De-Policing in America’s Cities: Erasing the “Thin Blue Line”

By Nicholas Stix
May, 2002
Middle American News

Driven by racial resentment against white cops, new policies devised by left-wing elites are turning the police departments of major cities into cesspools of corruption and incompetence, putting the lives of citizens at risk, and threatening to erase the “thin blue line,” that in cities, is the difference between chaos and civilization. As incidents in New York, Cincinnati, Seattle, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have shown, the police who are sworn to protect and serve, increasingly are cowering before urban thugs, when they are not themselves criminals, or laughably unable to do the job of protecting the public.

On June 10-11, 2000, New York police let black and Hispanic mobs assault dozens of white and Hispanic women in Spanish Harlem and Central Park, before and after the Puerto Rican Day Parade. When NYPD officers were blamed for not cracking down on the mayhem, dozens of them responded that they had been ordered to go easy on black and Hispanic miscreants.

On June 19, 2000, when the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, rioters celebrated by smashing shop windows, looting, and setting police cars on fire, causing millions of dollars in damage. The LAPD stood down, and city leaders bragged about the non-policing strategy.

During February, 2001 Mardi Gras celebrations in Seattle and Philadelphia, racist black mobs ran wild, picking out white revelers, and assaulting them with abandon.

In Seattle, the mobs were caught on camera, robbing and stomping whites senseless. As many as five black men would assault one small white woman. On February 27, one white man, Kristopher Kime, tried to help a brutalized white woman, and was stomped to death for his troubles. A large contingent of nearby police did nothing; Chief Gil Kerlikowske ordered them to stand down during the mayhem. Sgt. Dan Beste and Lt. William Edwards, who were present, publicly apologized to the victim’s family. Last summer, Seattle police—black and white—complained that since political leaders and police brass were ready to sacrifice them, they were routinely engaging in “depolicing,” ignoring crimes, so as to protect their jobs.

On March 8, 2001, a mob of black high school students “demonstrating” in Berkeley, California for the return of affirmative action, looted a Foot Locker store, and beat a white passerby unconscious, as police looked on. Even when pictures of the looters were transmitted all over the world, via the Internet, the authorities did nothing.

Last April in Cincinnati, incited by the Rev. Damon Lynch III, the head of the black supremacist Cincinnati Black United Front, and newspapers that portrayed vicious, sometimes homicidal black hoodlums as the victims of racist police, black rioters tore up the poor, black Over-the-Rhine neighborhood for several days, and ambushed white motorists, dragging them from their cars, and beating them to a pulp. Rev. Lynch even tried to hold a City Council meeting hostage. Instead of taking a stand against black racist demagoguery, white Mayor Charlie Luken, prostrated himself before black leaders. Last summer, as policemen backed off, violent crime exploded in Over-the-Rhine.

Urban police departments are under intense pressure to reduce violent crime, which blacks and Hispanics have a virtual monopoly over, while not offending outraged black and Hispanic criminals, or the media and non-criminal black and Hispanic residents who support them. The job is impossible.

And so, urban police chiefs have engaged in aggressively policing ... impressions. They hire black and Hispanic candidates whose profiles set off alarms, and who go on to commit crimes. Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Miami have all been wracked by criminal police scandals. And the police misrepresent crime, by faking statistics. The Philadelphia and New York police forces have been caught undercounting crime statistics for years. Police officers are instructed—sometimes with cheat sheets—to downgrade felonies to misdemeanors or non-crimes, to not record them, or to later “unfound” them. Thus, an assault becomes harassment, a burglary goes from breaking and entering and grand larceny to “lost property,” and many forcible rapes and shootings, and even some homicides are either defined down, not recorded, or “disappeared.”

As far back as 1996, the NYPD was caught by then-Daily News reporter, William K. Rashbaum, using cheat sheets, and by Newsday reporter Leonard Levitt, disappearing homicides and forcible rapes. Early that year NYPD spokeswoman, Officer Kathie Kelly, responded to my inquiry regarding an alleged shooting on December 8, 1995, by assuring me that “there’s no shootings on the eighth.” What I hadn’t told Officer Kelly, was that a shooting had occurred on the A (subway) train I rode on that night, and that I had seen the lifeless-looking victim, and no less than 39 police officers at the crime scene, nor had I mentioned the seven shooting victims of that morning’s “Harlem Massacre.”

As reporter Larry Celona showed in the March 14, 2002 New York Post, since then, nothing has changed: “Documents obtained by The Post show a rape recorded in the (Bronx’) 50th Precinct was logged as a lesser crime - thus giving a rare look into what some beat cops say is a statistical sleight of hand used by their commanders.

“According to many patrol officers, commanders sometimes reclassify major crimes like murder, assault, robbery and rape as lesser offenses to make it appear they are winning the war on crime....

“In the incident at the 50th Precinct, the March 8 rape of a woman at a Bailey Avenue hotel was recorded as an ‘inconclusive’ incident. Only on Tuesday, after The Post started asking questions, was the crime properly classified as rape.”

According to the FBI, the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) has routinely defined down felonies such as breaking and entering. The PPD has long disappeared most sexual attacks through “unfounding” them. According to a 2000 Philadelphia Inquirer report, “Among police, the practice is called ‘going down with crime.’”

The PPD is also the progressive leader in hiring criminals as police officers. PPD spokeswoman, Stephanie McNeil, told me that in 2001, “We had 26 police officers dismissed from the department” for engaging in criminal acts. Two of those officers, Gina McFadden and Dawn Norman, perpetrated an anthrax hoax.
And the non-criminal officers are hardly better. On February 6, 2002, at the black nationalist, Imani Education Circle Charter School, PPD Officer Vanessa Carter-Moragne violated department gun safety rules. She passed her gun around a class of sixth graders, reloaded it, dropped it, and while picking it up, accidentally fired it, coming within an inch of killing ten-year-old James Reeves, whom she grazed in the cheek. (Officer Carter-Moragne will face a Police Board of Inquiry hearing, probably in May.)

Last November 21, an AP report quoted Jim Pasco, the executive director of the national police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, as blaming poor recruitment and hiring decisions for the rise in criminal cops: “Making better recruitment and hiring decisions on the front end would ease the embarrassment of having to fire officers on the back end.... In almost all incidents, someone who is a lawbreaker after being hired had something in their background that was a red flag....

“He said an accelerated hiring policy and poor background checks in the Washington, D.C., police department led to the ‘Notorious Class of ‘89.’ Over time, more than two dozen officers from that class were arrested and sent to prison for a variety of crimes.”

During the 1980s, such “accelerated,” affirmative action hiring of Hispanic and black candidates in Miami resulted in a police crime wave. In New York City, affirmative action has resulted in corruption scandals involving black and Hispanic officers, most notably the predominantly Hispanic officers of the “Dirty 30” 30th Precinct in Harlem, and a much higher drug dismissal rate for black officers than for whites.

As a New York City psychologist who was a consultant to the New York City Police Academy told me as far back as 1992, “It’s incredible, the pressure to pass people, just because they’re minorities. It’s all racial. They push, push, push, with people who are inappropriate and are often antisocial themselves.”

As urban police brass seek to finesse fabricated charges of racism by hiring incompetent, and often criminal police officer candidates, based on the color of the candidates’ skin, and by misrepresenting the extent of urban crime, the cities continue their slide, and criminals increasingly rule both sides of “the thin blue line.”

Originally published in Middle American News.