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There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it, and the public as a whole there don't really loo

There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it, and the public as a whole there don't really look like they care.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
I think the public has seen the dramatic increase in violent crime and other major crimes since the pandemic and want NYPD to fix it and they don't really care how they do that. Adams ran on a platform of exactly this and now the public expects results.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Tbh, in my circles there’s already deep resentment for Adam’s not actually addressing this. Instead we have cops lining up to ticket bike riders for no bells or turning on a red, while bike lanes themselves are notoriously unprotected from cars parking in/driving through them and pedestrians are getting killed in hit and runs that go ignored. The general sentiment is that police presence will always make a situation worse and don’t have incentives aligned with actually improving the lives of people.
- marcellus23 4y ago
  The perception that crime has skyrocketed since the pandemic is propaganda, fueled by a police department afraid of being defunded, media outlets desperate for clicks, and a cop running for mayor. Reality doesn't back it up. The murder rate in NYC is roughly where it was in 2009, and still five times less than it was in the 90s. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-stat-reality/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-st... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/File:MURDERS_IN_NEW_YORK_CITY_BY_YEAR.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/...
  - overrun11 4y ago
    Your stats don't back up your claim. Crime _has_ skyrocketed since the pandemic as both of your links show. Your first links subtitle states: "Violent incidents are up since the pandemic began" and the second link shows a graph with a quite large spike starting around 2020. That there existed a time in history when the murder rate was a higher than it is now is completely irrelevant.
    - marcellus23 4y ago
      That is not skyrocketing. It's just an "increase". Crime is back to where it was 10 years ago, when NYC was still considered one of the safest cities in the country. Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting, or did you just read first half of the subtitle (conveniently omitting "But widespread anxiety obscures the fact that crime is still at decades-long lows.") Do you think there was this much fear around crime in 2009 when the crime rate was exactly the same?
      - overrun11 4y ago
        > That is not skyrocketing, by any definition of skyrocketing Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially. > Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting This is not surprising or damning. Crime rates have been dropping for 30+ years and this was the first major reversal of that trend. We lost 10 years of progress in one year. Such a highly abnormal event deserves outsized news coverage. There's no reason why news coverage must rise and fall in perfect proportion to the absolute value of the events being reported on. If median household income fell in one year from current highs to 2009 levels, I'd expect a lot of news coverage– more news coverage than it would have received in 2009. Likewise, I'm positive there's a lot more stories about interest rates now than the last time they were at the same levels. The background context is important to the newsworthiness of any particular statistic.
        marcellus23 4y ago
        > Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially. You said the data don't back up my claim. My claim was that they did not "skyrocket". Now the goalposts have been moved to "rise substantially," which can mean anything. Even the increase in 2006 from 539 to 596 murders (more than 10%) could be considered "substantial," it's a meaningless term. If you don't think the media and the public outcry about this has been extremely overinflated (including comparing crime rates to the 90s), then I don't think we have much to discuss here. The graphs in the sources I link make it pretty clear that the bump in crime is insignificant compared to the historical crime rates in NYC. And based on your comment history, you're clearly pretty partisan to one side of the issue, so I don't think there's much to be gained for either of us by continuing this. I find it particularly ironic that you complain about mainstream media coverage of Trump, but find it impossible to believe the media could be exaggerating crime rates.
- GVIrish 4y ago
  This is why police reform is so hard to achieve. When crime spikes, people are far less committed to police reform. Even when crime isn't spiking, police can just sit on their hands whenever reforms are pushed and instantly change the narrative. This happened in SF with the AG recall and has happened in numerous municipalities. Local politicians can't afford to anger the police union because all the police has to do is stop enforcing the law aggressively and a local politician is done for. So New Yorkers may want police reforms but the NYPD union has a lot of leverage to resist it. And voters generally dont' have the stomach to oppose police union backlash.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  Except the police aren’t fixing it and are also still walking around like they are untouchable gods. It’s one thing to be a thug that runs the trains on time and another to be a thug that doesn’t. See, also, Putin’s current reputation in Russia.
i80and 4y ago
This is anecdotal, but most New Yorkers I know care, there's just not much they can do. The NYPD is effectively a military force and they have de facto veto power over the city government.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is correct, and to elaborate: the NYPD (1) is largely staffed by employees who live outside of the city, and (2) has an openly revanchist attitude towards the citizens they ostensibly protect and serve. Under the current scheme, there is no incentive structure that "fixes" the NYPD; the NYPD is functioning as intended, and in broad conflict with the roles that constrain every other NYC civil servant (e.g., around living in the city).
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    "Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What would be the revanche?
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Revanchism doesn't require physical territory, only a sense of loss and a corresponding drive for revenge. The NYPD sees itself as an occupying force in a hostile city. What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives; rather than questioning why that is, they've decided that the appropriate course of action is to extract all the value they can from the city while diminishing the natives' qualities of life to the greatest extent possible. Revanchism is the appropriate descriptor.
      - bogomipz 4y ago
        Even if taken as a general "sense of loss" what did they lose? They didn't lose anything. They weren't "defunded", there was no structural reform or consents decrees. The protests stopped and it went back to business as usual for them. In fact as of last week they exceeded their already notorious annual overtime budget by 100 million dollars![1]][2] Again what loss do they to avenge exactly? [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blows-overtime-budget-by-nearly-100-million-on-pace-for-record https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-pay https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...
aqme28 4y ago
> the public as a whole there don't really look like they care Really? The George Floyd protests were the largest protests in US history. That summer in NYC was extremely tense between the NYPD and regular residents (I have plenty of stories). Maybe I lived in an NYC bubble, but nearly everyone I knew was extremely upset with the NYPD, and remains upset.
- drumhead 4y ago
  Why hasnt anything changed then?
  - aqme28 4y ago
    We're commenting on an article about how the NYPD aren't accountable and aren't even following NYC laws. It is well-known that they don't follow the law in general. There's very little power for the citizens to actually do anything. The NYPD holds tremendous political power, and wields it aggressively. They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor.
    - feanaro 4y ago
      > They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor. I'm curious to learn more. Do you have a source?
      - kevviiinn 4y ago
        https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-attacks-nypd-for-threatening-bill-de-blasios-daughter-after-arrest-2020-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-attacks-nypd-for-threate...
        Bud 4y ago
        This doesn't seem to support any allegation that the NYPD "publicly threatened" DeBlasio's "children". What did happen is that the NYPD Sergeants' union inappropriately tweeted details about her arrest, after she was arrested. That's one child, for those keeping score, not "children", and it's also not a "threat" of any identifiable kind. It is definitely inappropriate, though. So it would appear that Business Insider's headline was sensationalist and not well supported.
kmeisthax 4y ago
This has been the case for over a century. The history of the NYPD is actually wild: it was originally two different police organizations who would regularly get into fights with one another. This was itself the result of a power struggle between the city and the state. The public do care, though - in fact, it's why the Democratic Party base was more or less calling for a total purge of police departments. It wasn't because they want to be able to crime with impunity or because they want The Purge IRL. It's because a good chunk of them live in a city where the police force is a only few steps away from being the deep state.
- akira2501 4y ago
  A personnel purge without enacting any structural changes is not particularly useful, and it is often the action of a group who wishes to capture the corruption for themselves, rather than actually fixing it.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Yes, but the people calling for outright purges were also calling for significant structural changes. The real problem is that they blindly copypasted a conservative slogan and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation. That would require increasing police budgets[0], not slashing them. But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work. The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense. There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department[1]. Underfunded PDs are perfectly willing to hire them because they are the perfect candidate "on paper": they work for cheap and fix the problem, as long as the problem is "people that we don't want being able to live in our city". [0] Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system. [1] The slang term for it is "gypsy cops", which is offensive in Europe.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deepspace 4y ago
> There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it We were recently discussing police accountability in Vancouver, Canada. Different city, different country, but the same issue. Our police chief openly stated that he is not accountable to the city, or anyone at all, and he and the VPD will continue to do as they please.

There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it, and the public as a whole there don't really look like they care.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

I think the public has seen the dramatic increase in violent crime and other major crimes since the pandemic and want NYPD to fix it and they don't really care how they do that. Adams ran on a platform of exactly this and now the public expects results.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Tbh, in my circles there’s already deep resentment for Adam’s not actually addressing this. Instead we have cops lining up to ticket bike riders for no bells or turning on a red, while bike lanes themselves are notoriously unprotected from cars parking in/driving through them and pedestrians are getting killed in hit and runs that go ignored. The general sentiment is that police presence will always make a situation worse and don’t have incentives aligned with actually improving the lives of people.
marcellus23 4y ago
The perception that crime has skyrocketed since the pandemic is propaganda, fueled by a police department afraid of being defunded, media outlets desperate for clicks, and a cop running for mayor. Reality doesn't back it up. The murder rate in NYC is roughly where it was in 2009, and still five times less than it was in the 90s. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-stat-reality/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-st... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/File:MURDERS_IN_NEW_YORK_CITY_BY_YEAR.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/...
- overrun11 4y ago
  Your stats don't back up your claim. Crime _has_ skyrocketed since the pandemic as both of your links show. Your first links subtitle states: "Violent incidents are up since the pandemic began" and the second link shows a graph with a quite large spike starting around 2020. That there existed a time in history when the murder rate was a higher than it is now is completely irrelevant.
  - marcellus23 4y ago
    That is not skyrocketing. It's just an "increase". Crime is back to where it was 10 years ago, when NYC was still considered one of the safest cities in the country. Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting, or did you just read first half of the subtitle (conveniently omitting "But widespread anxiety obscures the fact that crime is still at decades-long lows.") Do you think there was this much fear around crime in 2009 when the crime rate was exactly the same?
    - overrun11 4y ago
      > That is not skyrocketing, by any definition of skyrocketing Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially. > Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting This is not surprising or damning. Crime rates have been dropping for 30+ years and this was the first major reversal of that trend. We lost 10 years of progress in one year. Such a highly abnormal event deserves outsized news coverage. There's no reason why news coverage must rise and fall in perfect proportion to the absolute value of the events being reported on. If median household income fell in one year from current highs to 2009 levels, I'd expect a lot of news coverage– more news coverage than it would have received in 2009. Likewise, I'm positive there's a lot more stories about interest rates now than the last time they were at the same levels. The background context is important to the newsworthiness of any particular statistic.
      - marcellus23 4y ago
        > Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially. You said the data don't back up my claim. My claim was that they did not "skyrocket". Now the goalposts have been moved to "rise substantially," which can mean anything. Even the increase in 2006 from 539 to 596 murders (more than 10%) could be considered "substantial," it's a meaningless term. If you don't think the media and the public outcry about this has been extremely overinflated (including comparing crime rates to the 90s), then I don't think we have much to discuss here. The graphs in the sources I link make it pretty clear that the bump in crime is insignificant compared to the historical crime rates in NYC. And based on your comment history, you're clearly pretty partisan to one side of the issue, so I don't think there's much to be gained for either of us by continuing this. I find it particularly ironic that you complain about mainstream media coverage of Trump, but find it impossible to believe the media could be exaggerating crime rates.
GVIrish 4y ago
This is why police reform is so hard to achieve. When crime spikes, people are far less committed to police reform. Even when crime isn't spiking, police can just sit on their hands whenever reforms are pushed and instantly change the narrative. This happened in SF with the AG recall and has happened in numerous municipalities. Local politicians can't afford to anger the police union because all the police has to do is stop enforcing the law aggressively and a local politician is done for. So New Yorkers may want police reforms but the NYPD union has a lot of leverage to resist it. And voters generally dont' have the stomach to oppose police union backlash.
bradleyjg 4y ago
Except the police aren’t fixing it and are also still walking around like they are untouchable gods. It’s one thing to be a thug that runs the trains on time and another to be a thug that doesn’t. See, also, Putin’s current reputation in Russia.

i80and 4y ago

This is anecdotal, but most New Yorkers I know care, there's just not much they can do. The NYPD is effectively a military force and they have de facto veto power over the city government.

woodruffw 4y ago
This is correct, and to elaborate: the NYPD (1) is largely staffed by employees who live outside of the city, and (2) has an openly revanchist attitude towards the citizens they ostensibly protect and serve. Under the current scheme, there is no incentive structure that "fixes" the NYPD; the NYPD is functioning as intended, and in broad conflict with the roles that constrain every other NYC civil servant (e.g., around living in the city).
- bogomipz 4y ago
  "Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What would be the revanche?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Revanchism doesn't require physical territory, only a sense of loss and a corresponding drive for revenge. The NYPD sees itself as an occupying force in a hostile city. What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives; rather than questioning why that is, they've decided that the appropriate course of action is to extract all the value they can from the city while diminishing the natives' qualities of life to the greatest extent possible. Revanchism is the appropriate descriptor.
    - bogomipz 4y ago
      Even if taken as a general "sense of loss" what did they lose? They didn't lose anything. They weren't "defunded", there was no structural reform or consents decrees. The protests stopped and it went back to business as usual for them. In fact as of last week they exceeded their already notorious annual overtime budget by 100 million dollars![1]][2] Again what loss do they to avenge exactly? [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blows-overtime-budget-by-nearly-100-million-on-pace-for-record https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-pay https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...

aqme28 4y ago

> the public as a whole there don't really look like they care Really? The George Floyd protests were the largest protests in US history. That summer in NYC was extremely tense between the NYPD and regular residents (I have plenty of stories). Maybe I lived in an NYC bubble, but nearly everyone I knew was extremely upset with the NYPD, and remains upset.

drumhead 4y ago
Why hasnt anything changed then?
- aqme28 4y ago
  We're commenting on an article about how the NYPD aren't accountable and aren't even following NYC laws. It is well-known that they don't follow the law in general. There's very little power for the citizens to actually do anything. The NYPD holds tremendous political power, and wields it aggressively. They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor.
  - feanaro 4y ago
    > They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor. I'm curious to learn more. Do you have a source?
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-attacks-nypd-for-threatening-bill-de-blasios-daughter-after-arrest-2020-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-attacks-nypd-for-threate...
      - Bud 4y ago
        This doesn't seem to support any allegation that the NYPD "publicly threatened" DeBlasio's "children". What did happen is that the NYPD Sergeants' union inappropriately tweeted details about her arrest, after she was arrested. That's one child, for those keeping score, not "children", and it's also not a "threat" of any identifiable kind. It is definitely inappropriate, though. So it would appear that Business Insider's headline was sensationalist and not well supported.

kmeisthax 4y ago

This has been the case for over a century. The history of the NYPD is actually wild: it was originally two different police organizations who would regularly get into fights with one another. This was itself the result of a power struggle between the city and the state. The public do care, though - in fact, it's why the Democratic Party base was more or less calling for a total purge of police departments. It wasn't because they want to be able to crime with impunity or because they want The Purge IRL. It's because a good chunk of them live in a city where the police force is a only few steps away from being the deep state.

akira2501 4y ago
A personnel purge without enacting any structural changes is not particularly useful, and it is often the action of a group who wishes to capture the corruption for themselves, rather than actually fixing it.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Yes, but the people calling for outright purges were also calling for significant structural changes. The real problem is that they blindly copypasted a conservative slogan and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation. That would require increasing police budgets[0], not slashing them. But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work. The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense. There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department[1]. Underfunded PDs are perfectly willing to hire them because they are the perfect candidate "on paper": they work for cheap and fix the problem, as long as the problem is "people that we don't want being able to live in our city". [0] Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system. [1] The slang term for it is "gypsy cops", which is offensive in Europe.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deepspace 4y ago

> There isn't much accountability when it comes to the NYPD. They seem to do what they want and get away with it We were recently discussing police accountability in Vancouver, Canada. Different city, different country, but the same issue. Our police chief openly stated that he is not accountable to the city, or anyone at all, and he and the VPD will continue to do as they please.