Welcome to the Welfare State

Monday 12 July 2010 - Filed under Government + Law enforcement

In an expose on the NYPD “stop, question, frisk” program, The New York Times gives us a glimpse in to the future of the American welfare state where government provides everything from housing to welfare money to “protection”. In a land where everything is provided for you, no rights exist other than those the police see fit to allow:

The officers stop people they think might be carrying guns; they stop and question people who merely enter the public housing project buildings without a key; they ask for identification from, and run warrant checks on, young people halted for riding bicycles on the sidewalk.

One night, 20 officers surrounded a man outside the Brownsville Houses after he would not let an officer smell the contents of his orange juice container.

Between January 2006 and March 2010, the police made nearly 52,000 stops on these blocks and in these buildings, according to a New York Times analysis of data provided by the Police Department and two organizations, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union. In each of those encounters, officers logged the names of those stopped — whether they were arrested or not — into a police database that the police say is valuable in helping solve future crimes.

These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made based on “fit description.” Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the city’s public housing.

The encounters — most urgently meant to get guns off the streets — yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made in this neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.

Wait, what? Less than a 1% arrest rate with 52,000 stops while the main reason for these stops, to keep guns off the streets results in a whole 25 recovered? Can this really be justified?

The practice has come under intense scrutiny. Lawmakers are monitoring the situation. Civil libertarians are challenging it. The Police Department is studying it. And police officials, from Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly to local precinct commanders, are defending it.

“I don’t know what too many stops are,” said Deputy Inspector Juanita Holmes, who until recently was in charge of the department’s officers specifically assigned to protect the housing projects that largely make up these blocks of Brownsville. “The stops conducted by us are to address the crime, or the quality-of-life issues.”

You can’t glean that a less than 1% arrest rate and less than .0005 guns per stop (that’s less than 5 guns per 10,000 stops) over a period of 52,000 stops might somehow be construed as too many fucking stops? And you can’t even imagine what too many stops might be? Sounds just like a police state to me, afforded to them by virtue of this area being a welfare state. How do I reach that conclusion?

The high number of stops in this part of Brooklyn can be explained in part by the fact that police can use violations of city Housing Authority rules to justify stops. For instance, the Housing Authority, which oversees public housing developments, forbids people from being in their buildings unless they live there or are visiting someone.

And so on a single Friday in January 2009, the police stopped 109 people in this area, 55 of them inside the project buildings, almost half for suspicion of trespassing. The show of force resulted in two arrests for misdemeanor possession of marijuana and misdemeanor possession of a weapon.

Inside the project buildings and out, males 15 to 34 years of age, who make up about 11 percent of the area’s population, accounted for 68 percent of the stops over the years. That amounted to about five stops a year each, though it was impossible to tell how often someone was stopped or if that person lived in the neighborhood, because the data did not include the names or addresses of those stopped. Police officials say the age figures sound right, since most crime suspects fit that description.

[. . .]

At an entrance to 305 Livonia Avenue, a 16-story building in Tilden Houses, the door lock has been broken for weeks. It is the same at 360 Dumont Avenue, negating anyone’s need for a key to get inside. At 363 Dumont Avenue, in the Brownsville Houses, another metal lock is broken to another door.

Young men cluster around the doorways on hot summer evenings. Mothers sit on benches outside them as they guard children in the courtyard playgrounds.

And officers are watching. If someone enters without a key, it is reason to stop them, check for identification and, if necessary, take out handcuffs.

[. . .]

Another former officer who worked in the 73rd Precinct said the pressure was felt more overtly to get an arrest or a criminal summons, but in lieu of those, extra [stop and frisks] would compensate.

“A lot of us didn’t want to bang everyone,” the officer said. “These people have a hard enough time in the situation they’re living in without making it worse by hitting them with a summons, having them travel to Manhattan for criminal court, and the bosses would get upset and say, ‘Well, give us some [stop and frisks].’ It’s an easy number.”

While each [stop and frisk] is required to be approved and signed by a supervisor, one former housing officer said getting them was easy: “Just go to the well.”

The well, said this officer, is the lobby of any of the many housing buildings. Ryan Sheridan, one of the former officers who said he had never heard supervisors emphasize numbers, nonetheless acknowledged that the lobby and hallways were a legitimate source of [stop and frisks].

“Once they walk into the building, every [stop and frisk] can come from a do-not-enter, meaning entering without a key,” he said. “But once you ask them for an ID, 90 percent of the people live in the building. That’s why the arrest rate is so low. They’re not acting suspiciously, but like I said, they don’t have a key to enter.”

[. . .]

One recent evening, the police stopped a 19-year-old man for spitting on the sidewalk, a health code violation, and entering Langston Hughes Apartments without using a key or being buzzed in, even though the doors were unlocked. “I’ve lived here for 19 years,” the young man, who lived in a neighboring building, protested. “You see me coming into these buildings every day, and now you’re going to stop me.”

When the state provides everything for you, they too set rules by which you must live. When they set the rules by which you must live (I.e., when and how you can enter your home) you are subject to the enforcement of said rules, even when enforcement is draconian. You simply have no choice. By virtue of living there, you give explicit consent to be subjected to overt state authority, even if all you’re doing is entering the building in which you live without a key because the lock has been broken for months (the lock that is supposed to be provided and maintained by the state). They actively patrol lobbies and hallways of buildings looking to stop people, most for no reason at all other than violating a minor rule so that they might have their careers advanced or, at the very least, meet unofficial stop and frisk quotas.

The official stance of the police department is to defend these actions as necessary, but unofficially, officers speak out against it anonymously for fear of reprisal or being blackballed in the law enforcement community.

The Times, for this article, interviewed 12 current or former officers who had worked in this part of Brooklyn in the last five years, and all defended the necessity of the stop-and-frisks.

But some former officers who worked the area say the stops seem less geared to bringing down crime than feeding the department’s appetite for numbers — a charge police officials steadfastly deny. Though none said they were ever given quotas to hit, all but two said that certain performance measures were implicitly expected in their monthly activity reports. Lots of stop-and-frisk reports suggested a vigilant officer.

“When I was there the floor number was 10 a month,” one officer said. Like many of the officers interviewed for this article, he asked not to be identified because he was still in law enforcement and worried that being seen as critical of the New York department could hurt his future employment opportunities. (Emphasis added)

When one is reliant on the state, one is subject to it under all circumstances. When you rely on it for protection, you have the state surveilling your lobby and hallway, stopping you for no reason at all. You you rely on it for your health care you are subject to living in line with what the state feels is appropriately healthy. When you rely on it for money, you will receive only what they feel is appropriate, not what you might earn according to your merit. When you rely on it for food, you eat only what and how much the state feels you need.

This is the American welfare state, and the future if we do not guard our individual liberties from those would seek to replace them with so-called collective rights and the primacy of the state.

2010-07-12  »  madlibertarianguy