Monday, November 06, 2006

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.....

Tuffy P works down near Atlantic and King. I was down there the other morning, dropping her at work, and there were a handful of cops on Atlantic, ticketing people making left-turns from King onto Atlantic. I was down there again this afternoon, and what did I see? A handful of cops on Atlantic, ticketing people making left-turns from King onto Atlantic. I'm not talking about a cop and his/her partner. No, I'm talking about two cop cars and at least 4 cops. This is good business. They have no shortage of customers making the illegal left. Why? Because, obviously there is a real need for a left turn there. Lately, we have all heard candidates for City Council talk about how many more cops we need. When I see 4 cops milking the left-turn cash-cow, I wonder about that. Maybe our politicians need to address intersections like this and figure out how to make a safe left-turn legal. And as for more cops, if we have enough to set up a 4-cop trap on Atlantic Ave. on a regular basis, then we don't need more cops. How about more serious focus for the ones we have first.

8 comments:

Timmer said...

Interesting and true! Incidentally during the summer there was an unusual amount of construction and activity down at Atlantic and Liberty. Since my studio is there I was having a coffee and sitting on the bench when I noticed opportunity for some photos. There was a line up of people getting hotdogs from the street vendor, behind which 2 large bread trucks were pulling onto the street, as well as some hydro wire truck on the other side, this worker walking a witch ditch drilling machine down the street and a lot of pretty women on lunch break stroling to and from the coffee shop. I ran to get my camera, when I started taking photos this cop harrassed me and wanted to see my id. He asked a lot of questions and threatened to confiscate my camera. He couldn't understand why I was taking photos and didn't get that I am a visual artist working in the adjacent building. He also couldn't grasp that I explained a theme of workers doing jobs as my subject matter. Finally when I admitted to working for the board of education and have the summer free, he decided that it was ok for me to take photos. Unfortunately the moment of action was forever gone! I wonder who or what he suspected that I was doing? What happened to freedom to take pictures on the street?

mister anchovy said...

Some people don't like to get their pictures taken. Me, I don't mind still photos but I don't like to be on video. Perhaps video would reveal what planet I am visitig from, I don't know. I'm sure cops especially hate getting their picture taken. I'll bet that if I photographed the boys out there on left-turn patrol, they would not be amused.

Radmila said...

cha cha cha CHING!

Anonymous said...

Good observation, Mr. Anchovy. Their budget gets bigger and bigger. They are trying to build a new police station on the school grounds across the street from me. The neighbours are fighting it tooth and nail, but money talks and the price is right for the city.

But I see the sunny side of life with two words: web cam

* (asterisk) said...

I wish British cops would take more seriously the crime of driving while on a cell phone. The other day I even saw a car doing 70mph (the legal limit) on the motorway, talking on his mobile, WITH A COP CAR BEHIND HIM! That's how much drivers don't respect the law here, and they are like that because they can get away with it. Am I a fascist?

Candy Minx said...

We need to get over the idea that more cops equals less crime. We can legislate rights and beliefs and habits, true. But people forget why a law is enforced. For instance the no left turn may be a way of keeping traffic moving quickly. Unless people use their heads to understand why a traffic law is in place, then we will waste money on cops power to dole out tickets. It makes me crazy when pedestrians just jay walk like crazy. It's nuts in Chicago, especially and usually it is tourists. In Manhattan if you see someone jaywalk...you know they are a tourist. People who live in New York helped create traffic laws and they use them. The term jay ewalk came about because "jay" was slang for rural and hicks and farmers. City people made traffic laws to help the flow of traffic and to get people moving safely. In Chicago...traffic gets slowed down because peedestrians just start crossing the street when ever. It's ridiculous. Wait your turn people!

Crime rates drop when people are able to have jobs and make a living!!!!

When people have some sense of security and community crime rate drops and when they can control their family planning...

And as for cops and crime rate...there is very little evidence in statistics that violent crime rate dropping is from more policing. No...something else entirely...I know Great White Bear read this book before, but take a look at this:


"One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country. In New York, California, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, a woman had been able to obtain a legal abortion for at least two years before Roe vs. Wade. And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall faster than the other forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Between 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the early-legalizing states fell 13 percent compared to the other states; between 1994 and 1997, their murder rates fell 23 percent more than those of other states.

But what if those early legalizers simply got lucky? What else might we look for in the data to establish an abortion-crime link?

One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state's abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970's experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990's, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. (This correlation exists even when controlling for a variety of factors that influence crime: a state's level of incarceration, number of police, and it's economic situation.) Since 1985, states with high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in crime relative to low-abortion states. (New York City had high abortion rates and lay within an early-legalizing state, a pair of facts that further dampen the claim that innovative policing caused the crime drop.) Moreover, there was no link between a given states's abortion rate and its crime rate BEFORE the late 1980's-when the first cohort affected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime-which is yet another indication that Roe vs. Wade was indeed the event that tipped the crime scale.

There are even more correlations, positive and negative, that shore up the abortion-crime link. In states with high abortion rates, the entire decline in crime was also among the post-Roe cohort as opposed to older criminals. Also, studies of Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime. And the post-Roe cohort was not only missing thousands of young male criminals but also thousands of single, teenage mothers-for many of the aborted baby girls would have been the children most likely to replicate their own mothers' tendencies.

To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G.K. Chesterton: when there aren't enough hats to go around, the problem isn't solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an "unintended benefit" of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good." from Freakonomics.

Anonymous said...

Candy, funny you just reminded me of the first time I was in Chicago (late 90's) I was on Michigan Ave. standing at a red light while 60 people were crossing it. One of them noticed me and asked if I was Canadian.

Red said...

Cops and council workers... peas in a pod, if you ask me.

Yesterday I saw a guy with a council uniform blowing leaves off the pavement; and there was another guy (same uniform) just standing near him, watching traffic go by. It's a simple enough job... do you really need two people doing it? Can't the other guy get a rake and make himself useful? Our tax money is paying for these people to stand there and do sod all!!!