Of Cops and Kids and Chess (and Cupcakes)

It's pretty sad when taxpayers and their kids can't enjoy the things their money buys.

And so what if the kids were out to make a little spending money? Don't kids do that every summer with lemonade stands? In my neighborhood this year, it was the done thing to go to the dollar store, buy tons of 50 cent bottles of hand lotion and sell them to adults passing by for $1. I knew I was getting gyped and I'm an unemployed college student, so money's kind of tight, but I can spare a buck or fifty cents for lotion or lemonade so kids have a little bit of spending money. It's better than them hiding inside playing xbox or getting underfoot at the mall.

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I've been a police officer for 16 years. I don't agree with what the officers did in these situations, but I can understand why they did it. A councilman called in complaining about what was going on in the park, and the officers were most likely ordered by their command to go take care of it. We can't pick and chose what calls we take, and are often told how to handle those calls once we show up. Not following orders can get us suspended with no pay, and too many suspensions will get us fired.
Blame the politician, not the police officer. We like to see kids doing things to help themselves. Most likely, had the councilman not called and complained, those officers would have been their best customers.

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It makes me wonder if there isn't some kind of state conspiracy to break up communities. A populace divided against itself is more easily controlled, after all.

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Oh brother, what a media event and black eye for my neighborhood and city. I live next to the playground in question, here's what really happened. It's an interesting tale of how news travels in 2010:

1) This playground is inside a huge park in Inwood, in far upper Manhattan. It's not a wealthy area and while loved by its residents for its greenery and somewhat off the radar location in decades past it had severe crime issues (like much of New York). These have greatly abated today but recent upticks in quality-of-living stuff -- smashed car windows, even muggings -- have the locals up in arms requesting the police to do more patrols. It's not a dangerous area by any means, no more unsafe than, say, the Lower East Side, but the NYPD has been under some pressure to keep things from coming unglued.

2) On Oct 20th the police did sweep the park, likely as part of the community pressure, and issued tickets to the men playing chess. They did this either out of laziness (had to meet a summons quota) or simply saw them as the easiest people to ticket, drug dealers and thugs being in short supply in the middle of the day. Dumb PR move but technically correct under the posted rules.

3) The rules, of course, are overreaching. No parent like me really fears abduction in 2010 as a likely event or thinks that any playground rule will stop it. But these rules are on the books from the bad old days and they continue to exist to let cops pick people up for minor infractions that can lead to more serious crimes. (You've probably heard of "Broken Windows Theory"). This playground is also ancient and neglected and the chess tables should have been moved long ago, but they were not. So the conflict was there ready-made between the fearmongering rules, the dated design of the playground, and the long habits of local use. All it took was a strict police sweep.

4) The men in question are known to the community and no one really minds them. In this instance, Broken Windows didn't pan out. Their summons will certainly be dismissed when it gets to the judge. That would have been the end of it but one local parent whose son played chess with the men was very (one might say radically) upset. Using a flurry of emails, she reached out to various officials. However, what really led to the story, nearly a month later, was an impassioned posting to a Yahoo parents group called InwoodKids.

5) One of the members of the group is a reporter for a new online local newspaper for Manhattan called DNAinfo.com. She wrote a story and posted it on that site, which is often used by larger media as a source for local tidbits.

6) Once the major NY papers got a hold of it, bang. Every single detail about the park, the crime sweeps, the local requests for more police presence all went out the window and it became an irresistable headline about the War on Chess. (The NY Post headline on the front page was "Check Mate"). It became all about cops arresting threatening chess players, parents vs nonparents, etc.

7) The next day, the wire services picked it up and now I get to read in the international press about a very local action that happened two blocks from me. Wild.

This is simply a story about an overzealous sweep of a tired playground in a park that has had some crime issues. The cops should have issued a warning, and now they are paying the price for their aggressive actions. I only hope this embarrassment does not deter actual policing of the area, which is still needed.

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"a children's play area off limits to adults unaccompanied by minors" - this seems backwards to me!

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Like Renee, I am replying to this post as a police officer. I am a Sergeant of Police in San Francisco and I have been with the SFPD for almost 10 years.

Renee offers the best answer to the incident mentioned in this article and while it may not make sense to someone looking at this from an outsiders' perspective, it is an unfortunate aspect of being a police officer. We don't pick the laws we choose to enforce, and 99% of the time we enforce the laws, we are doing so due to concerns voiced by others.

InwoodParent should be thanked for providing a background on the case of the NYPD citing the individuals in the park. Understanding the background of the fact that the officers were there with stepped up enforcement due to neighborhood complaints is important.

While I can't speak to why the officers issued citations as opposed to warnings, I can only believe that the chess players were cited due one of a number of reasons.

One would be the fact that they were ordered to issue citations so that their bosses could go to community meetings to say, "Look! We're doing something!" It could be that the chess players were previously given a warning not to play chess there and after previously being warned, they were issued a citation. It could also be because an individual called in a complaint about the chess players. Needless to say, there are a number of reasons the chess players were cited.

Now, I can tell you that having worked in San Francisco for almost 10 years, we have similar laws in place for our parks to both cases mentioned in this article. The majority of the time, we use discretion in enforcing the laws - the whole "Spirit of the Law" versus the "Letter of the Law." We have to be careful, however, in application of the laws on our books, thanks to organizations like the ACLU.

As many people know, San Francisco has a major homeless population. Three of our biggest problems with the parks and homelessness have to do in some way, shape or form with drugs.

One of the worst crimes in San Francisco is auto burglaries. We have ridiculous numbers of people (99% of those people are homeless and/or drug abusers) who break into cars, steal stuff, then sell that stuff in our parks. We therefore have a law on the books that says it's illegal to sell things in the park without a permit.

On the other issue, we have a huge problem with drug users using our parks as a place to shoot up or smoke their drugs. The homeless (and often users of drugs) also like to camp out in our parks, occasionally leaving behind their drug paraphernalia. The problem with the above is that drug users often leave their used needles or glass pipes in the same playgrounds children are supposed to play in. The law about "No Adults Allowed Unless Accompained by a Minor" is less about predators/pedophiles and is more about providing a refuge for children that is safe and free from instruments that can cause them harm.

Now, the biggest obstacles to the above-mentioned problems is that the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is constantly riding our collective behinds about "selective enforcement." As a result, we have to either choose to do nothing, or enforce the laws equally. That means that the same adults that we see in a playground playing chess and not bothering anybody have to be told to leave in the same manner that we would have to tell the (obvious) drug users. Totally different groups and one is obviously not causing a problem while the other is, but it boils down to selective enforcement, or "profiling," which we are not legally allowed to do.

With the selective enforcement/profiling thing in mind, I hope you're able to look at the actions of the officers through the eyes of what the officers are seeing and understand the obstacles they face. Also, please understand that though it seems like people are being "picked on," the reality is that the majority of enforcement actions come about as a result of complaints from others.

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