[hristov]

Yeah this is the reality of police work after Guliani. Guliani discovered that the best thing for a politician to do is to reduce crime so he tells his cops "reduce crime or else" and the easiest way to do it is to cook the numbers.

The funny thing is that sometimes cooking the numbers works. That is if you create a perception of lower crime you get gentrification and a lot of middle class people move in and crime may actually go down. But nobody should confuse the talk of politicians with actual reality, new york is much more crooked and crime ridden than any of those "tough on crime" politicians would admit. Some times that crookedness bubbles up to the surface, for example couple of summers ago when cranes started falling from the sky and killing people and destroying entire buildings.

I have to say that I feel bad for these cops. I was hoping that being a beat cop was one of those rare fields of endeavour where one could do their job well as driven by their own conscience and their own initiative and sense of self worth and not have to go by some ridiculous metric, but alas even the police departments have been invaded by modern MBA thinking. So apparently even in the police force it is all about performance metrics and making your numbers -- writing a sufficient number of tickets and stopping and frisking a sufficient number of random people, while making sure not to notice too many crimes.

Maybe in the end of the year the mayor looks at the numbers and sees -- wow, we frisked 10 million people and brought in 5 billion dollars in fines, we must truly have a fine police force.

[siculars]

I dunno bout you, but I actually live in New York City and although the police can be heavy handed at times, ok... a lot of the time, I can assure you that new york is a lot safer than when I was growing up in Queens in the 80's and 90's. I specifically recall leaving for university in the fall of '96 and returning summer of '98 to a completely different atmosphere. And for that I tip my hat to Giuliani.

[jamesbritt]

Seriously. The NYC of the '80s and '90s was much different from that of the '70s.

[jamesbritt]

"Guliani discovered that the best thing for a politician to do is to reduce crime so he tells his cops "reduce crime or else" and the easiest way to do it is to cook the numbers."

Born and raised in NYC, lived there until the late '90s.

Perhaps there was some number cooking (hard to believe there wouldn't be) , but Giuliani (maybe more so his Chief of Police, whose name eludes me) realized that if you start hassling people for the little shit, you have a good chance of grabbing someone with a outstanding DAT or warrant. Grab people for jumping turnstiles, hustling change, open bottles of beer, whatever, all the things Dinkins was ignoring.

Once you've got someone you can run checks on them and often hold them for something more serious.

And it was good for the city, financially at least, because if downtown/midtown was safer, or even just felt safer, more people went there and business thrived.

(Downside: Times Square seems to have become a branded theme park. Oh well.)

[hristov]

I don't doubt what you (or the other person that responded to this thread) said. I did live in new york in the late 90's and early 00s and it did feel much safer than the movies let me believe. I was just noting that the police trying to cook the crime figures is due to political pressure, which is also pretty certain.