Arrested Development

A Brooklyn cop became concerned that NYPD policies where no longer serving the public interest. “To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors… He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs.

“Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the [Village] Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it's like to work as a cop in this city… They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don't make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

“As a result, the tapes show, the rank-and-file NYPD street cop experiences enormous pressure in a strange catch-22: He or she is expected to maintain high ‘activity’—including stop-and-frisks—but, paradoxically, to record fewer actual crimes.” VillageVoice.com, May 4, 2010. Bottom line: “[There’s] increasing evidence that the NYPD is paying less attention to violent crime... [C]urrent and former NYPD officers told the publication that supervising officers encouraged them to either downgrade or not even bother to file reports for assault, robbery and even sexual assault. The theory is that the department faces political pressure to produce statistics showing that violent crime continues to drop. Since then, other New Yorkers have told the Voice that they have been rebuffed by NYPD when trying to report a crime.” Huffington Post, November 21^st.

Indeed, in economically impaired times when municipalities are looking for new sources of revenue, cops tend to be ordered to do what generates the most money for the department, often in the form of federal grants and other rather direct support. So if the department wants to show a decline in violent crime, it’s just as easy to avoid investigating and reporting such incidents. And if the federal government is shoving money into cracking down on drug trafficking, it’s equally easy to reemphasize that aspect of criminal activity at the expense of everything else.

“Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn't bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants….‘The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats,’ said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

“‘When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,’ Downing said.” Huffington Post.

As Mexico screams for help from the United States to stop the flow of illicit machine gun and other heavy weapons traffic from the US to Mexican drug cartels, the US does nothing to stop unlicensed gun dealers, operating perfectly legally in gun shows in states like Texas, from selling virtually unlimited supplies of automatic weapons to total strangers without the slightest background check or appropriate paper trail. “More than 70% of 29,284 firearms submitted to the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for tracing by the Mexican government during 2009 and 2010 originated in the United States...” CNN, June 14^th. We are obsessed with drug trafficking, yet unwilling to contain the pressures from the National Rifle Associate to keep the uncontrolled flow of automatic weapons that inevitably reinforce the cartels’ rather powerful ability to flow narcotics into the United States.

This current system is a total and complete failure. Half the criminal activity in the US is linked to drug use, and one quarter of our actual convictions are directly related to drug trafficking. But the flow of narcotics into the United States continues without the slightest sign of abatement. We allow violent crime to go unpunished in order to deploy our police efforts towards illicit narcotics. It’s time to reinvent our approach to drugs. Tax them, control them and make them legal. Take the incentive out of trafficking drugs, and generate revenue for our economically impaired cities and counties. And let our police force protect us from the thugs and cheats who currently just laugh at our efforts to arrest them. Even if we do convict them, so many states and municipalities just give them token time in prison, because overcrowding necessitates a massive early release program all over the US.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when something hasn’t work for as long as our anti-drug program, it’s for a ground-up review.