They then opened fire. The authorities would not estimate how many rounds were discharged. Mr. Gainer, the sergeant-at-arms, said he believed that five to seven officers had fired.
Possible Clues in Fatal Chase, but No Motive — Miriam Carey Was in Car When Police Fired, Official Says
Do Carnegie Hall stage hands really make $400,000 a year? I first thought this was some urban right-wing anti-labor myth (I was all ready to file this under “right-wing lies”).
But actually, well, they do. (Or at least close to it.) Holy sh*t!
Susan Adams of Forbes wrote this great piece explaining the why.
In short, why do they make so much money? For the same reason dogs lick their… boo-yah: Because they can!
Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director pulled in $1,113,571. Why not complain about that?
These aren’t government employees. You don’t pay their salary (unless you’re a patron of Carnegie Hall). So just what makes you so upset? These are skilled private workers. And, unlike some manual labor, actually, no, you cannot do their job.
Think of it this way: why is it OK for baseball players and executives to make as much as they can… but as soon as people who actually work and sweat for a living make as much as they can, people start bitching.
John Hammergren. Ever heard of him? Me neither. But he was paid $131 million last year. His net income was more than $1 billion! What the f*ck?! Michael Fascitelli? Doesn’t ring a bell. And he lost his shareholders money last year while being “compensated” $64 million (his net income? $830 million). George Paz? Maybe him I should know him. Because he’s the CEO of Express Scripts. That’s the annoying company that makes me mail-order my asthma medicine and charges me too much for the inconvenience. This is the kind of medicine, like most medicine, that is cheaper when I buy it without “insurance” while traveling in foreign countries. Mr. Paz also lost money for his shareholders last year. Meanwhile his “compensation” was $51.5 million (with a net income of $1.29 billion). About $1,000 of that is mine, motherf*cker!
So more power to the Local One for making buko dough! Don’t be a hater just because you’re jealous. Just tax the high-earning SOBs! And if you want to make more money for your work (and who doesn’t?), perhaps you should start supporting rather than breaking your local unions.
And, just for the record, the stage hands were not striking over money. They were striking to defend the strength of the union that has given them so much power. And, in my humble opinion, the settlement seems fair.
Because of the War on Drugs.
Like fellow “blockhead” Jay Livingston, I can’t believe I’ve been doing this “writing for free” crap since 2007. Like Jay, I decided to look back at my more popular posts. Unlike Jay, blogger/google doesn’t allow one to look at the past year. The choices jump from “last month” to “all time.” So let’s look at my five most popular posts of all time.
Starting with number 5, with 4,629 page views, a 2008 post in which I cast a critical gaze at St. Louis. St. Louis: Coulda Been a Contender. I’ve found that any time you say something bad about a place people call home (whether it’s St. Louis or Newburgh, NY), some people kinda get upset. Who would’ve thunk it? (Luckily, Baltimoreans have thick skin.)
With 4,766 page views, coming it at number 4, is Sneak-and-Peek from 2011. I observed that parts of The Patriot Act are used not to fight terrorism but the War on Drugs. I have no idea why this simple repost from New York Magazine got so many views. I can only guess it comes up high on some google search. Or maybe all the views are from the NSA.
Number 3, with 8,231 views, is a funny picture montage What they think I do. This must have gotten shared on some police sites.
Number 2, with 9,499 views, features my pictures and Memories of a Baltimore Crack House. The Atlantic linked to this. The Atlantic has always supported me and my work. Somebody there must like me. I don’t know who that person is, but thank you!
Coming in at Number 1, my most popular post of all time (by a wide 3:1 margin with 27,623 page views), is the Right-Wing Lies of the “welfare” of Larmondo “Flair” Allen. I’m proud to play a small role in the liberal quest for truth. Apparently some 27,000 folks also received a B.S. right-wing email and had the bright idea to actually see if it true. It’s not.
These twodidn’t die from MDMA. They died from whatever they took that wasn’t MDMA. Why? Because of prohibition.
To blame drugs rather than prohibition is exactly the same as when, during Prohibition, “alcohol” caused blindness, death, and (my own favorite) Jake Leg. These are prohibition problems. Of course during Prohibition, prohibitionists blamed the prohibited drug rather than their policy of prohibition. They still do.
If you’re not ready to end drug prohibition, how about testing booths? Testing booths would have saved these two lives. Clubs in Europe have them. But no, not here. You’d get arrested. Why? Because we want our drug users to buy from criminals and die. I mean, seriously, we don’t have a system that prevents recreational drug users from dying because prohibitionists, perhaps yourself included, say: “it sends the wrong message!” Because preventable death is such a good message. For shame.
Every weekend, throughout the world, countless hundreds of thousands of people take recreational drugs, have a good time, and live to tell about it. The fact that anybody dies from taking what they think is ecstasy is as absurd (and real) as partial permanent paralysis from a shot of booze.
This is far more radical than anything Judge Scheindlin ruled in her well publicized stop and frisk decision.
In a 3-2 decision (People v. Johnson is not long and worth reading in its entirety) the court managed to rule the following unconstitutional:
In a New York City Housing Authority building, which the testifying officer characterized as a “drug-prone” location, the officer observed defendant descending the stairs to the lobby. Upon seeing the police, defendant “froze,” “jerked back,” and appeared “as if he was going to go back up the stairs,” although he never retreated up the stairs. The officer asked defendant to come downstairs, and defendant complied. The officer inquired whether defendant lived in the building, and defendant replied in the affirmative, whereupon the officer asked defendant to produce identification. Defendant immediately clarified that he was visiting his girlfriend, who lived in the building, and informed the officer that his identification was located in his pocket. As defendant moved his hands to retrieve it, the officer’s partner grabbed defendant’s left arm and pulled his hand behind his back, revealing a handgun inside defendant’s coat pocket. The officer seized the gun and placed defendant under arrest.
Seems like good policing to me. This is from the dissent:
Defendant initially told the officers that he lived there. However, when asked for identification, he began to stutter, and changed his story to say that he was visiting his girlfriend. Although defendant stated that he had his identification in his pocket, he began moving his hands “all over the place, especially around his chest area,” which the officers interpreted to be threatening and indicative of possession of a weapon. To “take control of the situation” before it could “get out of hand,” an officer grabbed defendant’s left arm and brought it behind defendant’s back, which caused defendant’s open jacket to open up further and reveal a silver pistol in the netted interior coat pocket. One officer removed the pistol from the pocket, and another handcuffed defendant.
You can also read the New York Times article.
What are police officers now allowed to do? Where exactly in this arrest did police overstep their bounds? I don’t get it. The court said it had a problem not with subsequent stop and frisk, but with the initial questioning!? I cannot fathom (maybe somebody can explain to me) why this isn’t covered under what is known as the “common-law right of inquiry.” See, for instance, People v. Moore, which limited but defined that right.
I don’t see how to downplay this decision and say it’s no big deal (which is my usual reaction). If you were trying to get police to stop policing, telling officers they don’t have the right to question suspicious (and, in the end, armed) suspects seems like the ideal way to do so.
Unless you’re an academic, of course. From Commentary and worth reading in its entirely (if you care about this sort of thing):
Since the 1970s, the government has overseen the establishment of bodies called Institutional Review Boards, and these “IRBs” have suppressed vast amounts of talking, printing, and publishing—even mere reading and analyzing—for hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is utterly unconstitutional, and in stifling research and its publication, it has proved deadly.
[thanks to the Institutional Review Blog]
It’s worth highlighting this excellent comment to a previous post, from a anonymous police officer. You can file this under “if you don’t work, you can’t get in trouble.”
What I’ve learned over my career, and what has frustrated me as a life-long progressively inclined citizen, is that despite all common sense and evidence to the contrary, well-meaning liberal types are stubbornly attached to this outdated narrative of white officers maliciously and illegally harassing innocent black men “doing nothing.” As you just articulated, police work is a thinking person’s game. Unfortunately the critics are often so blinded by ideology that to educate themselves on very basic police procedures which may illustrate, like you stated, that for professionals it’s not all about race.
The real harm from this refusal to engage maturely with the subject matter is the effect this political pressure has on departments, and by extension the most vulnerable communities. I see officers putting blinders on and avoiding perfectly justified stops (not even grey area sophisticated, I’m talking straight probably cause) for fear of allegations of racism. It’s more trouble to deal with the subsequent complaints that now accompanies meaningful proactive police work than to do the bare minimum. And of course, the crime rate sky rockets because the suspects are emboldened by de-policing and ideological cover. So once again, it’s folks in the poor and predominately black neighborhoods, where the well-meaning liberal types don’t have to live, that suffer.
It’s too easy to be for “police accountability,” whatever that means. Good intentions aren’t enough. Hell, even I’m for police accountability at some very large level. But any “accountability” needs to result in better, not worse, policing. That may sound obvious, but it’s not.
I’m curious to see how things are going to work out in NYC with potentially two new levels of “accountability” that will just happen to coincide with a new mayor and new police chief who will have to reap what Bloomberg and Kelly sowed. It is not inevitable that crime will go up! But next year the NYPD will have to choose to do right and continue to improve and police (and stop stops for stops’ sake!) or curl-up into a ball and disengage.
If you create a system where an officer can get banged or sued for doing his or her job, don’t be surprised when officers say, “I want to get promoted. I want to keep my pension. I’m not getting out of this car unless someone calls 911.” Individual actors still act rationally in irrational systems. So-called accountability can all too easily lead to bureaucratic paralysis (for exactly how, see “the Anticorruption Project and the Pathologies of Bureaucracy” in Chapters 10 and 11 of Anechiarico and Jacobs’s The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity.)
New York City paid $167,731 for each prisoner last year. That’s insane. Crazy high. And much higher than even the highest estimates I had heard. The New York Times reports “83 percent of the cost per prisoner came from wages, benefits for staff and pension costs.” That means it’s not going down anytime soon. Rikers Island is overstaffed (despite what Norman Seabrook says).
New York State averages $60,000 per prisoner. The national average cost is estimated to be over $31,000 per inmate.