NYPD: This is What the U.S. Police State Looks Like

I always thought it was interesting that the day before the December 20 murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos by Ismaaiyl Brinsley Juan Gonzalez appeared on Democracy Now! to tell the show's leftist listeners that NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is the real deal. Here is the blurb that accompanies Gonzalez's December 19 segment:

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his exclusive year-end interview with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. "The list of his accomplishments in just one year has shocked even me — a total skeptic after more 35 years of covering urban politics in this country," writes González in his latest column. "And it’s not just the big issues like education, affordable housing, reform of police-community relations, or new contracts and pay raises for city workers. It’s also a host of less publicized but important measures affecting ordinary New Yorkers. Things like paid sick leave and a living wage for low-income workers. Like the lowest rent increase in memory for 800,000."

So what we have to consider is that the ongoing quasi-"sit down" strike that the NYPD is engaged in (see yesterday's "For Second Week, Arrests Plunge in New York City" by J. David Goodman and Al Baker) is a politically reactionary statement, a coup d'état of sorts. It is reminiscent of the situation in Cairo right before the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces removed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in a coup. Policing had effectively ceased.

Vivian Yee sums up the precipitous drop off in policing in New York City in today's "Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities":

In a city of more than eight million people and 33 million subway rides a week, police officers arrested or ticketed just 22 people for jumping the turnstile last week. In the same period a year ago, nearly 1,400 fare-beaters were caught. 

Tuesday morning’s alternate-side parking period found 25 cars on the wrong side of one block in Park Slope, Brooklyn, still occupying the spaces they were required to leave an hour earlier, without a single ticket in sight. None of this appeared to faze the street sweeper moving down the block — or the police cruiser just behind it, which did not stop. 

At New York City housing projects from the Bronx to Staten Island, residents said they had seen fewer officers patrolling their hallways and streets, leaving some people relieved and others frightened for their safety. 

And on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx on Tuesday morning, Leyni Soto relished sipping from a Red Bull in a brown paper bag. When he did the same thing two months ago, an officer asked him what was in the bag.

But this time was different. “They slowed down their pace, they looked at me, they looked at the bag and they kept going,” said Mr. Soto, 28, an assistant manager of a cellphone store. “It felt really good.” 

If the Police Department’s own statistics are any indication, Mr. Soto was not simply getting a lucky break. For two consecutive weeks, New York City police officers have seemed to sit back, ignoring minor offenses and parking transgressions so completely that only 347 criminal summonses were written in the seven days through Sunday, down from 4,077 in the same period a year ago. 

Such startling numbers reflect a continuing conflict between rank-and-file officers and Mayor Bill de Blasio, on whom they have literally turned their backs. But for the New Yorkers in the middle, the slowdown has not appeared to translate to a spike in serious crime so much as in a fading, for good or ill, of the blue line that keeps the city’s streets in order.

The question is whether the collapse in "broken windows" enforcement is necessarily a bad thing. There will certainly be a loss of city revenue from all those unwritten tickets. But major violent crime will most likely be unaffected. My experience of having lived five years in New York City at a time when it posted the highest numbers of homicides annually is that I had more to fear from the police than from any criminals. And I lived and moved about on the street in Washington Heights' 34th police precinct, one of the more dangerous places in New York City.

One thing is for sure. The Gray Lady thinks the police rebellion is a very bad thing. While originally stoking police ressentiment by publishing numerous stories connecting the Black Lives Matter protests and the murders of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos with a return to the social upheaval and "white flight" decline of the Big Apple in the early 1970s, The New York Times has published several hard-hitting unsigned editorials blaming the NYPD for fascistic overreach. Today's iteration is quite good, "No Justice, No Police." I'm going to quote the whole thing:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric. 

No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops. 

For the second straight week, police officers across the city have all but stopped writing tickets and severely cut down the number of arrests. The Times reported that in the week ending Sunday, only 347 criminal summonses were issued citywide, down from 4,077 over the same period last year. Parking and traffic tickets were down by more than 90 percent. In Coney Island, ticketing and summonses fell to zero. 

The city has been placed in an absurd position, with its police commissioner, William Bratton — a pioneer of “broken windows” policing who has just written a long, impassioned defense of that strategy as an essential crime-fighting tool — leading a force that is refusing to carry it out. 

Police union officials deny responsibility for the mass inaction. But Edward Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said officers had talked among themselves and “it became contagious,” apparently like the flu. 

Call this what it is: a reckless, coordinated escalation of a war between the police unions and Mr. de Blasio and a hijacking of law-enforcement policy by those who do not set law-enforcement policy. This deplorable gesture is bound to increase tension in a city already rattled over the killing by the police of an unarmed man, Eric Garner, last summer, the executions of two officers in Brooklyn last month, and the shootings on Monday of two plainclothes officers in the Bronx. 

Mr. Bratton spoke delicately at a news conference on Monday. He said there could be other explanations, like officers being too busy handling police-reform demonstrations and attending funerals. He promised to investigate — and to “deal with it very appropriately, if we have to.” 

Mr. de Blasio’s critics foretold doom when he was elected a year ago. They said graffiti, muggings and other crime would rush back with a vengeance. They were dead wrong — crime rates continued to decline to historic lows in 2014 — but now it seems the cops are trying to help prove them right. 

The madness has to stop. The problem is not that a two-week suspension of “broken windows” policing is going to unleash chaos in the city. The problem is that cops who refuse to do their jobs and revel in showing contempt to their civilian leaders are damaging the social order all by themselves. 

Mr. de Blasio, who has been cautious since the shootings, found his voice on Monday, saying for the first time that the police officers’ protests of turning their backs at the slain officers’ funerals had been disrespectful to the families of the dead. He was right, but he needs to do more. 

He should appeal directly to the public and say plainly that the police are trying to extort him and the city he leads. 

If the Police Department’s current commanders cannot get the cops to do their jobs, Mr. de Blasio should consider replacing them.

He should invite the Justice Department to determine if the police are guilty of civil rights violations in withdrawing policing from minority communities. 

He should remind the police that they are public employees, under oath to uphold city and state laws. 

If Mr. de Blasio’s critics are right and the city is coming unglued, it is not because of what he has done. He was elected by an overwhelming vote, because he promised action on police reform, starting with the end of stop-and-frisk tactics that corralled so many innocent New Yorkers into the criminal-justice system. The city got the mayor it wanted — and then, because of Mr. de Blasio, it got Mr. Bratton. 

Mr. Bratton’s faith in “broken windows” needs rethinking. But nothing will be fixed as long as police officers are refusing to do their jobs. 

A video emerged this week of a New York cop, apparently with nothing better to do, horsing around on the hood of a squad car, falling off and hitting his head. It would hard to invent a more fitting image of the ridiculous — and dangerous — place this atmosphere of sullen insubordination has taken us.

De Blasio will not "throw down" with the NYPD, as helpfully outlined by the Gray Lady. He is a shrewd politician. He knows the police are doing more damage to themselves than he could ever do by firing police commanders or demanding a DOJ investigation. This is an educable moment. People are aroused and alert because of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the Black Lives Matter movement. Now here comes the NYPD acting like a bully throwing a tantrum, arguing that police safety trumps public safety, comporting themselves as if risk, sometimes deadly, is not part of their job description. (Get a building trades guy talking about whose job is more dangerous, his or the police, and you will find out what he thinks about the risk of police work compared to construction.)

The educable moment that the NYPD is treating us to is on the nature of fascism. We must genuflect to and honor the authority of a violent, privileged, corrupt gang that rules over us with impunity, regardless of any code of ethics or set of laws. Those of us who have a certain skin color, mental illness, or come from a particular ethnic group can be slaughtered. This is the police state within which we reside. It is now on full display in the cultural capital of the United States.