# Cop for a day (in New York) - BBC News



## Yrys (15 Feb 2009)

Cop for a day







*To help fund expensive crime-fighting tools, New York's finest allow paying members 
of the public to take command, says Harold Evans.*

When I commanded a police unit in a tough precinct of Brooklyn, New York, I never knew 
what to expect. The bad day began with a shoot-out between a couple of young guys. By 
the time I got to the decent-looking apartment block, the paramedic teams had just moved 
the body of the loser from the elevator entrance and the wounded winner had fled. Nobody 
in the block was talking much but it seemed it wasn't drugs, as I thought it would be, but 
an argument over a woman.

The day ended with news almost as bad; that one of my counsellors posted to a school to 
keep a watch on drug dealers had become a dealer herself. In between, on patrol in an 
unmarked van with my team, we were stopping for a light in a derelict shopping area when 
four teenagers on motorbikes roared around the corner, missing an old woman by inches.

They were gone in a flash and we were facing the wrong way. There was no room for a 
U-turn. My driver knew the district well enough to go around the block double-quick and 
we caught the hell-raisers at the next corner. None of them had licences or insurance. 
We impounded the bikes. Minor stuff but their dangerous conduct could have ended our day 
as it began - with bloodshed. I wasn't a precinct commander for long. In fact, I did it only 
for a day. It wasn't that the New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly thought I had no 
aptitude for the work, though I soon enough decided myself that I hadn't.

I was just part of a scheme he'd cooked up to let citizens like me see what it was like to be 
responsible every day for the well-being of 85,000 people among the 8m in the city. The day 
was organised by the New York Police Foundation, which raises money for the police. Hey, 
isn't that what taxes are for? Yes, but what do you do when the police face budget cuts that 
make cities less safe?

One thing I admire about Americans is what the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted 
nearly 200 years ago: they have a gift for association, for coming together for philanthropic 
purposes. It's still true.

*Watchful eyes*

The New York citizens started their Police Foundation in 1971. Gang-ridden Los Angeles, much 
more chronically under-funded, started theirs in 1998. In New York 95% of the police budget 
goes on pay. It leaves little for the cops to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies of 
detection, so the Foundation has raised $90 million to put in 400 innovative programs.

For instance, stand in the Real Time Crime Center, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. 
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 40 detectives at serried banks of computers sit 
in front of a two-storey video wall of 18 connected screen panels giving them sight of the 
streets of the city. They zoom in by satellite and helicopter feed whenever a precinct reports a 
crime. The cops' desk computers have access to five million criminal records, parole and 
probation files, 20 million criminal complaints, arrests, emergency calls and summonses 
spanning five years… 31 million national criminal records. And more than 33 billion public 
records.

Before they set up the Real Time Crime Center - think of it as an integrated data warehouse - 
it took days, if not weeks, to access all these different scattered records. "Like any very big 
organisation," Kelly told me, "we didn't know what we knew."

Into the Real Time Crime Center comes a 911 call.

"A guy just robbed me. Stuck a gun in my face."
"Did you see what he was wearing?"
"Dunno. Had a tattoo on his neck." The cameras zoom in on the location, maybe they'll spot 
the bad guy - perp for perpetrator. An operator searches the records for robbers with tattoos. 
A lot of faces to go through.

There's another call. A customer in a pizzeria took his time eating a slice with pepperoni, then 
when everyone had gone, came up with a silver handgun, threatened to shoot the owner and 
got away with a big wad of dollars. All the owner could say was the robber was white and was 
tattooed - SUGAR - he thought. That one word narrowed the searches. The perp had a record 
and soon enough Sugar, hiding out in apartment 2B, was off the streets.

*Mug shots*

I wish they'd had a Real Time Crime Center when I was working as a publisher in the 1990s. I 
stood in midday sunshine at a railway station in the borough of Queens.There was nobody about 
for the good reason that no train was coming, since the Long Island Railroad operator I'd twice 
called for a time had overlooked some small print in her schedules.

I started to phone the office from an open public kiosk - no cell phones then - when I saw a man 
come down the stairs to the platform. I was loaded up with books but my companion had no 
interest in literature. If I didn't give him my effing money he'd shoot me. I found myself curiously 
detached, looking down as a middle-aged man in my suit holding my book bag tells the robber he 
can have $50 but not the credit cards. "They're no use to you," says the calm man who'd just as 
calmly observed the robber approach wearing a heavy woollen hood over his head in midsummer 
and deduced he wasn't coming to help.

The emergency operator couldn't decide whether it was a matter for transit or city police and 
refused to hear a description of a 5ft 9in robber with Louis Armstrong lips wearing a black hood 
and Reeboks. The cops, when they arrived, were very angry about that. A day later, with a 
blinding headache, I was taken to look at mug shots of muggers.

*Broken windows*

Crime had New York even more by the throat when I first arrived in 1983. Times Square was 
a centre for porn and pushers of crack cocaine. Murders were nearing 2,000 a year. Squeegee 
men menaced you at stops. Cops didn't bother with fare jumpers, street hustlers and graffiti 
gangs. Now it is all changed. Times Square is a showplace again. The commonplace explanation 
is based on the broken windows theory - that if you let one window stay broken, vandals will break 
the rest; that if you don't arrest one panhandler, you'll have scores of them. And often enough if 
you make an arrest, you'll find the offender has an illegal gun or knife.

I'm sure there is a lot to the theory. But it doesn't explain everything. The biggest difference in 
New York has been a police commissioner and a mayor with innovative ideas who got enough cops - 
38,000 in New York - and with dollars from the Police Foundation to invest in technology for 
intelligence gathering.

How else to explain that New York - yes New York - is the safest city in the United States? The 
murder rate is a third of what it was in 1990. That's matched with a comparable fall in major 
felony crime. So what? you may say. European cities are much safer. Despite all the efforts in 
New York, the murder rate at six per 100,000 citizens doesn't begin to touch London where the 
rate is a mere 1.95 per 100,000.

*Hair trigger*

There's a major reason for the homicide rates in the two societies, and I can give it you in four 
letters: Guns. Historically, the US has a more violent culture but it's easy access to guns that 
makes the violence lethal. More than 200 million guns are owned by Americans. New York City 
has the toughest law in the US against illegal guns but they're smuggled in all the time from states 
that don't bother to check on the buyers' mental or criminal records.

You may recall that in 2007, 32 people were shot dead when a crazy student went on the rampage 
on Virginia Tech campus. The ancient Commonwealth of Virginia, faced with the deadliest shooting 
by a single gunman in US history, has just voted against - repeat, against - making it impossible for 
the mentally disturbed to get a gun.

The National Rifle Association "buys" a majority of congressmen as easily as killers buy bullets. To 
cops all across the country, it's dismaying. Last year 140 cops died from gunfire in the line of duty.

So here's a final word from Precinct Commander Evans - if ever the British were mad enough to 
legalise guns US-style, they'd die to regret it.


----------



## Fishbone Jones (15 Feb 2009)

Starts as a feel good citizen piece, to drag you in, and ends up as a twisted, nonsensical anti gun rant. The last four paragraphs were the whole point to this dreck of an article. Obama's getting ready to go after America's guns and he needs a PR campaign in process to try ease in his plan. This article isn't even news, let alone an editorial piece.


----------



## chris_log (15 Feb 2009)

recceguy said:
			
		

> Starts as a feel good citizen piece, to drag you in, and ends up as a twisted, nonsensical anti gun rant. The last four paragraphs were the whole point to this dreck of an article. *Obama's getting ready to go after America's guns * and he needs a PR campaign in process to try ease in his plan. This article isn't even news, let alone an editorial piece.



 :

I supported McCain myself, but come on. Blind rhetoric like 'he's gonna get our guns' (in the appropriate redneck drawl) sounds as dumb coming from the right as it does coming from the left. 

He's in favour of stricter gun control laws, but he also voted in favour of concealed carry laws in llinois. 

Let me guess, disarming the American public is he precursor to a UN invasion and one world government, right?


----------



## daftandbarmy (16 Feb 2009)

There are plenty of guns in London and other parts of the UK. I know a SNCO who left the army to join the police, then rejoined the army a couple of years later. His reason? The police expected him to go up against the armed criminals, unarmed. At least in the army he could expect to be as equally well armed as his adversaries.


----------



## Fishbone Jones (16 Feb 2009)

Sorry Piper, my opinion and I'm entitled to it. I've been following this issue closely. Try educating yourself first. Don't like it, refute it, don't roll your eyes like a knob. Ad hominem attacks, calling me a redneck, are the attack of the ignorant.


----------



## chris_log (17 Feb 2009)

recceguy said:
			
		

> Sorry Piper, my opinion and I'm entitled to it. I've been following this issue closely. Try educating yourself first. Don't like it, refute it, don't roll your eyes like a knob. Ad hominem attacks, calling me a redneck, are the attack of the ignorant.



I never called you a redneck. I did add in a snide joke with the 'redneck accent' comment, which I think really is applicable when people get into these 'the guv'mint is gonna take ma guns away' arguments.

I have educated myself on this topic, I study criminal justice and you can bet my overly generous salary (for attending school) that I've looked quite a bit into gun control (mostly to shoot down the 'ban all guns' crowd). That being said, I do support gun control laws to an extent. 

Assuming that I know nothing about the issue because I rolled my eyes at your argument (if you can call it that) is ignorant. Just like the people who decried Obama because his middle name is Hussein, claiming that the sky is falling and Obama is 'gunna git our guns' just because he's a democrat is, quite frankly, stupid. 

Like I said previously, he has supported concealed carry legislation and has not ever professed a desire to 'disarm America' (another idiot argument). I didn't support the guy, but keep the conspiracy theory arguments where they belong (in your head and not in mature discussion). 

However, I will agree that the article is essentially a platform for a gun control rant. 

What annoys me most is that there has yet to be a single, mature argument about gun control in our society. On one hand we have the Brady-bunch type of person with a hate on for guns and on the other we have people convinced that not owning whatever firearm they want is the precursor to the end of the world. 

Just once I'd like to see legislation brought in that makes sense when talking about gun laws that doesn't take into account the loonies on the left or the tin-foil brigade on the far right.


----------



## chris_log (17 Feb 2009)

Also, as a completely different topic...the guy in the pic. Is he a police officer or the author? 

If he's a cop....dreadlocks? In uniform?


----------



## Fishbone Jones (17 Feb 2009)

Piper said:
			
		

> I never called you a redneck. I did add in a snide joke with the 'redneck accent' comment, which I think really is applicable when people get into these 'the guv'mint is gonna take ma guns away' arguments.
> 
> I have educated myself on this topic, I study criminal justice and you can bet my overly generous salary (for attending school) that I've looked quite a bit into gun control (mostly to shoot down the 'ban all guns' crowd). That being said, I do support gun control laws to an extent.
> 
> ...



You'll find my, and many other, factual counterpoints here:The Great Gun Control Debate I'm not retyping or debating you in this thread, given the obvious bias of the article. There are many anti gun points made, and destroyed, there. If you think you have something new and earth shattering that proves we need more nanny state babysitting, fill your boots and post up.


----------



## Fishbone Jones (17 Feb 2009)

Piper said:
			
		

> Also, as a completely different topic...the guy in the pic. Is he a police officer or the author?
> 
> If he's a cop....dreadlocks? In uniform?



Transit cop likely.


----------



## PMedMoe (17 Feb 2009)

Piper said:
			
		

> Also, as a completely different topic...the guy in the pic. Is he a police officer or the author?
> 
> If he's a cop....dreadlocks? In uniform?



Why not?  I'm sure their hair regulations are as "cultural" as ours in the CF.


----------

