The New York police commissioner, Bill Bratton, has confirmed that there is a work-slow protest in progress among NYPD officers. Bratton told NPR’s All Things Considered: “Quite clearly, we’re in a slowdown.”
“It is being corrected,” Bratton continued. “We’ve been taking management initiatives to identify where it’s occurring, when it’s occurring. I think the officers themselves have on their own been beginning to return to normal patterns of work, so we’re coming out of what was a pretty widespread stoppage of certain types of activity.”
The numbers for police activity, especially for summonses issued for minor traffic offences or other offences such as marijuana possession or jumping the barriers at subway stations, dropped dramatically in the weeks following the 20 December shooting deaths of two police officers in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood.
Police and police unions have been at odds with the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, over his apparent support for recent protests against perceived police brutality towards minorities and remarks about training his son, who is biracial, to be careful around the NYPD.
At the recent funerals of the two officers who were killed in Brooklyn, police turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke.
The most recent figures available from the NYPD, which are for the week between 29 December and 4 January, show summonses for parking and moving violations down around 92% from the same period a year before, and criminal summonses down 91.5%. That means summonses went from 4,077 in the first week of 2014 to just 347 in the first week of 2015.
The transit police saw the starkest drop, with the entire department making 32 arrests in the first week of 2015, after making 751 in the equivalent week a year previously. The housing bureau’s arrests were also down, with 80 compared with 377 a year ago. The housing bureau has over 2,000 officers.
The patrol services bureau, the division of foot-patrol police, also saw a large drop in arrests, from 3,408 to 1,493, a drop of 56.2%. Overall, arrests were down 55.9% on the equivalent week last year.
Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, told the Guardian: “The commissioners’ comments today regarding a work stoppage does not involve detectives. The arrest activity of our detectives is at or close to the expected activity in comparison to the same period last year.
“Keeping in mind that last year at this time we did not have two police officers assassinated nor did we have protesters and demonstrations in New York City.
“If there is any reduction in arrest activity by detectives, it is negligible and directly attributed to either their reassignment to police the demonstrations or the execution of their brother officers on 20 December.”
On 20 December, officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot and killed by a gunman who had posted threatening Instagram messages about the police. On the evening of the shooting, a memo was allegedly circulated among police officers, calling for a slowdown. Many reported it as having originated from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a police union.
In a release on Tuesday, PBA president Patrick Lynch denied there was a slowdown in operation at all. A spokesperson for the PBA was unavailable for comment on Friday.
John Eterno, a professor and director of graduate studies in criminal justice at Molloy College, and a former captain in the NYPD, told the Guardian it was “pretty obvious at this point” that the slowing-down of work within the NYPD was organised.
One area the slowdown has acutely affected is the bail bonds industry. Brenda Lugo, the manager of IG Bail Bonds in Flushing, told the Guardian that while the holiday season is usually her company’s busiest time of the year, business had dropped by as much as three-quarters.
“There is a major slowdown,” she said. “Cops are doing nothing about nothing any more.”
“I actually witnessed a group of people fighting behind the courthouse,” she said, “and no-one got arrested.”
