article.
Original research is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5
Both authors are political scientists who are highly unlikely to have a command of econometrics. I am not sure if they took into account the panel nature of the data and in those circumstances where authors focus solely on either the cross-section or the time-series nature of the process, it is not uncommon for "results" to be nonsense.
>"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."
The fact that assaults, robberies, and burglaries aren't being reported would seem to indicate that people just weren't bothering to contact the police, because they knew the police would not help. Murder, rape, and (hospital-reported) shooting rates dropping would be more indicative that less policing would reduce crime.
With that being said aggravated assault accounted for 68.2% of violent crime in 2019 according to the FBI.[0]
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
They absolutely do - and the cause is having violent criminals running loose on the streets. The overwhelming majority of serious crime, from rape and murder to assault and burglary is committed by an extremely small number of people. When those people aren't removed from society after committing crimes, they are out on the street committing other crimes. As a resident of NY for over 4 decades I haven't seen the situation this bad since the bad old days of the 80s and 90s. The streets are littered with people booting up on the sidewalks, in midtown, in broad daylight. Aggressive "panhandlers" harass, threaten and assault passersby without fear of reproach or arrest. The fact that crimes are not being reported or prosecuted does not mean that there has been a reduction of crime - quite the opposite - which is abundantly apparent to anyone who lives here. Since the "no bail" law was passed as well as laws preventing people under 18 from being prosecuted as adults (among other things), there has been a massive spike in crime. In years passed, getting caught with an illegal gun, let alone using it in a crime, would mean automatic jail time. Today, that criminal is back out on the street in hours. There is a good reason that New Yorkers rejected Bill Deblasio's buddies in favor of former cop Eric Adams to be the next mayor - the city is a disaster zone.
1. The # of phone calls to the police about a crime are not necessarily indicative of how common that crime is. If people think the police won't do anything, they're less likely to bother calling (I see this often in my area with things like stolen bikes and catalytic converters... people often don't bother getting a police report unless their insurance requires it).
2. Throughout the 2010s the crime rate trended downward
3. Crime rates can have seasonal variations (but this can vary based upon location and type of crime)
Skimming through the paper, #1 wasn't addressed at all.
For #2, the paper compared the 2015 data against 2014. I don't think they did anything to compensate for annual trends in crime rate. In other words, if the crime rate in Des Moines, Iowa lowered at the same time, is that actually a ripple effect from NYPD's actions? Or are both cities just part of a larger downward trend that we saw coming out of the 2009 recession?
For #3, they actually took temperature and precipitation into account which was cool.
You made a claim in #1 about the likelihood of people calling police when they think police won’t do anything about it. That claim sounds plausible but is it correct? Do know of studies on this?
If you, a non expert, can think immediately of three thoughts then it seems highly likely the authors - who spent effort and time on the topic - also thought about these same thoughts. Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
https://crosscut.com/2014/12/d-word-seattle-confronts-dilemm...
There's a number of studies, some of them contradictory (perhaps because they're looking at different populations of people). Hagan et al[1] found that in urban African-American communities, cynicism towards police and the legal system was a major factor in whether or not someone called the police after being a victim of a crime (in a way that is actually a bit counterintuitive to me).
Anyways, I owe the authors an apology. I took another look at the paper and noticed that they (sort of) addressed the issue of under-reporting, as was mentioned in the article.
Tautologically, they point out that underreporting of the crime rate doesn't impact the accuracy of statistics showing that the number of reported crimes went down. However they do admit that this makes it harder to make a causal link.
> Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.
That's an interesting point, and I suppose it's hard to say without being an expert. OTOH, from talking to people I know who have left academia[2], the 'publish or perish' mentality makes it easier to put blinders on when faced with something that's inconvenient.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1722210115
[2]: Admittedly this is going to be a biased sample
I'd like to provide a competing take on this.
In my experience, it's the job of the peer reviewers to force the authors to test alternative hypotheses, especially if it's something obvious or inconvenient. I once published a methods paper, where the reviewers got aggrieved I didn't mention a complementary, but mostly unrelated, method in my discussion. At first I was annoyed, because it was OBVIOUS to me that their objection was flippant.
However, once I thought about it, I realized that the reviewer was probably representative of the audience that's going to read my paper. Their criticism while tiresome was entirely valid. So I sat down and spent a week coding a series of experiments that showed how the two methods (mine, and theirs) were different and how they could complement each other. That translated into a paragraph in the discussion section and a couple of supplementary figures, and overall a better paper.
So to go back to the original point of the GP ("maybe things got left out because they are obvious"):
Obvious things, unless it's something really trivial, are only obvious to the authors of the paper. If you expect an educated reader to raise an obvious/natural objection, you should really address it in your text head on. And if you don't, then hopefully the peer review will catch it.
PS
This is not meant to be a commentary on the paper linked in this thread. I have not read it, and have no opinion on it. I just wanted to opine on the general topic of peer review and whether "obvious" things should go into an academic paper.
Thanks for the link to the study.
I've spent weeks in a middle-class community never seeing a cop. Surprise surprise, the crime-rate is low...Yet I knew that plenty of recreational drugs were flowing through this white-middle class community...it was barely hidden. Meanwhile, in poorer communities like where I grew up, police are everywhere patrolling, waiting to harass anyone they don't like the look of... hell I was interrogated for sitting in my front yard once.
The wealthy white kids I was around were loaded with hard drugs. Coke use was rampant. I could open random drawers at my friends place and see bags of the stuff. Heck, some were outright dealing the stuff.
Meanwhile my poorer black friends pretty much only smoked weed, while occasionally dabbling in some other minor drugs (mushrooms, MDMA, etc...).
Of course the only ones with stores of police harassment were my poorer friends. My rich friends got away with anything they wanted
As an alternative, maybe people who are mistreated by police become immediately more likely to commit crimes? Or maybe police who would otherwise be doing proactive policing are doing something more beneficial instead? Those are just speculations, though.
Once the due date is past, the fine is doubled or triple. A $200 fine can become 400 or $600. Now its harder to pay, and so it doesn't because your car broke down and the kids are hungry. A warrant is issued for your arrest. They arrest you while at work. Even though you are out again the next morning, your work fired you, and won't give you a good reference. You get a knock on your door. Rent is due. Then two months. You feel fucked. A neighbor offers you relief, a fun night with some meth. You consider, but decide not too. You get kicked out for not paying rent. Now you are back living at your mom's. You feel like a loser, but at least its a roof. But she's an ass. She forgets to tell you of a phone call inviting your to an interview.
But you have to make it to court to plead guilty/mercy for not paying your fines, but your sister calls you right before. She just got beat up down the street, and needs you to pick her up. Your are 5 minutes late, and the judge doesn't care. On the way home, you get pulled over for expired tags. New ticket. I guess you won't pay the car payment this month. Your car get repossessed. It costs 200 +%40/day + $400 in late payments. You borrow some money from the neighbor. He's creeepy but get your car back.
Insurance is due. Tags are not paid. You are afraid to drive. You don't have a job. Meanwhile your creepy neighbor will forgive your debt if you get on your knees. You decide to not pay him, but he grabs you anyway. Rapes you. Police don't believe you. You are a poor slut. Your friend says come over and says let's party. You do. You get high. You keep getting high. You sleep with someone because they have a hit. He says, damn you hot, you could make some good money, and leaves a little for the road. You start jonesing, then take him up on the offer. Next thing you know you are a hooked junky prostitute. You sell your car for next to nothing and a blowjob. Your mom kicks you out. Now you live by the river with Frank. Frank protects you but he's an alcoholic.
I made this up, but this is how it works. THis is how it worked for people I know.
I don't doubt that some small portion of the effect is exactly this. But 5% reduction in a month seems like far too much. I'm not even sure if there was a big reduction in fines- how many fines come out of proactive policing?
I don't know, it's not totally impossible. It just seems less likely than the null hypothesis of random variation in the data, while a more direct relationship could compete.
So I am not sure what it is.
Edit to add this link with the murder rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/984823/homicide-rate-pue...
[1] - https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-con...
It absolutely can and has been. [1]
> Photos of the teenager’s corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette. But police in Japan’s Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was “heart disease,” police declared.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...
The murder rate in most areas of the US is under 5 in 100,000.
There's less than 50 police departments in the US where you can expect even 50 murders per year. With numbers that small, you'll run into a lot of noise.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351000...
Your data is for the Greater Toronto Area. The commenter above you was referring to the City if Toronto (which is one of several municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area).
Murder rates don’t include “justifiable homicide”, because police departments are not required to report officer-involved shootings or killings to the federal government, nor the outcomes of any investigations into them. Which can also be gamed.
I’m not saying that radically transforms the statistic—I have no idea. But it’s a factor.
Having a deaths count -- which itself definitely has error bars, otherwise what the heck are missing persons estimates -- doesn't mean you have a correct attribution of those deaths. Never trust data in the absence of auditing how it got there.
For reference, a "gravity knife" is something originally issued to paratroopers. They could get stuck in trees and need to cut themselves out of their chutes. They needed a knife they could use with limited mobility. The traditional gravity knife had a button that released the knife that fell into place and locked by force of gravity.
These became popular later and evolved, most notably into the spring-loaded switch blade. To combat this and crime in the 70s and 80s, NYC clamped down on so-called gravity knives, which the law defined as anything that could be opened with one hand.
This law was clearly abused. NYPD officers would forcefully try and open a knife with one hand, claim it was a gravity knife and the owner would be charged. With a prior arrest this may be upsold to a felony.
This was such a problem for many professions that needed a knife for their job, most notably stagehands on Broadway and custodians. One custodian walking home at night ended up with a 5 year prison sentence with an upsold felony charge.
And of course minorities were overly targeted with this law.
Through the 2010s reform was repeatedly attempted. Twice this was vetoed by Cuomo at the behest of the Manhattan DA. Cuomo at this time I'm convinced still thought he could be president some day (to be fair, he probably could still be if he switched parties based on recent evidence) so courted the "law and order" crowd and political support from the police unions (who opposed reform) and the DA. Vague reasons were given for the veto.
Eventually this did pass but there still seems to be problems with that.
So let's outline the problems here:
1. A so-called Democratic governor choosing personal ambition over targeted minorities;
2. Arrest targets within the NYPD that drive police to meet those targets;
3. Police unions wanting more ways to randomly charge people for doing their job just in case they wanted to; and
4. Targeting of minorities, likely because they were poor (and couldn't thus afford legal representation and were also more likely to have a criminal record so the charges would stick).
For me I was glad to see Cuomo go but frankly I couldn't stand the guy long before the sexual harassment allegations came to light. It seems like every issue I looked into Cuomo landed on the wrong side of it and personal political gain seemed to be the reason. For example, NYC property tax reform and congestion charging for private vehicles in Manhattan.
When I lived there I switched to a Case folding knife so I wouldn't accidentally run afoul of this law.
>In sharp contrast to this trend, evidence shows that arrests by the Detective Bureau increased significantly during the slowdown. This result is highly relevant to one of our theoretical mechanisms, since the Detective Bureau is charged with intensive investigations, rather than proactive policing. Further confirming that the slowdown’s effects were localized to proactive policing, we find no evidence that ‘Major crime arrests’ were significantly affected by the slowdown when we condition our estimates on ‘Major crime complaints’.
This paragraph appears to rule out many of the "armchair" objections being raised in the comments. If it is a robust finding, it would imply that some "proactive policing" arrests are effectively a nuisance to prosecutors and detectives as they work to combat severe criminality.
Nonetheless, I was surprised to see how much confidence the authors report with such limited data. They are not shy about saying "our results imply..." (cf. suggest) and go on to assert the existence of a "vicious feedback between proactive policing and major crime" It's one study, in one city, over a brief time period. Further work is needed to see if the results generalize.
A very minor mistake - the kind of mistake I'm sure we've all made at some point - can easily send the life of a poor person spiralling out of control.
Get thrown in jail for a night, you could lose your job. If you lose your job, you will miss rent. If you miss rent, the lack of social safety net means you're essentially screwed. It's even worse if you're find or a parent. It's no mystery why people in this situation would turn to crime.
This is a good and interesting story but it's not new information, nor does it seem to have been updated with more recent data.
It's just not working.
Go and explain the idea of "less policing" to that beaten and robbed grandma in Oakland, or to the mother of that girl who got shot by a stray bullet in Chicago.
My guess is BLM is steadily losing support with general public thus the attempt to resuscitate this dying fad.