"PEOPLE ARE COMPLETELY MISUNDERSTANDING THIS NYPD SLOWDOWN. Here’s the key bit:
Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.
Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.
Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.
Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.
All of these, except maybe the drug arrests — and probably including those too — are basically revenue offenses. By not arresting here, the cops are starving the City for revenue. The Knoxville Police do the same thing when they’re crosswise with the City; they stop writing tickets. The real scandal isn’t that NYC is being denied law enforcement now, it’s that much of that “law enforcement” is really just a system designed to squeeze money out of the citizenry."
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Starving the Beast
From Instapundit:
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5 comments:
Wait a minute. What's his point again?
Those traffic violations, summonses, parking violations and drug arrests are real laws on the books, being enforced by police. In this case, they're not.
Where does Instapundit get that, because some of these things generate revenue for the city, that's the *only* reason they're being enforced? It could be, after all, because the people are breaking the law and getting caught!
Let's face it, if you get caught speeding or driving drunk and a cop catches you and cites you, are you gonna show up in court and accuse the 'system' of catching your drunken ass solely for the purpose of fattening the city coffers? Really?
And why is Instapundit shocked by the entirely novel idea that such revenue is used to support the city and its law enforcement? Does he suppose they are all volunteers?
Instapundit is pretty clever on most days, but this one is just off the mark.
There are several ways to look at this. Vox Day calls this an abdication of duty, and it is.
Yet it was the following of duty which the racist blacks object to, because it interferes with their culture of minor criminality. They don't want laws on the books enforced, they want their own kind of self-defined Social Justice. And the rampant, rabid left sang the same song and shouted the same slogans (including the mayor) as the those demonstrating against due process and police in general: "what do we want? Dead cops".
So the ticketing slow down does just what the leftists demanded. The minor infractions are being ignored. This is the kind of city they demanded to have, and now they have it. What will the result of that be?
I am against the municipal dependence on fines to finance its functions. That leads to quotas and abuse of policing powers.
BTW, stay away from Raven, Arkansas, unless you want to pay a hefty fine just for driving down the US highway that goes through it.
A question: how dependent is NY on these sorts of fines? Will it feel any pain?
Steven, I understand where you are coming from, but city planners all over the country make onerous laws in order to maximize revenue. As Stan said, they are beholden to a certain level of income. My ex-wife's father was a Cleveland cop/detective and he would tell me all the time about the hidden quotas. They threatened to take away his overtime once, until he threatened them with a law suit, because he had too few traffic stops, yet his felony arrest record was one of the highest in the precinct. As he's explained to me in the past, "ticketing increases revenue while felony arrests costs the city money.
More on police as revenue generators from Police Chief Magazine:
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=2108&issue_id=62010&utm_content=bufferc1a09&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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