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Category: Police

  • Why you’ll never be Batman

    By your second week, you’re unhappy that 90% of the crimes you’ve even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to support his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad, homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid when you saw him punch a lady and take her purse, but you can’t really pursue that kind of thing by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk… in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep there’s a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it’s YOU he’s after.
    …
    The police draw their guns and order you to stop. You turn and grab for the smoke pellet on your belt to help hide your getaway, but unfortunately for you the cops see you reaching for something and open fire… and you suit’s armor is already a mess from the shotgun blast earlier. Uh oh.

    From Mark Hughes [and thanks to a comment by Simmmons].

  • In Defense of Flogging

    In Defense of Flogging


    It’s in, hot, right off the presses!

    Amazon actually has nine copies of In Defense of Flogging in stock, for sale, ready to ship, to be in your grubby hands tomorrow!

    But I just bought eight of them. Still, that leaves one.

    The official release date is June 1. So your local bookstore should have them soon.

  • Warrant? We don’t need no stinkin’ warrant!

    The cops smell weed and bust down a door. The Supreme Court, in Kentucky v. King, say no big deal. It’s a dumb decision, but it’s not such a big deal. This decision simply reaffirms the status-quo.

    As best, the Court’s decision can be described as yet another nail in the coffin of the 4th Amendment. But thanks to the War on Drugs (starting with Alcohol Prohibition) it’s not like this is even the first or fifth nail.

    And the logic of court has been consistent. When it comes to policing and warrantless searches, here are the rules:

    1) Anything police come across is fair game. In other words, if police are there legally, they never have to close their eyes to something illegal (even if it’s not what they first came to look for).

    2) “Exigent circumstances” give police the right to skip the warrant requirement.

    3) Police are allowed to make honest mistakes if they’re acting in good faith.

    4) Police have the rights to look for weapons that could be used against them.

    5) The Court has no desire to read the minds and intentions of police officers (or concern themselves with how hard police knock). It just wants police behavior to be legal.

    Taken individually, it’s hard to see any of these rules as unreasonable. Taken collectively, it means arrests are almost never, as the Founding Fathers intended, conducted with a court-issued warrant. It’s strange to me, since the 4th Amendment–unlike, say, the 2nd Amendment–is pretty unambiguous.

    The Court says: “The text of the Fourth Amendment does not specify when a search warrant must be obtained.” Actually, in omission, it does: All the time. But the Court has long discarded that principle and declared the “unreasonable” word in the 4th Amendment means that “reasonableness” is the key. [Doesn’t this go against the 9th Amendment? But what do I know?]

    Kentucky v. King affirms what the rules of the street have long been: destruction of evidence is an exigent circumstance that gives police the right to bust down a door without a warrant. If the people in the apartment hadn’t made sounds like they were covering up evidence (which they were), police wouldn’t have had the right to break down the door.

    But here the court gets a little saucy: “Citizens who are startled by an unexpected knock on the door… may appreciate the opportunity to make an informed decision about whether to answer the door to the police.” Well ain’t that precious? “When law enforcement officers who are not armed with a warrant knock on a door, they do no more than any private citizen might do.” Wow. Having knocked hard on a few doors myself, I find that hard to believe, especially when the Court follows it up with this: “Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame for the warrantless exigent-circumstances search that may ensue.” Oh, snap!

    Here are the specifics:

    Police officers set up a controlled buy of crack cocaine outside an apartment complex. Undercover Officer … radioed uniformed officers … that the suspect was moving quickly toward the breezeway of an apartment building, and he urged them to “hurry up and get there” before the suspect entered an apartment.
    …
    Just as they entered the breezeway, [uniformed officers] heard a door shut and detected a very strong odor of burnt marijuana. At the end of the breezeway, the officers saw two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, and they did not know which apartment the suspect had entered. Gibbons had radioed that the suspect was running into the apartment on the right, but the officers did not hear this statement because they had already left their vehicles. Because they smelled marijuana smoke emanating from the apartment on the left, they approached the door of that apartment.
    …
    One of the uniformed officers … banged on the left apartment door “as loud as [they] could” and announced, … “Police, police, police.” … “[A]s soon as [the officers] started banging on the door,” they “could hear people inside moving,” and “[i]t sounded as [though] things were being moved inside the apartment.” These noises, Cobb testified, led the officers to believe that drug related evidence was about to be destroyed.
    …
    Cobb then kicked in the door, the officers entered the apartment, and they found three people in the front room: respondent Hollis King, respondent’s girlfriend, and a guest who was smoking marijuana. The officers performed a protective sweep [and] saw marijuana and powder cocaine in plain view. In a subsequent search, they also discovered crack cocaine, cash, and drug paraphernalia.

    Police eventually entered the apartment on the right. Inside, they found the suspected drug dealer who was the initial target of their investigation.

    Now it’s one thing to think, as I do, that the War on Drugs is futile and a very unproductive use of police resources, but in this case it all comes down to whether or not the officers “created their own exigency” by ordering the occupants to open the door. The Court somehow bases its decision on the hard to believe idea that the officers never said, “Open the door.” Now I wasn’t there, but I’d bet, “POLICE POLICE POLICE,” was quickly followed by “OPEN THE F*CKING DOOR OR WE’LL BUST IT DOWN!” The court, eight out of nine majestic justices, respectfully disagrees.

  • “This damn job could be work”

    No doubt you, like most others, think the professorial life is all glamor, fame, leisure, wine, and women. That’s just what I wantyou to think with my frequent vacations and the fact there’s a good chance I might still be in my bathrobe at 3pm (working at home, mind you). Such perks do have their advantages.

    Nevertheless, there’s nothing more mind-numbing than, at 1AM, correcting and editing writing assignments filled with basic grammar errors. I can’t help but wonder why my dear students didn’t learn sentence structure in high-school? Trying to teach basic writing skills–and taking the time to assign and correct writing assignments–may be the most important thing I do for my students. At least that’s what I tell myself. But it’s not what I thought I’d being doing when I got my PhD. Nor is it fun. Hour for hour, I’d prefer to be policing (does that bumper sticker exist?). So here’s to high-school English teachers… or at least the ones that teach good old-fashioned grammar.

    And then, just when I start thinking of complaining, I think of what my dad always said about being a professor, “It beats real work!” And you can’t beat summers off.

    [Update: here’s a great link from the comments section: Death to High-School English, by Kim Brooks. And here’s my attempt at a solution: Grammar 101.]

  • Memories of a Baltimore Crack House

    Memories of a Baltimore Crack House

    One of the nice things about being a police officer is you can explore places that normal people fear to tread (or would get arrested if found). Back in 2001, I wanted a good view to conduct surveillance of a drug corner. So I entered this vacant building. This block has since been torn down.

    #1) 1900 Block of E Eager. 1906 E Eager is the third house (with awning) from Mr. George’s corner laundromat. Two short blocks North of Johns Hopkins Hospital, this corner (Wolfe and Eager) is one of the “hottest” (but hardly the only) drug corners in the neighborhood, heroin and crack are sold around the clock, rain or shine. Most of the customers are locals, but a conspicuous minority of whites drive in from the poor suburbs looking for the purer heroin found in the ghetto. This neighborhood, built around the turn of the century and featuring typical Baltimore rowhomes, formstone, and marble stoops, was all white until the 1950s, middle class until the 70s and 80s, now it is mostly vacant, all black, and very poor. Hopkins and city own most of the property. Hopkins has since torn down most of this area.

    #2) The corner looks deserted. It is just 7 in the morning. But a few moments earlier, there were dozens of people roaming about. But a funny thing happens when you park a police car in the middle of the intersection, turn off the motor (otherwise the picture is blurry), and take a picture. People scatter. Note how everybody is walking away. I didn’t take in personally.

    #3) Approaching the rear of 1906 E Eager from N Chapel St. I was looking for a location to observe drug sales on the corner and out of one house in particular.

    #4) Most vacants are boarded up to prevent junkies from entering, or filled with too much trash and damage to let one safely enter. The rear entrance of 1906 E Eager is wide open. The first time, on official police business, I went in alone. The second time, to take pictures, I brought along a partner, just to be safe.

    #5) The rear room on the first floor is what used to be the kitchen. In the northeast corner are old appliances, partially stripped and peeling lead paint, and remnants of alpine wallpaper.
    #6) Another view of the alpine wallpaper.

    #7) Looking southwest in the kitchen, a few more appliances.

    #8) The southeast corner of the kitchen. Like almost all the metal, the iron stove top grates have long been sold for scrap.

    #9) The front room is the living room. A TV and couch remain. Makes me think the home was occupied into the 1990s. The front door is on the right. It’s interesting to me that a big color TV, once somebody’s prized possession, is no longer worth anything.

    #10) The front door is on the left. Vivid woodland wallpaper remains.

    #11) Looking up the staircase between the rooms. One of the stairs is rotted through, but the rest are in pretty good shape. This is a typical staircase for a rowhome. It’s horrible for police. Often there’s no handrail, and you can easily be pushed down. At the top, suspects could be in either or both directions. They don’t teach you about this in the police academy.

    #12) 2nd floor front room. Nice windows for surveillance of the dealers katty-corner across Wolfe St. Otherwise trash, some drug paraphernalia, a mattress against the wall, two pairs of shoes, and a nicely patterned linoleum floor remain.

    #13) Looking East in the upstairs front room. A nice old heating grate, removed from the wall, hasn’t been taken to sell for scrap (or to an antique store in Fells Point). A small water bottle (nicely labeled “water”) is on the floor. This water would be mixed with heroin and heated with lighter in a metal bottle cap from a 40oz bottle of malt liquor. The mixture is then injected. The only thing in these pictures I manipulated is the water bottle. I turned it so I could photograph the word, “water.” I love how it’s neatly labeled.

    #14) Rear room second floor. View looking rear from the stairs. Two layers of floor cover are visible, along with purple latex gloves, and a black tourniquet to make veins bulge for easier injection. An empty container of cornstarch is on the chair. Cornstarch can be put into empty crack vials and repackaged as “burn,” or fake drugs to sell for a quick buck, mostly to whites coming into the neighborhood. Some of these whites then call the police and tell us they were robbed (always of $10 or $20). They don’t get much sympathy. Locals would know not to buy from local junkies. But selling burn is not without risk as selling burn to the wrong person can get you beat up or killed.

    #15) Looking towards the front in the rear room. Mirrors and black pride posters increase the positivity and create a much nicer overall environment. Tupac, Goodie Mob, and Q-Tip. An almost empty bottle of Pepto Bismal lies on the ground, showing that indigestion can strike anyone.

    #16) A poster and broken clock on one wall is just of above the bottles of piss and cans of shit neatly kept in the corner. (Unfortunately my partner knocked over that door you see on the lower right corner, tipping everything over. I’m guessing the loose door was positioned for privacy. It spilled a lot of piss and really smelled really rank after that. We left the place worse than we found it. This wasn’t low-impact policing. Sorry.)

    #17) A 2000 Sears poster celebrating Black History claiming it’s not just for February anymore: “Every family has a history. We celebrate yours every day, every year.” I don’t think this is what they had in mind.

    #18) Bottles of old malt liquor bottles are filled with piss. I have no idea if any of the plumbing worked. Probably not, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it did. Finding bottles of piss in people’s home was not uncommon. Next to the bottles is a free parenting magazine and a toy box.

    #19) Another view of the main lounge and work area. Given the conditions, this is not where serious drug dealers do their work. This is a place for addicts to shoot up, relax, and scheme how to come up with their next $10 hit.

    #20) A few chairs are set around a collection of empty crack vials. There are also more shoes. Why all the shoes?

    #21) Looking closer, there are dozens of empty crack vials. Every color of the rainbow. The legal use for these vials in for perfumes and oils. The color of the cap on the vial often becomes a sort of brand name: red tops, blacks tops, or orange tops. Other good brand names: Uptown, Bodybag, Capone, and the more generic Ready Rock. Also on the floor are candles, cigarette butts, lighters (lots of them), tin foil, and bottle caps. Heroin and coke is an ever popular mix. John Belushi overdosed on it. Sugar, in the form of candy bars and tasty cakes, can take some of the edge of the beginnings of heroin withdrawal. Or so they say.


    Notice that the cup being used as an ashtray is standing and in use. The shoes are lined up. Paper is on the floor. In this disorder, there is order. But it’s almost inevitable that at some point in time they’ll burn the place down. And when that happens, you don’t want to be the neighbor next door.

    Update: Here’s what those first two pictures look like today (or the last time google drove through):


    [If you just stumbled across this blog for the first time, consider buying one of my books: Cop in the Hood and In Defense of Flogging. Talk about great Father’s Day presents. Christmas, too!]

  • In Defense of Flogging

    The United States now has more prisoners than any other country in the world. Ever. In sheer numbers and as a percentage of the population. Our rate of incarceration is roughly seven times that of Canada or any Western European country. Despite our “land of the free” rhetoric, we deem it necessary (at great expense) to incarcerate more of our people, 2.3 million, than the world’s most draconian regimes. We have more prisoners than China, and they have a billion more people than we do. We have more prisoners than soldiers; prison guards outnumber Marines.

    It wasn’t always this way. In 1970, just 338,000 Americans were behind bars. From 1970 to 1991 crime rose while we locked up a million more people. Since then we’ve locked up another million and crime has gone down. Is there something so special about that second million? Were they the only ones who were “real criminals”? Did we simply get it wrong with the first 1.3 million people we put behind bars?

    Because alternatives to incarceration usually lack punishment, changes to our current defective system of justice are hard to imagine. I am not proposing to completely end confinement or shut down every prison. Some inmates are, of course, too violent and hazardous to simply flog and release. They are being kept in prison not only to punish, but because we’re afraid of them. But for the millions of other prisoners–particularly those caught up in the war on drugs (which I would end tomorrow if I could)–the lash is better than a prison cell. Why not at least offer the choice?

    That prisons have failed in such a spectacular manner should matter more than it does. But it should come as no surprise, since prisons were designed not to punish, but to “cure.” Just as hospitals were for the physically sick, penitentiaries were created–mostly by Quakers in the late eighteenth century–to heal the criminally ill. Like so many utopian fairy tales, the movement to cure criminals failed.

    Make no mistake: flogging is punishment, and punishment must by definition hurt. Even under controlled conditions, with doctors present and the convict choosing a lashing over a prison sentence, the details of flogging are enough to make most people queasy. Skin is literally ripped from the body.

    Is flogging too cruel to contemplate? But then why, given the choice between five years in prison and brutal lashes, would most people choose flogging? Wouldn’t you? How can offering criminals the choice of the lash in lieu of being locked-up be so bad? If flogging were really worse than prison, nobody would choose it. Of course most people would choose the lash over incarceration. And that’s my point. Faced with the choice between hard time and the lash, the lash is better. What does that say about prison?

    [You can read more about this in the Chronicle of Higher Education and also in the May-June edition of the Washington Monthly (available in better newsstands, but not yet online). Even better, BUY MY BOOK, In Defense of Flogging. Agree with me or not, you should find the argument thought provoking and the book a good, short read. –posted in The Agitator]

  • Where’s Peter?

    As you may or may not know, I’m a guest blogger on The Agitator. A clever woman I’m married to pointed out that I shouldn’t have the same things posted in both places so that when when people visit here from there (or vice versa) they’ll be rewarded for their hard-earned click. So I’m going to re-post what may be my most popular post (pictures of a Baltimore crack house). And then, for the next week, I’m going to post different things here and there. But mostly I’ll be posting there.

  • Drug Legalization Gets Republican Cheers

    Al Sharpton and Ron Paul are the two people I can’t imagine ever voting for, and yet… God bless ’em for their contributions to presidential debates! They both liven things up, buck the Party Line, and sometimes just make plain sense (though, alas, not all the time).

    Here’s Paul talking about drug legalization. He makes it sound like a common-sense mainstream conservative issue. Which of course it should be. Maybe soon it will be.

    Making drug legalization a debateable issue (which, honestly, ten years ago it wasn’t) is half the battle. I like to think that organizations like LEAP (which I’m a member of) have helped this happen. Merely considering that the War on Drugs might be, I don’t know, misguided, used to be taboo in polite company. Now a call for heroin legalization gets raucous cheers in Republican debates. It’s great to see this shift because when it comes down to honest debate, the prohibitionists simply can’t win.

    [–Peter Moskos]

  • The Myth of “Rehabilitation”

    I’m skeptical of the very term prisoner “rehabilitation.” It seems rooted in a misguided sense of paternalism, implying there is some criminal class just waiting to be cured by us, the enlightened class. Rehabilitation implying there is something to “habilitate” in the first place. And this hogwash it is the very foundation upon which our whole prison system was invented.

    But the truth is, and many people don’t know this, we don’t even try to rehabilitate. The Wall Street Journal reports that just 6% of prisoners were enrolled in vocational or college programs. Of course some argue against all programs for prisoners. But what’s supposed to happen when they get out (as 95% of them do)? Is this the best we can do with our $60-billion-a-year government-run system of incarceration? Maybe it’s time to try something else.

    Even if we could “rehabilitate,” could you imagine a worse setting than in confinement, surrounded by criminals? And if prisons are just punishment, aren’t there better, cheaper, and more honest ways to punish? (Like, for instance, flogging ? But more on that later.)

    [Also posted at The Agitator]

  • “But is it good for the Jews?”

    In a shameful move, the trustees of the City University of New York voted not to allow my college to give an honorary degree to Pulitzer Prize-winning playing Tony Kushner. It’s the first time this has happened since 1961. Why? Because one of the trustees did some research on the interwebs and found some statements he says are anti-Israeli:

    “I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. “Especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are almost universally misogynist, antigay, anti-Christian.”

    Kushner, according to his own accounts, has criticized policies and actions by Israel in the past, but is a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist, has never supported a boycott of the country, and shares views held by many Jews and supporters of Israel:

    “This has been an incredibly ugly experience,” Mr. Kushner said, “that a great public university would make a decision based on slanderous mischaracterizations without giving the person in question a chance to be heard.”

    You can a letter from Kushner here.