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.

Poor, Poor POPO: NYPD Casts Black Lives Matter Protesters as Terrorists

Saturday, December 20 was the day that Ismaaiyl Brinsley gunned down two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, while they sat in their patrol car in Bed-Stuy. As a result, for the last two weeks the Black Lives Matter protest movement has been crowded out of the newspapers, replaced by the ceremonial charade of Patrolmen's Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch taking shots at NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and de Blasio meekly, apologetically replying.

The mainstream media prefers this type of reporting -- tit-for-tat squabbles between camps of officials -- to actually covering popular movements because it requires less work. The reporter gets a quote from one camp, a reply from the other camp, rehashes the main markers of the conflict followed by next steps, and Shazam! Story finished. That is what you have in "Police Unions’ Leaders Air Grievances in 2-Hour Meeting With de Blasio," by Matt Flegenheimer and J. David Goodman.

One interesting quote by a police union official in the Flegenheimer and Goodman piece conflates the Black Lives Matter protests with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 9/11:

Officials with the administration seemed to bet that some of the union leaders might act as peacekeepers, or at least supply more measured voices, in the conflict with the patrolmen’s union. 

However, in an email to members on Tuesday, Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains’ Endowment Association, said that he would allow the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association to “lead any conversation.” He added that he stood “in solidarity with them as they express raw outrage against the forces that caused the coldblooded assassination of our two brother police officers.” 

Mr. Richter compared the emotional climate of the day to that immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote that he had met privately with Mr. de Blasio — “at his request” — just before Christmas “to give him a blunt critique of the hostile antipolice environment” in the city.

There you have it. Police union leadership blaming protesters for the death of Liu and Ramos, comparing the Black Lives Matter protests and the 9/11 terror attacks. This is the direction we are headed: lawful protest conflated with terrorism.

To highlight the imbalanced, aggrieved state of mind dominant now in the NYPD is yesterday's report by Al Baker and J. David Goodman, "Arrest Statistics Decline Sharply; Police Unions Deny an Organized Slowdown." The NYPD is engaged in a form of wildcat sit-down strike, refusing to make arrests:

. . . [T]he latest official statistics came in. 

Arrests for crimes large and small, as well as tickets for minor infractions, are down drastically across the city. The department has not said whether it believes that officers are acting in concert — as a result of a specific job action — or whether the officers’ deaths produced a spontaneous response.

The two precincts most directly affected by the deaths — the 79th, where Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down as they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street; and the 84th, where they were usually assigned — saw a single criminal summons in the week that ended Sunday, according to Police Department statistics. Officers in those precincts wrote no parking or traffic tickets. By contrast, the combined tally of criminal summonses alone during the same week last year reached 130, the department statistics showed. 

Mr. Bratton said on Monday that a “weeklong period of mourning” and demonstrations that were straining resources were contributing to the drop-off in arrests and summonses. But he said the slowdown should not concern New Yorkers. “I would point out it has not had an impact on the city’s safety at all,” Mr. Bratton said. 

A top union official flatly denied that there was a job action and pointed to the orders to double up and the need to police demonstrations as the main reasons. 

“No one has sanctioned a slowdown or stoppage,” said Edward Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association. “That is not something that anybody came out and said to do.” 

He added: “We have demonstrations every night of the week, to which cops are being pulled into every night. We have had two officers killed that has changed the everyday duties of what we are doing, and one of those changes is the consistency of patrol cars backing each other up on radio assignments.” 

He said summonses were simply not a priority at moments like this. 

Still, one senior police official who reviewed precinct-level data across the city said the decline had the signs of an organized effort and was continuing this week. 

It is not uncommon for a grieving station house to ease up on enforcement for a brief period. Enforcement numbers can fluctuate from station house to station house, and from week to week, for a number of other reasons, too, including shifts in personnel or directives from commanders. The holidays can also be a factor. 

But the drop-off in activity in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in Downtown Brooklyn could not explain the sharp slowdown in routine enforcement in each of the city’s 77 police precincts, from the 120th in Staten Island to the 47th in the Bronx.

In the week after Officers Ramos and Liu were killed on Dec. 20, the number of summonses for minor criminal offenses, as well as those for parking and traffic violations, decreased by more than 90 percent versus the same week a year earlier. And arrests over seven major categories of felony offenses were nearly 40 percent lower, the numbers show.

My neighborhood was protester ground zero for the historic "Battle in Seattle." For several weeks following the WTO my perception was that policing of the Capitol Hill neighborhood effectively ceased. This was the police's way of saying, "You rise up against us, we will find a way to get back at you." New York City is experiencing something similar.

And all of this in an environment where crime continues to drop (J. David Goodman and Al Baker, "Murders in New York Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating"). So clearly we are dealing here with a sense of police entitlement under siege.

And while for the last two weeks the Gray Lady has dropped her focus on the Black Lives Matter protests, which continue across the country, choosing instead to follow the NYPD tantrum, she published a terrific unsigned editorial the other day, "When New York City Police Walk Off the Job":

The list of [police] grievances adds up to very little, unless you look at it through the magnifying lens of resentment fomented by union bosses and right-wing commentators. The falling murder rate, the increased resources for the department, the end of quota-based policing, which the police union despised, the mayor’s commitment to “broken-windows” policing — none of that matters, because many cops have latched on to the narrative that they are hated, with the mayor orchestrating the hate. 

It’s a false narrative. Mr. de Blasio was elected by a wide margin on a promise to reform the policing excesses that were found unconstitutional by a federal court. He hired a proven reformer, Mr. Bratton, who had achieved with the Los Angeles Police Department what needs doing in New York. The furor that has gripped the city since the Garner killing has been a complicated mess. But what New Yorkers expect of the Police Department is simple: 

1. Don’t violate the Constitution. 

2. Don’t kill unarmed people. 

To that we can add: 

3. Do your jobs. The police are sworn public servants, and refusing to work violates their oath to serve and protect. Mr. Bratton should hold his commanders and supervisors responsible, and turn this insubordination around.

I think the NYPD must be sensing now that business as usual is not going to fly here. But rather than moderate its messaging, it appears to be doubling down. The story by Al Baker this morning, "Man Threatened to Kill Officers, Authorities Say," plays up the poor, poor POPO motif:

The Police Department has now investigated in the past dozen days more than 90 threats it deemed serious among the hundreds that have streamed in from 311, 911, online postings and tips, including eight made on Wednesday through social media sites. 

The first step in analyzing them is to separate angry speech, hate speech and a threat “where someone is indicating they intend to act,” said John J. Miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. 

“What we’ve found in a number of these are, you’ve got dangerous people with serious criminal records, some of whom possessed weapons, who are making these threats,” he said. “And in other cases we’ve found guys who are big and bad over the computer but when the cops knock at their door, they are reduced to tears, saying they were drunk and never really meant anything by it.”

The way that the NYPD has responded to the Black Lives Matter protests after the Liu and Ramos shooting has been fascinating. Petulant, scared, vulnerable yet tough, in command and demanding obeisance from the citizens and elected leaders of the metropolis, it is a portrait of a balling infant coming to understand that mother's body is separate. Baby is on his own.