Originally Posted by okie john
My uncle is a Vietnam vet who went to DLI for Vietnamese and was a province advisor in this program. He carried a Swedish K.
Unc is pretty baller.
My uncle is a Vietnam vet who went to DLI for Vietnamese and was a province advisor in this program. He carried a Swedish K.
Unc is pretty baller.
Phoenix and its adjacent programs were likely the most effective tools we had for prosecuting that war, once we figured how it worked. Long after the '75 fall, military leadership in the North acknowledged that Phoenix was devastating their hold in the South and posed the likeliest possible course for a U.S./ARVN victory.
Last edited by Wingate's Hairbrush; 06-16-2020 at 11:20 AM.
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
You may have seen the S&W Model 76 submachine gun in police dept arsenals. It's based on the Swedish K. In the 1970's the sheriff of LeFlore County would loan his to me and a friend. We went broke shooting it.
When too many people get caught violating law, they view enforcement as harassment. Community leaders complain. City officials must take the heat. This is not the best example but will be used anyway. Wherever I have lived, civilians would express rage when cops used unmarked cars in traffic enforcement. The good citizens resented tickets. In NYC the anti crime units may have been performing at a level deemed too high.
How was anti-crime performing in the new world of NYC policing (honest question)?
I mean, I became aware of its use reading about when NYC was in fact, like the movie Taxi Driver. I am guessing Anti-Crime was witnessing serious crimes pretty often then. Likewise, it was bad enough that the short lived SOU had good success staking out fixed locations because crime was so rampant that the same places were just getting hit repeatedly.
How much bang for the buck was there, comparatively, after the large decline in reported crime in the late 90s? How does their remaining enforcement actions compare to the tensions that their activities caused with the citizenry? I have no earthly idea, but I could theoretically see if they were spending more time enforcing laws that piss people off vs directly stopping violent crime how they could become less popular.
But I simply have no idea. I dont live in NYC or follow its crime beat. I'm just an outside person that read books on the NYPD when I was in high school and later.
I spoke to someone who would know today and here is their answer to your question:
NYPD anti-crime was composed of plain clothes officers who operated in teams using unmarked cruisers. They were generally pretty obviously cops (plain clothes but with a duty belt on, body armor under a t-shirt, etc). Anti-Crime was basically a “stop-and-frisk machine” that was very effective at getting guns off the street and jamming up violent gang members and criminals. They’d patrol their precinct area and stop suspicious people who were violating the petty laws such as jaywalking, riding bicycles on sidewalks, etc. They would stop people who saw police and immediately turned around. They would question the stopped suspects and frisk them for weapons. Apparently the only difference between when NYPD was actively doing “stop-question-and-frisk” and now is that the Anti-Crime officers would now have to generate an additional report about the contact. The person I asked said they were incredibly effective at what they did, often finding half a dozen armed suspects in a single shift. Sometimes the officers would dress down to appear even less like law enforcement so they could get people to buzz them into apartment buildings. They’d stand outside yelling “Yo Maaaa” until someone buzzed them in. While inside the buildings they would look for things like gang members smoking marijuana in the hallways which would give them justification to investigate those people. They’d do car stops on the vehicles of probationers and parolees often finding drugs, guns or large sums of money.
The Anti-Crime officers would regularly roll up on crimes like robberies in progress or immediately after the fact. If someone flagged them down saying they had just been robbed, the officers were reportedly quite effective at catching the suspect.
For other LEOs reading this, you might notice that certain requirements about lawful Terry Frisks haven’t been addressed in this post, namely the requirement that an officer had to have articulable facts that the person to be frisked was both armed AND dangerous. NYC was never great about playing by all the rules.
My posts only represent my personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or official policies of any employer, past or present. Obvious spelling errors are likely the result of an iPhone keyboard.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
There's nothing civil about this war.
From Older Offspring after a discussion of coffee:
"If it doesn't come from the Kaffa province of Ethiopia, it's just hot roasted-bean juice."
Hell, I could have seen this coming.
— Ray Charles
How do you think the large decline in crime happened ?
Broken windows theory only takes you so far. At some point you need to proactively go after those doing the violence.
Brass at the political appointee level misusing anti crime teams doesn't mean they don't still have value as NYC's recent spike in shootings demonstrates.
If a military unit had sniper observer teams dedicated to hunting IED emplacers and a Col or Gen re-tasked them to observing U.S. Patrols looking for and reporting uniform violations you would A) piss off the soldiers on patrols and B) IEDs would spike. None of that detracts from the value of having sniper/observer teams hunting IED emplacers but do you think that Col or Gen is going to take the blame for the spike in IEDs ?
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