Crime, Race, IQ and “Vincent Broderick Syndrome”

By Nicholas Stix

Two years ago, my longtime reader, GW, sent me this. Fortunately, this was after AOL had ceased its old policy of automatically deleting every e-mail that was between 27 and 30 days old, and so GW’s message sat on my e-mail server.

He wrote,

I thought you might appreciate knowing of the "Vincent Broderick Syndrome."

* * *Skeptical CPA: The Law is an Ass-6
Independent Accountant at 9:25 AM
Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 9:25 a.m.

"Unlike the initial program, in which the props were worth at most a few hundred dollars, the bags are now salted with real American Express cards, issued under pseudonyms to the Police Department. Because the theft of a credit card is grand larceny, a Class E felony, those convicted could face sentences of up to four years.

... In dismissing one case, a Brooklyn judge noted that the law gives people 10 days to turn in property they find, and suggested the city had enough real crime for the police to fight without any need to provide fresh temptations. The penal law also does not requires [sic] that found items be turned over to a police officer. The Manhattan [DA's] office began to dismiss Lucky Bag charges," NYT, 28 November.

With tens of billions of dollars of fraud likely on Wall Street, the NYPD chooses to arrest a few peasants who found purses apparently lost in Macy's. Either the NYPD has too many cops or still suffers from Vincent Broderick Syndrome (VBS). VBS? VB was the NYPD's commissioner in the 1960s. When John Lindsay (JL) became Mayor in 1966, JL immediately fired VB. Why? Racism. Racism? VB said something to the effect that the NYPD could not investigate crimes anymore, it could only make summary arrests. Why? Because the NYPD's average IQ had fallen from 115 in 1949 to 99. It doesn't take brains to make "Lucky Bag" arrests. It takes lots of brains to investigate sophisticated crimes.

[N.S.: To those readers shaking their heads at the notion that the NYPD ever had such an astronomical average IQ: Almost all of those cops had been hired during the Great Depression, which was a great blessing for many public institutions.

At the time, New York City was over 90 percent white, and had two million Jews [roughly 25% of the population]. A substantial portion of the NYPD was Jewish—they built up their own fraternal organization, the Shomrin Society. However, it also had a lot of brilliant Irishmen and Italians. And because the cancer of affirmative action/diversity/multiculturalism had not yet entered “the job’s” system, it had much higher standards for black applicants. For instance, you had to demonstrate that you were literate. (New York City cops refer to what they do as “the job.”)

Jobs were hard to come by during the Depression, and being a cop offered job security and, as shocking as this sounds now, respect.

Somewhere in The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray talk about how deep the New York City Police Department was in brilliant men at the time.

Today, the “diverse” NYPD’s average IQ is probably between 90 and 95. And mind you, policing is much more complicated than it used to be, not only because a place like New York City, amidst all the brutal, low-grade thugs attracts a lot of sophisticated embezzlers and such, but because the federal courts, in order to aid and abet black and Hispanic criminals, have imposed so many technicalities and limitations on police work that you need to be a Philadelphia lawyer, to do the job.

And yet, the same affirmative action tendency that has the courts handcuff law enforcement, imposes on it the hiring of people who are intellectually unable, and psychologically and morally hostile towards following ridiculously complicated rules. And so, if anything, the average person's rights are no better protected than before.

(I seem to recall Murray and Herrnstein also saying something to the effect that making life so complicated was borne less of the desire to help the disadvantaged, than it was to make life miserable and confound those who were lower than them on the cognitive and social totem pole.)

Another reason why some public institutions had such high average IQs was pre-war anti-Semitism.

The depression-era New City public schools had the most educated teachers this country ever saw, or ever will see. They had large numbers of men teachers with Ph.D.s. They were Jews who had had their hearts set on becoming college professors, but during the early 1920s, America’s private colleges announced that they would cut the number of Jewish students they accepted to almost zero, and while I’m not aware of any statement regarding hiring Jewish professors, their policy was already to hire very few Jews.

So, academia’s loss was the public schools’ gain. Brilliant Jewish men were one of the reasons why New York City had the nation’s best public schools. Another was high IQ white students. A third was that teachers, like cops, were respected in those days. Even black kids showed white teachers a lot more respect than they do now, because the so-called Civil Rights Movement hadn’t yet taught them that they had the right to curse, batter, rob, rape and murder white teachers.

There are thousands of highly educated whites in this town who are perfectly qualified to be school teachers, but will never apply for the job, because they do not intend to become punching bags, human ATMs, and rape toys. Many of them toil as college adjuncts, for subsistence wages and no benefits, as I once did. God only knows what they do now.