CITIZEN POLICE CHANNEL & ONLINE POLICE ACADEMY RECOMMENDED
Why Delay When We Can Get It Done Now?
By Nobody
Press Independent
16 December 2019
MIAMI BEACH—I appreciated the good intentions of the Miami Beach Police Department when they reached out to me in response to my suggestions on how to really take rampant bicycle theft seriously. I fervently desired information on what would be done, if anything, in response to my suggestions. Perhaps nothing, because I am just a nobody, but what keeps me going is I vainly take some pride in being nobody, as did Jason when the one-eyed cyclops outside the cave in which he and his crew were trapped asked him for his name. He answered, at least according to one translation of the Greek, that he was ‘Nobody,’ hence the stone was rolled away from the entrance to the cave after poking out the eye of the cyclops inside the cave.
I hope my various suggestions will culminate in the police department ultimately reaching out by means of a Citizens Police Channel to the general public with all, and even more than a partner needs, in accord with its recent Partnering With The Public Program. Indeed, that sort of initiative would help fulfill any police department’s role as a caretaker independent of the political regime, which, as Karl Schmitt famously opined, is necessarily rife with hypocrisy in order to get anything done in a democracy.
Despite the good work that Miami Beach police officers did under the last regime, they were relatively invisible and unappreciated, leaving many people to feel they had been abandoned in their neighborhoods under the regime of Mayor Phil “King” Levine. It seem that the pioneering efforts of the likes of Officers David De La Espriella and Deborah Martineau to collaborate with neighbors in South Beach had been in vain as conditions worsened.
Now the bicycle theft issue, as I see it, provides opportunity to address what we have learned globally on a local, seemingly picayune crime, now being taken seriously according to Lt. Armatrading, the commander of the Property Crimes Unit. Bicycle theft is not trivial. It is a billion dollar, virtually risk-free business. Almost every community I have looked at thus far thinks it is the capital of bicycle theft: Florida has been called the worst, and Miami Beach the worst of the worst. So yes, a Taking Seriously approach is warranted.
The emotional personal impact of, say, 400 bicycles stolen far exceeds a similar economic value of 10 cars stolen. As my father used to say, “He who loves everybody loves nobody.” Mind you, I am not by any means in love with bicyclers as a general class, especially on the sidewalks, yet I have felt love and sympathy for individual victims of bicycle theft.
I shan’t forget how I was sitting at a bar on Broadway in New York City, chatting with other men, when a woman pulled up and locked her bike to a signpost and went inside. A thief showed up immediately with cutters and rode off with the bike. We ran out to apprehend him and perhaps beat him to a pulp if he resisted, but he was gone. That poor woman came out to find her bike gone. She cried and said that she had gone into the building to drop off a job application, and had no subway fare home to Flatbush in Brooklyn. Bicycle theft is indeed a crime to be taken very seriously. Out West it was once proper to hang a man for stealing a horse.
After my friend Betty’s fourth bike was stolen, I asked for images of the thief taken from video surveillance to be publicly posted. I wanted to know why the fingerprints were insufficient to be matched. If the mayor had been murdered in that basement, would not the criminal be in custody already given the seriousness of the crime? Lt. Armatrading thought the answers would be beyond the scope of putting them in writing. He kindly invited me over to discuss bicycle theft, and thought I might like to go to the Citizens Police Academy.
I figured the images were blurred, the prints smudged, and the mayor, unlike the bike, had many enemies to be checked out—how long would it take to write that down?
Would it not be more efficient to put the Citizens Police Academy online instead of educating and uncritically indoctrinating small numbers of citizens at a time to become insiders to otherwise secret methods while the general public is misinformed by CSI programs?
Of course people are naturally fascinated by crime, perhaps because, as some scholars think, everyone has a rebellious instinct. I loved The Untouchables when I was a kid, and, when I ran away to become homeless on the street shortly after my 13th birthday, I tried to join the Outfit in Chicago, but Sam said I talked too much, and he sent me to an employment agency to learn to type and operate a relatively new-fangled ten-key adding machine.
Television and movie producers do take advantage of the criminal predilection. Ironically, the good crime shows may serve to attract people to a particular city. So I wound up in Chicago by the power of suggestion, and then at a hotel on Miami Beach where Meyer Lansky used to hide out from the police. I know people who have moved to the Miami area because they watched CSI Miami, not knowing that the stories were filmed in California, with the beautiful scenic shots taken here.
How would the police detect and apprehend criminals unless they learn to think like criminals? Why not educate everyone in on the secrets of the illegal trades for their own good, instead of allowing them to be victimized over and over? I believe the Miami Beach Citizens Police Channel should retain a creative director and produce or use a documentaries already in existence to educate the public. For example, a documentary on biological identification systems would be a good introductory course. The art and science of identification evolved to weed out people according to the mores of the ruling elite. The Nazis measured skull dimensions to identify Jews. I recall that an innocent man was in prison, I think Leavenworth, because his bone structure was identical to that of another man. Today there are perhaps dozens of innocent people in prison and guilty people running free because of faulty negative and positive matching of latent fingerprints.
Now we have a far greater matching ability of with DNA analysis. And that is why I asked Mr. Armatrading why blood was not collected from the scene where Betty’s first bicycle was stolen—she had used what was considered to be a safe locking mechanism; the thief cut himself and bled all over the wall. He replied that he did not know about back then, but DNA evidence is now collected. Perhaps bicycle theft has only been recently part of the Taking Seriously program.
It is my information that the city's registration system or its promotion is relatively novel. Is our present registration system tied into a national and or international system so that bikes on sale or recovered outside of the city or state will be identified as stolen? Betty, my favorite bicycle theft victim, faithfully followed the rules. She took a photograph of her bike and registered it locally, but what good did that do if the bike is taken to another jurisdiction?
A nonprofit online registration called 529 Garage took over the National Bicycle Registration operation. It has been praised by police officers, and claims to have a couple million bikes registered. I asked the Miami Beach Police Department to look into it to see if it would be worthwhile collaborating with. Informed the brass of Betty’s suggestion, that the local bike shops inform purchasers that they should register their bikes with that organization as well as the police system, and even assist them in doing so at the point of sale. At the same time they could take photos, sell bicycle theft Insurance, which I understand cost about $100 per $1,000 of value per bike per annum, and also sell them guaranteed locks. In fact, I believe the police department should reach out to all of the bicycle shops with a bicycle theft circular as part of the Taking Bicycle Theft Seriously program that I have in mind. It public information officer now does his best to circulate information that would mitigate bicycle thefts. I believe a universal circular with more information concisely expressed could be devised and widely distributed. And then there is my favorite notion, that of a Citizens Police Channel as the nexus for all public information on policing.
Ironically, I have not found many bicyclers or police officers keenly interested in my notion so far. We all know that a lot of bikes are stolen, and maybe half from the same people due to their carelessness and ignorance. It is convenient to put the blame on the victims and wash our hands of the matter. But bicycle theft could be reduced by true public propaganda, and that would be to everyone’s advantage.
Miami Beach as recent as twenty years ago had a terrible inferiority complex. Realtors had to go about proclaiming it as a “world class city.” A public relations or public partnership program along the lines I have dreamed of would only work to serve and protect the public but also advertise it as a innovative first-class city. That is the direction it is going in, anyway, so why not take advantage of it? That is what clever developers do. The German developer I worked for made a fortune for himself and others that way. Maybe the police department should try it.
xYx
interesting article!
Never stop writing !
m
I found your suggestions quite enlightening and I hope they get it put into practice. I did see recently where front door theft of packages is being curtailed by placing locators on them, allowing police to track the thieves down, often to where they have kept other packages they have stolen. It seems to me that these kind of electronic locating devices could come as options, built into the bikes, like are available on smart phones, another item often stolen.
Made me think of my junior and senior year in college when I rode around campus on my well-worn sister's midsize girls' bike. I freely parked it all over campus in front of buildings where I took classes without any lock or chain and it was never molested. That may be still possible on some rural campuses in small towns like mine. Small town people tend to know who the thieves are.
I took in a guy riding a bicycle as a tenant. He had been angrily kicked out by his former landlord. One day he surprised me with a woman in the living room. He introduced me to her as his, parole officer. While in my house, he began pilfering small things. He kept his bike in our garage and I noticed two other bikes in the garage, thinking in the back of my mind that they may have been stolen. He held a series of jobs and food establishments. Shared condiments with us that he had taken from where he worked. There came a last straw when he stole coins from a decorative art piece my partner had been given. It is only recently that I found that my continuous collection of Playboys from 1968 has been decimated. If I wasn't in this wheelchair, I would have caught him much sooner. Strangely, I saw him on local television talking to reporters a couple of times.
Ron