Tag Archives: #BrokenWindowsPolicing

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Could Daniel Pearson be a conservative? Whether he realized it or not, he was pushing "broken windows" policing

I have said that my good friend Daniel Pearson — OK, OK, I think he knows who I am, but we’ve never met other than in debates on Twitter — is an editorial writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and that makes him a liberal, but he’s not a far left whacko, and conservatives can actually talk to him. And, other than the fact that he appears to be holding a disgusting Philly cheesesteak in his Twitter biography photo — a hot, freshly baked Philly pretzel would be more than acceptable, but cheesesteaks are vile — I pretty much like him.

But this morning, I had to consider that, Heaven forfend!, he might actually be a conservative! He tweeted:

The idea that people skip fares because they don’t have the cash isn’t supported by any evidence.

People skip fares because they are entitled jerks. Period. That’s why so many fare evaders are also smoking and assaulting people on transit.

Then:

And:

Honestly, Penn and Drexel should crack down on these students. There’s no excuse for disrespecting your host city.

I could have written that, and as both of our regular readers know, I’m as evil a reich-wing conservative as they come!

OK, OK, I know: Mr Pearson is no conservative, but if he’s a Democrat, he’s at least a moderate Democrat, the kind of people conservatives could respect, even if we disagreed with him on some issues. He, or at least the Editorial Board for which he does most of the writing, clearly despises former President Trump, and there’s the problem that even moderate Democrats supporting other Democrats enables the far-left of that party — Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema and perhaps even John Fetterman, I’m referring to you — but if we’ll never get the moderate Democrats to become Republicans, at least their existence within a party which sometimes seems to have gone completely off the rails of the sensibility train somewhat restrains the hard left impulses.

The Philadelphia Daily News article Mr Pearson linked:

SEPTA: Felonies down after crackdown on fare-evaders

New stats from SEPTA show that an increased focus on busting fare-jumpers has helped curb crime in the subways.

by Vinny Vella | February 5, 2015 | 3:01 AM EST

MICHAEL, a Frankford teen, is a poster boy for all the wrong reasons.

Last year, Michael – a pseudonym, because most of his offenses were committed as a juvenile – was cited 15 times in six months for hopping onto a SEPTA train without paying, law-enforcement sources said.

It got so bad, one SEPTA Transit Police officer told the Daily News, that the cashiers at his most frequently visited stations began to recognize him and would tip off police before he even approached their windows.

In November, six days after his 18th birthday, Michael was hit with his first fare-evasion citation as an adult. Three weeks later, he was cited again, this time with an added charge of resisting arrest, according to court records.

Did “Michael” do something really radical like go to jail for his (alleged) crimes? We know that District Attorney Larry Krasner and his minions would almost certainly not do anything like that to him, but reporter Vinny Vella’s article was written in 2015, when Michael Nutter was Mayor, Charles Ramsey was Police Commissioner, and Seth Williams was District Attorney. Under those three gentlemen, Killadelphia’s homicide total in the previous year was 248, and if it spiked to 280 the next year, it had steadily come down during their tenure.

Now, he’s seemingly straightened up and flying right: He hasn’t been arrested since.

And to hear SEPTA tell it, cracking down on fare-evaders like Michael – who authorities say also has been involved in at least two cellphone thefts – has done wonders for reducing felonies committed on the city’s subways.

“People jumping turnstiles are not heading to the library or going to see grandmom,” said Chief Thomas Nestel, head of SEPTA’s Transit Police. “They’re getting on the system to engage in activity that is either criminal or disorderly.”

There’s more at the original, but this is just more evidence that “broken windows” policing works. We don’t know if “Michael” stopped using SEPTA, or just started paying the fare to keep the Transit Police away from him. But the crime numbers dropped overall, and that does follow the greater enforcement of fare evasion.

More, “Michael’s” fare evasion as a juvenile didn’t seem to do much to him, but once he became an adult, and got a resisting arrest charge added to his offenses, his behavior changed. And this shows just how badly Mr Krasner’s leniency has affected the City of Brotherly Love. We have previously noted the Burholme SEPTA bus stop shooting, and how at least three of the four (alleged) shooters — three did the shooting, while a fourth drove the stolen getaway car — had previous juvenile offenses which could and should have had them already behind bars, but did not. Harsher treatment might not have mentally and morally reformed them, but at least putting criminals behind bars means that they are not out on the streets committing crimes! Had Mr Krasner and his office treated the three Burholme (alleged) shooters more seriously, there might have been eight fewer people shot in Philly twelve days ago.

Who knows? Perhaps Dayemen Taylor, deliberately targeted and murdered at another SEPTA bus stop just two days previously, would still be with us. We don’t know that yet, there’s no public information on the Ogontz shootings perpetrators has been made public, and we don’t know if they were previous offenders, but I’d bet euros to eclairs — my version of dollars to doughnuts — that yup, they have previous records.

Mr Pearson? Whether he realized it or not, he, too, was advocating “broken windows” policing, going after the small-time, first time, ‘lower’ offense level malefactors, before they reached the level of shooting, and sometimes killing, other people. Murder, and attempted murder, are not normally entry-level crimes. It doesn’t always work, individually, because prison isn’t something which normally makes people better, but it can be something that at least encourages them not to do the stuff that would send them back to prison.

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Elect #SocialJustice public officials, and watch crime soar

StJohnTheDivineWilliamPortoIt was the summer of 2007, when my younger daughter, then a rising sophomore in high school, was considering architecture as a potential collegiate major, and she and I went to New York City on an architecture tour. One of the places that she wanted to see was the Episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine, which is located at 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, at 112th Street.

Well, we missed our subway stop, and instead of getting off at 110th or 116th streets, we wound up getting off at 125th Street. That’s Harlem!

So, my daughter, who was the whitest white girl in town, and I walked back down to our destination. The streets were clean, the people were pleasant, and we didn’t have the first moment’s trouble.

Rudolph Giuliani had succeeded the abysmal David Dinkins as Mayor of New York City on January 1, 1994, and served through December 31, 2001. From Wikipedia:

Giuliani led the 1980s federal prosecution of New York City mafia bosses as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.[3][4] After a failed campaign for Mayor of New York City in the 1989 election, he succeeded in 1993, and was reelected in 1997, holding a platform of toughness on crime.[1][5] He led New York’s controversial “civic cleanup” as its mayor from 1994 to 2001.[1][6] Mayor Giuliani appointed an outsider, William Bratton, as New York City’s new police commissioner.[5] Reforming the police department’s administration and policing practices, they applied the broken windows theory,[5] which cites social disorder, like disrepair and vandalism, for attracting loitering addicts, panhandlers, and prostitutes, followed by serious and violent criminals.[7] In particular, Giuliani focused on removing panhandlers and sex clubs from Times Square, promoting a “family values” vibe and a return to the area’s earlier focus on business, theater, and the arts.[8] As crime rates fell steeply, well ahead of the national average pace, Giuliani was widely credited, yet later critics cite other contributing factors.[1] In 2000, he ran against First Lady Hillary Clinton for a US Senate seat from New York, but left the race once diagnosed with prostate cancer.[9][10] For his mayoral leadership after the September 11 attacks in 2001, he was called “America’s mayor”.[5][11] He was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2001,[12][13] and was given an honorary knighthood in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

By the time my daughter and I made that trip, Mayor Giuliani had been succeeded by another Republican — who later became an independent, and later still, a Democrat — in Michael Bloomberg, and as mayor, he kept the strict policing policies of Mr Giuliani.

But, after three terms, Mayor Bloomberg was succeeded by far left social justice warrior Bill de Blasio. From the New York Post:

NYPD union slams Big Apple as ‘city of violence’ amid surge in shootings

By Amanda Woods | April 27, 2021 | 1:09pm | Updated

The NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association slammed the Big Apple as “the city of violence” amid a 250 percent surge in shootings last week, and a slew of other disturbing crimes citywide.

“Mayor de Blasio has allocated 30 million dollars to bring tourism to NYC,” the union tweeted Monday morning. “Welcome to the city of violence.”

The SBA included a screengrab showing nearly two dozen shootings across the five boroughs between Friday and Sunday.

“Shootings and Homicides plaque [sic] NYC and the numbers aren’t final,” the union tweeted.

NYPD data indicates that 50 people were shot in 46 separate incidents over a seven-day period ending Sunday evening.

The department said it logged 12 shootings with 14 victims during the same time last year — more than a month into the city’s COVID-19 lockdown, according to the weekly Compstat data.

Chicago and Philadelphia laugh! The latest weekly NYPD CompStat Report, for the week of April 12th through 18th, indicates that there had been 106 murders in New York City through the th, up from 100 at the same time last year.

As of the 18th, Chicago had seen 177 homicides, up to 185 as of the 25th, while Philly had piled up 159 dead bodies by the end of the 25th. With New York’s much larger population, their effective homicide rate is significantly lower, but it’s climbing, and getting away from the stricter policing under “Broken Windows” has proven to be ineffective.

The left have, for years, decried “mass incarceration,” but lenient law enforcement has proven to be a bad idea even for the criminals. We have previously noted how John Lewis, AKA Lewis Jordan, who slew Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy, and Nikolas Cruz, accused of the mass murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were given every possible break. Had they been in jail at the time they committed their murders, yeah, they might have served a year or three, but Mr Jordan wouldn’t be on death row today, looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison, and Mr Cruz wouldn’t have the same kind of sentence looking him dead in the eye.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

Are Messrs Jordan and Cruz somehow better off today because lenient law enforcement kept them out of jail? Is Andrew Brown, with his 180-page-long rap sheet, better off today because, despite many criminal convictions, he was out of jail the day he decided to start a gunfight with several Pasquotank County, North Carolina, deputies trying to serve a couple of warrants? Was 21-year-old Hasan Elliot better off on that Friday the 13th when he should have been in jail, and would have been in jail had not Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office declined to have him locked up on a serious parole violation, and he had a shootout with police?

Treating the petty criminals seriously is better for everyone in the long run. It’s better for society, as it gets the bad guys off the street, and lowers the overall crime rate, and it’s better for the criminals themselves, because when they are locked up for crimes that leave them with hope of eventually getting out of prison, they don’t have as much time on the streets, usually in their prime crime committing ages, they are likely to commit the big crimes which will have them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives.