The original suspect from New Years, who escaped when another guy sucker-punched the arresting officer, was caught.
Category: Police
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The more things change… January 12, 1830
Paperwork:
The Superindendents of division will always in future, during Sessions, send into this office a list of the names and numbers of the men who are obliged to attend the Sessions the follow day, and a Serjeant will always take care to be sufficiently early at the Session-house, and each man will report to him his arrival and the nature of his business; the Serjeant will then endeavour to ascertain as nearly as possible how long each man is likely to be detained, and will make a note of the hour at which the business of each is finished, and will then order him to return to his duty.
In the evening the Serjeant will send to the Superintendent of each division, in writing, the name of each man of that division who attended, and the hour at which he ought to have returned to his duty.
Source: Metropolitan Police. Instructions Orders &c. &c.1836. London: W. Clowes & Sons.
[I’m on break. Regular blogging will resume in February.]
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Tough Baltimore arrest
Monument and Rose. 325 Post. Cop gets sucker punched trying to take a guy into custody.
Anybody know if the original 30-1 got away? Was he backing up time? (email me at mail@petermoskos.com if you don’t want to post a public comment.)
30-2 is lucky he didn’t end up like like “Fat Herb,” 11 years ago.
And is the term “30-1” still even used among Balto PD? Or was I, a G series, part of the last generation to use it, as we were the last to fill in a box 30-1?[thanks to Gotti and LvT for the link. The pic is mine.]
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Under 200
In 2011, there were 196 murders in Baltimore, the lowest number since 1977. From the Baltimore Sun:
The drop extends an overall downward trend in gun violence here since 2007, the year Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III took office.
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During the crack-fueled drug wars of the 1990s, killings in the [Eastern] district sometimes topped 80 a year. Last year, there were 27 killings, and only one since Oct. 17 — nothing to brag about and yet a remarkable number for this beleaguered area.
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The new priorities led to a sharp drop in arrests, with less than half as many people arrested last year than the 100,000 locked up in 2005. -
Favorite Books of 2011
One of Mother Jones’s favorite books of 2011 is In Defense of Flogging.
It makes a fabulous Christmas stocking stuffer, for all you Old Calendarists out there (just 10 shopping days left).
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Merry Christmas
I hope everybody goes gaga when they find a nice new Victrola under the tree!
[thanks to Bob]
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A Christmas Message From America’s Rich
From Rolling Stone:
The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people [the very rich] live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line.
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Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon — the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” — … orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.
Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.
What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.
As someone from a middle-class public-school background who has rubbed shoulders with the 0.1% (that’s what happen when you go to Princeton and Harvard), what bothered me about the uber-rich I met in Princeton (you don’t meet so many uber-rich in grad school) wasn’t that they were rich… It was their absolute sense of entitlement! They never counted their blessing. They didn’t need to. They knew the game was rigged and that were going to win it.
Now I benefited from the same game, and by most of the world’s standards I’m uber-rich (something mostly due to where and to whom I was born, for which I’m very thankful), so I can’t complain too much.
No, what bothered me about these people–our current masters of finance and industry–is that they somehow believed that they had earned their privileged position. And I’m talking about 18-year-old prep-school kids who at that point had never worked a day in their lives!
They had convinced themselves that somehow, because their parents were rich and they went to Princeton, that theyhad won a meritocratic game. They thought they were better–not just richer, mind you, but better–than working people, especially the janitors and cooks and service workers (students and professional alike) who took care of them (and had made the best of their life’s situation). I saw it all the time. The rich really are different than you and me: they have no clue.
[thanks to Alan for the link]
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The more things change… December 21, 1829
The Constables are not, in any instance, to ask for a Christmas-box from any of the inhabitants upon their beats; if any money is offered to them as a Christmas-box they must report the circumstances to their superior officer, who will ask permission from the Commissioners for them to receive it as in other cases.
What? No Christmas box?! Somehow it makes me think of the “no fruit cup” line from “High Anxiety.”
Source: Metropolitan Police. Instructions Orders &c. &c.1836. London: W. Clowes & Sons.
[I’m on break. Regular blogging will resume in February.]
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Ron Smith, RIP
Ron Smith was a newspaper columnist and radio host on WBAL in Baltimore. He died two days ago. Ron was a conservative and a libertarian. Suffice it to say, I’m not. We agreed on a few issues–like the stupidity of the war on Iraq and the war on drugs–but we disagreed on a lot more. And still he liked me; and I, him.
I was on his show maybe a half dozen times, sometimes by phone from New York, but whenever I was in Baltimore, it seemed like I could just drop by the studio for a chat. The discussions were simultaneously serious and lighthearted, and also much more intellectual than most anything found on commercial radio. His talk show was passionate (interrupted, unfortunately by far too many commercials) and based not on jingoism and ignorance, but on analysis, knowledge, and an keep understanding of history and current events.
I liked the repartee Ron and I developed during our time on air, and he seemed to take me under his wings. At the end of yet another appearance promoting Cop in the Hood, as the show came to a close, he looked at me with a big smile and said, “All right, kid, I’ve done everything I can for you. Now get out of here!” A true mensch.
