SFPD on jet ski outside Giants park. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
Month: October 2014
Those pesky facts
What if everything you thought about Michael Brown was wrong? Do you believe in evidence? Science? Evolution? Global warming? Can new evidence change your opinion? Is your conviction that a police officer killed an innocent surrendering black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, so strong that facts and evidence simply do not matter? Might you accept that there are racial injustices in…
Score one for cop’s camera
KOB Albuquerque reports how a lapel camera protected an officer against a woman’s false accusations that he sexually assaulting her.
Brrrr… it’s cold outside
I can’t help but notice — now that another long hot summer is done and a commie mayor and Al Sharpton are running the show and the police have been thrown under the bus and Obama is president and the ACLU stopped letting police stop criminals and there’s no more stop question and frisk and there’s independent oversight and body…
If crime doesn’t pay, why is it so expensive?
And in case you were wondering, the cost of housing a prisoner in jail on NYC’s Rikers Island is now officially $100,000 per year! You get what you pay for, they say. $1.1 billion dollars. 42 percent higher than seven years ago. “During the same period, there was a 124 percent increase in assaults on the staff by inmates at…
Bootlegging: for cigarettes, alive and well in New York City
Story in the New York Times: The toothpick pressed a hidden button that released a large magnet that kept a secret compartment locked. Deputy Davis lifted the front of the row of shelves like you would the trunk of a small car, and inside were rows and rows, all different brands, of contraband. Not narcotics or pills, but unopened packs…
“Why we need to fix St. Louis County”
Well said by Radley Balko in the Washington Post: When a local government’s very existence depends on its citizens breaking the law — when fines from ordinance violations are written into city budgets for the upcoming year as a primary or even the main expected source of revenue — the relationship between the government and the governed is not one…
“Can’t tase me, bro!”
There’s an excellent article by the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf about the use of a taser for non-compliance. I’ve long argued that, without an actual threat, tasers should not be used for compliance. The taser is too easy, usually not necessary, and sometimes kills people. Now I’m all for people complying with lawful orders; you do not have the right to…
Racial disparity in police-involved homicides: 4:1
Trying to set the record straight is a bit like pissing into the wind. The substantively wrong pro-publica story has now been repeated by every news source I can find. I suspect that over time the idea that from 2010-2012, blacks males 15-19 years-old were 21 times more likely than non-hispanic-whites males to be killed by police will simply become…
Won’t be national news
I’m going to wait till more is known before saying more. But here is yet another — I won’t say “common” but I will say “too common” — shootings that perhaps should but won’t become big national news. There probably won’t be protests. There won’t be unrest. But did police really break into the house of Jack Jacquez and shoot…