Last time I was in town I noticed the scaffolding around the building from the train. That had to be good news. I think it might be the most beautiful building in the world. It just happens to be in the Eastern. It was a bad shape when I roamed around it in 2000. Now it’s being fixed and saved.
I written about this building before.
Today the Sunhas this story.
Oops. Sorry.
Not really.
The story from the Baltimore Sun is here.
This is Sector One in the Eastern, for those who care.
The Washington Postreports: “A growing number of teenagers say it’s easier to illegally obtain prescription drugs than to buy beer or marijuana.” 19 percent, to be exact (according to the survey from The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuseat Columbia University). 25% say marijuana is the easiest, with 43 percent saying they could buy the drug in less than an hour.
Arguably, regulation of beer and cigarettes is pretty effective. The problem may be, given our absurdly high legal drinking age, that teenagers too often have trouble getting beer. For many, pilfering prescription drugs or buying weed is the easier option.
If the choice is between a few beers and popping pills, we really should encourage responsible drinking.
Like it or not, most teenagers start drinking around 16. Cracking down too much on that either fails or encourages kids to try other, more dangerous drugs.
Besides does anybody really believe that college students shouldn’t drink?
You know what I love about Baltimore? When I’m there, very often I want to burst out singing, “I love you, Baltimore!” just like Tracy Turnblad from “Hairspray.”
Usually, I resist the urge.
These past two days in Charm City were no exception. I never felt so welcome moving to a city as I did when I moved to Baltimore. Now, years later, when I go back, I still feel at home. And there’s always a couch and a cold beer waiting for me.
I go back every year for a Crab Feast at my sergeant’s church. The past two years the crabs weren’t as good as they should be. This year, I’m proud to say, they’re back up to par!
Now if you live in Baltimore, you might wonder why New Yorkers would travel six hours to eat Maryland steamed crabs. There’s nothing like it here! (Nor do we have Bull and Oyster Roasts, for that matter.)
In truth, we can and do steam blue crabs here (from Louisiana). And it is about the crabs. But a church Crab Feast is so much more than just steamed crabs. And just $37 gets you all this.
First the wait to get in. The entry process always moves slowly, even though everybody already has their ticket. It’s like waiting for a roller coaster. But only if, when waiting for a roller coaster, you could smell Old Bay and got to laugh at the role of aluminum foil hidden in the bag of the people in front you to facilitate easy (and prohibited) take out.
When you get close to the basement doors, you can hear the tok-tok-tok of the raffle wheel. That’s usually when I realize where I am!
Given our large group, we had part of two tables. But there’s an old lady (with an amazing hairdo) in one of our seats. She doesn’t seem to like us so we get the priest to sort this out. She won’t move, not even for man of God. First she said, “because my walker is here.” The priest offered to move her walker. “No,” she said, “I’m not moving!” How can you argue? And I’ll be damned if she didn’t move. Not for four hours. Not till she got up to go and sneak a few leftover tidbits in her purse
We went to Plan B and squeezed 12 of us around a table for 10 without any further problem.
And by the time my eyes get used to the florescent lights, everything has come together: the friends, the tok-tok-tok, the Old Bay, the music from the band.
I navigate what I call the “decoy table” (I ain’t eating no celery sticks and macaroni salad at a crab fest! But I do like one sloppy-joe like BBQ beef sandwich and a cup of crab soup). When I get back, the buckets of beer are filled.
And then, what we’ve all been waiting for: a 13-year-old boy dumps the first batch of steamed crabs on our craft-paper covered table.
This year, I even won 3 bottles of booze for a $5 raffle investment. It’s not just the booze I like, it’s also fun to take bottles and be able to say, “Thank you, father!”
Four hours after we came. I couldn’t eat another crab (and I did try). Thank you, ladies, for all your hard work. 
And see you next year! We went back to my sergeant’s house for a bit and then my wife and New York friends went home. I stayed behind. We went to a bar or two. A few hours later, after nearly 10 straight hours of eating and drinking, I was ready for bed.
I was careful not to drink too much because I didn’t want to be hungover for my radio interviews. I succeeded. The next day, Monday, I did two radio interviews in succession. One with Dan Rodricks. The other with Ron Smith. It was my third time on the Ron Smith show, but the first time in studio, which is always nicer. They went well.
After the second interview, I took the light rail from Television Hill down to Lexington Market. I got there at 4:45, 15 minutes before Faidleys closes. As last call goes out, I order two backfin crabcakes for there, 10 uncooked ones to go, and a Natty Bo. While standing and eating (there are no seats), I see a softshelled crab come out all golden and delicious. I say to no one in particular, “I forgot all about that!” The man asks if I want one. Yes! And with that, a few minutes after closing, the very last item goes in the deep fryer.
An female employee explains in wonder, “two backfin cakes and a softshell?! The last time I saw somebody eat like that, they were smoking the wacky weed!” I assured her there was no weed, just a homesick man from New York. Luckily, this woman was long gone and didn’t see me by the time I hit the oyster stand on the way out for a little “desert” (in the form of 4 oysters, 3 clams, and another beer–together that last order cost less than $10, half of what it would cost in NYC).
The were 4 of us slurping our oysters and one shucker.
Somehow, the barbershop-like conversation of black men (and me) turned from smoked pigs feet to road rage:
“…But she got outof her car to knock on my window to tell me I was an asshole!”
“Was she white or black?”
“She was a white woman! Can you believe that?!” [this was not a small man]
“She-it.”
“Maybe you should have told her you cut her off just to meet a woman like her,” I said.
“Yeah, Tell her you’ve been waiting for a woman like her all your life!”
“Man, I ain’t waiting for that shit! With her lazy eye, I couldn’t even tell who she was looking at.”
“That’s so when you get out the car, she can say ‘I wasn’t talking to you! I was just talking [pointing in opposite directions] to him and him!’”
Eventually the man next to me and I got back to talking about food and the proper heat and moisture needed to smoke meat and fish. He took a liking to me when I agreed with him and could tell him why cows are best grass fed (“…because they’re not madeto eat corn!”).
I expressed skepticism that a standard pork chop could ever be good. “They’re too lean to be good,” I said.
“I know. That’s why you gotta put bacon-grease on a pork chop! All the good soul food places do that. They just won’t admit it.” Brilliant! He also recommended rubbing pork loin in red wine before smoking.
One pleasant terrorist fist jab, a run for the the light rail, and 30 minutes later, I was happily half-sleeping on a train back to NYC.
Baltimore, you mean well.
And yes, I love you, Baltimore!
The Daily Newsreports that a cop’s gun “accidentally” fired. No it di’int!If there’s one thing I learned as a cop, it’s that guns don’t fire by themselves. You gotta pull the trigger.
Now there is a chance, if your finger is on the trigger, that you could get hit by something and accidentally squeeze the trigger. But if you did, the bullet wouldn’t hit the driver. No way. With the luck of police, if would probably hit your best friend.
It was a good shooting. Here’s the abridged version of what’s in the Daily News:
Stolen car. Backup called. Four uniformed cops approached, guns drawn. 25-year-old driver repeatedly slams into a parked SUV, tearing off the vehicle’s rear wheel and forcing its rear half onto the sidewalk.
One of the two passengers runs, is caught. The car jumps the curb and drives into a store gate. The driver spins the car about 270 degrees, striking the lieutenant. “As the car hit the cop, he accidentally fired his gun, sending a bullet through a rear window and striking the driver.”
So why would the cop say the gun accidentally fired when he took a good shot that needed to be taken in a tough situation? Because it’s against the rules to fire at or from a moving vehicle (I’ve always liked that “from” part).
Now it makes sense that you generally don’t want to kill the man in control of a car. But sometimes you need to. And this one one of the cases. But the rules don’t allow for that.
What’s an officer to do? There are three choices (and you have 1/2 second to decide):
1) Do nothing, get hit by a car, and have the car zoom off before it crashes into someone or something?
2) Do the right thing, shoot, be honest, and potentially get in trouble for shooting at the driver of a moving car?
Or 3) do the right thing, shoot, tell a little white lie, and be called a hero?
It’d do the latter. So did the lieutenant.
So this accidental bullet just accidentally happened to fly through the car rear window and accidentally go right into the area of the driver’s seat where the driver just happened to be sitting. He was accidentally killed. If this was an accident, what a lucky accident it was!
I wish departmental rules would allow cops to do their job, stay safe, tell the truth, and not get in trouble. But they don’t. And since they don’t, I say well done, L.T.!
Australia police confiscated 15 million pills of ecstasy. That’s a lot of dancing! The ecstasy was hidden in cans from Italy, supposedly of canned tomatoes.
What’s amazing about hauls of these huge sizes is just how little they matter.
Why, what if all that ecstasy had gotten through?! I mean just think, every shipment before this didget through… and nobody was the worse for it. Ecstasy isn’t really dangerous. If it were pure MDMA (the active ingredient) 15 million pills could have been swallowed and nobody would have died (unless, of course one person swallowed all 15 million).
But still, 15 million pills is a lot, almost enough one for every man, woman, and child in Australia.
You want to know how hard it is to stop drugs from coming in? Look at this picture from the BBC:
The article says 15 million pills were in 3,000 cans. That’s 5,000 pills per can. I think that’s doable. These are big cans.
Each layer in the pallet has 72 cans. That means you need only 42 layers of cans. I’m no expert with the fork lift, but I’m thinking maybe you could stack these 8 high(?). So with just maybe five pallets, you could enough E to supply all of Australia for, well, I have no idea for how long Australia needs to go through 15,000,000 pills.
How hard can it be to move a couple of pallets into an economy? Not hard at all. That’s why we’ll never get rid of drugs Not as long as people want to get high.
If you need more proof that something ain’t right in how the NYPD handles Manhattan’s Critical Mass bike ride, you should watch this video on the blog, The Agitator. There’s an anti-police tone I don’t like. And overproduction. And half-assed legal knowledge (there is no Constitutional right you “wave” when you identify yourself to police. Ask Dudley Hiibel. And if you really are concerned about bargaining away Constitutional rights, why not focus on our horrible system of legal plea bargains?)
Anyway… the juxtaposition of quotes from charging documents and video proof to the contrary is pretty bad.
In George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s classic “Broken Windows” piece, they talk about police being told to clean up a park because bums are harassing secretaries. So cops go in and bust heads and then, when the somebody like the ACLU inevitably complains, the brass throw those cops under the bus because they’re shocked. Shocked(!) that police officers would behave that way. Besides, they say, they never gave orders to bust heads.
One of the great successes in applying Broken Windows in NYC was that the chiefs did everything legally and openly. Not always popularly. But they didget the bums out of the subway. And they did so legally.
Why is that important? Because if you put police in an impossible situation and don’t tell them what to do, you shouldn’t be surprised when cops start being stupid.
I didn’t relish being filmed as police officer because things can be taken out of context and used against you. But filming police actions is legal and, especially if you’re in the middle of Times Square, get used to it!
Police departments willing to open themselves to public scrutiny are a good litmus test for a free society (that’s not my idea… but I can’t remember whose line it is). Generally, police in the U.S. do OK on that front. You want to go on a ride-along at your local police station? Odds are you can do it. That’s a good sign. Saying “no cameras” is a characteristic of repressive regimes. It’s not a good sign.
I feel sorry for police officers placed in situations where they are duty bound to fail. But if you area police officer placed in such a situation, remember that you don’t have to join the mob. Nobody can force you to do anything illegal and nobody can force you to lie on a Statement of Probable Cause and sign your name to it. And if you do lie and get caught, you can be damn sure that whoever “made you” do it won’t be protecting yourass!
So what if Iwere ordered to police Critical Mass and told to arrest anybody I legally could? Well, for starters I wouldn’t walk too fast. And come to think of it, I think an important part of policing such a “dangerous” event is making sure tourists, especially the good looking female kind, are safe from danger. I would protect as many as possible.
If I felt I actually had to work because my sergeant was breathing down my neck? I would only arrest somebody doing something worse than just biking down the street. Open container? Scaring pedestrians? Yelling “fuck you” to police without ID? I might even grab somebody off their bike if they wouldn’t stop (I’d look for a pale and thin looking hipster). I wouldn’t knock anybody off.
Finally, no matter what happened, I wouldn’t lie in my charging documents. As I write in my book, I may have violated the spirit of some laws (like loitering), but I never violated the letter of the law. Why risk your career to stop a person riding a bike through Times Square? It’s not worth it!
Oh, and one last thing, I don’t know what you should do if you’re being arrested for no good reason. But screaming and screaming and screaming does not endear you to me, Ms. Lin. By the end of that video, even I was glad to see you go.
I always accepted free coffee. And I’m proud of it. There’s nothing wrong with that. The links I built over coffee helped me be a better patrolman.
Accepting free coffee or a free meal should not be against the rules. But it is. People say it’s the start of corruption, but it’s not.
I mention this because this Chicago police officer was going too far. The Chicago Tribune reports:
A Chicago police officer was suspended for 15 months and ordered to undergo counseling for demanding free coffee and pastries from six Starbucks Coffee houses over five years.
The Police Board of Chicago decided in May to suspend Officer Barbara Nevers, a 14-year veteran, after finding her guilty of using her job as a police officer to intimidate the employees of the coffeehouses to give her free coffee by flashing her badge, handcuffs or gun when they asked for payment.
“I don’t pay for coffee, I am an officer, I get coffee for free,” Nevers, 55, allegedly told employees who asked for payment.
I think there are two rules police should follow before accepting anything for free:
1) Always offer to pay. And I mean always. Just because your last sandwich was free doesn’t mean this one is. If you always offer to pay, you’ll never be in awkward position where somebody feel compelled do something they don’t want to do (like give you something for free). And taking something without paying? That’s theft.
2) Be open about any freebies to your fellow officers. I’m not saying you want to advertise your sources too much. Because we all know that nobody screws up a good thing like a bunch of cops. The reason people don’t give freebies to cops is because then every cop in the city shows up. And at some point a line is crossed. A cup of coffee is OK. Even a meal is OK. A flat screen hi-def TV isn’t (but I have no problem with the discounts cops get here from a large electronics store).
How do you know you’ve crossed a line? When you tell other officers and their eyes bug out and turn away saying, “I don’t want to hear that shit!” Or alternatively, “How do I get me one!!!” If police are surprised, you’ve gone to far.
And it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) to not promise anything in return.
But, you may ask, if people don’t expect anything in return, why would they give police freebies. One, because it’s nice. Two, because they like having a cop around. Three, maybe because you speak Greek. And four, yeah, maybe they do expect something in return. That’s nice. I don’t care what they think. Besides, do you really think I’m so cheap that I can be bought for $1?!
Any blanket prohibition on freebies puts officers in a bad spot and forces them to break the rules. If you can’t prohibit something successfully, it’s better to regulate (where have I heard that before?).
Besides, sometimes it’s rude to say no.
A place on Harford road had great chicken sandwiches. Other cops got a good price. Mine were free. But I always offered to pay. I once asked one of the Greeks who ran the carry-out joint why they didn’t move to a safer location (that plexiglas ain’t as bulletproof as you might think). He said, “Have you seen prices we charge? You can’t get away with that in Greektown.”
Ikarus was a block from home on Eastern Ave. The owners there are wonderful. Even before I was a cop, they were good to me. I found my apartment through them. And have have great crab cakes. They opened at 11. On the unfortunately days when I was still in uniform at 11am (normally I was off at 8am), I could eat for free. But if I were still in uniform at 11am, I probably wanted a drink. And I couldn’t drink in uniform. So I would prefer to change and pay.
McDonald’s give all cops free food. But I don’t like McDonald’s so I wouldn’t go there.
7-11 had courtesy cups. Anything in one of those was free. It wasn’t just for cops. Others got them, too (like delivery men and employees). Nothing wrong there. Plus 7-11 have decent private bathroom.
And Dunkin’ Donuts, well, it depended on who was working there. I like their coffee. I would always offer to pay. Sometimes they took my money. Sometimes they didn’t. Either way, I much preferred a good fresh pot of coffee to a bad free pot.
Yolande, the woman who made the best and freshest coffee (she always knew when our shift change was) never charged. And she remembered how each of us took our coffee. She was so on the ball, so mentally alert, so able to multitask (and yes, so sweet… and good looking, too). We tried to get her to become a dispatcher. But the pay wasn’t good enough. I think she went to work for Coca-Cola or something. The coffee was never the same after that.
If you want to keep a bad drug raid from hitting the papers, I guess you shouldn’t do it to prominent white folk (see picture).
Doug Donovan in the Baltimore Sun reports:
[The Mayor of Berwyn Hights, Prince George County, Maryland] Calvo’s home was raided by the county Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and narcotics officers after a package of marijuana addressed to the house was seized. Police obtained a search warrant and officers broke down their door and shot and killed the family’s two black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase.
But arrests this week of two men involved in a marijuana smuggling ring that allegedly delivers packages of the drug to unsuspecting homes appears to indicate that Calvo was not involved in any illegal activity.
A while back I wrote: “Just because this guy is mayor, does not mean he is not a drug dealer. Maybe he is. Maybe not. Maybe his wife is. Maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t care!”
I’ve always told people that can’t be illegal to receive drugs in the mail, because if it were, why not just send drugs to all your enemies. I made the mistake of applying logic to the war on drugs.
Now seems clear that this mayor is not a drug dealer. And you know what, despite what I wrote earlier, it does matter and I do care. It’s wrong for police to bust down your front door when nobody’s life is in danger. It’s bad enough to do so if you do have drugs. But to do so when you don’t have drugs is far worse.