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Cops Bitch To NY Post That Stop-And-Frisk Oversight Will Make Society Collapse
By
Ben Yakas
Published Aug 24, 2013
Modified Aug 24, 2013
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Christopher Parypa / Shutterstock.com
By
Ben Yakas
Published Aug 24, 2013
Modified Aug 24, 2013
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It's starting to feel like a rite of passage that every time there's a major inroad made to reform the controversial stop-and-frisk police policy, anonymous cops will go to the NY Post to complain about it. As Battlestar Galactica put it: "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." But today's bitchfest is particularly alarmist: "Crime is about to skyrocket. We are going to show up and take reports. This was the safest city in the country...Now most crimes will go unsolved."
Yes, society as we know it is about to collapse, and it's all because this week the City Council overrode Mayor Bloomberg's vetoes, affirming the passage of two laws that will strengthen existing profiling bans, allow citizens to meaningfully challenge discriminatory police practices, and install an Inspector General to broadly review NYPD policy and make recommendations. Following this, a memo was sent to police stations around the city stating:
All officers should take action if he or she sees a crime in progress, or if he or she sees that his or her life or the life of another person is in danger...[But] all officers should be careful not to initiate any law-enforcement action that could be construed as violating the new legislation and subject the officer to legal action.
And several unnamed "police sources" (it's hard to tell how many the Post talked to) say this means that no police work will get done from here on out: “These rookies are just getting on the job out of college," one source said. "They’re not going to risk their pensions. Arrests are going to drop, and crime’s going to soar. It really puts a wrench into law enforcement. They’re going to be second-guessing everything they do."
One "source" went as far as to say that if they have a description of a suspect and it's a black male, they're not going to pursue much farther than that: “If someone gets raped and says it was a black male, I’m going to be handicapped to stop someone because I could get sued for racial profiling. So now I’m just going to take reports,” the cop said.
“I’m not stopping a soul,” said another cop who perhaps should consider another line of employment. "You think any cop with a functioning brain is going to risk getting a lawsuit or losing their pension?" And then there's the "police source" who claims that "bad guys" know that this is their chance to pillage NYC:
Even the bad guys have gotten the memo.
“Perps on the street are saying, ‘If they’re not going to stop me, I’m going to start carrying [my gun] again.’ That’s the word on the street,” said one police source.
“The number of stops is going to go way down, and crime is going to go way up. Shootings and murders are going to come back big time,” the source said.
“Now all these guys who weren’t carrying guns are going to carry again, because they know we can’t stop them. The first thing a perp is going to say is, ‘You can’t stop me, I’m going to sue you,’ a second source agreed.
Perhaps Mayor Bloomberg is one of these anonymous sources: he's continued to badmouth the City Council since the vote. "It's election-year politicking rather than common sense in terms of what's right for the city," he said during his radio appearance on Friday. But he vowed to keep fighting in the courts: “We believe that we have a very good case in court that state law is what determines criminal procedures and not city law, and so we will certainly appeal that,” Bloomberg said.
Tagged
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police
stop and frisk
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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