Posted on 03/25/2013 7:02:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A fiendishly deceptive article about the New York Police Department in the New York Times has set back the cause of public safety not just in New York but nationally. A front-page story on Friday twisted a police commander’s exhortation to an underperforming officer to work harder against crime into an injunction to target blacks on the basis of race. The commander’s statements were captured on a tape secretly recorded by the officer and replayed last Thursday during a federal racial-profiling trial directed against the New York Police Department’s stop, question, and frisk policy. The officer had already joined the lawsuit when he made the recording and was patently trying to goad the commander into making a statement that could be used in the litigation. As I explain here, Officer Pedro Serrano failed in his effort to elicit anything remotely approaching a racial-profiling mandate from Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, who is shown in the recording to be fiercely committed to protecting the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic residents of his South Bronx precinct and who explicitly repudiates stopping people on the basis of race, rather than criminal behavior. It didn’t matter. The Times finished the job for Serrano, making it seem that McCormack had said the opposite of what he had actually said. (Readers can now compare the Times account of the episode with the actual transcript and decide for themselves.)
Just to make sure that the damage was irrevocable, the Times followed up the next day with an editorial that was even more duplicitous than the article on which it was based. Titled “Walking While Black in New York,” the editorial strips whatever meager context the Friday article had included that might have allowed a highly determined reader to hazily glimpse the truth behind the Times’ distortions: that McCormack was referring to an ongoing, local string of robberies perpetrated by young male blacks when he responded to Serrano’s increasingly aggressive racial provocations with the phrases: “The problem was, what, male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, [the problem was] male blacks 14 to 20, 21.” It is perfectly appropriate to mention suspects’ race when police are looking for actual perpetrators who have been identified by their victims, but “Walking While Black” displays a breathtakingly juvenile determination to eliminate all facts that stand in the way of the all-consuming agenda to demonize the police.
If the Times honored its by now-dubious status as the newspaper of record, it would run a correction. But even if it did, it would come too late to help the police. Sharpton, the NAACP, and the ACLU are labeling McCormack’s remarks the NYPD’s “smoking gun” and are calling for his suspension, despite his strong backing from the actual residents of the South Bronx. But this is about more than one hard-working commander’s slandered reputation or the ability of the NYPD to preserve its record-breaking crime drop. The conceit that McCormack has revealed the truth about proactive policing will become gospel in anti-cop circles nationwide, making it even harder for police everywhere to do their jobs, due to political pressure from above and street resistance from below.
On March 6 of this year, I attended a community council meeting in the NYPD’s 40th Precinct, where Deputy Inspector McCormack presides. A former Marine named Duwon urgently called for more vigorous policing. He travels to the Bronx from Brooklyn to escort his mother to cash her Social Security payments, he said, because she is terrified of the addicts and youth milling on the corners. “If she ever fell, they’d pick her dry,” he observed.
The Times’ writers and publishers will likely not notice much of a difference (at least initially) if the current campaign against New York’s stop, question, and frisk policy succeeds. Times staffers overwhelmingly live in safe neighborhoods where shootings are merely theoretical. But law-abiding residents of inner-city neighborhoods know that effective policing is a life-and-death matter, and thus passionately support law enforcement. The NYPD works around the clock to provide upstanding members of poor communities the same freedom from fear that affluent areas take for granted. The Times’ preposterous conceit of “walking while black” will only widen the crime gap that, despite the NYPD’s unmatched success in fighting crime, still separates the cozy enclaves of white liberals and the hard streets that continue to blight too many striving inner-city lives.
Wrong, in common discourse, that is the very definition of a police state.
How do you feel about internal passports and being greeted with, “Show me your papers!” a few times every day?
You have a disappointingly high tolerance for tyranny. If it isn’t too awfully instrusive and makes you feel safer, you appear to be OK with most any intrusion.
Good Germans didn’t really have to worry about the Gestapo, did they? It was a bit of a hassle to be stopped, but it brought a high level of order to society, only affecting those that everyone agreed were a problem, so where was the harm?
You're also making a point that is orthogonal to the topic. Let's say their crime rates are stratospheric for cultural reasons. Are you the deux ex machina, the Hand of God, that will change their cultural predilections? It is what it is - we deal with the world as it is, not how we'd like it to be. The stats are pretty straightforward - regardless of cultural influences, whether Anglo-Saxon, Lusitanian (i.e. in black majority Brazil) or African, black populations tend to have far higher homicide rates than those of other races.
My speculative theory is that high level of criminality among blacks has to do with the relatively short duration of civilization in black Africa, meaning that hunter gatherers who saw other humans as prey got to propagate themselves, whereas in more established civilizations, where even petty thieves were executed or exiled pretty much right until the end of the 18th century, only the genes of those who played well with other humans survived until the present age. The wonderful thing about the modern welfare state is that where in the pre-welfare past, criminals generally failed to pass on their genes, now it's the law-abiding of all races who fail to do so.
By your definition, every country outside of these United States is a police state.
I don't understand these theoretical constructs. New York City elects its politicians. In police states, the citizenry has no say over its leaders, no ability to influence legislation short of violent revolution and no idea what the actual laws are, since most of them are a state secret, simply to avoid the kind of nickel-and-diming that citizens of a city like New York can get up to in trying to get around the spirit of the law.
Every country outside the U.S. doesn't have the Constitution of the U.S. protecting it's citizens against an overzealous government. I live here. I'll let citizens of other countries worry about their rights.
Being asked for "your papers" is hardly different from stop and frisk.
New York City elects its politicians. In police states, the citizenry has no say over its leaders...
Wrong. Many police states have the consent of the majority. Hitler won overwhelmingly in a general plebiscite, and was quite popular with the majority of Germans, while the minority was being exterminated.
Democracy is not mutually exclusive from tyranny, and most certainly no protector of the minority rights.
You have a very basic misunderstanding of what rights are. The concept of natural rights, as enumerated in the Constitution, protect people from tyranny, which in its most common form is instituted and enforced by the majority.
You have a pretty unconventional definition of tyranny. Hyperbole aside, tyranny is not a word to be used casually. Heck, I'd say the Founding Fathers used it a bit recklessly. If King George were truly a tyrant, then the proper course of action for the Patriots was to bring the war to Mother England or at the very least, liberate the Canadian provinces from British rule at any cost. What did they actually do? They resumed trade with Mother England just about as soon as they could.
All this long-winded navel-gazing psychoanalytical fluff about the German mind is, in my view, beside the point. Ultimately, the Germans decided to revert to the rules of war used by the Vikings during which captives were enslaved or killed depending on the whim of the captor. It had nothing to do with creeping this or that. The German people were in the grip of the romantic fantasy that they were Vikings reincarnated and that if they conquered the world, they were all going to Valhalla.
Are you trying to set a record for being wrong on a single thread? You have no concept of rights. None. Every time you post, you demonstrate a total ignorance of what real liberty is.
Hyperbole aside, tyranny is not a word to be used casually. Heck, I'd say the Founding Fathers used it a bit recklessly.
I believe you just stuck a fork in yourself. You have zero regard for the Constitution, natural rights, or your fellow citizens. You just want a nanny state to pat your head and rock you to sleep.
If you are a "NY conservative", then I guess I understand why things suck so much in NYC.
They're actually very different. Stop and frisk is generally carried out in high crime areas. New Yorkers can try to end stop-and-frisk and black and Hispanic race hustlers are in the process of mounting court challenges, in addition to getting City Council members to put up legislation banning the practice. Citizens in police states do not have the ability to influence police procedure and can in fact be imprisoned or executed for merely questioning police procedure.
Wrong, again. What is that, like 20 times now?
You think democracy is all the freedom you need, but democracy only protects the simple majority.
In your world, it is OK to run roughshod over people, just as long as it is in accordance with the wishes of the majority.
And this is different from the rest of African history how? Heck, the Bantu tribes have massacring the pygmies for hundreds of years. Muslim raids on European coasts all the way up to Ireland resulted in the taking of over a million slaves, most of whom were worked to death. Similar raids were mounted by Vikings against Saxons and vice versa. Slave raids, massacres and so on - all are part of the complicated fabric of history. As someone who's read a fair number of Chinese histories (hence the Internet alias Zhang Fei), including by John King Fairbank and Jonathan Spence, I can tell you that every change of dynasty in China involved the deaths of up to half the population as a result of the civil war, partition, foreign invasion, famine and plagues that followed. And they were the lucky ones. Europe had it much worse - with serious conflicts (Hundred Years War, anyone?) and slave raids wiping out ethnic groups and keeping the population at low levels until pretty much the beginning of the renaissance. Note also that the Dutch used similar measures against conquered populations elsewhere, including in Batavia (now Indonesia), and yet African crime rates are many times those in Indonesia.
Ultimately, your issue is denial. What you're missing is that in aggregate, the races are different in the same way that various breeds of dogs are different. While there are slow greyhounds and docile pit bulls, they are the exception to the rule - on average, greyhounds can run really fast and pit bulls are pretty aggressive. Obviously everyone is responsible only for his own actions, but the reality is that a random white stranger is less likely to be a criminal than a random black stranger. This is why Jesse Jackson, in a moment of candor, said that when he's walking on the street at night and hears footsteps behind him, he's generally relieved when he swivels his head and sees a white person. The black colleague you know and like isn't a criminal. But the random black stranger you encounter on the street is 6x more likely to be one than a random white stranger.
You're entitled to your definition of tyranny. But the reality is that calling someone a tyrant has no consequences in NYC, whereas calling Hitler a tyrant in Nazi Germany would have resulted in arrest, torture and perhaps execution. And that's the difference between actual tyranny and a pale facsimile of the real thing - it's sort of like the difference between terminal cancer and a paper cut.
I repeat, you have a very high, unhealthy, and unadmirable tolerance for tyranny.
Apparently, the 4th amendment and the 2nd amendment are expendable for you, because “real rights” aren’t being violated. When Canada imprisons a person for speaking against homosexuals, I’m sure you aren’t troubled at that little “paper cut” in a democratic society. I’m fairly certain that the restrictions that have been put on religious freedom by Obamacare don’t trouble you much, as “we get to vote”, so it’s not really oppression.
Until you have the guts to actually oppose tyranny, you won’t be arrested for resisting it; thus, in your world, tyranny won’t exist.
I might be able to tolerate your position if it weren’t for your whole-hearted willingness to back your little tyrants. I have zero respect for your position on this, as you have zero respect for the natural rights of mankind.
Free people don’t refer to having their persons searched without a warrant, nor probable cause, to be a “paper cut”.
There is term to describe your point of view on accepting such tyranny in the hope of safety and acceptance, it is “Quisling”.
And my contention is that your definition of tyranny is unrecognizable to the vast majority of people in these United States, and bears the same relationship to the real thing as the Bush administration did to what its critics called fascism.
I fully understand your contention. And I thoroughly reject it.
Some people just don’t have the desire to be free.
The judge made the right decision, albeit for the wrong reasons.
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