Discussion for article #236441
Just stop issuing warrants if the offense isnât one that would merit jail time in the first place.
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The police know they have a problem and want to continue to hold these people accountable - now why would you expect compliance. It would make more sense for the police to use their database to determine how many of those warrants would be dismissed and just do that - why punish people with threatâŚjust take a friendly visit and hope your case is dismissed. NYPD have the data - they need to purge the system of cases/ warrants they know full well should never have been issued in the first place. Including all the OWS cases.
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Then who would bother ever showing up in court for them???
New York has a policing policy called Broken Windows involving âquality of lifeâ issues, which indirectly led to Eric Garnerâs death for selling cigarettes, and a summons for a dog off leash is just part of that misguided philosophy. In the case of the summons for an off-leash dog, here in San Francisco (which has its own police problems) I rarely let my dog off leash, for her safety and my peace of mind, and if I were ever seen with her off leash, I was asked or told politely to put her back on the leash if a cop was ever near by.
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That doesnât solve the problem of the outstanding warrants.
What are you doing sitting in front of your PC!
Bay to Breakers Day.
Did it about 40 years ago. Get out there!
Iâm a swimmer, not a runner, but Sunday is the day when I read the funny papers and many of the runners will do what they do they do best: run, drink, puke, repeat.
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Perhaps they could take a lantern into the streets? :}
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This would give some less of an excuse for saying that minor offenses are hindering some people from getting a job. However, should this be done, I would not be surprised to have warrants pile up again.
FTP, look it up
Error on the side of common sense and train the beat cops more thoroughly. So what if they let someone off with a warning that only deserves just that. A ticket is a day in court meaning missed work, court costs and the fine besides the frigginâ record.
IOW, the ordeal is penalty overkill beside the fine.
In some towns, probably lots of towns, the cops have quotas that they must hit in order to justify their pay I guess. This causes things like writing tickets for dog poop or other ridiculous crap, haha.
If youâve ever spent a morning or longer in court and watched the judge reprimand repeat offenders with another âsternâ warning then youâd know that the bigger problem is unequal justice. A person that no shows on a doggie poop violation is not the same criminal as someone that has numerous traffic offenses, misses court dates, refuses to pay fines and do the court ordered programs and yet the defiant ones are always the ones getting the breaks. An old good friend of mine was just like this. He was meaner than the system and the system was geared more for compliance, so he won out by disobedience but not too much of it. That is how I recognized the trend and it has reproven itself many times over.
The cops have got to get real and the judges have to be consistent, you know, always balancing the scales of justice.
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How about some kind of web portal? You enter your name in a database it checks for outstanding warrants, then you schedule a âsurrenderâ date. Some kind of situation where you can surrender, get the warrant cleared, get a new court date scheduled and be on your way (after paying court costs of like $20)
Maybe have like a police mobile command center and Saturdays from 8-10am they can process old warrants for minor offenses. Have the people come up to the desk, show an id etc âsurrenderâ then if itâs a minor offense they can then go before a video chat judge who then assigns a new court appearance date.
If the person is warrant is for something more serious - they can hold these events in Walmart parking lots, then inter the people to the mole people running the FEMA camps in the tunnels beneath the store
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ââŚthat backlogâŚâ
Open discussion is a good quality to have in a police commissioner, in my opinion. I think a complete discussion begins with the question of what the problem really is.
For decades, the conservative movement has deliberately steered this country in the direction of âmight makes rightâ, and that harsher punitive action by the government was our path to a heaven on earth with unrestricted guns.
That backlog is failure of the conservative movement. So now whatâs the choice theyâre offering: buy more government force, or just ignore some of the laws on the books?
Figures.
Somebody, who somebody in Congress knows, is benefiting a lot from the taxpayers. All the âexcess military hardwareâ passed down to our local streets, spotted recently in certain neighborhood war zones â excess? Donât try to kid us.
Conservatives not only need that excess, they need that excess to increase.
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One summer a friend and I decided to take my new Dodge Van, pack it with ornamental plants and go to Manhattan to sell them. Before we could set up we needed to get lunch at Brownieâs on 14th St near Union Square. Well, NYC being NYC we missed the signs for a tow away. We came out from lunch to the fact that the van was gone. After the panic wore off, we took a cab to the âPoundâ as it was called in those days. Refusing to take an out of state check, the NYPD allowed us to move the van to the front of the pier and sell plants until we had enough cash to get it out of hock.
Ah, the good old days.
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A friend of my daughterâs got a $250 fine for letting her dog step on grass in some park in NYC. He pooped and she was gathering it into a baggie when a cop approached and told her the dog wasnât allowed to set foot on the grass. She said, âSorry, but I already cleaned up after him.â He gave her a summons anyway. She used an old drivers license from Mississippi, so they canât find her but they have her name.
That seems excessive to me. She never did pay it and supposedly there is a warrant and an increased fine - now around $1,000 (family in Mississippi keeps getting the notices. They write ânot at this addressâ on half of them and read the rest of them, and so thatâs how they know the advancement of the penalty! Give me a break!
What a wonderful idea. It is simple, doable, and practical. However, bureaucracy is where good ideas go to die, alas. BUT! That said, why donât you send your ideas to Bratton? What do you have to lose?
(But I can tell you that $20 for court costs is not likely. You can barely get out of Starbucks for $20)
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I think that nails it.
Youâve told a story from a dystopian universe Iâm glad I donât live in. In the dog-friendly parks and recreation sites Iâve gone to, other dog walkers will offer a bag or a gentle vocal reminder when they see the pick-up-poop laws are about to be broken. Police are not needed when peer pressure will work instead. But NYâs âBroken Windowsâ policies must be abandoned tout de suite. Imagine the scenario if the dog had barked or growled at said blue shirtâŚ
And so The Bay to Breakers 2015 ends.
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