Crime and Punishment

"Police Crash: Conference." Photo by oiyou. October 7, 2006.

When there’s a dangerous situation and the police are involved, it normally doesn’t end with violence.

According to the New York Times, police officers were able to safely arrest a man who shot eight times from a second-floor window of a house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

The shooter, Derek Gallo, had accused his landlord, Michael Pisciotti, of stealing his E-ZPass, but the police showed restraint and did not fire back as the shots hit nearby cars.

In an interview by reporter Ron Howell, architect and designer, Ren, 22, said, “I think that’s really good, when the police hold back and they didn’t do anything. That’s when the police department is actually on the good side. I trust the police department when they do things like that. but sometimes they don’t do that. They shoot first and ask questions later. So some cops are actually good when it comes to doing their job. Others do their job because they can get away with that.

The police were quickly able to assess the situation and were able to get Gallo to surrender to an arrest, but if the police had not responded in the way they had, things might have turned out differently.

In fact, the connection between disorder and crime can be found in the broken-windows theory.

According to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, whose article, Broken Windows, appeared on the Manhattan Institute website, the broken windows theory revolves around the concept that if a window in a building is broken and is left that way, all the rest of the windows in the building will get broken soon afterward.

The theory works for both affluent and poverty-stricken neighborhoods and ordinarily, does not happen on a large scale by avid window-breakers.

Instead, an unrepaired window indicates the lack of care over property so that a single, broken and  forsaken window becomes an open playground with zero repercussions and multiple broken windows.

In 1969, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, tested the broken-window theory by placing a car without a license plate and with its hood up, on a street in the Bronx and one in Palo Alto, California.

The Bronx car was vandalized within ten minutes whereas the Palo Alto car remained untouched for more than a week. However, when Zimbardo used a sledgehammer to damage the Palo Alto car, the car was destroyed within hours.

"Vancouver Transit Police 3." Photo by 2sirius. March 15, 2009.

In both cases, the cars were vandalized by mostly ‘respectable whites’ and showed that untended property invites people to damage the property either for theft or entertainment purposes.

The study also showed that when small things aren’t taken care of, petty crimes become more serious crimes. Violent attacks on strangers are likely to occur as people change their behavior to adapt to neighborhoods that are no longer safe.

With the intention of keeping the streets safe, the controversial stop and frisk practices were practiced by police officers and has stirred up issues of racial profiling and distrust of police officers.

Ren said, “I don’t really like the cops sometimes, on experience, because when they’re looking for a certain type of person, they look for everyone in that book and treat everyone the same without asking anymore information. But on other causes like if there’s something dangerous going on and they actually know it, the police department is very good so I have a little bit of mixed feelings sometimes.”

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the “[New York Police] Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) found that in 2009, Black and Latino popualtions comprised of about 36% of New York City’s total population, but 84% of the 576,394 people stopped were Black and Latino.

In 2006, the NYCLU found that whites were stopped less often than Blacks (2.6% of the 3.6 million White population stopped vs. 55% of the 2.2 million Black population), police officers were twice as likely to find handguns, drugs, or stolen property on White suspects than they did on Black stops.

"Police Arrest." Photo by jennifercw. December 1. 2009.

Based on the New York Police Department’s own reports, the NYCLU also found that “nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent” and that “only 10 percent of stops led to summonses or arrests.”

Ren recounted his own experience with police officers one year ago at a New York City park. “Some young white kid was running around doing bad things. All the information [the police] had was some kids were running around spray painting on the buildings and stuff.”

“Me and my younger cousins were walking in the same area,” said Ren. “We were arrested for that crime and we [weren’t] prosecuted because they caught the kids like a week later. That made me not like the cops because they thought we were doing it because we’re black and we all had like book bags and stuff.”

Said Ren, “They thought because we were black, our race was bad, but we’re not bad. We’re actually live in a nice neighborhood so sometimes race is horrible to police.”

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Tell the World I’m Coming Home

Youthography.com, a youth focused marketing firm, found that young adults are continuing to live at home a lot longer than previous generations.

Photo by philentropist (Parents at MIT)

According to President and CEO of youthography.com, Max Valiquette, Generation Y are going through a phenomenon known as “extended adolescence,” where all things related to  adulthood are being postponed. The 2008 findings by youthography.com found that the trend can be found in larger cities where 54-59% of 20-29 year-olds live at home.

The firm also found “the average age to graduate from university is now 25 (20 years ago it was 23). The average age of first marriage is 28 (20 years ago it was 25) and the average age to give birth to your first child is 29 (20 years ago it was 26).”

Generation Y have often been accused of not making an effort to get good jobs and move out of their parent’s homes, but some say parents are the ones at fault.

Two parenting styles that often come to when discussing extended adolescence are helicopter parenting and cockpit parenting. Helicopter parenting describes parents who hover over their child’s decision-making, whereas cockpit parenting is more extreme and involves parents essentially making all their child’s decisions.

In a recent January 2011 study, “money was shown to be the top concern for Generation Y and that a majority of them were still financially dependent on parents and family members.”

The study, called “The Quarterlife Project,” surveyed 1,253 people and found that “only two in five people in their 20s describes themselves as being completely financially independent.”

The survey results also reveal that, “[t]he vast majority (86%) of people in their twenties describe their current financial situation as “stressful” [and a] few feel that there are financial resources and tools that are helpful to their demographic.

Furthermore, the survey shows that “more than half (54%) of Generation Y believe that most financial services are geared toward older age groups [and that] two-thirds say they wish they had more tools and resources to increase their understanding and knowledge about financial issues (67%) and money management (66%).”

A 2008 poll by Gumtree.com showed similar results with 86% of the 1,082 20-somethings surveyed saying that they felt pressure to do well financially, to form good relationships, and to have a solid career before they turned 30-years-old.

Research has also indicated that some parents are more willing to welcome home their child, while others are not as lenient. In the United Kingdom, a survey conducted by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment found that the sex of the child played a role in whether or not parents allowed their son or daughter to move back home.

The survey shows that “parents are three times more likely to let a son move back home than a daughter.” This may be due to findings that showed that “almost 60% of parents  say they spoil their sons, while only 35% say they spoil their daughters.”

Regardless of the case, both sons and daughters will still need to rely on their parents and relatives in the future. They’ll also need a place to call home -well, at least for the time being.

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Yearbooks, Get Digital or Get Going

With so many things going digital, Brooklyn College has joined other schools in producing digital copies of its yearbook.

On March 30, Brooklyn College students received an email which invited graduating students to schedule their yearbook photo appointment for the Broeklundian, Brooklyn College’s DVD yearbook.

“The transition has been, in my opinion, an interesting one,” said  Vanessa E. Green, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. “Individuals who are used to having a book would probably prefer having a book, but with the technology and resources available, we’re moving forward.”

As stated by the email, “The move to a DVD was made to take advantage of current technology and drastically reduce production costs, thus passing a 75 percent savings on to you.”

On the decision to move from a printed copy to a digital copy, Green said, “It wasn’t easy,  but it was necessary. The cost of producing a book was almost $20,000 which would get you about 400 books. That’s like spending $50 per student. If we weren’t getting the sales and we couldn’t estimate what we needed, we’d end up with extra and not gain a profit back.”

Ingersoll Hall

Liaison of the Honors Academy, Robert Scott, said that with the printed copy, it was about $80.00, but with the DVD, the college is pushing for it it be less than $30.00.

On the similarities and differences between the printed and digital copies, Scott said, “The DVD will have very similar content. We can arrange the images, combine stills and motions, and add sound. We can completely change it around so that in the end, you don’t have to give up anything. You’re adding things. We don’t have to lose anything.”

The students would determine the content and design of the yearbook. They would schedule appointments for seniors, get information out, and decide on the theme. Then the vendors would make copies of the master copy of the yearbook.

“The difficult part would be training the students to learn skills to produce a digital yearbook,” said Green.

The move toward a DVD yearbook began months ago with the idea of having a digital yearbook for the class of 2010.

Scott said that he wanted a yearbook that was low in costs, but high in quality so graduates of the 2010 class have not yet received their yearbooks. The production of the 2010 class yearbook is currently in its final stages and will soon be ready to be copied by outside vendors so that the DVDs can be distributed to students.

Graduates from the class of 2010 did not receive a yearbook. Students still working on last year’s yearbook, but are beginning to work on the 2011 class yearbook.

For the 2011 class yearbook, Green said that she would like the yearbook to have music playing in the background and people speaking.

As for the length of digital yearbook, Scott said, “We would like to aim for an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes. Any longer will be unwatchable. We care about it being watchable, the content, and it being pretty.”

To get students to be more involved in the yearbook making process, Scott said, “We’ve talked about producing a short DVD in the summer which would advertise and inform students about joining the yearbook committee.”

For those students who are interested in learning more about the yearbook, they should talk to the students working on the yearbook. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, students can visit the official room of the yearbook committee, room 152 in New Ingersoll.

For more information on yearbooks going digital, click here.

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