Major Problems By Ignoring the Minors

2

December 30, 2014 by JImbo

Fearing for Their Own Safety, NYPD Officers Stop Responding to “Minor” Calls

This isn’t unexpected. The same thing happened in the 1960s/1970s. That is what led directly to the HUGE crime problem of the 1970s.

To put it simply, small crimes become big crimes. Author Malcolm Gladwell addresses the issues in his book “The Tipping Point” very well, but anyone who has any criminal justice background could tell you the story.

“Minor” crimes create a perception of an unsafe neighborhood.

Car breakins, broken windows, graffiti, etc.

Once people get the idea that they are in a “bad neighborhood”, then they start ACTING bad. There is less reluctance to mess the place up. Who care about littering, vandalizing and stealing stuff from a “bad neighborhood?” It’s crappy anyway, right?

The subway is a good example. All it takes is a handful of people jumping the turn styles and soon basically no one was paying. Why would you PAY if other people were riding for FREE? As the saying went “Only suckas follow the rules.”

This lead to no one CARING about anything. With no money for maintenance, the subway cars were run down. People littered and even urinated in them.

Once foot traffic dropped from people not taking the subway, the tunnels became a convenient place for criminal activity. After all, it’s a secluded place with bad lighting and low foot traffic. That’s where you went to get drugs and other such things.

The story of how to fight this is very interesting and I think you’d like the book. It’s a good read (with lots of other stories besides that.) However, the point of the book is that there are “tipping points” where things get really good or really bad.

NOT policing your city, even on the “little things” is a REALLY BAD IDEA.

I’m not blaming the police here. They are being targeted and not supported by their leaders. And no, I’m not blindly supporting them either. There is a definite “us vs them” attitude that has to be addressed in police forces today that wasn’t there a few years ago. Call it the “militarization” of our police or what have you. They are not “police” in the way most of us grew up knowing them… helpful, friendly, protective.

This divide has to stop or it will erode all confidence built up since the 1970s in the police and all the gains made against crime for the public good.

It’s not a coincidence that the same propaganda from the 1960s (racist, classist, statist, socialist crap) is being recycled and used again today by many of the SAME PEOPLE.

(Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Eric Holder, Bill Ayers, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc) Go look up where they were back in those days and who they were hanging out with.

All this hate and conflict for selfish reasons WILL backfire. It ALWAYS does. You can’t replace unity and healing with hate and injury.

It won’t work.

It never has.

No, it’s not fair for the cops to pick and choose what they want to enforce. However, it’s also not fair for them to have to double their response to calls because they’re being targeted by the very citizens they are sworn to protect.

Overseas we called it “Force Protection.” We spent WAY more time not getting shot than we ever got to do actually doing a job. The police are now in that predicament. They are spending their time watching their backs and making sure they aren’t being ambushed rather than aggressively fighting crime and hunting down crooks.

That will not end well.

 

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