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Comment by thmsths | Hacker News Reader

This just boggles my mind. First time I heard about this was when I saw the headline on Fox News, and I initially thought it was just an hyperbole. But now I see it repeated in more reputable media orgs and I still can't understand how this is happening.

The NYPD has one of the largest police budgets in the world, they have their own intelligence division and even overseas offices, and yet they seem unable to be able to station officers on the subway and now the national guard needs to step up. How did it come to this?

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And the attention is because of optics rather than reality. From the article:

> Hochul has tried to mount a more aggressive public safety messaging strategy after Republicans campaigned on crime concerns and performed well in House races around New York City in the 2022 elections.

It doesn't matter whether you have a crime wave or not if people watch Fox News and believe you have a crime wave.

I believe some part of it is that this is led by the governor, and the governor can’t deploy NYPD on her own. The subway is also a state system, so deploying a state system (National Guard) to another state system makes sense to me.

>the governor can’t deploy NYPD on her own

If this is the case, why wouldn't she just put pressure on Mayor Adams to deploy more police?

I do wonder how much of this is data driven vs a combination of fear mongering by the usual suspects and reacting to fear mongering, and thus causing its own fear issues.

Granted homicide isn't the only violent crime in the world but there were the headlines a week or so ago that homicide rates were far higher in the states complaining about NYC's crime than NYC has. Is it really *that* dangerous?

No, NYC is far, far safer than other large US cities. It’s the subject of attention because NYC is always the subject of attention.

No. NYC crime is lower than almost every major city.

It's always fun when finding out someone who lives in a rural area has a higher per capita crime rate than NYC while they complain about how NYC is a crime shithole.

Per capita crime will still be more densely concentrated in areas of higher population density. So yes, NYC could have a lower crime rate than a rural area by number of people, but still have it be much more "in your face" because all those crimes are happening in a smaller geographical footprint. And crime being "in your face" as opposed to happening where you don't notice it is what makes people think "wow, this is a shithole."

The homicide rate in cities needs to be lower than primarily rural or suburban or small city states. This is because cities require citizens to be more trusting of one another due to close proximity. It takes a much lower crime rate to make a city feel unsafe compared to a less populated area.

I don't understand why this concept is still hard to grasp. If you lived in a low trust high crime society would you rather live in a tenement building or have your own acreage and gun?

That being said, yes Nyc is safer than many cities thanks to Giulianis continued policies that make new York city policing closer to a right wing fever dream than many would like to admit.

There are a decent number of NYPD officers in the subway system, but they do not seem to be utilized effectively. They almost exclusively congregate near station entrances, rather than patrolling the platforms where incidents actually occur.

And they seem to be obsessed with their personal phones.

Policing issues worldwide always seem like some bizarre budgeting priority issue to me. They're happy to spend many millions upgrading their vehicle fleets and equipment each year - kit that is perfectly fit for purpose in most cases, much of it only 5 or 6 years old - yet they can't afford to get bodies on the ground or respond to crime-in-progress calls. Seems to be classic white elephant behaviour.

To be frank, the general public doesn't care about the extreme crime that most police forces concern themselves with. They just want to feel safe on the subway or walk home from work. They want to be able to have a delivery left on their doorstep and not be stolen. They want to be able to park their car without someone smashing their window to steal some spare change. Yet little funding ever seems to come together to do anything about that; it all goes into the exciting anti-terrorism unit or drug-enforcement agency and the likem which make up the tiniest fraction of actual crimes.

Much of the SWAT gear is likely military surplus. My city has part time SWAT but two huge hummers that were built for the military but never deployed.

I am not saying that police prioritize their deployment of officers properly. I’m just saying they likely don’t pay for military surplus.

Military surplus is usually auctioned off to eligible buyers at a large discount. There were a number of stories back when MRAPs coming from Afghanistan and Iraq were sold to municipalities.

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