NYPD demonstrates the self defeating nature of bureaucratic command.

Upworthy  - The 17-Year-Old Who Blew The Lid Off Racial Profiling With His iPod


The actual recording of the 'stop and frisk' event is creepy enough; it shows that the event is simply an unprovoked assault by police officers.

What is truly horrendous is to hear - from the anonymous police officer contributors - is that the whole process is driven by a dehumanised policy of command and control through abuse and conquest. This is bureaucratic idiocy approaching its extreme: the measure of 'high performance' has been totally divorced from the true task of policing. The point of policing is to prevent crime and to maintain law and order.  The policy of 'stop and frisk' does not do this:

• free citizens not in the course of committing a crime and probably for the most part not even contemplating one are stopped and searched, verbally assaulted and often, it seems, physically assaulted  just because they are not white and do not look middle class - this is not crime prevention because it is not related to criminal activity [by the citizens at least]; 
• these incidents almost certainly constitute an on going series of crimes perpetrated against innocent citizens by the NYC constabulary; the temporary outcome may be less obvious appearances of dark skinned citizens on the streets but the enduring outcome is certainly a complete loss of respect for NYPD and the city government;
• taxpayers of NYC are being conned and their tax dollars wasted subsidising a policing policy which brutalises both a class of citizens and the police officers themselves. 

That last dot point is worth thinking about quite thoroughly because the effect of acts of violence on the perpetrators of the violence is just as deep as on the victims. The victims suffer pain and humiliation but they don't necessarily loose their ability to empathise [ie their 'soul']. Those who commit violence for its own sake however, as in the policy of NYPD in 'stop and frisk', lose their ability to perceive their victims as persons; in other words each such act of aggression erodes the connection of the aggressor to their own true self and to the rest of humanity. 

The policy has potential to reach the penultimate stage that Karl Popper predicts of regimes where democracy is absent.
Those who suffer the negative results of dictatorial policy become so numerous and their situation so devoid of hope of redress that they feel like they have nothing left to lose. It is then just a matter of time before the situation explodes.

In so far as the result of systematic discrimination and violent aggression against minorities has been shown through the history of the last few centuries to be either very counter productive or completely self defeating,  NYPD policy of 'stop and frisk' for its own sake is objectively STUPID!

Open Communication Amongst Peers

The answer to most of the ills of bureaucracy is Open Communication Amongst Peers.

If we assume, reasonable in my opinion, that Capitalism is the default state of economies in the Modern Era the we must also assume that taking care of things that the capitalists can't make money out of is always going to be overseen by bureaucracies. There is no point in lamenting this; it is inevitable.  Advocates of small government need to pull their heads out of the sand or whatever other dark places they put them and realise that this is not the result of devilish conspiracies but simply what must happen when the pursuit of individual and corporate profit is held to be the reason for our existence.

Bureaucratic method however is fraught with difficulties. It can be very frustrating and sometimes quite mind-numbing either to deal with a bureaucratic agency or to work within it. I have described some aspects of the reasons for this in previous posts. Here I wish to point out that upwards of twenty six years experience in one particular agency assures me that the best way to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of bureaucratic organisations is to allow and encourage real internal communication.

In particular I advocate Open Communication Amongst Peers [= OCAP] as a fundamental requisite of any large organisation if it is to survive and achieve good and useful outcomes without destroying people in the process.