This week, perhaps feeling more prickly than usual following a year and half of getting, as he says, pretty much whatever he wants from the New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio, progressive New York's most powerful person (according to some) suggested we need to put more people in jail, and to keep them there for longer.
While the rest of the country's political class frets about how to reduce the prison population without disrupting the social order or the power dynamics that leave the indigent and people of color most vulnerable to criminal law enforcement, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton wants more people in jail, going back to the future with the 1990s-era super-predation myths.
Here is Bratton on Wednesday:
"There are people in our society -- I'm sorry, they're criminals. They're bad people. You don't want to put them in diversion programs. You don't want to try to keep them out of jail. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time, because they're a danger to the rest of us," Bratton said on the John Gambling radio show.
In a recent fear-mongering mix-up bordering on parody, Bratton showed reporters videos he claimed were of people acting unpredictably after consuming what he described as "weaponized weed;" he was busted when journalists exposed the videos as 2002 COPS reruns showing PCP arrests in the Midwest.
While just about any social scientist would dispute Bratton's assertion, the fact also remains that Rikers Island, New York's largest jail complex, as is becoming increasingly well-known, is not actually filled with baby-killers (despite claims to the contrary by Norman Seabrook). According to the Independent Budget Office, of the 13,049 daily population average (2010) in New York City Jails, 9,765 (or 75 percent) are awaiting trial having not even been convicted of a crime. Instead they are in jail simply because they cannot pay their way out - an unfair situation the city and state are limply attempting to address over Bratton's opposition. (About 10 percent of pre-trial cases are remanded.) The most common charge class for people on Rikers Island is actually non-violent misdemeanors (16 percent of the daily population according to the IBO). Adding all of the drug charges, both felonies and misdemeanors, together tallies another 27 percent. Assaults and Robberies make up another 14 percent.
The combined number of all murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape, attempted rape, and weapons cases makes up just 7 percent of the daily jail population according to the IBO.
Another note on the City jails: 95 percent people of color.
Here is New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman on the Rikers Island population: "Far too many individuals awaiting trial who pose no risk to public safety are incarcerated simply because they [don't have money]."
Here is De Blasio: "Too many people have been detained at Rikers, sometimes for years, while they wait for trial. For the first time, our city will work with the courts, law enforcement, district attorneys and the defense bar to immediately tackle case delays head-on and significantly reduce the average daily population on Rikers Island."
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito wants to set up a $1.4 million fund to pay bail for people who otherwise would be ticketed for city jails, despite committing only minor crimes and infractions.
Bratton, meanwhile, implies that people need to be in jail forever: "The problem with letting them out is there's nothing to do when they come out. They can't find jobs, so a lot of them go back to the crimes that put them in jail in the first place." (Earlier this year Bratton explained to the Guardian how the lack of diversity in the NYPD was a result of so many Black people having criminal records; he seemingly missed the irony of his own mass-criminalization, racial profiling policies playing a role in everyone's criminal background check).
And remember, it was only this May when Bratton, sitting in front of City Council, said: "These black and Hispanic lives matter." It's laughable. But hey, the cheese stands alone.
Bratton's deputy commissioner for operations, Dermot Shea, like deputy commissioner for collaborative policing Susan Herman last month, tried to make the case for the NYPD's precision enforcement - going after only the "bad guys."
"We know exactly what we are facing. We know exactly who is responsible," Shea said Tuesday. But that's simply not reflected in the way the NYPD goes about their business, according to a new report by the Police Reform Organizing Project.
PROP cataloged the extensive nature of NYPD enforcement activities: 1,913,015 incidents in 2014 alone, according to the NYPD's own stats. A recent report by the NYPD's federal monitor Peter Zimroth suggested that many police interactions, such as stop and frisks, are not being reported by officers. So much for the "peace dividend."
This breaks down, PROP says, to 5,700 enforcement actions a day; 40,000 each week; and 159,000 every month - all the while Bratton is saying crime has never been lower, and, of course, more people should be in jail. Not even 10 percent of police interactions involve felonies - the most serious crimes.
Of course, these enforcement actions are not equal opportunity. It's not that a quarter of the city has punitive interactions with the police each year - rather the activity discriminates by place and race. In fact, 80-95 percent of these interactions occur between the NYPD and Black and/or Latino people between the ages of 15 and 59, according to PROP. In Mott Haven, a mostly Black neighborhood in the Bronx, there were three times as many summonses issued in 2014 as there are residents.
In 2014, 94.4 percent of juvenile arrests involved Black and/or Latino people and 87.5 percent of stop and frisks involved people of color. The NYPD gave out 74,345 tinted windows violations in 2014 (I wonder where?). In PROP's survey, 89 percent of defendants were people of color. #deblasiosnewyork
Once people are dragged into court for these "crimes," District Attorneys use bail and jail to exact leverage from people unable to pay their way out of jail, and judges fearful of being splashed out on the front page of the NY Post frequently acquiesce to their demands.
When the City Council advocated fiercely for more police officers earlier this year (much credit due to Inez Barron as the lone dissention) - they tried to pitch the nonsensical idea that more cops would mean less arrests. Bratton put any such notions to bed this week:
"Good news is as we're going forward, that the now soon-to-be-enlarged NYPD will have an even stronger capacity to keep this city safe, both in terms of serious crime as well as the quality of life crime," he told amNY.
The rest of us, I guess, can assume more of the same.
Of course, Bratton's own house is a bit of a trainwreck with cops currently involved in trials for rape, road rage assault and homophobic hate crimes.
The PROP report ends with a call: "It's time that our city's leaders, particularly Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Mark-Viverito, take off their blinders and recognize the institutional racism inherent in the NYPD's current practices and direct the Department to abandon "broken windows" tactics. Until then, corrosive law enforcement policies will continue to exacerbate the racial, social, and economic inequities that plague our city."
While Bratton might long for the day when every homeless person is confined to a cage, and there is no longer graffiti to see on his Sunday drives out to the Hamptons, others long for those two glorious weeks in December, when the NYPD turned their backs on the Mayor and Commissioner and stopped working; summonses dropped by 90 percent, arrests by 66 percent, and crime fell as well - the PROP report notes.
"To many of us from these communities, the past two weeks have amounted to a vacation from fear, surveillance, and punishment. Maybe this is what it feels like to not be prejudged and seen as suspicious law breakers. Maybe this is a small taste of what it feels like to be white," Aurin Squire wrote in the New Republic.
Bratton meanwhile has nearly wrapped up selling the City his bill of goods: community policing and neighborhood cops in the morning, predictive-policing-I-can-do-Minority-Report-right-now in the afternoon, and more people in jail during the long, dark night.