Stray Dogs and Squirrels
August 2, 2012
The Brooklyn Paper’s Natalie O’Neill reports on the Vigilante Bike Lane on Bergen Street. Note the quote from a police spokesman, who explains why officers use the bike lane as a parking lane:
“It could be because a prisoner needs to be taken in or a stray dog needs to be transported.”
Compare that to this quote from a police officer in a July 12th Post story about a “pedal protester” planting tacks at the bottom of a hill in Central Park.
“We have more important things to worry about, like people getting shot and squirrels getting run over.”
By now the message is clear: If you transport yourself on two wheels instead of four, the NYPD regards your safety as less important than a squirrel’s or a stray dog’s.
Brooklyn Spoke 
We need to NYPD oversight. Who watches the police???
John, then you will have to appoint oversight for the oversight, and so on.
The NYPD make no effort to hide corruption in their ranks; they openly defend it as “courtesy”, of a discriminatory kind only enjoyed by themselves and their cronies; the mayor cracks a joke about it happening since the Egyptians and we shrug our shoulders.
Anyone who advocates repairing restrictions on police and government power that were adhered to just a decade ago is branded as a civil liberties extremist. And the privileges that the public are willing to grant to its police are seemingly without bound. Recently when complaining about NYPD officers living far outside the city I was told by a fellow citizen that we would have to pay them a “living wage” to live here. Yet they have great salaries and benefits, far far better than the average person who does live in this city, at all stages of their careers. It’s just amazing, the public ignorance and complacency on display.
It won’t help to appoint a new group of bureaucrats to watch an old group of bureaucrats. That would just expand the circle of collusion. We are already paying one city employee to oversee the police force and that is its commissioner. The cheap, effective, and only way to fix the NYPD is to cut its budget and fire people until they change their attitude. Until they remember who is paying the bills, who is in charge in a legal, ethical, and economic sense. If there is no public will to do this then there is no fixing the problem.