The John Batchelor Show

VIDEO: The Policing New York Needs

February 16, 2015

Thursday  12 February 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Edward Hayes, Esq. criminal defense attorney par excellence, in re:   At the end of the movie Goodfellas, Mary Kissel on a plane sees Eddie Hayes as the lawyer. / Broken windows and DeBlasio's/Mark-Viverito's tale of 2 cities: does tolerating disorder in public spaces create a safer city? The broken windows theory of policing:  If you can control pubic order, you can reduce crime.
 In the words of New York City's City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito:  Turnstile jumping,” she said, pointing to a signature Bratton priority, “to me is something minor, and I don’t think a young person’s life should be derailed because of it. This particularly impacts young men of color and their communities. It’s a systematic issue when it seems to be impacting one part of the community more than others.”

The policing New York needs  It sounds simple: cops need to go where the crime is, but without needlessly putting some kinds of people in jail or shooting innocent ones in stairwells.  Wednesday morning, 27-year-old officer Peter Liang left his house in Bensonhurst and drove to downtown Brooklyn to first turn himself in, and then plead not guilty to manslaughter, official misconduct and other charges for killing a 28-year-old man who’d committed no crime.

In November, Liang and partner Shaun Landau had been in East New York’s Pink Houses on a vertical patrol — going to the roof of a housing project and then walking down the stairs and out the lobby — intended to ensure a building’s common spaces are safe for residents.

When they entered the stairwell, the light on the eighth-floor landing was out and Liang drew his gun. Akai Gurley and girlfriend Melissa Butler, in the hall one flight below, got tired of waiting for a slow elevator. They opened the stairwell door to walk down.

Liang’s gun went off, and a bullet ricocheted off a wall and struck Gurley in the chest. With no idea who’d shot, the couple sprinted down the stairs. The officers ran into the hall, where — horrifically — they talked for minutes about whether or not to call in the shooting. When they finally went down the stairs, they offered no care to the man they’d shot as he lay dying.


If that account of Liang’s actions, as conveyed by Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, holds up, the actions of the young cop — with just 18 months on the job — are morally indefensible.

They are certainly exceptional. But with record-low crime and Mayor de Blasio having declared victory in his clash with police union leaders last year, the lingering question remains: How much policing — and what sort of it — does the city need?

The tension is that cops need to be where major crimes happen, so they rightly cluster in the neighborhoods where violence is highest, and hope lowest. That’s why they’re in the buildings where roofs leak, stairwells are dark and elevators fail, the ones the federal government gave up on long ago.

It’s a point that cops and their critics actually agree on, that policing can’t be separated from broader social conditions. That cops aren’t why New York City has one of America’s most segregated school systems and, by some measures, the most segregated housing of any big city. They’re not why the ladder of opportunity here has had half of the rungs sawed off.

To the contrary, many of the remaining rungs are there because of the incredible drop in crime over the last quarter century.

But with crime down, the damage that sometimes results from those interactions between cops and citizens has driven a much larger share of the conversation about policing.

“While the focal point has been . . . " [more]