> This was super distressing for a lot of people, as those belongings usually included wallet, phone, and keys. So after you are done at Central Booking, you are basically left with no possessions or money, and no way to get into your home or contact anyone.<p>Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.
> <i>for every one of the 120+ of us in holding, there was also a cop who was waiting there too, being paid overtime and trying to get our paperwork processed so that they could go home</i><p>Cops being paid overtime is a tremendous conflict of interest motivating them to arrest and to process slowly.
NYPD needs to be disbanded. If you have officers repeating the same conduct one just got charged with depraved heart murder for, it's out of control.<p>This stuff is simple enough. Get out of your escort, stand among the other normal people and do some dogfooding of the police experience. I guess nobody higher up wants to spend the day doing that, because at the end of it there wouldn't be anyone still employed at NYPD.
Perhaps it time someone built a web site where the opinions, comments, and especially actions/votes, of every politician running for office, from City Council on up, were tracked.<p>Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.
It's ridiculous that they're allowed to waste so much of our time, taking hours to fill out paperwork with pen and paper as if it's the 20th century. That needs to change. And police officers taking selfies with the people they arrested and boasting about it on social media should be arrested. So fucking unprofessional.
> The police officers in the front of the wagon were taking selfie videos of the crazy race-car style driving and posting to Snapchat stories that they shared with each other and boasted about openly in front of us, laughing.<p>Mind blowing. The behavior part of the nation is completely up in arms about, they still see fit doing.
It's out of print and kind of hard to find, but if you can get a copy of "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner [1], it is well worth it. (Don't confuse it for the at least 10 other books whose titles start with "Rough Justice"...).<p>Heilbroner was a fresh law school graduate who took a job as a New York D.A., and then wrote this book about his time there. He started out handling misdemeanors, and there are a LOT of those. There's basically an assembly line, running all day and all night, to bring in those who have been arrested, get their paperwork to a D.A. for charging, get the arresting officer in to make a statement, and getting a hearing before a judge where the defendant usually pleads guilty and gets a fine.<p>The Public Defender has a similar assembly line going.<p>When his shift would start, he describes walking into the office, stepping over or around all the officers sleeping in the hall waiting to have their statements taken, then picking up all the cases that the previous shift was working on when their shift ended. Often he'd end up in court with a stack of cases he'd never seen, and have to frantically work to read the notes from the previous shift and skim the officer's statement as the case was being called.<p>When his shift ends, the cases he's working on are handed off to someone on the next shift, and almost always will be resolved by the time his next shift comes around. So there is no engagement with the case, he's just a cog in the machine, processing his pieces of paper as the pass through, and occasionally taking statements from officers, and reading from these pieces of paper in front of a judge.<p>Eventually he gets to handle felony cases, which for both the D.A.s and the Public Defenders are more like what they had in mind when they were in law school imagining what their jobs would be like--taking a case all the way from charging through to a trial, and actually making serious legal arguments.<p>It's quite an eye opener.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-Young-D/dp/0394581911/ref=la_B001KDVXT8_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430629926&sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-Young-D/dp/039458...</a>
"My arresting officer walked me out the door and down the street past the barricade, where there were volunteers from New York Lawyers Guild waiting to provide information on legal resources, as well as donuts and coffee."<p>That must've been a sight of relief. What a horrible experience everyone had to go through. This is nothing short of intimidation tactic.
I'm not from the States - when this kind of thing happens, does it affect your future employment opportunities? Will it turn up on background checks?
For the data driven types, here is some data from the Economist:<p><a href="http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/594593671661641728" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/594593671661641728</a>
Maybe the accelerometers in people's devices could be used to record rough-riding incidents. There should probably be "black box" devices in all police cars to prevent incidents like the one that allegedly killed Freddie Gray.
> I just got back from 12 hours in NYPD holding. If I can get arrested (with all of my white privilege and generally perceived non-threatening stature), so can anybody. ... Obviously I don’t know what happened in each person’s actual arrest, but I do know that the criminal charges overwhelmingly fell to people of color and those with more masculine gender presentations.<p>One of the most distressing things I find about the language of 'privilege' is that it denies that women can have it as a group. In this last sentence, she recognizes that women can be privileged over men in some situations.