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Tomato, Tomahto

Make Up Your Mind, New York!

Do cops work hard enough?	Are the cops around here quick to respond?	What do you think of how the cops deal with graffiti?	Do we need more cops on the streets?	Are there enough cops in your neighborhood?

Betty (store owner): The cops should patrol here. We get a lot of homeless people every morning, and instead of them passing through and making sure we can open the store and not have to wake them up and get knocked out, there’s no cops. One morning I woke up a homeless man sleeping in front of the store and he punched me in the jaw—broke it. So, now we have to leave them there. They sleep there, they urinate there, and I have to breathe that every morning.

Jamal: I manage a McDonald’s, and with confrontations in here, which happen often, it’s tough to get a response unless someone’s been really wounded. We get lots of fights, and it’s not as if there’s cops walking the street here. If you make a call to one of the precincts, unless there’s a very big situation, the response is less than adequate.

Tony (store owner):
I guess graffiti is lower on the cops’ totem pole of crime to fight, but it’s disgusting. We try to paint over it right away, but that’s the best we can do. The people that live in and enjoy the neighborhood, they don’t want to see it everywhere. They’ve voiced their opinion, so we do what we can. I don’t know the cops’ workload, but they should put up surveillance cameras or something to catch these kids.

Millie: Yes, we do need more cops on the streets. When you see them at parades, it looks like they’re overstaffed, but then after the parade’s over, who knows where they disappear to. Whoever the commanders are, they don’t put enough cops out, cause you feel a lot safer when you see a uniform every five or ten blocks.

Tracy: There needs to be more police on the beat. Maybe then it would be safer and everyone would feel safer. There are people running around raping our children. I don’t feel that they do their job when they really need to. They do unnecessary stuff, like sitting inside a building waiting for trespassers, but let me tell you, if I’m getting beat up, they’re going to take their time to come. And sometimes they don’t even come.

Do cops work hard enough?	Are the cops around here quick to respond?	What do you think of how the cops deal with graffiti?	Do we need more cops on the streets?	Are there enough cops in your neighborhood?

Noah: They spend more time doing easy stuff instead of doing what they’re really there for. You see them every night in the East Village. They are only enforcing the little crimes that are easy and they don’t have to write paperwork for, when they’re not even going after what is actually causing a problem.

Javier: Cops bother too much. They’re always suspecting something. Me and my friends, we walk in a group and they always think we’re gonna fight or something, and they always approach us, ask us for our names and stuff. It’s always the case in the streets when we’re just walking around looking for girls. Then, if we’re in the front of our building, they always want to come up to us, thinking that we’re doing something.

Aibe (graffiti writer): A cop has to have to have a job, but most of it’s just hassling. If you tag on a wall or throw a mural, even for a museum, you’re put down to the same level as a crack or heroin dealer. It’s like it’s a violent crime just for tagging, and it’s absurd because all these neighborhoods where rent went from $700 a month to $2,700—it was because there was graffiti and that made it hip.

Debbie: They come out at night and stand on the corner. Ain’t nobody on the corner, ain’t nothing happening there. What they need to do is go to LaGuardia Airport. Go for the big guys. These people here are trying to make a living and feed their families.
Cops are out here profiling our children. My son was walking down the block Friday night—he’s never been in trouble a day in his life, no drugs, no nothing. He went outside to wait for his sister; they stopped him and locked him up. Now he got a nasty record, and he has to be on probation for a whole year.

Tracy: Where I live at, there’s always police around. I mean, look out the window. They’re in front of the building. You’re sitting in buildings waiting for people to come in the building to catch them for trespassing? I think you got something better to do.

5 years ago Like · Comment · Share