Stop, Question, and Frisk

So I was in my Car2Go on the way home and heard a piece on NPR's Tell Me More on New York City's Stop, Question and Frisk problem.  The host kept referring to this as an NYPD policy.  Let me be very clear about this.  This is not a policy.  It's policework and paperwork.

People getting stopped on the corners and patted down for weapons has been happening probably since humans carried anything sharp.  New York teaches a fair amount of restraint in their Academy.  For example, 911 call of a guy in a Chicken costume with a gun at 2AM.  You roll up and the only person there is in a chicken costume.  The caller is anonymous, which means you can't toss the guy.  That's the way you're taught.  I won't always say that's what happens.

But in LA, they frequently pull everyone out of cars on a traffic stop and search their pockets and car, which rarely happens in NYC.  At least we rarely did it in Harlem when I worked there.  Let me also explain the difference between a frisk, or "toss" in the vernacular, and a search.  A frisk is when you quickly check the person's waist, legs and groin area from outside the clothing, without going in the pockets.  If you feel something that could be considered a weapon, like a hard eyeglasses case, then you can check the pockets.  If you find drugs, then you're fine, because you were checking for a weapon.  If however you find drugs and all they had was tissues in their pocket, then your frisk won't  hold up.

But let's get back to this policy.  Looking for suspicious characters doing suspicious things is what police do.  They then get out of the car and toss the guys.  Nothing found, they send them on their way.  Maybe the guy runs and ends up tossing a weapon or drugs.  All good.  The technical term of Stop, Question and Frisk didn't come around until 2002 or so, with the introduction of a form called the UF-250. It's funny.  If you do a Google Image Search for this form or S,Q,F, you'll find photos of angry community members, marches and rallies and photos of people who have been stopped.  But they have no photos of this yellow rectangular form, which is the reason for this whole brouhaha.

So the job decides that it wants to know how many people they're stopping and the reason and the race of the people stopped.  Not sure whether this is for their own database or because they were required to share this information.  So what happens, cops go about their business as usual and begin to fill out these forms. Again, this is not a policy.  Just a piece of additional paperwork to document existing actions.  I'm not going to get into the issue of profiling in this post, because it's a large issue.

But if you've read my previous posts about CompStat, then you will understand, that soon these forms become a metric that is tracked, much like parking tickets or summonses for bad brakelights.  And this is where the story changes to what makes it look like a policy.  So crime is down and it starts going back up, because that's what crime does.  It's a cycle.  So one of the things that a Precinct C.O. can do to show that they're trying to combat this rise is to increase 250s.  You have armed robberies up by 15% from last year, and it looks good to say, "Yes Commissioner, but we stopped an additional 300 people over last year in looking for these suspects."

But let's explain what's going on.  The Precinct C.O., usually a Deputy Inspector or Captain is feeling the heat, and because we aren't in Minority Report, he can't predict where the next crime will happen.  So he leans on his Lieutenants who oversee each Platoon (12X8, 7X3,4X12) and they in turn lean on their three squad Sergeants.  And those bosses lean on their cops. 

So what happens is that, the Sgt ends up telling his cops that each car needs to get 5 250s for the shift.  And so if you have 5 sector cars working, that 25 people are going to get stopped in the next 8 hours.  Some would have gotten stopped anyway, because they are criminals and not good at hiding it.  But some are just people who are walking on the street and who have a good chance of not having warrants.

Oh yeah, you need to be careful when you do this, if you're just getting numbers, that one of these guys doesn't "pop" which means he has an active warrant.  Because that can be a pain in the ass, so you don't look for the mentally ill or homeless because they totally have warrants.  So you generally find people who look clean, which sounds like it defeats the purpose right?

So this issue of Stop, Question and Frisk being a systemic cancer of racial profiling is a falsehood.  It sounds good for the cameras.  But the reality is that its a numbers game and the only people who can stop it are the Commissioner and the Mayor, when they accept that crime does go down and up.

Comments or thoughts appreciated below...

Allow me to add that most of the places where these precinct commanders are feeling this heat are in precincts where the suspects in most of the crimes spiking are African-American and Latino.  But rest assured if there was a robbery pattern on the Upper East Side by guys in suits, all kinds of I-Bankers would be getting some groin massages by New York's Finest.  Numbers are numbers.

The Disease of Statistics: Part 2

So we left off talking about how CompStat humiliated Captains and made grown men terrified of statistics for the first time since 10th grade.  But to show you that Compstat isn't all bad, observe this graph.

So, as you can see from the graph, 1990 was not a good year for the City of New York.  The spike has been attributed to many factors, but the main one is drugs, specifically crack.  Berkley researchers gave this explanation for why crack became such a violent drug.


Evidently, crack cocaine use and distribution became popular in cities that were in social and economic chaos such as Los Angeles and Atlanta. 'As a result of the low-skill levels and minimal initial resource outlay required to sell crack, systemic violence flourished as a growing army of young, enthusiastic inner-city crack sellers attempt to defend their economic investment.' (Inciardi, 1994) Once the drug became embedded in the particular communities, the economic environment that was best suited for its survival caused further social disintegration within that city. An environment that was based on violence and deceit as an avenue for the crack dealers to protect their economic interests


2,245 murders.  That's a lot.  It's more than some natural disasters.  I remember being in high school and the Daily News running a Gun Clock on one of the pages, counting all of the people killed by handguns.  So CompStat certainly had something to do with the sharp decline.  But there are other theories Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, said that though over 50% of Americans believe that innovative policing strategies had something to do with it, it really didn't.  He listed 4 alternate reasons, being more police officers, larger prison population, the wane of the crack epidemic, and finally Roe V. Wade.  That last one landed him in hot water.  You can read the report here.  


Regardless, crime plummeted, making a terrible mayor for New York*, a golden hero for busloads of tourists from Kansas.   And here we are in 2011 with 515 murders.  In a city of 8.5 million people.  Amazing.  In an FBI chart of cities greater than 250,000, looking at murder rates per 100,000 people, New York places between Lexington, Kentucky and Long Beach, California.  Well below other places like Boston, Columbus, Buffalo, and the very dangerous Tulsa.  


So with Compstat, you're always fighting a number.  Let's take a look at this form: 

This was pulled off the web from a GIS.  You can actually go to the NYPD home page and look at the most current stats citywide and precinct-wide.  So this document, or more accurately, the numbers contained within are the gospel.  So as a Lieutenant, you'd be chasing numbers.  In this case, your number is 17.  I've literally have bosses come to roll call on a Friday and say "The number is 18, and right now we're at 14." In English this means that we could record no more than 4 felonies through the weekend to be level with where we were last year.  The reason you focus so much on the week to date is that with that secured, the 28 day will follow. 


So crime in New York City is an an all-time low, and yet there's constant pressure to keep it where it is or make it lower.  In a city of 8.5 million people, crime will happen and will rise and fall in cycles.  Surely, you can use tools to keep it under 2,000 murders a year, but this process eventually feels like squeezing blood out of a stone.  I've personally seen all kinds of chicanery, like bosses waiting to input reports until after midnight on a Monday so they don't count against the week-to-date total.  The worst was the reclassifying of crimes.  I once had a felony arrest I had made and finally got down to court on it to speak to the ADA, and I had to call and ask the precinct to fax down the report.  When the fax came through, the crime had been downgraded to a misdemeanor.  This is not good.  Because with the strike of a pen by a gentleman in a white shirt, my sworn and signed statement to the ADA was garbage.  If this went to trial, which it clearly didn't, (PROTIP: Nothing goes to trial.  Everyone pleads.  Seriously), then I'd be screwed and look like a moron.  

How, you may ask, do you reduce felonies?  Well, asides from murder, it's pretty easy.  Let's say you get burglarized.  And a real burglary, as opposed to the one I had where the guy insisted that someone climbed in his 3rd floor window and stole 2 pairs of pants and that was it, but I digress.  So your stuff gets stolen.  I arrive and ask if you have receipts for the things that were lost to prove their worth?  Oh, you don't have receipts for the jewelry you got as a gift 10 years ago?  Or the laptop?  Then, this really isn't a burglary....it's more of a criminal trespass and a petit robbery.  How convenient that both of those happen to be misdemeanors.  Let me stop here and give the definition of burglary.  To enter a premises unlawfully with the intent to commit a crime therein. You don't even need to steal anything.  If I enter a house and kill you, technically I'm charged with burglary and murder.  But clearly, this definition fits the above case, no matter how much stuff was stolen.  But what do I know.  I'm just a silver shield.  


Perhaps you leave your purse in the Bank of America ATM and 10 seconds later you remember and rush back.  Grand Larceny?  Noooo.  Lost Property.  You can't prove that someone stole it.  You can't prove that your purse didn't become a sentient being and walk out of the ATM lobby.  And let me tell you that if anyone tells you they're filing a lost property report for your stuff, you can kiss that shit goodbye.  I have no idea where those complaint forms go, but I'm guessing some room in the bowels of 1 Police Plaza.  


But let's say that you just can't get the magic number lower and you're over....what happens then?  Well, you need to show that you're doing something.  For example, you're stopping and frisking people for guns.  Funny story about this.  The NYPD started using the UF-250 which is the Stop and Frisk form at the request of various groups to show who they were stopping and why.  So soon the bosses wanted 250 forms to show that the precinct was doing something to fight crime.  This led to tons of people being tossed (cop speak for being frisked) Again, this is a frisk, so I can only look for a gun or something that could hurt me.  No drugs.  No search.  Just a pat down and a waistband check.  This surge in 250 forms eventually led to a lawsuit, go figure.


Cops can also write criminal court summonses or "C" summonses.  These are given out for urinating in public or drinking in public or riding your bike on the sidewalk.  These became popular to for the bosses to show action.  So listen up kids, when you get pissed at the pigs for writing you a ticket for some bullshit like your bicycle didn't have a bell or something, the cop writing you that summons has a lot of things he or she would rather be doing.  Unless of course you're a loud mouthed DYKWIA liberal, then we actually enjoy writing you a lot of tickets.  


That's all for now.  In the third and final part of this series, I will discuss the real danger to the Job, much greater than statistics, is from within.  


* I would be happy to explain in a later post why I think Rudy Giuliani was a terrible mayor and a petulant child for 7.75 years of his mayoralty.

The Disease of Statistics: Part 1

A friend of mine who is still on the Job (That's cop jargon for being an NYPD officer) posted an article from NY Magazine on his Facebook wall.  It was really well written and talked about the malaise that the rank and file of the department are feeling under Commissioner Kelly.  It talks about Compstat, but also goes deeper.
Everyone should click here to read it, if you haven't already.   Here's my take on this whole thing, for what it's worth....

Way back in time, in a NYPD far, far away, there was crime.  Lots of crime.  And you sent out uniforms on patrol to prevent it and respond to it.  And you had detectives try and clean up after it.  But if someone asked the Commanding Officer of a precinct in Brooklyn why the murders were so high, they were apt to get a response like "What can you do?  These freaking people are animals." In short,  crime was sort of like a ride you were on.  This is not to say that specific crimes, like pattern rapes or the Son of Sam for example, weren't handled without care or attention.  But the day to day crimes like burglary or assault were just a fact of life.

Fast Forward to 1994.  Bill Bratton is Police Commissioner, having spent spent time working in Boston and NYC in their transit police departments.  Bratton promoted a lieutenant named Jack Maple from Transit to Deputy Commissioner in charge of Crime Control Strategy.  Why?  Maple, in addition to being a hell of a character, loved maps.  He used them to pinpoint crimes and then moved resources based on what the patterns and maps showed him.  And thus COMPSTAT was born.  While the idea of tracking crimes by location wasn't new, there were some things that put the department on its ear.

First, the data from all crimes were fed into this centralized database and then plotted on a map.  The program allowed them to break down every possible parameter, like robberies of women over 65 between the hours of 2PM and 5PM in a particular neighborhood.  So Maple and his team would crunch these stats and then, here's the new part, call the precinct C.O.s up to explain why this crime was going on.  In front of their peers.  Literally, these guys were on the hot seat.  And it gets worse for them, because Maple who ran the sessions at first, had an earpiece that fed him answers to the questions he wanted to know.  So picture this:

You're in a room with giant screens showing your crime statistics, standing at a podium in front of the department's command staff and your colleagues and you have about 500 pages of reports and stats and anything you think they might want to know.  Maple asks "Captain, can you tell me how many criminal court summonses your precinct has written in the past month?  You start shuffling through pages and pages looking for that info.  Maple, who has the answer in his ear, "158. And can you tell me how many have been written on 118th street where the robbery pattern is?" More shuffling and sweating by you, the C.O. Maple, omniscient as ever, "1.  Captain. don't you think that we stand of better catching your suspects if we start stopping criminals in the area?" And so on and so on.

Not surprisingly, this led a lot of senior leadership to retire, as they didn't want to look stupid or be held to a standard they felt they couldn't meet.  The brass at CompStat would give you anything you wanted to fix your problems.  You could get horses, extra patrol officers, helicopters, really sky's the limit.  But in one month, God help you if your numbers haven't come down.  You could and probably would lose your command.  And in case it's not clear, losing your command is pretty much a career death sentence in the NYPD.

There's a dirty secret about Compstat.  The system only cares about the "7 Majors" which are the seven major crimes that are tracked and reported by the FBI.  And they are:

• Murder
• Rape
• Robbery
• Felony Assault
• Grand Larceny
• Grand Larceny Auto
• Burglary

So basically, if you commit another crime it doesn't make the list.  Funny Story Time:  Working in Harlem, a guy walked up to another guy at Popeye's on 125th St. and St. Nicholas Ave, and said "Die, Motherfucker, Die" and fired a handgun multiple times.  This being a Harlem shooting, none of the rounds struck the intended victim, instead ending up through windows and the front of the restaurant.  Patrol cops pull up, conduct an initial investigation, and determine that this was an attempted murder.  Commanding Officer arrives and says that its Reckless Endangerment, which is a silent felony.  True story.  

In the next segment I'll talk about how this laser-like focus on crimes and other things has made the Job a shell of its former self and turned officers into lackeys.  

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In other news, I did make it to Natalie's funeral and got to hug George before he left for the burial.  Incredibly sad, but I was very glad to have made it and seen so many old friends, and a few retards. The redeye and the bus back late that night made for a looong travel day, but it was totally worth it.