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Category: Police

  • Anti-Union B.S.

    Thanks to the good people at Target for the video explaining just how bad unions would be for their “team members.”

    [You know, if Target really considers me their “guest,” how come nobody ever offers me a drink? They’re not being a very good host.]

    You should watch the video. It’s shocking the way those “union businesses” exploit their workers! “With a union, you no longer have your own voice…. Somebody else will do your talking for you.” The horrors! (yes, I’m being sarcastic)

    Starting salary at Target comes out to around $25,000 a year. But don’t worry, if you have a family, you make so little the government will have to kick in some earned income tax credit!

    I remember when I went through waiter job training with Lettuce Entertain You in Chicago (Papagus on State Street, which did have excellent food). This was back in maybe 1993.

    I remember being told, “At Lettuce Entertain You restaurants, youdon’t needa union.” That was awfully nice of management to tell me. I would think how great my union-free life was whenever I was cut at lunch after doing a few hours of opening sidework and tipping out money I never made. (What? Was I not going to give the hard-working Mexican coffee guy his $2 just because I didn’t make any?) And then, if I still had any money in my pocket, on my hour-long L ride home, I could celebrate my union-free freedom!

    Seriously, though, who can put a monetary value on the ability to flambé a delicious saganikiwhile yelling, “Opa!”?

    [Update: There was a unionization vote at a Target store in New York State. The workers voted against the union.]

  • Canadian Riots

    Canadian Riots

    Americans riot when their team wins. Canadians riot when they lose.

    There’s video of two police cars being torched in Vancouver.


    There was some pretty hard-core looting and dozens of injuries. But even their riots seem relatively polite. Apparently, nobody was shot. From the Vancouver Province:

    Just after 11 p.m., in the aftermath of violence, the street was a deserted war zone. Very few businesses were left unscathed and sidewalks were littered with shattered glass.

    One shoe store had virtually no merchandise left, while the London Drugs on Georgia and Granville, where alarms still blared, had its doors smashed in, and coat hangers and shoes strewn outside.

    Unruly, booze-fuelled mobs also broke into Sears at Robson and Howe. One looter managed to break into Chapters bookstore, but apparently no one bothered entering.

    Looters have never been known for their discerning literary tastes.

    Police, of course, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The Boston Herald reports: “While some members of the crowd expressed dismay that the police didn’t take a more aggressive approach to the early vandalism, others said officers were heavy-handed.”

  • In lieu of prison, bring back the lash

    I have an op-ed in the Washington Post:

    Suggest adding the whipping post to America’s system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison?

    Read the whole article here.

  • Narcotics Officer Says End War On Drugs

    Neill Franklin was my commanding officer when I graduated from the police academy. Now we’re co-authors and friends. Here, on WBAL, he talks about ending the drug war.

    You can also read a good article about Neill Franklin in The Fix.

  • Five Year, or Ten Lashes?

    Josh Rothman writes in the Boston Globe:

    His book is, as promised, a well-reasoned defense of flogging. It’s also an attack upon the penal system.
    …
    It’s hard to say how serious Moskos is being (though my money is on “pretty serious”). Even if you aren’t convinced that flogging is the future, though, Moskos’ deeper argument is still compelling.

  • India Seeks a Good Hangman

    There’s a story about this in the New York Times. But what struck me was this:

    Today, even prison officials encourage death row inmates to draft appeals. “At times, we also help the person draft the petition,” said K.V. Reddy, president of the All-India Prison Officers Association, who opposes capital punishment. “Normally, everybody sympathizes with a person who has spent a number of years in prison.”

  • Oh, Canada

    Macleans, the Canadian news magazine, has a great article and Q&A with me. There’s some very good new material here, even if you think you’re heard everything I have to say about In Defense of Flogging. What is it about the Canadians? Why are their articles smarter and more insightful than ours? And they are awfully nice people. I mean, there must be some bad Canadians out there, but I’ve never met one.

    They also have health care, a homicide rate that is a fraction of ours, and many fewer people in prison. (Though, as I learned in the interview, they might be about to go on a US-inspired prison building boom.)

  • A Sixth Season of The Wire…

    …As soon as the Department of Justice is “ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.”

  • Irrelevant academic research

    By journalist Mara Hvistendahl in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

    I turned to academic papers because I wanted to do more than throw back a fleeting image.

    But scholars are haunted by their own demons. I recently polled a few journalist friends, asking them how often they rely on academic research, and how useful and accessible they find that information. David Biello, environment editor at Scientific American, said he felt spoiled with information, particularly on the subject of climate change. But several others described being led astray by studies that turned out to be immaterial or steeped in opaque discourse. Adam Minter, a journalist covering the recycling trade who is writing the forthcoming Wasted: Inside the Multi-Billion Dollar Trade in American Trash, told me via e-mail that while there is a growing body of work on his topic, “The material is outdated, oriented toward creating new types of jargon totally irrelevant and indecipherable to the industry that I cover, and rarely concerned with primary source material.”
    …
    Beginning in the 1970s, academe became increasingly specialized. That, especially in the social sciences, the reward structure worked against accessibility: Tenure hung on publishing in peer-reviewed journals or with university presses, while more-popular work went largely uncompensated. …”To parody it, the fewer the number of people who could and would read your work, the more sophisticated it must be.”

  • “Honestly, but unreasonably”

    Officer Gahiji Tshamba was found guilty of manslaughter. From the Sun:

    “He drew his gun when it was not at all necessary,” [Circuit Judge Edward R.K.] Hargadon said in court, finding that Tshamba lied about the incident and never identified himself as an officer. “The defendant grossly overreacted and in fact exacerbated this whole tragic set of events.”

    Yet Hargadon also found that Tshamba was not the legal aggressor and that the officer was indeed afraid of Brown, a much bigger man, who set off the fateful chain of events by inappropriately groping a woman’s buttocks after a night of drinking.

    “The defendant was acting honestly, but unreasonably, in defense of himself,” Hargadon said, rejecting harsher verdicts of first-degree and second-degree murder.