Is NYC Worth It Anymore? (Video) (New York, Fulton: transplants, sales, city hall)
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I saw that video this morning, and this person thinks that it is still worth it, but especially in 2021 cause it'll be a "V shaped recovery." I don't think so. He obviously doesnt' understand that the city is in extreme debt and it won't take 2021 to fix it.
He also hasn't been here in the 70's and 80's with a defunded fire department and NYPD, which caused a crack epidemic, the rise of the Italian mob controlling all unions and construction, people shooting each other in the street, burning buildings with no fire department to adequately respond, and terrible public schools.
These transplants seem to be very unaware of how bad in can get here.
I saw that video this morning, and this person thinks that it is still worth it, but especially in 2021 cause it'll be a "V shaped recovery." I don't think so. He obviously doesnt' understand that the city is in extreme debt and it won't take 2021 to fix it.
He also hasn't been here in the 70's and 80's with a defunded fire department and NYPD, which caused a crack epidemic, the rise of the Italian mob controlling all unions and construction, people shooting each other in the street, burning buildings with no fire department to adequately respond, and terrible public schools.
These transplants seem to be very unaware of how bad in can get here.
"In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in Colombia, trafficked through the Bahamas and Dominican Republic.. [1] Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent.[1] Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to "crack", a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop.[1] As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, New York, and in the Caribbean.[1]"
"In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in Colombia, trafficked through the Bahamas and Dominican Republic.. [1] Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent.[1] Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to "crack", a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop.[1] As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, New York, and in the Caribbean.[1]"
I posted crack epidemic, but there was also widespread heroin abuse. The city was extremely corrupt, as no money was available to audit or oversee that programs were carried appropriately. Police corruption was so rampant (just watch Serpico, and you'll see).
In any case, this all started with a financial crisis.
Here is an article that ran in the NY Times back in 1985:
FISCAL CRISIS STILL HAUNTS THE POLICE
(For those of you who don't have a subscription to the NY Times, here it is, copied and pasted):
From July 1975 until November 1979, no police officers were hired or trained in the City of New York.
No classes were held at the Police Academy. No one was being taught about police procedures, and no one was asking why things were done the way they were done. There was no new blood with a fresh view of a changing world.
The only ''new'' officers were those who had been laid off on July 1, 1975, and were rehired over the next three years.
This was a time of deep frustration in the Police Department. But those difficult days are not just history; they are also at the root of a severe problem the department is struggling with today.
For there is a missing cadre in the New York City Police Department - a gap in the thin blue line. It is a gap that hampers the operations of the Police Department every day, making it just that much more difficult to do a difficult job.
While no agency of city government is quite like any other, the five-year disruption of normal growth and transition at the Police Department is emblematic of the struggle and trauma that has gone on throughout the government since the fiscal crisis. Vast reserves of experience and practical knowledge were lost, and the effort to rebuild was often almost as traumatic as the original cuts
For example, the number of teachers paid out of city revenues dropped by 13,000 from 1975 to 1976, and the average age of a New York City public school teacher rose from 28 in 1973 to 41 in 1978. When the Board of Education tried to hire back 2,300 laid-off teachers in 1978, it had to approach 9,000 before enough agreed to return.
The Bellevue Hospital Center once routinely attracted some of the best nurses in the country and trained many of them at its own nursing school. Now it and other municipal hospitals offer significantly lower pay than private hospitals and must rely heavily on foreign-trained nurses.
Enforcement of the myriad of city codes, never an easy task, became a far more difficult one with the elimination of such units as the Sanitation Police and with drastic cutbacks in the number of city inspectors.
In the Buildings Department, which inspects construction sites, plumbing, elevators and boilers, among other things, the number of inspectors fell from 367 in 1973 to a low of 209 in 1980 before rising to the current complement of 352. Commissioner Charles M. Smith Jr. estimated that where a decade ago more than half the inspectors had at least a decade of experience, today more than half have less than five years.
In the Transit Authority, the number of man-hours worked skidded by 12 percent between 1973 and 1975 and by 33 percent in the car maintenance department. At the same time, the number of miles between subway-car breakdowns fell from 17,546 in 1974 to a low of 6,823 in 1980. Training for employees dropped by 77 percent between 1974 and 1976 alone.
In all these places and others, insiders talk about the tremendous disruptions and the struggle to maintain the services that had come to be seen as basic.
The Police Department - big, highly visible and with a sense of its own tradition - felt the problem as much as any agency, and feels it still.
Those officers who were never hired between 1975 and 1979 would now have between 6 and 10 years on the force. They would be the experienced patrol officers. They would be the teachers, the role models and the moderating force on young officers. But they are not there. ''There's a trench that goes right through the job,'' Inspector Ronald Johnson said. 5,000 Police Officers Lose Their Jobs The New York City Police Department is an immensely complex agency, larger than the armies of more than 50 countries, from Lebanon to Nicaragua.
After the worst retrenchment in its history, the department is now going through the largest expansion ever, trying to get back to the manpower levels that existed before July 1, 1975, when 5,000 police officers and 14,000 other city workers were laid off, the only mass layoff of police officers in the department's history.
Today, thousands of young police officers are being recruited, and then being sent out onto the streets very much more on their own than police commanders would like. When a police commander teams a rookie with an ''experienced'' officer these days, he often means someone with who has been on the job six months longer.
When the age distribution of New York City police officers is plotted on a chart, the result is dramatic and troubling to police experts.
The chart shows the two largest groups are those between 26 and 30 and those between 41 and 45. In the middle is a smaller group, Inspector Johnson's trench, representing the officers between 31 and 35. This generation gap is the legacy of the fiscal crisis.
A wide range of forces influence the department, and no one factor or event can explain all that happens. But, by the same token, no explanation of the New York police today is complete without a look back to July 1, 1975.
In the summer of 1975, as the city headed into its fiscal crisis, the Police Department was just coming out of a crisis - the corruption inquiries of the Knapp Commission. It was on this problem that police officials were focusing their attention. But within months they would have an even larger problem.
Officer William Gamble was scheduled to work the midnight-to-8 A.M. tour on July 1 at the precinct that officers call ''the Two-O,'' the 20th Precinct, with its station house on West 82d Street.
It was hot and humid that night, Officer Gamble recalls. The city had been full of dire talk for weeks, talk about budgets and bonds and brinksmanship. But to the officer on patrol, it was all a bit removed. No one really thought that police officers would be laid off. After all, it had never happened in New York.
''I don't think anyone believed it,'' Officer Gamble said recently, ''until the Teletype started clicking.''
Over the police teleprinter came a command from headquarters unlike any that had ever been sent. The following officers, it said, are to be laid off immediately. ''The Teletype just started running off the names,'' said Officer Gamble.
On the list was William Gamble, 31 years old at the time, a police officer for less than two years.
Several other members of Officer Gamble's squad were on the list, too. ''It was more or less blank stares,'' he said. ''I didn't believe it. We hung around for a couple of hours. Then we were told to turn in our shield and our gun. We did. Then, one by one, two by two, people drifted off.''
They drifted off into total uncertainty. Most thought they would be rehired quickly, as soon as ''the politics'' was worked out. Many decided they would just wait it out at home.
Some were rehired within a few days. But for others the weeks dragged into months. The savings accounts ran out. Finding a job was tough. Many employers simply would not hire the laid-off officers, fearing they would quit the moment the call came to put their uniforms back on.
William Gamble got a job selling tokens in the subway station at 42d Street and Eighth Avenue. ''I had knives stuck in at me,'' he recalls. But the worst cut of all was when the Transit Authority laid him and other police officers off again, just days before they would have completed their probation.
Some laid-off officers packed up and left town. ''One fellow called up from Colorado to tell us how beautiful it was and how he was never coming back to New York,'' Officer Gamble said.
While Officer Gamble and his friends waited, the department they left behind was almost as shaken as the laid-off officers themselves.
The layoffs had been dictated from City Hall, and James A. Cavanagh, then First Deputy Mayor, said in a recent interview that there had been little time to consider the long-term impact of the cuts.
''You had to go where the money was,'' he said. ''The big departments.''
The number of New York City Police officers was reduced through layoffs and attrition from 27,262 in 1974 to 22,304 in 1976. The total police force, including sergeants, lieutenants and higher-ranking commanders, went from 31,531 to 26,432.
With a smaller department, the effort to keep up basic police presence became an almost desperate struggle.
The very notion of police services - for that matter, of most city services - was redefined as the Police Department made clear choices.
Reordering Priorities In the War on Crime At first, the crisis seemed manageable. The crime rate actually came down. The department made a choice, focusing on serious crime and all but abandoning efforts to enforce traffic laws and regulations against littering, loitering or other ''quality of life'' crimes.
''A smaller police force was deployed so as to increase felony arrests and reduce arrests for less serious crimes,'' observed Prof. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton in an article this year in The Public Administration Review.
''Specifically, while total arrests fell one-fifth between 1975 and 1979,'' they wrote, ''the number of felony arrests increased 11 percent and arrests for misdemeanors and violations dropped 27 percent and 75 percent respectively.''
But things got steadily worse. The crime rate started to rise quickly. In the late 1970's, street crime became a scourge. Anyone with a shield and a uniform was put out in a radio car.
Programs as diverse as organized-crime control and community liaison were sacrificed to the need to keep officers in uniform. The narcotics unit did not work on weekends. An investigation of criminal influence at the Fulton Fish Market was abandoned.
Joseph Veyvoda, who retired recently as a chief, in charge of personnel, said the late 70's were a wide open period for organized crime because of the retreat of the Police Department as it concentrated its meager artillery on the war on the mugger.
''It gave those people involved in narcotics, involved in gambling an opportunity to expand their organization without fear of being arrested, without fear of being infiltrated,'' Chief Veyvoda said. ''They knew we weren't there. They had freedom of movement. They didn't see any strange faces.''
Efforts to stop drug sales in schools were blocked by a simple problem. ''You can't put a 40-year-old guy undercover into a schoolyard,'' he said. ''Today they get a 20-year-old officer; they can get into a high school. We didn't have any of those guys.''
Cutbacks struck hard, too, at the internal operations of the department.
Time allotted to training police officers in everything from how to resist corruption to how to handle emergencies was slashed. The program to spot officers with alcohol, drug or emotional problems, established just before the fiscal crisis in the wake of an incident in which an emotionally unstable police officer shot a young boy, was sharply curtailed.
No new officers meant few opportunities for transfer, virtually no opportunity for promotion.
''People were locked into assignments,'' said Assistant Chief Richard J. Koehler, head of the Personnel Bureau.
One sergeant scored right at the top of the examination for lieutenant and then waited four years for his promotion. The city even stopped giving the promotional tests. The lieutenants' examination was given in 1973 and then not again until 1982.
''We had a serious morale problem,'' Chief Veyvoda recalled. ''We had a lot of fellows retire. They said, 'We can't go anywhere anymore.' '' Too Few Veterans To Train Newcomers Those days are in the past now.
Faced with a continuing high crime rate and an improved fiscal picture, the Police Department has followed the worst retrenchment in its history with the largest expansion.
Several thousand officers are being hired each year. The Police Academy is working double shifts, is short of space and must hold its graduations in Madison Square Garden, the only hall in the city large enough.
But the actions taken in 1975 continue to plague the department today. More than half the people in the Police Department now have less than five years' experience. Some sergeants have been police officers only three years before being promoted.
After waiting for years for opportunites for transfer, many veteran officers are now being moved to long-sought jobs at headquarters or in investigatory or specialized units. But that means the percentage of inexperienced officers on routine patrol duty is high.
In the 44th Precinct, with its station house on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, 85 percent of the officers have been on the job less than five years, reports the new precinct commander, Anthony Vastola.
Inspector Johnson recalled that when he was a rookie, he was sent to the 24th Precinct, based on West 100th Street, with 11 other rookies. Today at the Midtown South Precinct, where Inspector Johnson was commander until a few weeks ago, there are often as many as 50 new recruits.
''You can absorb 5 or 10,'' said Inspector Johnson. ''Fifty is a difficult situation. You do have a problem.''
It is not that the young officers are bad. Their quality is debated, just as the skill of every new recruit has always been debated by older officers. Police supervisors said the new officers were well-educated and energetic and had passed screenings more stringent than their predecessors faced.
The problem is not whether they are good or bad; it is simply that there are just so many of them and so few senior officers to show them how things are done on the street.
''It's like a high school prom, all the little boys and girls going to school,'' said Lieut. James Gebhardt, president of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association.
''We have only young kids and older guys,'' he said. ''There hasn't been this transition. Normally people would be trained by their peers. A senior cop would teach them how to approach people or hold them back when it was necessary. But we have this gap. You can't teach this in school. If there's no one out there to guide them, it can be difficult.''
Capt. Walter P. Signorelli said he saw the problem in many small ways. For example, when ''a boss,'' as police officers call their sergeants and other ranking officers, enters a station house, the police officers are supposed to salute.
This procedure is normally handed down by example. ''It used to be,'' said Captain Signorelli, ''that an older officer would be standing with a young officer and he would nudge the young officer and say, 'There's the sergeant, salute him.' ''
But now, the captain said, ''two rookies will be standing there and there will be no one there to tell them what to do.''
The lack of senior police officers means that police supervisors must work that much harder. Sergeants and lieutenants are the day-to-day managers of police work. They must make many of the field decisions. But now many of them are also busy teaching the basics.
In addition, the department is still short of sergeants and higher-ranking officers, partly because of the fiscal crisis, but also because of disputes over racial quotas in promotions.
In 1972 there were 2,546 sergeants. Today there are 2,479, including 550 provisional sergeants - police officers serving as sergeants without the certainty that they will keep the job permanently.
There are 879 lieutenants today, compared with 1,102 in 1972. There are 259 captains, compared with 369 in 1972.
Civilian complaints about rude police behavior are up, and police superiors said that part of the problem is the large numbers of inexperienced officers.
Another indicator often cited is that police officers are cracking up their patrol cars at a rate of more than one a day.
One veteran officer said that when the young officers received a call to respond to a crime, they often roared out at top speed, sirens blaring, lights blazing, the way they had seen it done on television.
But the more experienced officer knows better. ''By the time the call gets to us, the crime is probably over,'' he said. The correct response is to head for the scene of the crime, quickly but under control, surveying the streets, looking for fleeing suspects and listening for further reports.
Patrolling in a radio car was once a coveted job that took years to get. But often as not now, two young officers are sitting side by side, with no one to tell them how to do things. Facing the Problems And the Future An elderly woman is shot dead by a police officer during an eviction. There are accusations of torture in a Queens station house. A police officer puts a cocked gun to the head of a young man suspected of jumping a subway turnstile; the gun goes off and the suspect dies.
Senior police officials said that while these episodes had created the impression of a department in trouble, they were in fact isolated incidents. The systemic problems are different, they said, but perhaps just as serious.
One case that does appear to be a reflection of the larger problem, they said, occurred one night on Park Avenue. It reveals both the problem the department is having with its middle-level supervisors and the danger of having so many inexperienced police officers.
A police sergeant with a record of drunken-driving problems was driving a patrol car, with two young officers as his passengers, authorities said. They apparently had been out for some time. The sergeant may have used the car's loudspeaker to make catcalls at women.
As the car went down Park Avenue, it struck two men, killing one. The patrol car moved on without stopping. The sergeant, Frederick G. Sherman, told the two young officers, one 25 years old and the other 26, that he would handle all the reports, according to the young officers. They did nothing.
Days later the young officers testified against Sergeant Sherman, who was hired in 1973, laid off in 1975 and rehired in 1978.
''It's a sergeant, they are young officers, and they were just afraid to say anything until it was appropriate to come forward,'' said Richard Hartman, a lawyer for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. The two officers were ''afraid of the whole situation and wanted time to think it over,'' according to Mr. Hartman.
There are police officials who said this case illustrated the danger of having so few senior officers and so many relatively young officers. ''There are more people who are easily led,'' said one police official. ''It's not like 10 years ago when you had everybody the same age. There is this whole cadre that can be swayed.''
The department's Internal Affairs Division recently issued a report saying that police precinct commanders were concerned about the dangers of increased drug abuse by the large number of young officers. Other police officials said they feared that because of the abrupt transition, many important lessons from the days of the Knapp Commission were not being passed on.
The department's concern is reflected in the decision to strengthen what is known as the Early Intervention Program. The program was established in 1973 with a staff of 23 to spot officers in trouble - whether it was a divorce, a drug problem or a bout with alcohol.
The impetus was the case of Officer Thomas J. Shea. Officer Shea had a record of violence against citizens, and in April 1973 he shot and killed a 10-year-old boy in Queens. The officer said he thought he had seen the boy, Clifford Glover, with a gun.
In the midst of Officer Shea's trial for murder, a charge of which he was acquitted, the Police Department began screening officers with a record of violence or unstable behavior. But with the fiscal crisis, the program's staff was cut to five people.
''We were cutting corners,'' said Sgt. Gerard W. Kelly, who remained on the job. ''I was hand-writing reports. I was doing a lot less field work. We didn't perhaps go out and gather as much information.''
The price of this cutback will never really be known. ''I don't know of anyone we missed who went out and shot a bus load of nuns,'' he said. ''Perhaps there are people who I would have liked to put in an alcohol program a little earlier.''
But now the program's staff has been boosted to 15 and it is busy monitoring the new officers. ''The influx of rookies,'' said Captain Signorelli, of the employee management division, ''you could say with them are going to come a certain number of personnel problems.''
With them, however, there is also something else, an energy that the department has not seen in more than a decade. On Tuesday the latest Police Academy class was graduated. White-gloved hands snapped smartly to salute, and visors glinted in the spotlights. ''I'd trade my job for your age,'' Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward said.
The class valedictorian, Gabrielle Sbano, talked about how eager they were to get out in the field and begin learning from ''experienced officers.''
One thing the rookies did not talk about was the layoff of 5,000 police officers 10 years before. ''I don't really think it affects me,'' said John Frammosa, who was off for his new assignment in Queens. What about all the young officers? ''I think it's going to help the department,'' he said ''In 10 years there are going to be a lot of experienced officers. You're putting it in now and reap the benefits later.''
As I said in other thread, NYC’s cost structure is dead. They can’t keep taxing and spending. The hole will get too deep the city will fall into despair once the transplants leave and businesses flee. People are now heading for the country to have a big self sustaining backyard to grow food and enjoy nature. Office workers are buying bigger homes away from NYC.
As I said in other thread, NYC’s cost structure is dead. They can’t keep taxing and spending. The hole will get too deep the city will fall into despair once the transplants leave and businesses flee. People are now heading for the country to have a big self sustaining backyard to grow food and enjoy nature. Office workers are buying bigger homes away from NYC.
And I have a feeling that pretty soon, NYC will mandate pay cuts in the form of higher taxes for those who leave the city but who still work from home in a New York based office.
I read that is happening somewhere in California - not sure if in Los Angeles or San Francisco
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