Imagine if this kind of “mayhem” took place on Prospect Park West and 1st Street, which has a similar street layout to where the accident took place. I am sure your fellow Brooklynites would be up in arms about “excessive force” and “putting innocent bystanders in danger.”

Also, as you are well aware from reading Streetsblog, it’s possible to get arrested for quality-of-life offenses, like running red lights while taking part in Critical Mass. I’m therefore skeptical that “20 arrests” is as descriptive a statistic in crime-fighting as “20 wins” is in major league baseball.

No one wants to see a police chase and a shootout, especially since it poses a threat to innocent bystanders and luckily here in NYC we have relatively few considering our size. But this wasn’t some minor property crime. This was bad people with history, armed.

That said, we can totally agree on the better street design aspect of your post and how better street design would minimize the opportunity for high speed chase in residential areas.

I’m not condoning robbery at gunpoint, but I think the NYPD’s firing live rounds at property-crimes suspects is a little reckless. What if one had hit a bystander?

Maybe if we had complete streets in CB 12, instead of the drag strips that the present design encourages, the perpetrators would have hit a speed bump, crashed into a tree planter, and lived to face justice.

Those sites provided a good deal for those who worked there and the places they were located in. Hence the push for federal subsidies, paid for by the next generations of people who never received those advantages, to keep things as they are, or were. And the battle in Congress to keep excess dealerships open somehow.

No one is thinking about what could replace them. Decay and abandonment?

http://www.heartlandrebusiness.com/articles/JUL09/cover1.html