Out of Control

The NYPD needs to get down of its high horse, or eventually, 
the citizens of this city will have to teach them some manners

I was shocked to see a New York Times piece with balls yesterday. Bob Herbert writes:

From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them.

Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet the New York Police Department is compounding this intolerable indignity by compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police.

Not only are most of the people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is no defense for this policy. It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease.

Generally, but with some exceptions, police officers are rather intimidating and unhelpful. Routinely in the last three years I have found police officers to me more often than not rude and unhelpful. One evening, after a gun was fired in a Deli near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, I walked past the cordoned-off street corner. I -- white, well-dressed, wide-eyed  -- asked a young woman officer: "Oh my goodness, what happened?" And she replied: "Keep moving. It's none of your FUCKING BUSINESS."

Incidentally, after a hold-up in a jewelry store in January during which a store employee was murdered, the police department released this sketch of the gunman, above. Oh my God! Is that my neighbor /mother / Ray Kelly / R Kelly / St Vincent de Paul / Captain America / the Virgin Mary / a Cadillac / Richard Nixon / all of Iowa's teenage girls and some Iraqi children / Donald Duck and Michael Bloomberg kissing / the Jabberwocky, in a mask?!