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comment by bioemerl
bioemerl  ·  3639 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 5% of New York cops turn in 40% of "resisting arrest" cases

Some actual numbers:

    WNYC looked at over 51,000 cases where someone was charged with "resisting arrest" since 2009. They found that 40 percent of those cases — over 20,000 — were committed by just 5 percent of all the police officers on the force. And 15 percent of officers accounted for a majority of all "resisting arrest" charges.

    The New York Police Department is made up of 35,000 officers, and just a minority of them have sent people into court for "resisting arrest."

So this isn't a case of thousands of police, ten resisting cases.

A second criticism I have that isn't addressed is how many of those officers listed are non-arresting or non-active police officers.

I imagine a FBI agent who specializes in busting down doors is going to do a lot more resisting arrest than the average cop in a suburb.





Panopticon  ·  3635 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-arresting or non-active police officers".

bioemerl  ·  3635 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Office workers, police who sit around in schools, radar police, traffic police, etc. People who generally never meet a resisting arrest situation.

cgod  ·  3634 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's a good point I hadn't considered.

all the same I have to imagine that there are more than 15% of officers who are going to be making some arrests. It's still probably a good place to start sifting through the data. I know that in my city there are a small number of officers that have repeatedly been sued for using excessive force, I wouldn't be surprised if these same aggressive assholes charged people for resisting arrest more than their fellow officers.

The guy who shot a 12 year old girl with a bean bag round is the same guy who kicked in the ribs of a non-threatening mentally ill guy and is probably the same guy that lets situations get out of hand so he can beat some ass a lay a resisting arrest charge (Officer Chris Humphrys).

The data might say something different but I'd be surprised if there isn't a correlation with cops who use excessive force who also charge people with resisting arrest more often because these are the kinds of cops that aren't good at controlling a situation with anything other than physical force.

Panopticon  ·  3628 days ago  ·  link  ·  

According to the FBI website, New York has 35,000 officers and 15,000 civilian employees. Office workers are already discounted from the article's statistics. You're wrong.

bioemerl  ·  3627 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I did not mention only office workers. Secondly, my criticism is the fact that the information about these things is not mentioned in the article.