The Q at Parkside

(for those for whom the Parkside Q is their hometrain)

News and Nonsense from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Lefferts and environs, or more specifically a neighborhood once known as Melrose Park. Sometimes called Lefferts Gardens. Or Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Or PLG. Or North Flatbush. Or Caledonia (west of Ocean). Or West Pigtown. Across From Park Slope. Under Crown Heights. Near Drummer's Grove. The Side of the Park With the McDonalds. Jackie Robinson Town. Home of Lefferts Manor. West Wingate. Near Kings County Hospital. Or if you're coming from the airport in taxi, maybe just Flatbush is best.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

A Remarkable Reality

New respect for the Daily News, given their admission they were wrong about the potential negative effects of ending Stop & Frisk, the notoriously anti-constitutional policy that was supposed to have reduced crime dramatically through the years. With a 97% reduction of S&Fs, there has been no uptick in crime. Quite the opposite.

So let's reflect for a moment, shall we? That's thousands, no hundreds of thousands, no millions, of demeaning and wholly unnecessary infringements on civil rights over the years. How do we reconcile that with the justice and equality we Americans supposedly strive for? It's outrageous, nearly inconceivable, and as clear a sign that racism thrives in NYC - perhaps the greatest working, breathing social experiment in human history. What legacy are we leaving now?

See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. If it's not happening to me, it's not happening.

SLATE MAG ON S&F

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stop and frisk was a good tool to use to get known gang members, guys like one officer told me after I witnessed him shooting at somebody, they knew to be very bad but could never catch in the act so they couldn't get him off the streets. But it's abused and misused by the NYPD and now it's gone. They can't blame a mayor for that. That's absurd.

Clarkson FlatBed said...

Hmmm. I think a "good tool" would be one that had a demonstrably better chance of reducing crime, given the massive "inconvenience" afforded tens of thousands of innocent civilians. One must assume that thousands of arrests also followed, arrests that should not have even happened. The result has been a social rift so severe that people of different skin color have had an entirely unique experience of law enforcement. Under no circumstances would I describe that as "good tool," unless the point is to enforce subjugation.

Hardly a "good tool" in a civil society that is not CURRENTLY at war. Civil war. Unless of course, a civil war is your goal, in which case, by all means...

Anonymous said...

I think I said all that in saying it was misused and abused by the NYPD.

Alex said...

Ugh. Stop and frisk is a terrible policy. It did not produce squat, anon. The current NYPD hates De Blasio, so they'll say anything to make his policies appear to be failures.

Also note, stopping and frisking someone is not illegal. Choosing to stop and frisk someone based on their age, race, and gender is. I don't know if it's possible to use a tactic like stop and frisk without racial profiling, but technically, if the police have a reason (such as the person is a suspected shooter), they can stop that individual and frisk him or her. Actually, witness testimony ought to be enough to pick someone up for a shooting, so I'm guessing that the 71st has fed you several lines of b*llshit, attempting to exonerate themselves from their many failures.

If our local NYPD stepped their anti-gang efforts up strategically, they could catch this guy of whom you refer. Unfortunately, we have the worst leadership in the entire City Council and the most ineffective precinct in the city, harassing postal workers, for example, with wrongly assigned plain clothes units instead of putting their efforts into community policing (which they were instructed to do a year ago and are now JUST starting) and going after bad guys with guns.