They also regularly use their lights and sirens just to get through traffic. Those constant little violations of the law have a cumulative effect, like how broken windows and other minor violations make a neighborhood feel less safe.
The constant skirting of the law public servants in NYC, be it the illegal parking, the using of sirens to push their way through traffic, the "I won't wear a mask but will fine you for not wearing one", NYPD officers not paying subway fares but fining the average joe, the special treatment (private spaces for NYPD families and adjacents in what are supposed to be public events)...
All of that shit culminates in the lack of trust in institutions and the degradation of OUR city.
Now the deal is: you get extra physical power over the people around you, the public is grateful for your 'sacrifice' and protection, such that if you screw up you'll get away with it. You will, like most humans, behave in a way that maximizes your pleasure and minimizes your pain, to the extent you can get away with it, and you'll quickly find that you can get away with almost anything. Just don't be too good, or piss off the wrong people in the department, and after 20 years you get to retire on a fat pension. Let's just get you tested to make sure you aren't too intelligent, and then you'll get your 6 weeks of training, and boom, you'll be on the street with a gun, ready "to protect and to serve"!
Sometimes I think we'd be better off with AI cops.
If I park on the sidewalk, I will get a ticket. If a police officer parks on the sidewalk, there is no check on their ability to say "It was necessary for police business", even if it wasn't. Adding a method to track and prosecute that abuse is all I care about; police aren't being held accountable today, but I also don't see any need to hold them extra accountable -- just the same amount as everyone else is fine by me.
People don’t know the exact charges and likely punishments before they commit a crime, so they don’t game out exactly the risk-reward tradeoff.
However, cops generally know the likelihood of avoiding prosecution before they commit a crime. Fixing the disincentive to prosecute police officers for any small crime is 1000x better than doubling the theoretical punishment that is so rarely applied.
https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-blocked-off-vip-viewing-site...
I do think turning on the lights possibly serves a good thing: it’s a silent reminder that the cops are in the area, especially at night.
Or maybe that's just conjecture.
However I'm quite uninformed about it. Just raising the topic :)
On a more serious note, I am surprised parking on sidewalks is a thing over there. It really is a massive problem here in Bulgaria. Has been for decades at this point
They went out of fashion as police departments transitioned from "visible deterrent presence" to "haha gocthca, now pay up you filthy peasant" business model over the course of the war on drugs.
I think Hawaii and Connecticut still do them though.
Anecdotally speaking I've seen them in Pennsylvania and Maryland, but super uncommonly.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-leading-cause-law-enforc...
It's not surprising in the slightest. I'm guessing a lot of them developed a aversion to vaccines from the media they ingest.
Edit* I'm laughing at the downvotes for posting an article. Real Reddit energy.
1) as you said they seem to be, as a group, vaccine adverse. Maybe because they see themselves as the ones that 'should be giving the orders not taking them'
2) Similarly, perhaps in macho alignment with point 1, their masking discipline was poor
3) .. and this is one in their favor, they were perhaps one of of the largest groups of 'essential workers' that still had to interact with many people even during the height of whatever we want to call that period early on where we were 'locked down'.
But then what I hear about it is very limited an done-sided.
Now let's recreate the NYPD as something new! Let's hire all new cops. All 36000 of them.
Who's going to apply for those jobs? Seems likely most of that original 36000 would be in line.
that is, if you have cops, someone has to do that job. It seems like the job as practiced in the US naturally gravitates towards the kind of policing we seem to have. I think that all extends from the fact that guns are basically fully legal and ubiquitous throughout the US which puts it on police departments to be hyper aggressive, highly armed and dangerous, and generally mistrustful of the public; it also does not help that the educational background requirements for cops in the US are very low.
As far as why US cops specifically are like that - it's because they're literally trained to be like that. Look up Dave Grossman and his "killology" nuttery (if you ever heard people talking about "sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs", that's from there). You'd think that would be some kind of fringe stuff, but no - there are police departments where the leadership paid for the entire force to attend one of his seminars.