2013-09-12

Decline in Social Mood Drives Desire for Order; NYC Mayor's Race

One of the social policy topics for debate is the falling murder rates. There are various explanations for the causes, but one counter argument is that the hospitals have become better at saving potential murder victims. Or the police are using creative paperwork, see Assault Statistics of Hospitals and City Police Seem to Differ.

What we do know for sure is that outside of New York City, where stop and frisk is an aggressive policy targeted at mainly minority neighborhoods, aggressive police strategy (as opposed to the militarized tactics of SWAT teams) and social control have been on the decline. In one city in Europe, this is changing.

Roma family is banished to Amsterdam's 'scum' village
A ROMA family has become the first to be forcibly evicted by Dutch authorities and moved to a "scum village" constructed out of shipping containers on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

...Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam's mayor, admitted that the removal of the family was a draconian measure but insisted that bullying and violent behaviour had left him with no choice.

"The family has been causing problems for years and has a history of vandalism, noise nuisance and threatening behaviour," he said.

The eight members of the gypsy family have compared their container homes, numbers 48a and 48b, to a concentration camp and accused Amsterdam council of "pure racism".

...The housing camps have been nicknamed "scum villages" because their establishment follows a 2011 proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers.

"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he argued at the time.
In America, the scum take over a neighborhood and then years later, it is "gentrified." As social mood declines, you may see more proactive policies to keep neighborhoods safe. Based on crime statistics, the charge of racism will be far greater in the United States, but perhaps you missed Mayor Bloomberg's explanation of why stop and frisk mainly targets minorities:
“One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be. But it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murders,” Bloomberg said.

“In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” the mayor said. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.”

...To buttress the mayor’s remarks, his office released a set of statistics. The numbers showed that 87% of the people stopped under stop-and-frisk in 2012 were black or Latino, and that 9% were white. That same year, more than 90% of those identified as murder suspects were blacks or Latino; just 7% were white.
Critics of stop-and-frisk charge that such numbers are irrelevant. They charge that cops indiscriminately go after young black and Hispanic men on bogus grounds, and that nearly nine out of ten people who are stopped are innocent.
See Mayor Bloomberg on stop-and-frisk: It can be argued ‘We disproportionately stop whites too much. And minorities too little’ . The policy is not designed to catch criminals. It is designed to make criminals scared, to keep them from carrying guns or other weapons, and in the process prevent murders. It is the same as the broken windows policy under Giuliani, where cops started cracking down on subway turnstile jumpers and other small offenders to send a message that there would be law and order in the city.

Ironically, a Guardian article indicates the policy works. Whether the policy is good or not is another issue, but it does appear to be meeting a demand for law and order. Mike Bloomberg's fact-free defence of stop-and-frisk
So, what about the claim that forcible stops will get guns off the streets? The fact is that only 0.2% of stops yield guns. Further, guns are more likely to be found on white suspects who are stopped, yet about 90% of the stops are of minorities. The NYPD has done much better with other operations, such as gun buy-back programs and focusing on illegal gun trafficking. Stop-and-frisk is fundamentally ineffective when it comes to getting guns off the streets.

Nearly 700,000 forcible stops of mostly minority youth – many without reasonable suspicion (the legal standard necessary for police to conduct such stops) – damage the NYPD's ability to fight crime and violence. Rather than reducing crime and violence, the practice likely alienates minority youth and prevents the people we want to communicate with police from even approaching them.

What person will trust the police officer who just forcibly stopped them? If they "see something" they are now less likely to "say something", to borrow the NYPD's public appeal.

Importantly, forcible stops may lead to minor violations such as summonses for possession of open containers of alcohol, or marijuana possession. These types of violations occur more regularly in white neighborhoods. Yet, black New Yorkers are more likely to get summonses because police are stopping them more often, resulting in criminal records which make it more difficult for them to get jobs. In this information age, such a record can be devastating to career opportunities.
If stops of whites, who are less targeted by stop-and-frisk, results in more minor violations, then it would seem stop and frisk is achieving the goal of keeping weapons off the streets. White's are less concerned about being stopped and therefore end up caught in more violations.

Judging by social mood, a win by anti-stop-and-frisk Blasio in the NYC mayoral race will be a short-lived victory as his crime policies are out of step with social mood.
de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm in the Boston-area city of Cambridge, which is home to Harvard University. He eventually moved to New York City where he pursued the career of a bureaucrat, first at the local level, and ultimately in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

He changed his name to “de Blasio” and married former lesbian Chirlane McCray, an activist in the black feminist community. They have two children and reside in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood; once a violent ghetto, it has since been gentrified and boasts a famously cosmopolitan atmosphere.
Bill de Blasio: Pro-class war, anti-stop-question-frisk, and much more

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