New Haven's Top Cop: 'You Don't Know Us Anymore'

[Crazy Eddie]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...vens-top-cop-you-dont-know-us-anymore/416514/

I'll close with this story. I have three children who are my life, which is why I have three jobs. And my oldest graduated college. If you knew him you'd be as proud and as amazed as me. He got a job in Washington, D.C., which I've come to learn, because I've avoided it my whole life, is the nation's most dangerous city, right, politically and otherwise. When he graduated I bought him a bicycle, because I'm an honest police chief, and I couldn't afford to buy him a car. About the third or forth week someone clipped the chain on the bannister and stole his bike. Who do you think is the first person that my son called? Me. Now how is it that the son of an American police chief wouldn't have the instinct to call 911? If the son of an American police chief wouldn't have the instinct to call 911, why do we think anyone else does? Reality is, you call who you know. And you don't know us anymore.

We've become strangers in the community. It's why we've been ordered to wear numbers on our badges and why we have to wear our name on our uniforms. It's by court orders. My hope is, one day, to come full circle. When someone asks some citizen in New Haven, who is your family cop, who is your neighborhood cop, they're gonna know I don't mean that they have a cop in the family who took the civil service test.

I mean the officer on your beat, like my father was the neighborhood doctor. That's going back to where we began, when it was a citizen who had the duty for the night. We are not the military. We are not an army in occupation. There is no national American police force and there never will be.

There's just thousands of local police forces and what we have to do is take it one step farther, and make it thousands and thousands of local police cops.

I thought I'd take a minute from posting bad stories about cops to post this uplifting one.

I like his vision.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Groups of people larger than 300 biologically cannot form communities. A great deal more than 300 people pass through every major intersection in a typical day in a large modern city.

And yet a great deal less than 300 people actually live on any particular city block. In fact, with its average population density of 11,864 people per square mile, the Chicago metropolitan area averages about 190 people per city block. This, of course, is averaging out the entire city; the figure will be much lower in places that don't have highrise buildings (e.g. neighborhoods dominated by shotgun houses, two-flats and condo-style apartment buildings will have 50 to 100 people per block). A single beat cop in charge of patrolling four residential blocks and an adjacent business district would therefore have between 200 and 400 people to deal with; less, if he walks that beat with a partner. Those relationships become far easier to manage if a portion of that population are actually living under shared households (children, spouses, siblings, etc) and can be dealt with as a family unit instead of (necessarily) individuals.

Highrise districts will have a different set of problems, mainly owing to the fact that the entire building is basically a condensed neighborhood with hundreds and hundreds of people living in it, people who usually will not commit a lot of crimes inside their own homes.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Why? Why can't that be true today? What is stopping people today from building community?

Have you heard of Dunbar's number?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[7] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
Anthropologist H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth and associates have done a variety of field studies in the United States that came up with an estimated mean number of ties, 290, which is roughly double Dunbar's estimate. The Bernard–Killworth median of 231 is lower, due to upward straggle in the distribution, but still appreciably larger than Dunbar's estimate.

Groups of people larger than 300 biologically cannot form communities. A great deal more than 300 people pass through every major intersection in a typical day in a large modern city.

Which was true in the 1940s when beat cops patroled and people knew each other in neighborhoods. so what is your point?

 

[Will Wiley]

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

To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

 

[Frikki]

Should people really be calling 911 about a stolen bike? That's the line for emergencies.

I figure that, at best, the 911 operator would give you another number to call for this non-emergency service. Then someone would bleed out on his floor while waiting on hold for the operator you were wasting time with when you could have googled that exact same information and not taken someone away from an important job for your minor bullshit.

I´m a 112 (911) operator/dispatcher and we at least mann the shift so that we can take these bullshit calls and still service the bleeding out on the floor ones. A lot of the time a stolen bike is also a break inn, people call about their bike being stolen and when we ask about how it happened it turns out some one forced open a door or something like that. Stolen bikes can be major bullshit.