[jdeibele]

A local firefighter and I were volunteers for our kids' soccer club. He said that he specifically worked on the other side of town because he didn't want to respond to fires or health emergencies that involved his neighbors.

There are definitely some tradeoffs with having police officers or firefighters live and work in the same neighborhood. Does being familiar with the local troublemaker help or hurt the police response? Does going to the grocery store and seeing the family of someone you couldn't save make you feel like staying home? Or maybe you do see the people you did help.

[woodruffw]

> A local firefighter and I were volunteers for our kids' soccer club. He said that he specifically worked on the other side of town because he didn't want to respond to fires or health emergencies that involved his neighbors.

This is a good point. I think it demonstrates a pretty drastic difference in scope between (ordinary) police and firefighter job requirements: a cop might go their entire career without firing their weapon, while a firefighter's job is almost entirely defined by situations where multiple people might die.

Put another way: I think it's perfectly reasonable for fightfighters to not want to work in the neighborhood they live in, given the severity of the average incident they respond to. I don't think this applies to beat cops, any more than it does to mailmen.

(The other point is also great: there's an argument that cops are more likely to feel territorial or even more violent if they live in the same area as someone they've branded a "troublemaker." I don't have a good answer to this.)

[lowkey_]

As someone who has lived in NYC, there's a ton of crime there [1]. It's not at all similar to being a police officer in a town. It's also part of why police don't seem to care about petty crime in the city.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/05/us/new-york-city-crime-wave-2...

[yowzadave]

> there's a ton of crime there. It's not at all similar to being a police officer in a town.

I assume people get this idea from the media, but it's not true--crime rates in NYC are significantly less than that of most other US cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

A pandemic-related uptick (that has affected the country as a whole) doesn't change the fact that the cops from St. Louis are dealing with a murder rate about 20x what we have in NYC.

[woodruffw]

I’ve lived in this city my whole life. News cycles notwithstanding (there’s a “crime wave” article every single year, using whatever cherry-picked month-to-month statistic proves the point), it’s only gotten safer with each decade.

[DiggyJohnson]

My brother was standing next to a cop in Manhattan when he saw a person get mugged and have their bag stolen about 100 yards down the road (next block over, specifically). He alerted the cop to what he was seeing as the perpetrator ran off around the corner. The victim had a badly bruised face, and was standing but clearly in distress.

The cop shrugged, asked “what am I supposed to do about it?” and walked the other way.

I’m sorry if this seems anecdotal, but this story has had a lasting impact on my opinion of the NYC police. I vouch that there is no hyperbole on this story, neither my brother nor myself want this to be true, and we couldn’t think of any justification for the officer’s apathy. I consider this single incident to be a stain upon the NYPD, and an embarrassment to any American - I don’t usually get worked up about systemic injustice or what it’s worth.

[woodruffw]

Anecdotes are fine. Here's the thing: NYC is a massive city, and we do have crime. You're describing a crime that you have indirect knowledge of; I could similarly relate any number of stores about acquaintances, friends, and family members suffering from crimes (and the NYPD doing very little about it).

It's also true that the city is safer. The city was already "safe" relative to the 1970s and 1980s by 2000, and it's only gotten safer since[1]. You can see that some crimes ebb and flow and that assaults, in particular, haven't changed that much over the last 20 years.

To conclude with my own anecdote: on the year I was born, the city's murder rate was over 3 times higher than the current rate (our supposed "crime wave of 2022"). The neighborhood I grew up in was considered a bad one; it's now one of the most expensive in the city. The neighborhood I live in now was considered "too dangerous to enter" by the city's "respectable" population; it's now gentrified and "hip." Crime hasn't disappeared! But it is much, much less common.

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...

[dTal]

Safer it might be, but that's probably due to sociological effects rather than improved policing.

[logifail]

> He said that he specifically worked on the other side of town because he didn't want to respond to fires or health emergencies that involved his neighbors.

It's totally normal for smaller towns and villages across Germany (and Austria and (?) Switzerland) to have mostly volunteer fire services.

"the predominant number of Germany's 1,383,730 firefighters are members of voluntary fire brigades" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_fire_services