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In the spirit of Lee Sigelman, I enjoyed a beautiful bike ride yesterday morning which ended up at one of New York City’s famed West Village cafes. While there, I observed a couple of local police officers coming in for coffee, and they seemed to be paying a different price that I was. I relayed this observation to my friend with whom I had been biking, and he responded that normally (he’s a writer, so, much as one would expect from writers in NYC, hangs out in West Village cafes a lot) it seemed the local police didn’t even pay at all for their coffee.
As someone who has a written on corruption, this got me thinking. On the one hand, this seemed like an extremely nice thing to do for local public servants. The police are not highest paid residents of the West Village and they provide a valuable service to the residents and small businesses in the neighborhood, so why not give them a free (or heavily discounted) coffee?
The problem is, where do you draw the line? If three of the four coffee shops in a neighborhood give out free coffee to the police, does the fourth one have to? And if it is OK to give the policy coffee, then how about a bagel? If a bagel’s fine, what about breakfast? And if breakfast is OK, then how about dinner? And why stop there - surely the copy store and the stationary store will want to show their appreciation as well. Some small businesses may not have an appropriately useful gift from the shop for the local police, so why not just give them money? And of course, why stop with the police? The fire department also provides useful services, as do local building inspectors, and so on. At some point, this begins to resemble a much more corrupt society, where cash is needed to secure services that are supposed to be provided by the state.
Ultimately, a coffee is probably just a coffee, and what I witnessed is unlikely to have much effect on quality of governance in New York City. Still, it would be interesting to see if societies that prevent this kind of petty corruption do so absolutely —i.e., not even free coffee given out to local policemen—or if there is some sort of natural break point, below which is just being nice and above which is clearly corruption. When I asked my friend where you draw the line, he thought coffee sounded like a good place: free coffee is fine, everything else is problematic.
But then what about donuts?
[Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]
c.red on May 08, 2011 9:04 PM:
Seems kind of a silly premise to me like most of these type of slippery slope arguments are. Let common sense prevail; as long as the gratuity is voluntary no harm is done.
If you absolutely have to have a rule for everything then put a cap, no gifts worth more than $5 or something. Sure it will be abused by someone, but it would no matter what, and that is why internal affairs departments exist.
It is not like the merchants don't get anything out of it; in high school I worked late night in a gas station, we always had free coffee for the police and had a reputation as a place for them to be. I can't say it specifically had any effect, but we never had any problems and other places around us occasionally did.
Shantyhag on May 08, 2011 11:22 PM:
When I was a kid, one of my high school jobs was working at Burger King. It was standard policy-- literally, part of the training-- to give police free meals. The idea was that if the police were likely to make the rounds, there'd be less trouble. It's not a policy that bothered me then, and it doesn't really smack of corruption to me now. A free Whopper seems a long way from a bag of cash from a guy running numbers.
alix on May 09, 2011 12:18 AM:
I worked as a waitress in a downtown Chicago restaurant. We had a policy that policemen in uniform always got free food. The reason was a good business one--- no one was likely to rob the place where cops were going to be. I didn't have any problem with it, then or now. It was cheaper than hiring a security guard, and cops were good tippers too.
And it was just a free meal, not a $100 bill. Not much of a corruption.
Ted on May 11, 2011 10:31 PM:
I think it would be a lot better to pay the police a comfortable wage, so that they could go into the coffee shop and buy coffee like anyone else. It's a shame that we think that somehow public servants ought to get paid less, simply because their employer happens to be the city.
I don't disagree with alix' rationale. It makes good business sense. But what alix is describing is classic bribery: you're giving someone a benefit so that they will treat you differently. This is corrosive to the police, because they are likely to develop a sense of entitlement, and it's corrosive to citizens, because citizens who see this kind of behavior can't help but wonder about it.
Citizens should have every reason to respect the police, so doing something that undermines that respect is a bad idea. It's not immoral. It just doesn't work. Police should feel as much like ordinary citizens as they can. It's a hard job, and there's always going to be a separateness about it, but it's a mistake to encourage anything that makes that worse.
Rick B on May 12, 2011 1:01 PM:
We have the busiest 7-11 in a major city of 3/4 a million people. It is also in a low-income neighborhood, one in which the city has concentrated all the homeless shelters and support for the homeless. The 7-11 is located 2 miles from one police substation and a mile (across rr tracks) from another. The 7-11 provides free coffee and fountain drinks to the police.
The 7-11 usually has a police car in the parking lot. It is essentially a sort of police sub-substation. A new manager came in a couple of years ago and stopped the free drinks policy.
The number of police at the 7-11 declined sharply. I live half a mile away, and the crime rate in the neighborhood immediately jumped. Fortunately the new manager left within a few months and the new manager had good sense. The free coffee brought the police back to the neighborhood where there were badly needed.
I pay $0.99 a cup for the same refill the cops get free. I also get the opportunity to speak regularly to my neighborhood police, and the homeless people from the shelters do a lot less begging around the corner from the 7-11. I trade at the 7-11 instead of the closer convenience store which does not give the police free drinks - and where the night manager was murdered by a Meth-head several years ago.
The experiment conducted by the idiot new manager convinced me that the free coffee and fountain drinks is the better policy all 'round.
No, they don't get free donuts. Just coffee and slurpees.
AND thanks to Washington Monthly for returning the Preview option!!!
paul on May 12, 2011 1:43 PM:
I think Rick B's comment illustrates both the good and the bad about this policy perfectly. Who knew that there was capital punishment for not offering free drinks?
John Hoffman on May 13, 2011 6:39 AM:
A long time ago, when I worked at a Hardee's in Illinois, we gave cops in uniform free coffee and a discount on their meals.
We regularly had State Police, Deputy Sheriffs, and local police in the store.
tanstaafl on May 13, 2011 11:22 AM:
My first reaction to this was c.red and shantyhag that this just didn't seem like a big deal.
However, after reading the comments by Alix, Rick B and John Hoffman, I have changed my mind. According to them, free coffee and free or discounted food is not only common but it has a major impact on the behavior of the police to the significant detriment of every business that doesn't follow that policy, and to the detriment of everyone that doesn't live in a neighborhood near a business that has that policy.
As innocent as it seems on the surface, this seems exactly like corruption to me.
Crissa on May 13, 2011 9:28 PM:
There is also the problem of police (or other first-responders) ordering and then leaving without paying - or ordering and leaving without receiving their order. So there are reasons to give leeway.
But it is to the detriment of poorer businesses that cannot afford to give out free meals.
Alan on May 14, 2011 9:48 AM:
I agree that this argument certainly overlooks a slippery slope. However, after having worked as a police officer for over 13 years, I have seen this first hand.
Police officers who receive this sort of treatment do play favorites with businesses. In fact, certain officers will refuse to visit certain establishments simply because they do not offer this type of treatment. One officer refused to give up his half price or free breakfasts even after finding out that the restaurant owner had been a suspect in several offenses.
Police officers also definitely become accustomed to this type of treatment to the point that they feel entitled to it. I've seen officers become extremely irate when they found out that their meal wasn't going to be discounted. I've seen other officers hang out at a convenience store for hours each shift just drinking free coffee or free soda and accomplishing nothing. Sure, it makes that one particular store a safe place, but what about the rest of the municipality that's being neglected?
As police officers, we're supposed to remain unbiased in the performance of our duties. That means no special treatment for anyone. Why shouldn't we be subject to the same?
Darsan54 on May 17, 2011 10:34 AM:
An editor friend once said about his newspaper's policy to never accept anything at a press op, "I'm not saying I don't have a price, but it's a hellva lot higher than a cup of coffee and danish."