I live in Stuyvesant Town in New York City and we have our own peacekeeping force. They wear uniforms that look like police uniforms, and they painted their Geo Trackers to look like police cars, but they don't even scare the teenagers who smoke weed in the toddler playground every night. Whenever I have to interact with these people, I first remind myself that it's very easy to join the NYPD. The pay there is low, the work is dangerous, but the NYPD is still, by a very long shot, much better than working as a security guard for an apartment building. This means that our security guards had: a) such a bad criminal record they couldn't join the NYPD; b) failed the 6th-grade level entrance exam; or c) or used to be in the NYPD but were fired because they did something so terrible that even the NYPD couldn't' overlook it. So, in spite of paying absurd rental prices, you don't expect a very high level of service when you have to talk to these guys. When one of my neighbors told me that he'd had a run-in, it didn't come as a surprise. His bike had been stolen out of our bike room, the cut lock left on the floor. The room is locked and covered with a camera. He went to report the stolen bike to our peacekeepers, ran them through the incident, told them about the lock and their surveillance camera, and asked what his next steps should be. The security guard said to him, "How do you know it's been stolen?" They did not recover his bike.
