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Comment by skymast | Hacker News Reader

Manhattan is getting the law enforcement it demanded.

Not really. Walk around the city and you see more cops than ever. The issue is that police don’t actually prevent crime. Putting more cops on the street is like trying to use water to extinguish a grease fire.

The cops are generally part of the crime problem in NYC. They also don't go after people for anything short of attempted murder (even when it's done in front of their faces), so lots of crime goes unreported.

NYC used to have a solution for this, it was called broken windows policing.

The issue is that the people most often breaking the metaphorical windows are the police themselves.

Broken windows policing doesn't work when the cops have the city's largest supply of bricks.

or broken pens. If it isn’t written up, it did not happen.

Yes, that’s a big part of the problem. By far the most common lawbreakers I see in my day-to-day are cops committing traffic infractions. You can tell you’re by a police station solely by how impassable the sidewalk becomes for pedestrians.

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.

> There was an incident recently in which someone removed an obstruction from a license plate[…]

Fortunately, the incident seems to only have encouraged him, and he’s continued to “fix” plate obstructions.

https://twitter.com/gershkuntzman

You should never base opinions off single instances you see a news story of. Both because of the misleading nature of such stories in terms of the information they include or miss out and because single cherry picked instances are not representative.

I agree with the general principle of that, but in this case I do think it represents a broader trend. Walking around NYC, if I see an intentionally obfuscated plate, nine times out of ten it has a police placard in the dashboard.

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.

I see it constantly, both in person and on social media. I've personally reported many cases to 311 and to officers in person, and every single time they either ignore me or lie about handling the complaint. It's so endemic that a City Council member has introduced a bill that would allow civilians themselves to ticket illegally parked vehicles [1].

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...

The police are not preventing crime because DeBlasio/Adams stripped the NYPD of all their power post-2020

Can you explain how exactly they were stripped of all their power please?

Well, if law enforcement proves useless, give shopowners protection for handling it themselves. Our current attitude of just deal with it/ignore it is not only insanity, it's infuriating.

Assuming you mean allowing them to use violence against shoplifters, I’m curious how far you think we should take this. Should we allow employees to use violent force to recover stolen wages from their employers? After all, orders of magnitude more is stolen via wage theft than shoplifting.

Whataboutism aside, in a more just world, law enforcement and the judicial system handle things so townspeople don't have to. And that's a great thing. But what do you do when those systems stop doing anything?

It’s not whataboutism. You’re proposing a change to society, and I’m asking you exactly what that change would look like.

Zero liability or recourse for injuries sustained by reasonable force during the commission of a provable crime.

So again, if let’s say a waiter assaults their manager who isn’t covering the difference between their tips and minimum wage, that would be allowed? What if I slash the tires of an illegally parked car with an expired police placard?

When the GP says “reasonable force,” that “reasonable” is doing all the heavy lifting. It’s whatever he considers reasonable. Let’s also ignore that “provable” is decided by the courts which these vigilantes are meant to bypass.

Rules for thee but not for me.

Doesn't everyone use words to mean what they want to mean by the words?? I seriously though your post was a defense at first. Why would their rule not protect you from liability also?

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.

OK so we have something like this: Stand Your Ground laws. A bunch of states passed then recently and saw a large increase in shooting deaths that legally weren't proven to be either self-defense or murder, becuause the witness is dead. Now what?

We have something exactly like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege

The bizarre examples you keep bringing up are retaliatory actions, not preventative ones.

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.

> 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.

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.

Yes. Call it Plan Romanov.

In a sense they are. The article talks about putting deodorant behind a locked panel. I'm hoping you're not talking about something like an physical confrontation, since that would strike me as dangerous and unmanageable. That's the last thing I'd want to expose employees and customers to.

So you need military, not police?

One prevalent narrative in NYC is that there’s an epidemic of people being pushed onto the tracks. We need more police in the subway to prevent this from happening.

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.

I'd be very happy for western cities to emulate Singapore

By extremely punishing petty offenses, or by harboring billion-dollar financial criminals, or by being dictatorships?

So we should use public caning and ramp up the use of the death penalty for illegal drug possession?

Kindly point out where I'm advocating for anything remotely like what you're describing here.

The idea that lawlessness or criminal behavior is inhibited by a short wall in the subway between the platform and the tracks is absurd. There are broader cultural forces at play, in particular the "non-carcerial" alternatives that Singapore employs- harsh punishments for small crimes. Giuliani's "broken windows" policies on steroids.

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.

This is possibly the most ridiculous argument being used today. Anyone who has looked at their speed and slowed down while driving past a cop can confirm that you’re full of it.

Speeding is not shoplifting

Yeah, and then they speed right back up after once out of view. The best you can say is that cops prevent crimes when they make their presence known and have the would-be crime doer in their sight.

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.

NYC cops don’t have radar guns

>The issue is that police don't actually prevent crime.

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...

> Research on the police–crime relationship generally shows police levels have little impact on crime rates.

> 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".

Police usually prevent crime. Does everyone seriously need to watch and read Lord of the Flies?

To see when police are absent, look to CHAZ. Did CHAZ not have one of the highest murder rates in the known world?

Wrong

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