Hundreds of Police Officers turn their back on Mayor de Blasio at a Police Funeral because of his comments on Police Use of Force and Stop and Frisk policies.
Sometimes Fiction is Far Less Strange than Truth. Those on the opposite of the use of force debate argue that these cases of excessive force by police are isolated. That they're exceeding rare. Neverminding the fact that the Bureau of Justice Statistics tracks them, even if somehow magically excluding the fatal cases, and they found that in 2008 Black people are 20% more likely to be stopped for the same offense, 50% more likely to be searched - even though guns and drugs are found on them less often - 100% more likely to be arrested and 200% more likely to experience some use of non-lethal force from being punched, kicked, hit with a baton or tasered by police.
I've watched CBS Show Blue Bloods from the first episode as it generally does a good job of juxtaposing the various issues and conflicts internally and externally faced by large forces such as the NYPD. In the show, if you haven't seen it, the featured characters are all members of the Reagan Family - no relation to Ronald, although the allusion may not be coincidental - with patriarch Henry who is a former NYPD Police Commissioner, his son Francis [Frank] Reagan who is the current Police Commissioner played by Tom Selleck, his oldest son Detective Danny Reagan played by Donnie Wahlberg, his sister Assistant District Attorney Erin Reagan played by Bridget Moynahan, the youngest son Officer Jamie Reagan played by Will Estes, rounding out the family is Erin's daughter Nicky and Danny's wife Linda and their two boys. I started growing concerned that the show was beginning to not just have a Pro-Cop Leaning, which is only natural under the circumstances, but to now go far out of it's way to create little right-wing mini-meme's of Police Victimhood, like those Officers yesterday who stood petulantly with their backs to Mayor de Blasio.
Whereas before there would be some balance to the ethical, social, political and legal issues facing various members of the family often with the younger members Jamie, Erin and Nicky taking up the side of Civil Rights and the older members, particularly the crotchety Henry and Danny pushing for a no-nonsense hard-line, now things seem to have changed. Follow me over the flip to read more.
The following scene from a few weeks ago, where Danny and his partner walk in on a robbery at a mini-grocer, give chase only to have the suspect thrown himself through a window and then falsely claim "Police Brutality" is a case in point.YouTube Video
As you can see, it's not that the suspect just suddenly decides to fling himself through the window, Danny threatens to throw him thru it first because threatening people is pretty much a regular thing with Danny. And not just threats either. Here's another scene from later in the same episode as other allegations of Danny's pattern of physical abuse ruffle through the community. Now everything this person says complaining about Danny hitting him in the back of the head, and kicking him in the butt are actually true - it's in the opening scene of the episode - but it's also clear these aren't intended to cause injury, only to get this guy to pay attention and comply. There are things he doesn't mention to the crowd, the first being that he's a drug addict who was trying to get Danny to help him score in exchange for info on a case, and the second that Danny - in his usual style - threatened to throw him in the river if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know.YouTube Video
What concerns me is the portrayal of the Pastor Character - a clear allusion to people such as Al Sharpton or Reverend Jackson - as being a complete fraud and phony. This is long before the detailed facts of the case, that the suspect injured himself are made fully clear, but rather it's Commissioner Frank Reagan who sets the default tone that all such allegations are merely a means of trying to "get over" for their own wrong-doings or misdeeds just as similar claims have been made about Michael Brown, Eric Garner or for that matter Michele Watts. To them: it's nothing more than a scam, a hustle, before they really even bother to investigate. Following the window incident Danny's commanding Officer stands up for him during the COMPSTAT meeting where different Precincts are held to task for bringing down their crime numbers, a real life statistical methodology that was originated by the NYPD. This outbust, celebrating the bare-knuckled rough and tumble ex-Marine Cops like Danny over the cerebral and analytical version of policing - represented somewhat by Harvard Law Graduate Kid-Brother Jamie - results in his being promoted to Chief of Detectives.
The influence of COMPSTAT on modern day policing can not be underestimated. It's influence has spread from New York all around the country as a method for police to justify resource allocations, and specifically in New York it's used as a way to justify and rationalize Stop, Question and Frisk. The problem is that the data can be easily corrupted and slanted once you begin to tie raises and promotions to statistical performance as the LA Times has recently found. LAPD wrongly reclassified some serious crimes as minor, Times review finds
On a July night in 2013, a customer attacked cocktail waitress Alicia Alfaro in the face with a set of car keys outside the El Recreo Room in Cypress Park. "Half my face was covered in blood," said Alfaro, who bears a scar on her forehead. "My shirt and jeans were soaked in blood, too." At the time, Los Angeles police recorded the assault as a serious offense, a decision that was in line with federal rules for classifying crime. It was later changed to a "simple assault," a switch that meant the attack was not included in the city's violent-crime statistics. The Times reviewed dozens of cases the Los Angeles Police Department initially documented as serious but later downgraded to minor offenses. A third of the time, the decision to reclassify the incident was wrong, The Times concluded.
But I digress about CompStat, it may track crimes states by location, victim and offender the interesting thing it doesn't do to my knowledge is track whether the force used in these cases was excessive or not. And that's a rather serious omission IMO, particular since the various concerns about Danny's "history of aggressiveness" isn't just a plot point for this episode. In the Pilot episode for the series five years ago, Danny shoved a suspects head into a toilet for information to help find a kidnapped girl who urgently needed her insulin. A perfect "ticking time bomb" scenario to justify a little impromptu make shift waterboarding.
In the third episode from Season 1 "Officer Down" Danny takes a handcuffed suspect who had been involved in a robbery which led to an Officer's death, and sticks a gun to his head [First Scene after last commercial break] to get him to reveal where the shooter is. Over time Danny has mellowed and shown far more dimension and compassion that he did as the show started, but that seems to be less of the case for others on the show. Season Four Episode 11: Ties that Bind - Stop and Frisk Just last night, CBS reran the episode Ties that Bind, the main plot of which - as shown in the promo below - is about an old friend of Danny's who's now established some links to a Florida based Mob, but the secondary plot addresses specifically the Stop, Question and Frisk Policy of the NYPD.YouTube Video
Full Episode currently available on Hulu..
In the first scene following the cold open in a meeting Frank's Officers his advisers tell him that "Quality of Life Crimes are up 30%, and Violent Crimes is up 20%" all of this they lay on the feet of a Judge who had just ruled against the use of Stop, Question and Frisk - in parallel to the real life decision by Judge Shira Scheindlin last December.
Earlier in this episode it is discussed that the wounded Officer's shooting - during yet another bodega robbery - could have been avoided, as the suspect had been observed near the location several hours earlier and the wounded Officers partner had seen him, but choose not to stop and search him because of the judges order. Later in the episode Frank the Commissioner takes the Mayor for a ride-along to display his amazing "Super Cop Ex-Ray Vision" where after 30 years on the force he can spot a guy with a conceal hand gun at 50 yards, arguing that you should just trust the observation skills of officers to decide who needs more scrutiny and who doesn't. Yeah, sure. Only this states a pile of facts that are just plain wrong.
Crime in New York has actually fallen since Judge Scheindlin's order and the Mayor de Blasio's push to limit use of Stop, Question and Frisk. In the episode, as in real life, many continue to proclaim that this tactic is a "vital tool" for law enforcement. Jamie correctly points out that it's not the only tool, and it has tended to become a crutch, which is fairly true but it's actually much worse than that. The reason Judge Scheindlin decided as she did is because while minority individuals may only be 30% of those in New York, they were over 80% of the people that "Stop, Question & Frisk" focused on, while only finding reason to arrest in 10% of the cases and failing to find any weapons or violations in over 95% of the times people were accosted. Rather than Frank's Super-Powered Super-Focused COP-VISION, real police are practically blind when it comes to actually identifying who is and who is not an actual criminal.
Now normally during Christmas break shows replay episodes from earlier in the same season, but considering the increasingly right-wing bent of the show of late I find it troubling that they chose to drag back an episode from the middle of last season to show, one that specifically talks at length about how Police are being hampered and their job made "so much more difficult" by no longer having the Stop/Question/Frisk tool when in reality when you look at the results using the same COMPSTAT system Police are so proud of, it never really worked at all.
In fact, as I documented back in 2013 NYPD was more likely to find guns on White Guys, than Black and Brown people yet continued to use S&F to target minorities rather than those who were more likely to be carrying weapons.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon. • The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.
Yet still...
The statistics are overwhelming. An independent study of the city’s stop-and-frisk program found that 87 percent of the 685,724 stops in 2011 — a record high — were of blacks and latinos. Young black men between the ages of 14 and 24 were stopped 106% of the time — as in, there were more stops of young black men than the entire population of young black men. The evidence does not support Bloomberg’s claim that stopping more minorities will lower the city’s crime rate. Stop-and-frisk had a 90 percent failure rate in 2011, and in the first three months of 2013, when the number of stops fell by 51 percent from the same period last year, the crime rate dropped as well.
If you were to believe what then Mayor Bloomberg was claiming, you'd agree with the claims made by Frank Reagan and his staff during this show - but those claims are Flat-Out Lies. Now, I understand dramatic license, and I understand that you can't expect a dramatic tv show to show to be 100% factual reality. But I think we should expect better than literally bending reality into a pretzel
Seaons 5 Episode 5 : Loose Lips -Those Darn Liberals. Here's a scene that I found really betrayed the growing Right-wing bias of the show. Erin's daughter Nicky loses her chance to attend Rutgers after she tweets about one of her teachers that she's a "Bitch, who might be a good teacher if she wasn't so busy ramming her personal views down our throat all the time", because she apparently hates anyone linked to Law Enforcement. This is what happens when Nicky goes to apologize, and remember from much of what we've seen of Nicky during the last four seasons, she's one of the most liberal and left conscious members of the Reagan family.YouTube Video
The teacher is a rude shrew, like some kind of wild paranoid caricatured version of a anti-cop scold literally with a poster of Che Guevarra over her shoulder as she not only continues to dress down Nicky after she apologizes, she insists she go to confessional over the incident, then demands an apology from her mother has well.
The larger story arc of this episode is one where a stalker/murderer has decided to target Jamie [who's still a Uniformed Officer after 4 years even with a Harvard degree when his non-degreed brother became a Detective in 3 years], in response his grandfather Henry gets recorded saying that in his day when an Officer was threatened he would make sure his officers handed out "Wood Shampoos" until the perp was found.
The teacher in a later scene goes after Nicky yet again because of her Grand Fathers comments, "Now we know people in power want a police state where random people can be brutalized." As a result Nicky, who had been pretty much the shows consistent left leaner, then got back on twitter in support her Grand Dad's comments in support of "Wood Shampoos" for innocent people.
That's an amazing turnaround.
Nicky's second tweet and Henry's comments lead to the judge in the case of the stalker threatening Jamie to toss the case claiming too many members of the Reagan family have shown bias, additionally suggesting that Erin recuse herself before they resubmit the case. The stalker now free and proceeds to kidnap Jamie's partner and try to kill her.
In the end at every turn, Liberalism and probable cause are the enemies of Reagan Justice, only the mad genius of Danny's amazing super intuitive cop-skills saves Jamie's partner Janko. Gakk!
Season 5: Episode 8: Power of the Press - Cop Shooting of an Armed Suspect Part of the reason I'm writing about this at all is because I can see how the way the show is beginning to swing, from having honest and direct debates by various members of the family over difficult issues to one where those leaning to the right are always shown to be more legitimate in their view and those leaning to the left are shews, frauds, hucksters, liars, clueless or just generally scum, y'know just like Fox News usually displays, that this might begin to have an impact on the right. That just like with Fox's "24", real life right-wingnuts might start picking up on some of these memes and using them for validation, not to mention justification for merciless displays of force. I was correct about that as by those Youtube Video by a right-leaner who pretty much jumps up and down in praise of the increasing hard-line view of Commisionor Frank Reagan.YouTube Video
And here again from the next episode (#9: "Under the Gun") where Frank Reagan gets upset at a set of Jews because they suspect - after three prominent jews have been murdered by what seems to be the same suspect - that a series of Hate Crimes may be occurring and they're choosing to take their own action on their own to protect themselves and Frank decides to take it as a personal insult.YouTube Video
It seems to me that bit by bit the show is slowly sliding more and more to the right, and it's noticeable because that wasn't always the case. Season 4: Episode 20 "Custody Battle" - Death in Custody Last year in this episode [available here on Hulu] we had a situation almost identical to that of the choking death of Eric Garner, only this person was already in custody at the station and died after a one-on-one scuffle with a single officer. The Medical Examiner says that it's "Homicide" but the Officers partner backs him up in his claims that he "barely touched the guy".YouTube Video
In the end it turns out that he used an unauthorized choke hold and suffocated the man, and also that he'd had a history of excessive force at his previous department in Long Island which hadn't been disclosed (much like the Officer who shot Tamir Rice, and also Darren Wilson whose entire force prior to Ferguson was fired for that dreadful state of their relations with the largely African-American community). In the end the Grand Jury decides not to indict the Officer, surprise, surprise, but ultimately Commissioner Reagan decides to fire the Officer anyway because the pattern of abuse. He tells him...
"Randy, this job is not about being strong enough to use force, it's about being strong enough not too".
Apparently the Commissioner Reagan from this year hasn't met the Commissioner Reagan from Last Year. And that's a shame. Vyan
