[Peace-discuss] NYC’s Top Cop Defends Racist Policing At Israel

Sat May 31 08:11:31 EDT 2014

  NYC’s Top Cop Defends Racist Policing At Israel

Screen Shot 2014-05-30 at 9.48.08 AM
Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Democracy 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/democracy/>, Israel 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/israel/>, NYC 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/nyc/>, Police 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/police/>, Racism 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/racism/>
By Rania Khalek, www.electronicintifada.net 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/nycs-top-cop-defends-racist-policing-at-israel-security-conference/electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/nycs-top-cop-defends-racist-policing-israel-security-conference>
May 30th, 2014
   Powered by Translate <https://translate.google.com>
2 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/nycs-top-cop-defends-racist-policing-at-israel-security-conference/#>
Print Friendly 
<http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.popularresistance.org%2Fnycs-top-cop-defends-racist-policing-at-israel-security-conference%2F>

On 13 May, New York Police Department 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/new-york-police-department> 
commissioner Bill Bratton 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/bill-bratton> delivered the keynote 
address at Israel’s first ever National Conference on Personal Security 
in Jersusalem.

Accompanied by NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence John Miller 
(formerly a CBS senior news correspondent 
<http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bratton-taps-cbs-john-miller-counter-terror-post-article-1.1564576>), 
Bratton also met with 
<http://www.jpost.com/International/NYPD-Chief-defends-controversial-policy-to-recruit-Muslim-arrestees-as-informants-352144> 
Yohanan Danino, the Inspector General of the Israeli police 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/israeli-police>, and Yoram Cohen, 
director of Israel’s notorious Shin Bet secret police.

In his 30-minute speech, which can be viewed in the above video, Bratton 
offered a uniquely revisionist history of American policing and proposed 
a dystopian vision for a future in which Israel is held up as a model 
for law enforcement worldwide.

    *“World’s strongest democracies”*

“We are fortunate in the United States and Israel to live in the world’s 
two strongest democracies,” declared Bratton, kicking off his speech 
with the mythology and pandering we’ve come to expect from US officials 
visiting Israel.

Bratton went on to offer an odd interpretation of how a democracy functions.

“In a democracy,” he said, “the first obligation of government is public 
safety.”

This may come as a surprise to those who were under the impression that 
the government’s most essential role in a democracy is to ensure the 
civil and human rights of the people it represents. While public safety 
is certainly important, Bratton has throughout his career advocated for 
and spearheaded policing practices that strip minority communities, 
particularly poor African Americans and Latinos, of their civil rights, 
all under the cover of promoting public safety.

    *Historical revisionism*

Perhaps Bratton’s disdain for civil rights explains the deceptive 
historical analysis provided in his speech, in which he blamed the civil 
rights and anti-war movements for rising crime and disorder in the 1970s.

“My country in the 1970s was just coming out of the turbulence of the 
1960s in our society, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, 
a society that was wrestling with what we thought to be too much 
government control,” explained Bratton.

He then attributed growing crime rates in the 1980s to “drug culture” 
and society’s inability to control poor people and minorities:

    As my country moved into the 1980s there were several additional
    societal trends that began to have a significant negative impact on
    our ability to keep our streets safe. The growth of a drug market
    and a drug culture, particularly the more problematic drugs of
    heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine. The increasing number of young
    people coming out of a society that was no longer educating them, no
    longer controlling them, a dissolution of many of the families in
    our society, particularly among the poor and in the minority
    communities.

Bratton went on to read off New York City’s horrifying crime statistics 
in 1990, when violent crime was at its peak.

Describing the early 1990s, Bratton conflated graffiti with rampant 
murder, saying, “conditions in the city had deteriorated so badly that 
subway cars were covered in graffiti.”

He then credited policies introduced by him and former New York City 
Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the massive reduction in violent crime that 
followed.

During Bratton’s first term as NYPD commissioner in 1994, he implemented 
what he referred to in his speech as “community policing” or “quality of 
life” policing, otherwise known as “broken windows.” Bratton is credited 
with popularizing the “broken windows theory,” a zero-tolerance approach 
to policing that focuses on stamping out minor nonviolent infractions 
before they evolve into violent crimes.

Bratton proceeded to paint a before-and-after picture of New York City:

    It is a city that in the 1980s and 1990s was a very frightening
    experience to walk the streets — the aggressive beggars, the
    prostitutes, the gangs, the filth, the graffiti. It is a city today
    that is vibrant, it is alive, it is safe. On the subway system, the
    graffiti is gone, the beggars are gone, the vandalism is gone.

This is the essence of broken windows, the idea that graffiti and 
litter, if left unpunished, will balloon into rape and murder, and 
therefore must be treated like violent crimes. (Two decades later, 
Bratton’s obsessive hatred 
<http://nypost.com/2014/05/21/bill-bratton-has-a-deep-personal-hatred-of-graffiti/> 
for graffiti has only grown stronger.)

    *Racist policing*

There is no empirical proof 
<http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2013/03/chicago-broken-windows-bernard-harcourt.html> that 
“broken windows” policing was responsible for New York City’s historic 
decline in crime in the 1990s. In fact, similar crime reductions were 
taking place in cities across the country where “broken windows” was not 
being employed.

In reality, Bratton’s policies had more to do with removing poor people 
of color from prime gentrification real estate in an effort to create a 
more aesthetically appealing landscape for the mostly upper class whites 
the city wanted to attract.

Under Bratton’s first term as New York City’s top cop in 1994, the NYPD 
went after young people of color with a vengeance for everything from 
truancy and playing loud music to jumping subway turnstiles and loitering.

As the murder rate fell dramatically between 1994 and 1996, misdemeanor 
arrests skyrocketed 73 percent, and as Christian Parenti meticulously 
documents in the book /Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age 
of Crisis 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=a46BJOHmq_gC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false>/, 
the main targets were the African American and Latino communities, whose 
police brutality complaints increased by 50 percent 
<http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/27/nyregion/bratton-resignation-legacy-bratton-hailed-pioneer-new-style-policing.html?action=click&module=Search&region=searchResults&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry785%23%2Fbratton+quality+of+life>.

Bratton would go on to carry out “quality of life sweeps” 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/us/in-los-angeles-skid-row-resists-an-upgrade.html?action=click&module=Search&region=searchResults&mabReward=relbias%3As&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry17%23%2Fquality+of+life+sweeps> 
during his reign as police chief of the Los Angeles Police Department 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/los-angeles-police-department>, 
resulting in the mass displacement 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/04/local/me-skidrow4> of homeless 
and mentally ill residents, who Bratton’s foot soldiers harassed with 
tickets for jaywalking and sleeping on the sidewalk. Unable to pay the 
fines, those targeted were often locked up, increasing the overall jail 
population. On top of that, he oversaw a twofold increase 
<http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bratton-article-1.1527258#ixzz2mcCk1Mgy> 
in stop and frisks by the LAPD.

Since being appointed head of the NYPD for the second time in two 
decades by the supposedly progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bratton has 
doubled down on broken windows with his mission to rid the subway of 
homeless people 
<http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/03/8541293/bratton-aggressive-begging-and-squeegee-pests>.

    *Learning from each other*

 From New York City to Los Angeles, Bratton’s form of suppression 
policing — packaged as crime prevention — has aggressively facilitated 
gentrification 
<http://colorlines.com/archives/2007/10/lapd_gentrifies_skid_row.html>, 
which is just a more insidious version of ethnic cleansing.

A similar (though more openly racist) dynamic has played out in Israel, 
where security and terrorism prevention are invoked to justify the 
subjugation and removal of Palestinians.

For example, Israel insists to the world that the apartheid wall in the 
occupied West Bank is a vital security measure designed to keep suicide 
bombers out. But even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admits 
that the purpose of the “separation fence” is to avert “demographic 
spillover 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/netanyahu-israel-s-arabs-are-the-real-demographic-threat-1.109045>” 
of Palestinians from the West Bank.

The apartheid wall, the home demolitions, the checkpoints, the more than 
fifty laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel — 
all of these have little to do with Israel’s security and everything to 
do with maintaining Israel’s demographically engineered Jewish majority 
to consolidate Jewish supremacy in the Holy Land.

“The police commissioner of New York City coming to meet with the police 
commissioner of the Israeli National Police, why?” asked Bratton. “So we 
can learn from each other.”

    *Terrorism *

After praising the Israeli police for their efforts at employing 
“quality of life” policing, Bratton moved on to the issue of terrorism 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/terrorism>.

“[The United States] did not have the terrorism experience that you have 
had since your birth,” said Bratton, noting that Israel’s was a “birth 
of necessity.” The irony of course is that Israel was built over the 
ashes of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages that were deliberately 
destroyed through terrorism.

Bratton added, “We can continue to defeat [terrorism] by the way you 
have been doing it in your country so successfully.”

While it’s unclear which of Israel’s abusive counterterrorism policies 
Bratton plans to adopt, he did leave some clues.

As the New York Times recently reported 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/nyregion/new-york-police-recruit-muslims-to-be-informers.html>, 
there exists an NYPD squad called the Citywide Debriefing Team, which 
scours city jails for Muslims to coerce into spying on their 
communities. During his visit to Israel, Bratton defended 
<http://www.jpost.com/International/NYPD-Chief-defends-controversial-policy-to-recruit-Muslim-arrestees-as-informants-352144> the 
NYPD’s recruitment of jailed Muslims as informants, calling the program 
“an essential element of policing.”

    A future dystopia

Next, Bratton offered words of praise for predictive policing, calling 
it “the new revolution in American policing, indeed world policing.”

“Can we prevent all crime? No. But we need to use that as our goal,” he 
said.

Predictive policing 
<http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5419854/the-minority-report-this-computer-predicts-crime-but-is-it-racist> uses 
computer algorithms to generate hotspots where crimes are likely to 
occur and lists of people who are likely to commit them. It is a form of 
pre-crime that should raise alarm bells. Given the racism permeating all 
levels of the American criminal justice system, predictive policing will 
more likely produce a system of computer-generated racial profiling than 
crime prevention.

Bratton ended his speech by portraying his and Israel’s dystopian 
policing practices as necessary “in ensuring that democracy survives for 
our children and our children’s children.”

“We are strengthened in democracies when we collaborate together, when 
we form partnerships,” said Bratton. “I thank the Israeli government for 
the opportunity to strengthen the partnership that was already strong 
between my city and my country and your city and your country, for the 
vital mission we are all engaged in and that is the preservation of our 
democracies.”

Before leaving the podium, Bratton was presented with a gift, an album 
of photos taken during his trip. Some of those pictures were posted on 
the website of the Israeli Ministry of Public Security.

      Related Posts:

  * Breaking: AIPAC Protests Pictures, Parody Memes and Video
    <http://www.popularresistance.org/breaking-aipac-protests-pictures-parody-memes-and-video/>March
    2, 2014
  * Dozens Of Palestinian Detainees On Hunger Strike Are Hospitalized
    <http://www.popularresistance.org/dozens-of-palestinian-detainees-on-hunger-strike-are-hospitalized/>May
    29, 2014
  * UK Parliament Seeks Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu
    <http://www.popularresistance.org/uk-parliament-seeks-whistleblower-mordechai-vanunu-to-speak-june-17/>May
    28, 2014
  * CODEP PINK VT Protests Ben & Jerry’s Sales In Illegal…
    <http://www.popularresistance.org/codep-pink-vt-protests-ben-jerrys-sales-in-illegal-settlement-in-palestine/>April
    11, 2014
  * South African Church Leaders Endorse Israeli Apartheid Week
    <http://www.popularresistance.org/south-african-church-leaders-endorse-israeli-apartheid-week/>March
    10, 2014

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140531/2ac95a74/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screen-Shot-2014-05-30-at-9.48.08-AM.png
Type: image/png
Size: 165876 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140531/2ac95a74/attachment-0002.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: google_logo_41.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2357 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140531/2ac95a74/attachment-0003.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: pf-button.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 1848 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140531/2ac95a74/attachment-0001.gif>