In an interview on CBS this morning, Mayor Bill deBlasio’s new police commissioner (as opposed to Rudy Giuliani’s old police commissioner) Bill Bratton made three points abundantly clear:
1. The NYPD Stop and Frisk program will continue, though he says cops need better training (because that reasonable and articulable suspicion part is way too hard to grasp).
2. The reason the program disproportionately impacts minorities is because that’s where the crime is.
3. If deBlasio didn’t allow Bratton to bring in authoritarian shill news legend John Miller, Bratton would not have taken the job.
The day after the mayoral election, I received a number of telephone calls from reporter friends asking if deBlasio’s election meant the stop & frisk appeal was a “dead issue,” since deBlasio ran for office on the promise of ending the program. I reminded them that people often run on a promise that somehow doesn’t manage to pan out when they finally get to wear the mayor hat.
When deBlasio picked Giuliani’s ex to be his PC, it might have been a clue that Bratton was an architect of the stop & frisk program, though people can change over the intervening decades. It appears that the new rhetoric will be a warmer, kinder stop and frisk, where cops will be directed to say “may I” as they throw young black men into walls face first in order to make their CompStat numbers.
Or as a cop friend explained to me a few days ago, the UF-250 forms will have better check off boxes so no matter how suspicionless a stop may be, it will appear constitutional under Bratton. And if those black kids complain about it, it’s because they’re liars and criminals. After all, why would a cop lie?
Yup, it’s all going to be different this time. That is all.
Won’t get fooled again…
Trick of the Light ….
Disappointed, but politically I get it. Crime is the soft underbelly of NYC democrats. If crime goes up, he can point to the fact that he has Giuliani’s old commissioner. Ah well.
And so the beat goes on in NYC as it always does.
If I were a juvenile “delinquent” today prowling the streets of NYC listing to remixed disco cuts from the ’70’s and pondering how in the fuck-hip-hoping-tecno-funk Joseph Saddler’s message got lost along the trail I might be pondering my own electronic “form” complete with boxes for the kind and courteous officers of NYC to check off on for their own safety and security every time I was approached. But then again I would be truly fucked and no way I am getting laid without my cell phone so it’s risky because Mr. pOlicE mAN might accidentally break it while filling out my form.
Live stream perhaps? Could forward those encounters auto mystically by email, between the time it takes the kindly officers to fail to find the automatic pistol but seize the ecstasy tab or blunt, to that mayor dude.
(Please forward your donations for the servers to the distillery.)
I think it should be called the Frisky Joker. But should the laugh of the Frisky Joker be menacing or more of a Sesame Street sort of Bert and Ernie or Kermit type of laugh?
But, then again perhaps scrap the Joker motif all together and go with some sort of modernist surreal evolution of the Tom and Jerry flavor?
Will have to think on this.
Don’t forget to vote kids.
P.S. Do the kids still play “cops and robbers” in NYC? If my app doesn’t take off I might have to sell out and create a new line of action figures for the toddlers and grade schoolers to play with before the grow up and become teenagers and learn first hand about proper submissive social skills for their own safety and security of course.