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Category: Police

  • The cost for weed arrests just went up

    Last week I reported that marijuana arrests in New York City cost the city $75 million per year. In truth, that’s a pretty conservative estimate. One thing left out is the cost of actually testing the drugs people are arrested for. Now if somebody takes a quick plea, the drugs may never be tested. But with 50,000 marijuana arrests, there must be a lot of testing going on.

    But how much does it cost to test drugs? Good question. I’ve always wondered. Well in Nassau County (Eastern Long Island), it’s going to cost them up to $167 per test to clean up their crime lab mess. That’s through a private company. I would hope and assume that the NYPD does it in-house for cheaper.

    Still… 50,000 drug tests could cost most than $8,000,000. Just add that to the bill.

  • Eastern District Officer Shot

    On Harford road by armed guy on a bike. The suspect was also shot. The story in the Sun.

  • Movies: Adjustment Bureau & Precious

    Not that you asked (you didn’t), but here’s what I thought of two movies I just saw:

    “Adjustment Bureau.” Good stuff. I liked it. Cool. Great concept. Good New York movie.

    But really I’m here to tell you about the other one: “Precious.”

    What? “Precious”? Isn’t that so 2009? Yes, but I didn’t see it till 2011.

    Why? Because every time somebody told me it was good I would think: “Yeah, right, like I need to sink into a depression coma for two hours watching a fat, illiterate, HIV-positive Harlem girl get knocked up (twice) by her daddy, brutally battered by her mother and laughed at by a world eager to pound abuse on her 16-year-old ass.” Well it showed up via Netflix and we reluctantly put it on.

    Well, take it from Rolling Stonecritic Peter Travers, the above quote is from his review:

    When I tell people how good this movie is — and I can’t shut up about it — they flash me the stink eye. As in “Yeah, right, like I need to sink into a depression coma for two hours watching a fat, illiterate, HIV-positive Harlem girl get knocked up (twice) by her daddy, brutally battered by her mother and laughed at by a world eager to pound abuse on her 16-year-old ass.”

    Won’t you dickheads be surprised. . . . Sorry, haters, Precious is an emotional powerhouse, a triumph of bruising humor and bracing hope that deserves its place among the year’s best films.

    It’s true. But here’s what the reviews don’t tell you:

    1) The movie is really cool visually; it’s got style and energy. It’s not at all cinema verite faux-documentary and depressing lighting. What other movie would have a father banging his daughter and I’m thinking about bed springs and the cool wallpaper?

    2) It may be one of the most un-politically correct film made since Birth of a Nation. There’s a baby with Down Syndrome and the baby is called “Mongo.” Mongo? “You know, short for Mongoloid.” Ohhh…. More significantly there is a very-bad very-racist mother in this movie. She wants kids for their welfare. She’s also got good aim when chucking an ash tray. She happens to be black.

    It’s kind of amazing the movie gets away with everything it shows. Is the film realistic? Well, it’s certain not typical… but do such situations exist? Yes (though usually the various misfortunes are divided among a few more people). And police often end up picking up the pieces. Though police don’t make an appearance in the movie, police–or at least Baltimore police–will relate.

    Cops I know deal with this crap all the time. But when police start describing their little slice of reality, some people just call them racist. In some ways, watching this movie made me feel like I was back in some of the so-called “homes” I saw in Baltimore’s Eastern District.

    But don’t see the movie for the message or lack of message. See it because it’s an entertaining flick. From start to finish. The acting is great, and, as Bill Cosby used to say, “If you’re not careful you may learn something before it’s done.”

  • Broken Windows (or booze bottles)

    This type of crime bothers me far more than it should. Known (at least to the cognoscente) as the “Broken Bottle Scam,” some S.O.B. bumps into somebody (usually a tourist), drops a bottle of booze, and confrontationally demands $40 for a replacement.

    That’s old-school New York and it’s wrong. Crap like that preys on the weak, makes people afraid of the city, and is just a bastard way to hustle for a living. Parson said he pulled the scam up to 10 times a day. Many people just give up the dough rather than get into a confrontation with a threatening man.

    The story in the Post, the Daily News, and CBS.

    Well Mr. Parson picked the wrong mark: a tourist (with his elderly father) who just happened to be a Swedish Navy Lt. Commander and flew back for the trial.

    But poor poor Mr. Parson, I can hear liberals complain, he wasn’t hurting anybody…

    …Unless you don’t pay. When Palm didn’t pay up, Parson followed him and his father into their hotel lobby and threatened them with a box cutter. .

    He was found guilty and got 20 years. Twenty years?! Really? I don’t have sympathy for Mr. Parson. But 20 years?! When does sentence length become absurd? And why do I, as a New York State taxpayer, have to pay part of what will be close to a million dollars to “protect” us from him? Come on, we’re all smart people. Are you telling me there isn’t a better and cheaper way to deal with bastards like him? Can’t we just cut the guy a check for 10 grand on condition he never comes back? People, put on your thinking caps!

  • Camden brings back some police, firefighters

    The AP story.

  • “Retiree who yelled ‘Gun’ has ‘annoying habit’ of visiting crime scenes”

    “He listens to scanners and races to locations where police are called, a source told the New York Post.”

  • The DEA and the Death Penalty

    Good ol’ Radley has the most interesting take I’ve read. The subject is the DEA seizing death-penalty drugs in Georgia because they were… bought illegally from a foreign country.

  • “My name is Frunk-en-steen”

    “My name is Frunk-en-steen”

    That’s a “Young Frankenstein” reference, for all you kids out there. That’s from back in the days when Mel Brooks was funny. Or at least funny to a seven-year-old. I watched that from the family Datsun with my dad and brother at the old Sunset Drive-Inon McCormick Blvd in Skokie, ILL.

    Man, I sound like I’m getting old… Maybe I am.

    No matter, the movie was funny to kids my age, however old I was. Anyway, kids, dig this (that expression really is before my time):

  • NYC Marijuana Arrests Cost City $75 mil

    So reports the Daily Newsabout a new reportby the Drug Policy Alliance.

    In response, Commissioner Kelly says if you don’t like, call your state senator. Of course, that’s a bit disingenuous because the law is already pretty clear: small-scale possession of marijuana in New York State is not an arrestable offense. The problem is how the NYPD enforces a violation they’ve been told to just write a ticket for. The law is pretty clear: it doesn’t want an arrest for small-scale personal weed possession. But the NYPD gets around this law by “asking” people to empty their pockets (that’s the legal way, at least). But… why?

    I can answer that question, by the way: overtime, paperwork, compstat pressure, and the boss. Remember, in the police world, some arrests are better than others, but all arrests are good. Of course in the tax-paying world and even the crime-fighting world, all arrests are not necessarily good.

    Kelly says the NYPD must be doing something right, because crime is still low. He’s right about that…. But that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with $75 million worth of marijuana arrests. One can make a stronger argument that marijuana arrests increased becausecrime went down. It became harder and harder to keep up those numbers for Compstat and meet certain “productivity goals.”

  • Mistaken-Identity Police Shootings in Black and White

    The death of a Nassau County police officer got me thinking about cases of police officers shot by other cops. There’s the belief out there that black officers are much more at risk of being mistaken for suspects than are white officers. It’s also been said (by me?) that such accidental mistaken-identity shootings almost never happen to white officers. Officer Breitkopf is white.

    So this afternoon I went to the Officer Down Memorial Page. I’ve found the data at Officer Down to be quite reliable and comprehensive. I looked at all deaths involving accidental police shooting of police officers. This does not include officers who were shot and lived. Or officers who didn’t meet Officer Down’s criteria for being killed on duty. But generally when officers get in any such situation, they’re considered on duty. And I wouldn’t expect including those data to change the basic findings.

    I went back as far as 1960 and looked at the descriptions to determine which officers were killed after being mistaken for suspects (ie: not “friendly fire” or accidents–though I should point out that training grounds seem particularly prone to accidental lethal shooting). At least 47 officers have been killed in such split-second cases of mistaken identity. I then looked at the pictures of the deceased officer to judge race (they were all pretty clear cut). I then coded for the circumstances of the killings based on the description given. (So, what did you do this afternoon?) I ended up selected only those killed since 1976 because half of those between 1960-1976 didn’t have pictures. That brought the total number of officers number down to 28 (which was lower than I expected).

    Here are the basic facts:

    Since 1976, at least 28 officers have been shot and killed by other police who thought the police officer was a bad guy with a gun. (Or bad girl. Two officers killed were women, which surprised me.)

    15 of these officers were white; 11 were black; 2 were hispanic. (I was surprised to find that so many white officers have been killed in such circumstances. Before yesterday, I knew of exactly two cases, and one of those was from 1972.)

    3 officers were in uniform (all 3 of whom were white); 22 were in plainclothes. (And there were a few unknowns.)

    19 were off duty before the incident started; 9 were on duty.

    Racially, the only thing that jumps out is that 8 of 11 black officers were off dutyand 14 in 15 white officers who were on duty.

    39% of officer shot and killed in cases of mistaken identity were African-American. But what does that mean? What’s the denominator? Should it be the percentage of black officers? Do we even know what percentage of police nationwide are black? I asked the kind people at the National Black Police Association if they could tell me. I got a quick reply saying they didn’t have such a number handy, but would guess around 10 percent (or 80,000 out of 800,000) of police nationwide are African-American.

    Or perhaps the denominator should be the race of those working plainclothes? Or narcotics (about one-third of cases I could determine involved drug enforement)?

    Or maybe we should look at the race of officers living in higher-crime districts? That seems to be the biggest contributing factor with regards to black officers getting involved in off-duty incidents.

    Perhaps it’s more important to look at the demographics of the area in which the shooting took place? Or the race of the suspects in the incident? Or the race of the police officer who fired the lethal shot?

    Of course most police officers officers are not black, so compared to white officers, black officers are disproportionately killed (about four times more likely) by other police mistaking them for suspects. Is this because police are much more likely to perceive any black man as a threat? Or are there simply more cases in which minority police officers end up in a situations where they’re out of uniform and holding a gun? I, for one, was surprised to see the issue isn’t so, well, black and white.