I told y'all, cops don't do what you think they do.🤷🏿♂️
Black folk know this from lived experience. Some white folk only learn this when they go to report a theft or sexual assault and find out that the $11B/year NYPD are not equipped to handle that.
15,000 bikes stolen in NYC every year! Many of these bikes are stolen from college campuses. Cops are not effective in their recovery. Confirm this with someone that's reported a bike stolen in NYC.
And yet, police care so little about the problem, that they don't even recognize a heavy duty bike lock.
Of course, that's the less cynical interpretation of why the police would say what they said about the lock.
@mekkaokereke Cops love bike theft. It’s very convenient for them. It cuts down on bike ridership and reduces the number of complaints about their SUVs being illegally parked in bike lanes. They’ll probably now make a push for bike locks to be banned so bicycle users can’t protect their vehicles at all.
@mhoye@mekkaokereke When I was hit walking in a crosswalk, two bystanders had called 911 before I scraped myself up off the street. The driver stayed at the scene. The cop who showed up coached her on how to lie about where I was when she hit me (because it’s fine to hit people with SUVs as punishment if they don’t follow all traffic laws to the letter while not operating deadly machinery) and threatened to ticket me instead when I said she should ticket the driver for failure to yield.
What if we had 100 fewer cops harassing Black folk and beating up college students, and replaced them with even 25 more stolen goods recovery officers / SA detectives?
There's no such thing as a fiscal conservative. Because whether someone is conservative or progressive depends on who is getting the money!
🙂🙃
For example, me being fiscally conservative: "$11B a year sounds like a lot for local government! What do we get for all that money?"
@mekkaokereke That's always been the key argument for me when people complain about taxes. I get way better value from the Philadelphia Streets Department (even with our potholes) than suburbanites do having to pay private contractors separately for paving, signage, garbage pickup, and recycling.
@mekkaokereke I watched the video of 100 cops pushing their way through a dozen quietly singing students (on their own damn campus!) and thought, every single one of these cops are getting overtime for this.
That single operation, rousting kids out of Hind's Hall, cost NYC millions of additional dollars.
@mekkaokereke heh, sounds about right. My wife had her identity stolen by someone to sign up for a cell phone account and get a free iPhone when we lived in NYC and the NYPD were similarly useless.
Ultimately it was American Express (who weren't involved at all) who gave us the right contact at Sprint to fix the "I didn't sign up for this" part of the problem.
If we tracked local law enforcement effectiveness with the same vigor we did pro sports.... different world.
And because this question always comes up from my EU friends: No, the $11B number is not hyperbole. Yes, that really is the police budget. Not the US police budget, or even the New York State police budget. New York City alone, will spend $11B this year on its police force.
It has cancelled school music programs, reduced the number of days public libraries are open, reduced public swimming pool hours, to make budget room to increase the police budget, in ways they admit don't reduce crime🤡
I looked up the stats for Austria (population size 9,1 million, so actually comparable to New York City).
Budget for internal security 2024: 4,06 billion EUR (But that's not only the police, it also covers an intelligence agency and the expenses for refugees)
@mekkaokereke We always hear right-wing types telling us that we can't "throw money at the problem" to deal with societal ills. I think the amount of money we spend on police is itself a case of "throwing money at the problem," and it's clear that that money is being misspent judging by the results!
@StanWonn
Nah, the people spending the money know what they're doing. It's not being misspent, it's being invested in your oppression. They can't say that, so they make up stories about catching bad guys.
They're not trying to solve your problems. They're solving theirs. @mekkaokereke
@mekkaokereke not a dollar comparison but the ratio of police to citizens in NYC is approximately the same as the ratio of Stasi to citizens in East Germany. (GDR was a bit less than 2x the NYC population; full-time Stasi employees was a bit less than 2x NYPD.)
This is why there are no police officers to recover your stolen goods.
This is why Black people feel like police are out to get them, and just invent crimes to ruin their lives.
By budget, by number of arrests, by time spent, this is the vast majority of what the $11 billion NYPD budget goes towards: low level arrests, summons, and tickets, on Black and to a lesser extent, Latiné people, most of whom are completely innocent.
@mekkaokereke Policing is crazy like that. One of the only things I can think of that you pay more money to get worse outcomes. And it never ends and is impossible to change. Communities would have to solve crime on their own, to ever justify spending less on law enforcement.
@mekkaokereke I had to look it up for comparison. The whole of germany has a "security in the interior" budget of 32B Euro, which is mainly police, but also security-adjacent costs. At about ten times the population and three hundred times the size. (so, per capita or square kilometer, a lot cheaper :) )
@mekkaokereke and about those bikes? 600k per year get stolen in Germany, and I think about none of them get recovered by the police. (there even was a fence ring run by some police officers that dealt with stolen bikes, IIRC.)
@jollyorc@mekkaokereke I find it comforting that some things at least aren’t just USian problems. :/ But at least you aren’t cutting beneficial programs to pay for the corrupt police, it sounds like. Days like this I think about moving, but still determined to fight for a better US than we have today.
@queenofnewyork@mekkaokereke@akareilly is the person to give you a better comparison, but my impression is that right now, Germany is by comparison less draconian, less and different flavours of corrupt, less police state, more social benefits. The racism is ... it's complicated, but alas, depending on where you are, quite there and comparable in intensity, but not flavour. (I'm white and middle-aged, so take this with a big chunk of salt.)
On the other hand, the culture around bureaucracy and how things are done are apparently crazy-subtly different to make non-Germans really mad. (Germans just get annoyed by it, but have a lifetime of training to deal with it)
@jollyorc@queenofnewyork@mekkaokereke@akareilly nah, it's the same shit here, too.
Police are just not allowed to walk around with machine guns. Since no one is allowed to walk around with machine guns.
And our police is killing, too and full of Nazi racists.
All policing is violent, but the scale of US police killing borders on the unimaginable.
Since modern record keeping began in 1952, German police have killed a total of 529 people. It's May 3rd, 2024 today. US police will kill another 529 people before Thanksgiving (November 28th).
German police killed 8 people in 2023. It's Friday today. US police will kill about 9 more people before the stock market opens on Monday.
@mekkaokereke@jollyorc@queenofnewyork@akareilly yeah, i totally get the margins (although you have to add that the population in Germany is less than 1/3 of US population and damn old)
My point is, that the same things that are happening in the US can happen here, too. There are band fights and shootings in Sweden i.e.
We are just more regulated and always around 5 to 10 years behind the US development.
@jollyorc@mekkaokereke I remember a report in the San Francisco Chronicle some 20 years ago about a delegation of the German feds (BKA) visiting California. The reporter was amused by a German very politely inquiring if the budget figure on a slide was the correct figure because it was unfathomably large by comparison.
Happy Friday!
@mekkaokereke they're just a constantly deployed paramilitary force, at this point (always were?).
That chart someone made showing the progression of Lego police mini figs over the years tells an extraordinary story. One which I was frequently blind to, in my incredibly privileged position.
I can't find the chart you are talking about, but I did find this image picturing the original 1978 police mini fig on the left and a more modern SWAT mini fig on the right:
@tehstu@mekkaokereke just remember that the first one was smiling in his friendly blue shirt because it was the 60s and he was free to continue his job as ex-slave-patrol and Jim Crow enforcer
Lego cops of 1970s (and the associated Lego city) were based more on scenes in Northern Europe than America - although today our officers increasingly wear American style uniforms, even if in some countries (UK and Norway) they are still not all routinely armed
@Jonas_Bostrom@mekkaokereke I have a better comparison. The NYPD budget, if you include their overtime charges, is bigger than the entire Belgian military. Belgium. A NATO member. It's even bigger if we include lawsuit settlements.
@mekkaokereke More for the people seeing this thread than Mekka but, recent examples of dumb spending: A robot cop (Dalek headass) patrolling times square subway station (though I never saw it before that thing got relegated). "AI" based gun/knife detectors made by a company that got sued recently by their own shareholders saying the things don't work. Anecdotally I've seen them rolling around penn station on a golf cart and watched one patrolling times square station whilst On A Facetime.
As a Black man in the US, and as someone that knows how to find and read statistics, I know that the vast majority of what that US police force does, by budget and by time spent, is harassing, arresting, and incarcerating innocent Black folk, mostly men. Innocent!
And US police do this at a scale exceeding almost every other country's militaries.
@mekkaokereke (And, since we're on about it, thanks to the "creative" bookkeeping that goes into funding "national security" efforts, $11B is likely /just/ the $ that we're allowed to know about.
Fun fact: the NYPD has an office in Israel, because it's a totally normal, not at all totalitarian, thing for a municipal law enforcement agency to have an office on the other side of the planet.
That is an astonishingly large budget. Not like a public service budget, more like a tribute levied by an occupying army.
An army marches on its stomach, as they say. It's another reason that "defund the police" often means "restore funding to libraries, water, power, sewer, schools, hospitals, clinics, and fire departments" — pay the soldiers, or pay the polity; we cannot do both
@mekkaokereke Huh. I just checked, and the police of North Rhine-Westphalia - Germany's most populous state with 18 million inhabitants - have an annual budget of €3.89 billion.
@juergen_hubert@mekkaokereke the budget of the Basque Autonomous Community Police (which covers nearly all cases), is 800M USD for ~2 million people. The Basque Country is one of the places with more police density in Europe.
@mekkaokereke I've had some... arguments with Americans why their law enforcement/justice/prison system is so much more brutal and expensive than the German one, and has much worse outcomes.
They usually claim: "The USA is much bigger and more diverse, so of course we have more crime and thus need more and tougher law enforcement!"
I then usually ask: "Are you saying that the average American is significantly more depraved than the average German? Because I think I have some history-based arguments which say otherwise."
@Hash@mekkaokereke That reminds me - German police officers have to complete three years of training on average before they are considered fit for duty.
From what I gather, this tends to be considerably shorter for their American counterparts. And some of the training they do receive tends to be counterproductive (like that "Warrior Mindset" training).
@mekkaokereke@robey a coworker had his bike stolen. He had gps on the bike and told the cops exactly where it was. He even went to the location and could see his bike through the window. The cops did nothing!
@Andres4NY@mekkaokereke Yeah, and to biking being a better idea. Last time I went from Washington Heights to Cobble Hill that was the way I went too. :)
@mekkaokereke LOL Anyone who lives in an urban area and rides a bike knew they were lying! But that's what NYPD does second best, right after shooting, killing and maiming.
@blikkie@mekkaokereke It's just so brazen. I mean the lock portion he's holding is Kryptonite orange and clearly says "Kryptonite" on the side. If there's one bike lock brand people know it's gotta be that one.
The chain probably had a cloth cover over it that also said "Kryptonite," and I guaran-goddamn-tee you the cops went out of their way to take that off specifically for optics/propaganda purposes.
@mekkaokereke The protesters at Columbia are mostly very well to do. Some of them are Jews. It sure would be sweet for one of the to sue this cop and the NYPD for defamation of character and denying them a fair trial because of the false pretrial publicity they created.
@mekkaokereke Yes. But remember they can be. Remember that some of these trust funds would put a major lawsuit in chump change. Remember the Chief is a political appointee. That he can be. This cop can be called to testify under oath that he lied to the press or he was misinformed and will have to point a finger up the command structure, which will ruin his career.
I wish! But unfortunately no. You must be new here.
The first thing cops say after a major incident is always a lie. Always.
I've been saying that on Twitter for like the past 10 years. People used to respond with, "Not always! Mekka, you don't know that! Only a Sith speaks in absolutes! Let's wait for all the facts to come out!"
But after seeing it happen repeatedly, and me not taking a single L, they don't ask that anymore.🤷🏿♂️
The 1st statement is always a lie. Nothing happens.
@mekkaokereke It would seem that a responsible press should be putting that up. The officer said, xxx but we have found the first LEO statements have been factually incorrect and are investigating the truth since they are unable to.
Us News will never do that. They're worse than complicit. They know that they're printing lies, and they print them anyway. And they know that their lies result in millions of Black people being falsely arrested and killed. They don't care.
Every major newspaper can point to at least 5 times that they've been blatantly and intentionally lied to by police in the past few years. They don't suspect that cops lie. They know it for a fact!
And yet they will print the next hard to believe statement that cops issue, as if it were a fact.
No one is this bad at this. No one can be fooled this many times in a row. They know. They've known for decades. They just don't care.
Newspapers cannot bring real police accountability.
@mekkaokereke@ralph058 One of my favorite Trevor Noah jokes from the 2022 WH Correspondents' Dinner:
"I love the NYT, I really do. You guys are the best. Some of the most accurate, precise reporting in news. You never fail to write down exactly whatever the police have given you to say. Really powerful!"
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