New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is pushing a plan to decriminalize public urination, turnstile-jumping and public drinking. This is a superb example of ideology trumping the lessons of history, anthropology, law, psychology and common sense. Liberals have never forgiven Rudy Giuliani for adopting the lessons of the “broken windows” theory to clean up Times Square, thus showing why it is important, effective and responsible for government to insist on ethical conduct and have its laws reflect those values.
Using the tragic death of Eric Garner in an arrest for a petty crime as her justification, Mark-Viverito appears to believe that criminalizing minor crimes like public urination leads to pretext police stops, arrests and searches. What she stubbornly refuses to understand is that the government declaring that certain conduct is unacceptable is essential to ensuring that such conduct, and eventually, worse conduct, isn’t accepted, and that enforcement of laws with meaningful penalties is crucial to limiting the spread of unhealthy, ugly, harmful or uncivilized behavior. If the City Council wants human excrement and waste to be a regular component of the New York experience, this is one way to guarantee it—by sending the message that “It’s rude, but it’s not that wrong and we’re not going to make a big deal out of it.” The message of allowing turnstile cheats to get away with a citation—which they will never pay, of course—is that small thefts don’t matter either. Cheats and crooks can reliably be expected to see how much they can get away with stealing without real punishment, and the Mark-Viveritos in our various governments can be counted on to keep letting the standards slide.
Oh yes, she is not the only one. They are legion.
The amazing thing is that we all saw where her approach led in the Seventies. New York City became filthy and dangerous, tourists and business started to stay away, crime exploded and people died. It will lead there again, too. This is the inevitable result when elected officials regard their primary duty as serving the interests of law-breakers and the habitually unethical rather than honest, fair, responsible citizens.
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Pointer: Res Ipsa Loquitur
Facts: New York Post
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So I can take a leak in Times Square? Geez…..no more running into the Marriott Marquis. If at age 70 I managed to jump a turnstile I should be citizen of the week. GDI….I’d love to be able to jump it. Judge would probably buy me a beer and we could both piss it out. Maybe at DeBlassio’s office?
I’ve been going to NYC since the mid 50s when my mother would take me to ballgames and I’d have to go to the theater. My wife and I go a few times a year for the theater.
Times Square – really a several block area from 39th through 45th (give or take) – started downward in the late 60s and by 1980 was a pathetic dump. I’ll give Ed Koch credit as he did his part to get the ball rolling in the 80s. There was movement in City Council for years for revitalization and even Dinkins did his part. But the main player became Rudy. Really pushed hard.
Rudy brought all the legislation, proposals, new zoning and eminent domain right to the front burner.
You set standards. IMO this legislation may not impact Times Square – may not is the key. Why take a chance?
Unfortunately, Rudy was a law-and-order Republican. That point alone renders anything he did to be an affront to The People and therefore to be expunged. Besides, such things interfere with the sterling work of Occupy Wall Street and the advocates of the disenfranchised. The freedom to urinate must not be infringed.
I’ll bite.
Given the current laws and culture, law enforcement have a lot of leeway in performing their jobs. And for every clear case of appropriate use of force (e.g. Michael Brown) or controversial (e.g. Tamir Rice) there are numerous others of clear abuse (Brian Torgerson or Baltimore’s “enjoy your ride” sticker).
Decriminalization looks like a reasonable compromise. If we’re not able or willing to take police forces to task for abuses of power (as slight as they can be, on the ground the police hold a significant advantage both physically and legally) then we need to limit the situations where that is a possible outcome to ones that merit the risk.
Every law we pass is a norm we are implicitly accepting to uphold by the application of force. Is an unpaid turnstile-jumping something we really want to enforce at the point of a gun?
It is something we want to enforce. The violator determines how it is enforced. (Nobody is shooting Times Square pissers and turnstyle jumpers.)
Well, there’s this guy whose crime was getting away from ununiformed police officers who yelled at him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9pluHd7TBQ (ignore the blatantly provocative title, but I could not find a better quality video).
No violation, no threats, no violence. The guy ended in a comma and the city settled for over a million dollars. No one was criminally prosecuted because one or other law was being enforced. One episode like this is too much, so I’m reluctant to support laws that in the end are used to protect misconduct.
I promise lowering some violations to the next tier will not bring the zombie apocalypse. You can call this the broken window theory approach to law writing: If we let stupid low-impact laws overreach we will end up with stupid laws that will criminalize everything (for an example of how this escalates look at our current sex-offender laws).
Not necessarily. In my state, decriminalization simply means it is not punishable by jail time. It is a fineable offense. Furthermore, even low level crimes are not arrestable offenses, even if they are jail able offenses. I do not know about New York, but, in my state, Eric Garner would have been issued a ticket and sent on his way. He might not have died. Of course, it presumes that he would have been able and willing to produce an ID (but, it sounds like they knew him).
So, depending on what “de-criminalize” means, I may not know whether I agree with you.
-Jut
Is the Bronx burning yet?
It occurs to me that if we want to be less cruel to Jean Valjean, the solution is not decriminalizing bread theft and window breaking, but giving Javert proper training. To use a less fictional example, it was not cigarette taxes that killed Eric Garner, but an illegal chokehold.
It’s the hip thing to do. After all, the hipster-in-charge just pardoned over 40 kilogram-level intent to distribute crack cocaine dealers. Oh, and need I mention the race of all of them?