As reported by John
Surico at Vice, the
NYPD has been quietly deploying a tactic called “Omnipresence,”
which involves floodlights pointed at housing projects all night
long, parked police cars on sidewalks with their menacing blue and
white lights flashing, and beat cops indefinitely stationed on
street corners as a new means of policing
pre-crime. Surico calls it “stop and frisk
2.0.”
Stop and frisk as commonly understood is
barely practiced anymore, having died an
ignominious death in 2013 when
Judge Shira Schiendlin ruled that searches of black
and Latino youths based on generalized suspicion was
unconstitutional.
Former mayor and ardent stop-and-frisk
enthusiast Michael Bloomberg defended the practice on his WOR
radio show, “the kids think they’re going to get stopped, so they
don’t carry the gun. And if you can’t do that, you turn the city
over to the criminals, literally overnight.”
The post-Bloomberg NYPD is not about to let the city revert to a
scene from “The Warriors”
without a fight, so instead of instilling citizens with the fear
that they can be stopped and searched for no reason at any time,
they want the public to know that they are there, all the time, and
always watching. If that sounds Orwellian to you, you’re not alone.
Surico writes of “Omnipresence”:
“That’s the comically Orwellian (and completely fucking
terrifying) name for the freshest tactic in the NYPD playbook. To
her, the bright beams mean one thing: The cops are here until
dawn.”
Unlike stop and frisk, very little public information exists on
Omnipresence. It’s barely google-able. Surico cites a single
article in the
The New York Times as the only other major outfit to
report on it at all. The NYPD has made no public statements
explaining the tactic. It’s just there.
Perhaps Mayor Bill de Blasio and his NYPD Commissioner William
Bratton learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, who clung
to stop and frisk even as it became a public relations disaster for
them. During the trial of stop and frisk, Eric Adams, a former NYPD
captain and New York State Senator testified that then-NYPD
Commissioner
Ray Kelly hoped that stop and frisk would “instill fear” in the
young men of Gotham’s high crime areas, and that would in turn keep
guns off the street.
The experience of all-night flood lights on courtyards and the
always unnerving sight of flashing police cruiser lights might just
be instilling the fear Kelly envisioned. And by avoiding
belligerent public pronouncements of impending anarchy, the new
bosses can claim to be post-stop-and-frisk reformers.
Still, with a name like “Omnipresence,” it’s going to be hard
for the NYPD to keep this a secret for too long.
Reason TV reported on the stop and frisk trial in 2013:
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