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.
What you call an excuse, many would simply note as a statistical truth. Your allergy to numbers does not obviate the truths behind those numbers. Black majority countries have the worst homicide rates in the world. Thailand and Jamaica have roughly the same GDP per capita, but Jamaica has 10x Thailand's per capita murder rate. Demographics are a major factor in crime rates.
Racists love to throw numbers around. Crime is usually a cultural thing and not a skin color.
So, let me get this straight. I’m walking down the street in N.Y. A cop sees me and starts asking me a bunch of questions. I refuse to answer so he puts me up against the nearest car, wall, post, fence and starts putting his hands on me. Under my arms, down the sides, feeling inside my waistband, grabbing my crotch, running his hands down my legs. And this is somehow OK with you?
Well, apparently it has been responsible for the dramatic drop in crime in NYC. Crime rates are at its lowest since the 1960’s and NYC is arguably one of the safest big cities in the world.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams
This question is not whether Stop and Frisk is effective or not or unconstitutional or not. (Of course its effective and, of course, its totally unconstitutional.)
The question should be: Do we want to live among people that are unwilling or unable to act civilized in a free country and so dangerous and disruptive that we must abandon the Constitution to maintain a semblance of order.
And you believe them that stopping and frisking millions of people is the reason for lowering the stats on those felonies? You probably believe in CompStat too.
Not willingly, but the reality is conservatives are outnumbered and your friends, family and job are where they are. It is therefore necessary to make the necessary compromises required to secure life and property against those who conspire against them. And it's not that big a compromise. The rest of the constitution's freedoms are not yet in peril. Note that NYC's gun laws have been around 100 years, and the city is still free.
One of the unbelievable things in my life, is that I come to this site almost everyday. Supposedly “Conservative”. Bound by the Constitution. And yet day after day there are those here who will support, hell cheer, the erosion of our rights. It makes me sick. If there is this much opposition here on Free Republic, then how can I believe that someday the Sheeple will wake up and take back this country.
So, you are barking up the wrong tree. Here’s an idea. Next time you see a thread on DUI roadblocks just chime in with some 4th amendment claims. You’ll be called a drunk. A murderer. A child killer. And if you are lucky you’ll get a mailbox full calling you things that can’t be read in public.
So, lot’s of luck.
“Note that NYC’s gun laws have been around 100 years, and the city is still free.”
WHAT!!!
You can’t even buy whatever size softdrink you want. You can be searched without probable cause. You can’t exercise your rights R.E. the second amendment and on and on.
You are confusing freedom with security.
It's still an unconstitutional and immoral policy based on an unconstitutional and immoral "law". It's also mostly used to enforce another unconstitutional set of laws, those repressing the rights of the people to keep and bear arms.
When the Constitution is outlawed Constitutionalists will be outlaws.
Football and basketball must feature a lot of anti-white racism. Or it may simply be that blacks are just better at those sports, for whatever reason.
Crime is usually a cultural thing and not a skin color.
While there may be a cultural aspect, a big part of it is race. Why that's the case, who knows? It is what it is. African culture has nothing in common with black American culture but homicide rates in Africa are nonetheless stratospheric.
I don't see where you're getting the part about NYC conservatives being cheerful about this. It's not their preference that gun-grabbers dominate in NYC - stop-and-frisk is merely their compromise solution to the fact that the only armed civilians in NYC are criminals.
You have an odd notion that a police state doesn't exist until people are arrested for dissent. First, if I refuse to be stopped and frisked, that is dissent, and I would be arrested, no?
That said, a police state exists when your free actions are unreasonably constrained by the power of the state. It doesn't matter whether the state's intentions are good or bad. Of course, a good king is better than a bad king, but that should not be the choice presented to free peoples.
Oh. I didn’t realize New York City conservatives had a say in this. Actually, I didn’t realize there were enough conservatives in N.Y. to make that much of a difference. I guess I should thank them for making sure the minorities don’t take over from the good folks.
You are lobbying for the unconstitutional laws
You are part of the problem.
You’re a racist who supports unconstitutional laws.
The cultures in many parts of Africa are dysfunctional because the cultures were destroyed in the 1700s and 1800s.
I’m done with ya.
You can obviously define words to mean whatever you want them to mean. However, in common discourse, the phrase "police state" has a very definite meaning that does not incorporate most developed countries, where routine street-level weapon searches by the police are not only legal - they are standard police procedure.
I think the word you're looking for is "improved". However, even improvements in culture can only accomplish so much.
They do - by voting for the lesser of two evils in Democratic primaries. And by voting for the lesser of two evils in the mayoral election - Bloomberg and Giuliani before him.
For example the Dutch took over a large portion of central Africa in the 1700-1800s (roughly). He set up work camps, (aka slave camps) and worked everyone killing thousands upon thousands.
I guess I can see how a racist would see that as an improvement.
“where routine street-level weapon searches by the police are not only legal - they are standard police procedure.”
Ironically, I think in you’re explanation on what a police state is and is not, you just defined “police state”
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