You’re suggesting that officers actually handcuff themselves to a person resisting arrest. That seems very tactically bad. At the heart of it, they are using brute strength to subdue a person. Why would police resort to that when there are much better tools available? Injuries to police and suspects go way down when officers don’t have to go hands on. I can’t tell if this is serious or I’m being wooshed.
It is also not much easier or more efficient than handcuffing the subject. The hard part (IME) is getting the first cuff on - after that you have a handle and some leverage on his arm.
IANAPoliceOfficer, but I have trained with them. The guy who showed me cuffing and restraint techniques was the chief of police in a small town near me, and he was also very good at groundwork. He taught the principle of getting control of the guy’s centerline before trying to cuff him, which usually means getting head control. You then turn him face-down, pin him in place with a knee, and then worry about getting an arm and cuffing it, pin that arm in place, and go after the other.
Three on one is not always automatically better, either, unless they are trained in cooperating with each other so they don’t get in each other’s way.
It’s messy, like the real world usually is. It is hard to subdue someone without hurting them too much.
Regards,
Shodan
There is a false premise often mentioned in the anti-cop posts. I’ll paraphrase it as “Cops are killing people for minor offenses” When you start your argument with such an inaccurate statement it hard to take the rest of what you say seriously. If the powers that be tell the cops on the street “Zero tolerance for (insert your favorite minor offense here)”, the cops are duty-bound to enforce it. I’m talking about lawful orders here so don’t throw Nazis in my face, please.
If you or the person accused of committing the said offense doesn’t like it, you are not permitted to resist just because you feel you are being hassled. If you resist arrest that resistance will be met with some level of force. The cops are under no obligation to “baby” you into submission by handcuffing themselves to you (really?) or duct taping your feet. They are permitted to use reasonable force based on the circumstances as THEY reasonably believed them to be at the time. Not Al Sharpton or any other talking head with 20/20 goggles.
It is impossible to overestimate the number of people who have absolutely no idea what the realities of these violent encounters are. “Shoot him in the leg!” “Taser the guy coming at you with a knife!” “Just let him go!” Its really quite simple. Don’t resist or fight with the cops and the chances of getting hurt become incredibly small.
Have to agree. And cops can’t go easy on someone just because they appear to be in poor health. If you are a dude who doesn’t exercise, smokes cigarettes and has eaten too many Twinkies in your life, you might want to consider cooperating even if you believe you are in the right. The way to fight police isn’t to actually fight police.
The real issue is ordering cops to enforce stupid laws. Eric Garner was hurting absolutely no one. Rather, he was messing with the revenue department’s money. In a world of rogue government, it’s actually not surprising at all that the government would prioritize its own interests so high. What happened to Eric Garner wasn’t the actions of one police officer, it was the actions of a Mafia-like organization not wanting anyone cutting in on their revenue stream.
How about the false premise that posts criticizing poor policing are “anti-cop?”
Well, Ok, let us say you have a dude committing a minor crime. You tell him you’re going to give him a ticket. He tears the ticket up or refuses to sign. You then bring out the handcuffs. He refuses to be handcuffed and resists. And so forth.
If you are going to have meaningful laws they have to be enforced. If the criminal resists the enforcement, violence will occur.
But that’s also an argument for not passing petty little laws. The existence of a black market in cigarettes is a side effect of high taxes, but the correct response to that isn’t to have the police arrest people selling loosies.
How do you “ticket them or give them summons” if they refuse to sign the citation or refuse to ID themselves?
In “Freakonomics”, Levitt and Dubner argue that the main cause of the reduction in crime rate was due to Roe v. Wade. (Gee, imagine: unwanted children might be more likely to grow up to be criminals.) That doesn’t mean that “Broken Windows” policies don’t work, but it does mean that they might not be the primary factor in New York’s case.
Any policy can be administered well or poorly. IMHO, treating minor crimes “harshly” rather than “appropriately” would indeed increase antipathy. Furthermore, taking minor crimes seriously is only one facet: you also have to FIX THE DAMN WINDOWS. It may be that the latter part is more significant than the former: if people live in a run-down, neglected world, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have less respect for the rules than if everything was nicely kept.
Crime in NYC peaked 4 years before Giuliani was elected. It was already trending downwards when he got into office, just like every other major city in America at the time. So, no.
You simply can’t point at any one factor, whether Broken Windows, liberalized abortion, midnight basketball, whatever, as the significant factor in reducing crime (you might be able to point at lead pollution). While it certainly seems true that strictly enforcing laws against vandalism and other petty crime can reduce the incidence of such criminal acts, that’s generally true of any crime. If you’re more likely to get caught, you’re less likely to do it. And I’ve noticed that all kinds of enforcement gets included under the Broken Windows banner, like cracking down on the squeegee men and aggressive panhandlers in NYC. Those guys were committing borderline muggings, which I don’t consider a minor criminal act. So if the police never bothered those guys for years and let them get away with anything, then started cracking down on them, that’s not Broken Windows, that’s just plain law enforcement.
The other premise of the “broken windows” idea of policing is not merely that it reduced annoying crimes which signalled that there was a higher level of social control being exerted, but also that major criminals committed a lot of petty crimes in between major crimes. Thus a NY cop would stop someone for turnstile jumping, frisk him incident to his arrest, and find that he was a felon in possession of a firearm (or whatever).
Regards,
Shodan
That can be a point in its favor, but only if there’s a backlog in the system and the city or county can devote criminal justice resources to prosecute the backlog. Otherwise, it’s just Stop and Frisk, where you’re harassing people to generate stats.
Nice story.
edited to add: Got any stats that show that this approach was successful in leading to an increase in serious arrests of that nature?
It is very hard to tell what are the causes of a crime decrease, but I can tell you, having directly seen it in action and read the reports- that cleaning up graffiti does reduce new graffiti placement.
I would argue that Levitt and Dubner don’t “argue” anything in Freakonomics: they just recount a bunch of easy-to-quote anecdotes.
But their anecdote about “broken windows” lost me completely. “Look” they said, “the reduction in crime in NYC was not actually caused by increased policing – it was actually caused by increased policing”.
That is not an actual quotation. As alluded to above, they used the phrase “broken windows” as a proxy for something else, which concealed the paucity of their incite.
The clear claim was
So when a criminal moved to a new place that was clean, by this rule he’s magically prevented from graffiting.
yes Askance, that’s what happens. The more graffiti that occurs, the more likely it will spread.
Well, we could look at the crime stats in New York before 1990 and after, and also look at the overall drop in crime across the country and do a comparison. I don’t have time for the second half, but here are the raw stats and seems the drop in crime has been pretty dramatic. Of course, crime dropped not only in New York or even in the US during that period but from what I understand in nearly every western country as well, but you could work out what the average drop is in US big cities who didn’t do ‘broken window’ and do a comparison.
Yet even with all of that number crunching you would have zero evidence that draconian police tactics were the causative effect.
The hard handed tactics of “broken windows” policing against law abiding citizens tends to reduce the perception of police legitimacy.
This is the critical difference between a draconian policy like “broken windows” compared to other options like community policing. And while there is little to no academic evidence that broken windows style policies are more effective in reducing crime than other increased policing policies there is a growing body of evidence that shows that programs which increase the publics perception of police legitimacy also increase compliance with both police and the law.
To claim that “broken windows” policing is the reason for the drop has been refuted. Increased policing does work, forcing massive numbers of petty crime cases through the courts does not work better and reduces the publics perception of police legitimacy.
Cite as to the lack of increase effectiveness of “broken windows” policing compared to other increased policing efforts:
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2473&context=journal_articles
Sigh. How, since no-one can ever create the first piece of graffiti in an area?