Newark cops, with reform, didn't fire a single shot in 2020

https://www.nj.com/news/2021/01/newark-cops-with-reform-didnt-fire-a-single-shot-in-2020-moran.html

by mycologos • 5 years ago

353 180 5 years ago

tyingq4• 5 years ago

Some time ago, I watched Frontline's "Policing the Police" episode that featured Newark and Baraka's efforts. The episode was fairly early in their process (2016), and does a nice job of framing up both the problem, and how they intended to solve it. Jelani Cobb hosts it. He does a ride-along, and somewhat incredibly, sees the problems first hand...despite the cops he's riding with knowing full well he's filming everything.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/policing-the-police/

Edit: Apparently this link works outside the US: https://player.pbs.org/widget/partnerplayer/2365792793/

throwaway10905• 5 years ago

It's on youtube [1]. They released another documentary with the same name and the same Newark subject with 2020 updates [2]. They both have the same duration but are different.

[1] Policing the Police (2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_8vTl6D940

[2] Policing the Police (2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taNwWilMVLg

Both come with optional English subtitles.

gadrev• 5 years ago

I guess it's US only? Can't access from EU.

imagineerschool2• 5 years ago

Extra confusing that they share a lot of footage. The 2020 release is an update more than a new work.

throwaway10905• 5 years ago

Can't edit above comment. Invidious to the rescue [1]. Just enable 'proxy videos' in settings (circle icon).

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=2_8vTl6D940

and

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=taNwWilMVLg

Notes: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

elil173• 5 years ago

I think this only addresses half of what's wrong with Newark PD.

Newark still spends about a third of it's city budget on police, at the expense of essential services like infrastructure and education.

Newark PD still arrests Black people at a much much higher rate than white people. The disparity of arrest rates is even greater when it comes to drug possession.

bananabiscuit3• 5 years ago

Check the demographics, white people make up only about one third of the population in Newark.

elil173• 5 years ago

Arresting at a hire rate means in comparison to the demographics of the city. In 2020, 50% of Newark residents were Black but 80% of arrests were of Black people. 80% of victims of police use of force were Black. A third of the city is white but only 4% of police use of force victims are white. [1]

[1] https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/07/newark-must-do-more-to-st...

imwillofficial• 5 years ago

Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

js2• 5 years ago

I was surprised to learn that overall, the U.S. spends about 0.8% of GDP on policing, which places it in about the middle of OECD countries.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...

Budget seems like the least of our problems in fixing U.S. policing, though I recognize in some cities it may be more of a problem than others. The biggest problem seems to be the huge amount of resistance from police to any change at all.

I'm watching this closely:

https://cornellsun.com/2021/04/02/mayor-svante-myricks-09-po...

mathewsanders• 5 years ago

That surprises me as well! Particularly if it includes departments like ICE and FBI within that definition of policing.

I tried to search for the original source to see if I could find how they are calculating theses costs but didn’t have any luck.

I mention this because NYPD budget is often referenced as $6 billion, but that’s only operating costs, and the actual amount is closer to $11 billion (including fringe benefits like overtime and funding the NYPD pension).

With a 2020 GPD of $20,936 billion Then 0.8% of that is $167 billion

If we assume that policing costs are more closely tied to population rather than GDP we’d expect that NYPD costs to be about 2.5% of national amount. That’s approximately $4.2 billion.

But NYPD costs are $11 billion, which is 6.5% of estimated national policing costs (for 2.5% of the population).

Admittedly, I can imagine that there are reasons why a big city area might have higher than average costs, but 6.5% makes me feel that the 0.8% of GDP might be either underestimating how much US spends as part of GDP, or calculating national costs using different methods for different countries.

seneca• 5 years ago

The biggest problem seems to be the huge amount of resistance from police to any change at all.

A huge problem is the massive, and influential, police union. Police resisting change at an individual or local level is one thing, but their union is a huge coordinated lobby that works against anything that would be better for the public if they perceive it as even slightly unfavorable to police.

helloworld112• 5 years ago

Newark PD still arrests Black people at a much much higher rate than white people.

And if it's the case that people in the city's black community are committing arrestable offenses (however stupid some definitions of what is an offense for which you can be arrested and charged with for are), then what should the department do? Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing just because it's bad PR?

It's apparently not popular to mention and undoubtedly there are many social victimization factors at work contributing to it, but young men in the black community really do commit more violent crime and crime of many other types than do many young men in a number of other ethnic communities.

elil173• 5 years ago

Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing

Yes. No one’s ordered police to focus on anyone one kind of crime. Police in America have total discretion to choose which laws they enforce and which they don’t.

In Arizona you can get six months in jail for spitting in a public park, but you don’t see Arizona cops trying to arrest everyone for that. It’s a federal crime to let your dog bark in a National Park but the park police don’t really care. Similarly, there’s nothing forcing cops to focus on marijuana possession.

commentingbadly• 5 years ago

What a disgusting and false comment

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/29/fac...

- Rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black homicide are similar, at around 80% and 90%

- Rates of Black-on-white and white-on-Black homicide also within 8 points

- Police kill Black people at disproportionate rates

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

if

There is a lot of evidence, that is easy to find, that laws criminalize African-Americans (e.g., drugs abused by poor African-Americans are criminal and result in prison; those abused by wealthy white people are sicknesses and result in treatment); that police harass and are brutal toward them (e.g., driving while black, predictive policing, and all the well-documented brutality and racism), and that prosecutors and courts sentence them to disproportionately harsh sentences, including long probation and loss of voting rights, and the inability, with a conviction, to get employment.

In my city I've seen the police in action many 5 times. Twice, it involved clear abuse and harassment of peaceful African-Americans. It's just my anecdotal experience, but are the odds?

Your argument is decades-old at this point; we know so much more now. What do you think of all that's been learned in the meantime (and by learned, I mean learned by the wealthy white population - it was known by some for generations)? Are we going to just rehash decades of learning? Nobody is making the points you are arguing with.

loeg• 5 years ago

Newark still spends about a third of it's city budget on police, at the expense of essential services like infrastructure and education.

How does that compare with other metros? My impression is that police and schools are some of the most expensive services cities provide, and both consume a significant chunk of most cities' budgets.

NoImmatureAdHom9• 5 years ago

This sentiment about arrest rates really needs to go.

I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people:

White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3

White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2

White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8

The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe.

This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system". There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. That cop will (involuntarily) collect statistics on the world around him or her, and will act accordingly. We call it learning. You can't help but do it. I think some small proportion of this enormous difference is due to a feedback loop, i.e. people end up murdering more because they're policed more.

Insofar as you are "outraged" by this simple statement of fact, you are part of the problem--not the solution. Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye. Ignoring the obvious truth proves to me that you don't really care about actually helping people, and are really in it to impress your friends with how woke you are.

There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution.

FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...

deepakhj• 5 years ago

I don't believe white and black people are on the same footing economically. They've been held down since slavery and it still affects them today. Here's a few examples: real estate redlining (even though that was banned it's still happening today in other forms https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-...), the Tulsi race massacre (This story is crazy), urban renewal (Fillmore, West Oakland), all the neighborhoods they destroyed building freeways through them (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/role-of..., https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/01/11/senate-considering-10...). The crack cocaine sentencing disparity split up families, creating the single parent unit, throw in the gang explosion in the 90s, and tough on crime sentencing, it's amazing people make it out of the hood.

Do you think we can improve the damage we've done through policing?

cozzyd3• 5 years ago

Those statistics are probably "correct," but missing lots of context.

First of all, most police stops and arrests aren't for murder, but for various petty crimes (particularly drugs and traffic violations) that are certainly unevenly enforced, even controlling for other factors (see e.g. see e.g. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...), so citing murder statistics here to seems a little irrelevant, as they are such a small fraction of police stops. It is also probably not an effective means of catching murderers (instead turning communities against the police, perhaps contributing to the pathetic murder clearance rates achieved by police). As you probably know, many have argued that there is both overpolicing of petty crimes and underpolicing of violent crimes in minority communities ( see, e.g. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8411733/black-community-polici...).

But, sticking to murder rates, these statistics also ignore a lot of dynamics. At least in urban areas (I don't have much familiarity with rural areas), most murders aren't individuals acting independently to commit murder. Instead, a large fraction of murders are gang-related (either directly, or collaterally), suggesting that to large extent, differential gang prevalence might be a dominant factor in the difference in murder rates.

Why are gangs prevalent today in some communities and not others? 100 years ago, gangs in places like Chicago were predominantly ethnic white (think Al Capone), though those gangs have largely declined and no longer play a larger role as far as I can tell. Nowadays, 90% of gang members appear to be Black or Hispanic (https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demograph...). Gangs of course are not all the same (some are probably more violent than others), but maybe the right question to be asking is why are gangs so prevalent among urban minorities.

I don't have any special knowledge here, but I imagine that in many cases, differential policing may certainly be a direct or indirect contributor to high gang prevalence. . There of course other many other reasons (community disinvestment, inertia, the "war on drugs."), but differential policing has the potential to cause a positive feedback loop here (unfair treatment -> higher gang membership -> higher violent rates -> unfair treatment) that probably needs to be broken. Of course, historically, unfair treatment of Blacks well predates the formation of Black street gangs (according to https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/434..., Black street gangs didn't become prevalent in large urban areas until the 50's/60's).

It might be "natural" for police to treat communities with higher murder rates differently, but that does not mean that it's the smart or right thing to do.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

I'm sure I'll get downvoted but isn't it possible that BOTH the real crime rate is higher in more poverty stricken areas AND that cops are more likely to arrest blacks in general? Does it always have to be one or the other, rather than both?

AtNightWeCode• 5 years ago

Good for Newark!

But, from what I understand, they gave the cops better training and got better result. That is how education works.

tomerico• 5 years ago

I disagree. The largest factors are likely to be culture (coming from leadership) and higher scrutiny (mentioned in the article as a requirement to report and investigate any use of force).

yaml-ops-guy2• 5 years ago

Couldn’t possibly be a confluence of all the above? Not even in the tiniest degree?

zero_deg_kevin• 5 years ago

They’re now proof points that governments can reduce police fatalities by training their police to use more than guns. This hopefully makes it a little easier to sue a city into the ground for failure to adequately train its police force.

ww_wpg• 5 years ago

Importantly, such training requires more funding, not "defunding the police" as some propose.

odonnellryan• 5 years ago

NJ is decent. We had one small issue of police violence during the large BLM protests. Compared to NY...

misiti3780• 5 years ago

Sam Harris has a new, very interesting podcast with Rener Gracie about police training and how inadequate it is across the entire United States. Officers in California get one - 4 hour course every two years to learn how to subdue criminals, and of the 4 hours, only one is actually spent training, the other three are instruction.

Rener Gracie is obviously famous for Brazilian jiu-jitsu but he also trains police on how to subdue criminals in a safe way. He has some interesting ideas about how to identify bad cops also.

It was worth the listen.

https://samharris.org/podcasts/246-police-training-police-mi...

bitexploder3• 5 years ago

My BJJ gym offers deep discount to police. This is a good thing. I’ve rolled with many police fresh to grappling and even with my limited skills they are very easy to subdue. No wonder they resort to weapons (lethal and less than lethal) so quickly. I have been training a few years now.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

It seems like a great idea, and that they’ve gathered significant evidence that other police departments can now take advantage of to start their own similar programs. That’s really exciting. The episode did kind of devolve into a commercial for Gracie JJ though. Well, maybe that just keeps it simple for others. One phone number to call for training...

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

It's more complicated than that.

They disbanded the entire department -- breaking the police union in the process, and then hired far _more_ (but somewhat lower-paid) police than before.

The new, larger, but reformed department has done dramatically better than before. So there's really something for everyone -- breaking the union was important, _increasing_ funding was important, but also increased de-escalation training helped.

oivey2• 5 years ago

I think that was Camden, not Newark.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

As another comment noted, that was Camden. There’s also more to that story - the city significantly stepped up its surveillance of public spaces (https://www.insider.com/inside-camden-new-jerseys-high-tech-...). Personally I think using technology to ensure public safety, with the right safeguards to prevent government abuses, is both acceptable and very possible. However, the anti policing activists are now against the Camden model - they initially held it up as evidence that defunding works but quickly changed opinion when more details came out (that funding simply shifted to the county level). You can find an example of arguments against Camden’s surveillance model at https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/camden-new-jersey-police-refo...

throwaway10905• 5 years ago

In addition to education, as per the article, "They hired more Black and brown officers" ; "required any officer who uses force in any way to report it in detail, and for the supervisor to review it". Resulting in "The bad cops were suddenly outed."

lostlogin• 5 years ago

The story describes positive change and this is good. However the detail is rather dark.

“On Jan. 1, a Newark officer fatally shot Carl Dorsey III, of South Orange, during a confrontation in the South Ward, a case that’s being investigated by Attorney General”

The link there says that officers arrived on Jan 1 2021 at 12:03am.

So 3 minutes after 2020 they shot someone dead.

https://www.nj.com/essex/2021/01/nj-protesters-rally-demand-...

bonestamp2• 5 years ago

Fair enough, so let's say it was 1 shooting. Based on that incident, it sounds like that's still 1 too many, but is it an improvement over previous years?

I can't find any stats on that, here's the department's site for this year though: https://npd.newarkpublicsafety.org/statistics/transparency

jchook• 5 years ago

Significant to note that Newark Police officers did not wear body cameras until early 2020. It seems like part of the same “decree” but I didn’t see the article mention it.

I recall a similar stat from CA where body cameras reduced complaints by 80%.

Also it looks like Merrick Garland reversed Jeff Sessions’ limitations on consent decree.

0xbadcafebee• 5 years ago

Anecdotal counter-argument: police have been filmed planting evidence, assaulting suspects, on their own body cameras. It may be useful at catching them, but not necessarily a deterrent

karaterobot• 5 years ago

Looking at the 28-day periods, aggravated assault is up a lot, robbery is down by a lot, and most of the rest are within what I imagine are the yearly fluctuations. Is there more convincing support for the claim that crime is down in Newark?

AbrahamParangi• 5 years ago

Violent crime has been on a decade-long decline in Newark[1] so wouldn't at all be surprising if crime as a whole declined in 2020.

[1] https://www.city-data.com/city/Newark-New-Jersey.html

jghn• 5 years ago

Even if it stays stable, isn't that enough evidence that we don't need the Warrior Cop model? Being able to demonstrate an improvement in crime by toning down the violence is just gravy on top.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

Police rarely stop crimes in progress. As the saying goes, "when seconds count, the police are minutes away."

A strategy of high visibility, or "omnipresence" may have more of a deterrent effect than anything else.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

What it does confirm is that you don't need "warriored" up cops. Regular protect and serve types will work.

mbg721• 5 years ago

2020 had so many confounding factors, I don't know that there's convincing evidence of any trend.

sanguy• 5 years ago

We need Robocop more than ever in this country. Or Judge's like Dredd.

No judgement for color, gender, age, or appearance. Just policing based on the facts of the situation and the criminal record of those being policed.

stadium4• 5 years ago

criminal record of those being policed

What if there is bias in the criminal record? This ignores the idea of rehabilitation and assumes that one crime, one bad decision, makes someone a criminal for life.

brigandish• 5 years ago

We need Robocop more than ever in this country. Or Judge's like Dredd.

Both were a satire on fascism, I'm not sure they're the best examples you could find.

zo1• 5 years ago

And yet here we are, in just the last few days:

1. Making organ "donation" default and you have to "opt out". 2. Talking about a 100% inheritance "tax" so parents can't leave their possessions to children.

Talk about fascism, most people can't even see it coming.

randomopining• 5 years ago

Yeah so “defund the police!” Should actually be “fund better police training!”

Of course the AOC-type libs are utterly wrong. Biden is right.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Yeah so “defund the police!” Should actually be “fund better police training!”

Most people saying the former would support it being accompanied by the latter, however, they will note that that the past several decades have involved several police reform movements that have driven additional net funding to police at the expense of other local services, contributing to the expansion of police roles. “Defund the police” is about driving down the proportion of local funding consumed by paramilitary law enforcement and, along with it, the scope of responsibility. Increasing the share of those remaining resoueces devoted to training, and even moreso the quality of that training in respect to the remaining role of the paramilitary law enforcement services, is not something “defund" activists oppose, just something that they see as inadequate and not the first priority.

failwhaleshark3• 5 years ago

Why is this such a rarity these days?

My grandfather was an AP (MP) for decades and never shot at anyone, despite handling uncountable hairy/critical situations with individuals trained in killing.

Shoot first and ask questions never? Deescalation and self-control should be job #1 along with verbal/social skills to solve problems before jumping to the nuclear option out of fear.

logicslave• 5 years ago

Because criminals have alot of guns

failwhaleshark3• 5 years ago

That seems oversimplified. Do you have any data about the trends of gun possession by criminals or gun crime related to attacks on police?

There are also a lot of innocent people being shot too, or the visibility of it has increased.

Edit: also, could it be police are less trained or more fearful than in the past?

watwut2• 5 years ago

Different training. Different level of accountability/liability/etc. Cops are not trained to deescalate, their are taught to have commanding control and respond aggressively. And they are trained to shoot to kill. They are also taught to fear a lot, the emphasis is on danger they are in.

And plus, this behavior is rewarded with promotions. And courts progressively removed legal obstacles to the above.

wingspar• 5 years ago

...trained to shoot to kil.

There’s really not another option. Shoot to wound isn’t an option. You don’t shoot to kill, you shoot to neutralize the threat.

https://www.ajc.com/news/national/here-why-police-don-shoot-...

https://www.forcescience.org/2006/03/why-shooting-to-wound-d...

creato2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure about entire departments, but for individual officers, it's not rare. Many if not most police officers never fire their weapon on duty for their entire careers.

For some perspective, there are around a million police officers in the US (https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=249).

A lot of police shooting incidents have made the national news in recent years, but I can think of tens of such incidents over a decade.

dfrankow• 5 years ago

Police kill about 1000-1200 people per year in the U.S., depending on who's counting. See for example the Washington Post data. So it's not just tens over a decade.

samatman• 5 years ago

There were 287 homicides in Newark in 2020, up from 234 in 2019. That's 53 more lives lost, a shocking 23% increase.

How related are these two facts? I don't know, but if you're going to come at this with "completely unrelated" I question your honesty.

Source: https://www.nj.com/crime/2020/12/homicides-in-nj-soared-22-i...

Edit: apologies for not reading the source carefully, I was mislead by the search I used to retrieve it. That was for all of New Jersey, not Newark, where homicides have been flat (and that is unusual for the United States in general).

I'm pretty distracted today. Sorry about that.

darkerside• 5 years ago

https://www.statista.com/chart/23905/change-in-homicides-in-...

5vforest• 5 years ago

Your cited source literally says the opposite:

While Trenton and Paterson saw spikes this year, other cities like Newark and Jersey City haven’t seen much of a change.

vanviegen• 5 years ago

2020 was by no means a typical year. A rise in domestic violence, perhaps? Still seems weird though.

tyingq4• 5 years ago

You're quoting stats for all of New Jersey, not just Newark.

This sentence is in your linked source:

"In Newark, the state’s most populous city, 51 homicides occurred in 2020 as of Dec. 30 — the same number the city had in 2019, officials said."

Which seems pretty notable. The most populous city is flat, while the state itself is up 23%.

koolba• 5 years ago

Given the lack of commuters and total cancellation of sporting events limiting tourism, I’d expect a drop in overall crime of all kinds in Newark. A flat number with the lower flow of people isn’t necessarily a drop.

martin_bech• 5 years ago

One of the big differences between the US and Europe. Violence is way down here, as the nightlife is pretty much gone because of the covid restrictions.

enaaem• 5 years ago

I wonder why cops in the West don't use man catchers? It's a great tool to subdue any non-gun wielding person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-2SpSMZtyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4z-gzkb6s4

Pepper spray and stick don't work against someone who is strong and aggressive.

virtuous_signal• 5 years ago

I had never even considered the possibility of something like this. I wonder what effective interventions we might be missing simply due to lack of creativity.

I imagine a version of these wide enough for a person’s waist and with a locking mechanism could be used for knife/fistfights and be much more humane than shooting. Perhaps they could be stored in squad cars the way shotguns are.

craftinator• 5 years ago

"I thought I had grabbed the mancatcher, not the shotgun! It was an accident!"

fridif• 5 years ago

And still, Newark is not a very nice place to live.

Newark cops, with reform, didn't fire a single shot in 2020

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