Yeah, I had never heard of him either. But apparently he was a big deal to a good number people in Baltimore. They liked his music. So what does he stand for? I don’t know. Google and read up if you want. What’s amazing is all the tears shed by some people who had never heard of him. I wrote…
The contrast between this well written piece about a murder victim in the Bronx and that BS pieceabout a murder in Baltimore is striking. Not surprisingly, Al Baker is on the byline of the good piece (Benjamin Meuller is first on the byline): Over nearly three decades, Mr. Perez held court on this block of East 157th Street off Melrose…
Sometimes the police-are-bad set can be so casual in their negative assumptions about police you just might miss it. But it’s worth calling out, because accepting these lies is damaging, potentially lethal if you’re in a high-crime neighborhood. This is buried in Kate Crawford’s article in the New York Timesabout artificial intelligence: Police departments across the United States are also…
My piece over at CNN: Those who have not been following the trial assume there was some justification to the state’s charges. This assumption may be too generous. The prosecution not only failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but as presented, the facts failed to show even evidence of a crime.
One point of Broken Windows policing is that it requires police discretion and intelligence. Yes, rules are important so police act without the bounds of the law, but just because something is against the rules doesn’t mean it’s a Broken Window worthy of police attention. Similarly, just because something is a Broken Window wouldn’t necessary mean it’s against the law.…
There’s a report out by the newfangled NYC Department of Investigation Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD (you know, OIG-NYPD, for short): “An Analysis of Quality of Life Summonses, Quality of Life Misdemeanor Arrests, and Felony Crime in New York City, 2010-2015.” The report is surprisingly good, in terms of data analysis and presentation. (I love, for instance,…
The branches of the poisonous tree got pruned a bit. The Supreme Court says that if a cop makes a kinda illegal stop — “mistaken” is the word the Court uses — and then arrests the person after a warrant check, and then finds drugs in a post-arrest search, the drugs are admissible in court. This might seem to go…
One thing that may be worth considering is the position of former commissioner Anthony Batts and current Commissioner Kevin Davis as to whether or not the officers should have been criminally charged in the first place. Perhaps Batts thought of Gray’s death as more of civil issue (which was the correct position) and Batts pushed back against the mayor and…
I’m calling this trial for the defense. Now I’m only following on twitter, so take this with a grain of salt, but the trial of Goodson — the most culpable of the officers on trial for the death of Freddie Gray — is not going well for the prosecution. Judge Williams told the defensethat they may “truncate their case.” The…
First published many years ago. I’ll just keep doing so. Tom Tomorrow, one of my favorite cartoonists, summarizes gun control and killings quite well. Click through to read. “Barring some seismic realignment in this country, the gun control debate is all but settled–and your side won. The occasional horrific civilian massacre is just the price the rest of us have…