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Category: Police

  • Oh, please!

    Here’s a non-story: NYPD Commissioner Kelly didn’t disclose that the Police Foundation paid his dues at the Harvard Club. My God, who cares? Good God, Lenny, I know you hate Kelly with a passion bordering on obsessive (and that’s putting it mildly), but is this the best you got on the guy? If so, you should have skipped it and talked more about Jennifer Hunt’s great book.

    I wish the Police Foundation would pay mydues at the Harvard Club. I wouldn’t mind being a member. And I did go to Harvard. I’m just too cheap to join.

    Well, should Kelly have disclosed it? I guess if them’s the rules, he should have. But they shouldn’t be the rules. The rules are too strict. Nothing wrong with a free cup of coffee. And nothing wrong with the commissioner taking people out on the Police Foundation’s dime. Assuming the police commission isn’t a crook (what do Bernard Kerik and Ed Norris have in common?) can’t we let him do his job? And no, I don’t want to know who he was with.

  • “Excuse me, sir, do you know where I can find…

    “Excuse me, sir, do you know where I can find…

    …Oh, never mind. I see it now. G2. Thanks anyway.”

    It’s a sign from Athens send by the woman who runs this great bike tour company in Greece.

    The weird part is that for the life of me I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be (and I speak Greek!).

    [Update: I think I figured it out. It’s supposed to say fishing wharf.]

  • National Service

    Mark Shields has a good column about a speech by Robert Gates, “the one memorable speech of the 2010 campaign”:

    Gates spoke directly of an avoided undemocratic reality — that most Americans have grown detached from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the great civilian majority has come to view military service as “something for other people to do.”

    Those “other people,” as Gates reminded us, come overwhelmingly from a “tiny sliver of America” concentrated in the South and the Rocky Mountain West, in rural areas and small towns.

    There is the distinct possibility that eventually the U.S. military and its leaders will be estranged — culturally and geographically — from the civilian population it is defending.

    Then Shields quotes my father:

    Nobody understood this as well as the late military scholar and ex-GI, Charles Moskos, who told me that the U.S. “national interest is determined not so much by the cause, itself, but instead by who is willing to die for that cause.”

    Moskos continued: “Only when the privileged do military service, only when the elite youth are under fire does the nation define the cause as worth the blood of our young people.” He added that, in both World Wars, the British nobility had higher casualty rates than did the British working class.

  • A Dog That Barks

    A Dog That Barks

    White dog… that’s moonshine, hootch, likker. Who hasn’t dreamed of distilling up a little batch in their basement (What? Is it just me?). It’s also generally illegal. Max Watman, I nice guy I met once (what’s how I learned about his book) has written a gem, Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine.I’m enjoying more than any other book I’ve read in a while. Well written, informative, and with a very lively and personal style. I’m about 55 pages from the end, but I wanted to post his guide to “How to Be a Criminal,” scattered throughout the book, based on people who failed (interestingly and tellingly, the fourth commandment of crack, never get high on your own supply, does not make the list):

    Item 1: Do not, while on probation or having recently come to the attention of the law, engage in large-scale felonies with strangers.

    Item 2: Surprisingly, drugs and crime don’t mix. Stoners will forget what they have to remember, crackheads are unreliable, meth heads are crazy. Even drunks–they’ll either get pulled over for driving drunk or they’ll get in a fight.

    Item 3: Do not write down the keys to the code. If you can’t count to ten, think of another code.

    Item 4: Read up on the law you are breaking.

    Item 5: It’s important to understand that criminal justice attends no only to the crime committed but to every ancillary activity involved in the perpetration, and especially perpetuation and concealment, of illegal activity, and that those acts, because they suggest intent, because they are part of a scheme, often carry heavier sentences than what we would normally think of as the illegal act. If you view it in a forgiving light, the law could be seen to forgive reckless impulse (“I was lonely and drink and I picked up this hooker”) and punish a pattern of concealment and manipulation (“I set up this bank account so that I could withdraw cash without my wife noticing and pay for hookers”).

    Item 6: Do not hire as underlings people whose next strike will be their third.

    Item 7: Buy equipment at tiny mom-and-op hardware stores with no computer systems and no video.

    You can buy the book here.

  • Smoke and Horrors

    Smoke and Horrors

    Charles Blow of the New York Times write about drugs (and yes, that is his real name), specifically about the racial disparity in marijuana arrests. Some people just don’t seem to care, but it seems to be a fundamental issue about fairness in justice.

    Whites and blacks smoke weed at nearly similar rates (actually whites smoke more), and yet blacks get arrested for it far more often. This report reflects more good work by Queens College professor Harry Levine:

    From 2006 through 2008, police in 25 of California’s major cities have ar­rested blacks for low-level marijuana possession at four, five, six, seven and even twelve times the rate of whites.

    The City of Los Angeles, with ten percent of California’s population, arrested blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites.

    These racially-biased marijuana arrests were a system-wide phenomenon, occurring in every county and nearly every police department in California. They were not mainly the result of individual prejudice or racism. In making these arrests, patrol officers were doing what they were assigned to do.

    Doesn’t that matter?

  • Change is bad

    Yeah. I changed the layout of my blog. Honestly, I should probably care more about how my blog looks, but I have other things to do.

    So why’d I change anything when I, of all people, know damn well that change is bad?

    Because I wanted to make the text column wider. It was (for me) annoyingly narrow. It didn’t hold much text, and I had to manually re-size almost every video I embedded. But to make the text column wider, I had to pick a different template. I went with… simple.

  • “So, I can’t call you no more?”

    Says the rapist to his victim. It led to his arrest.

    Timothy West, who broke into a stranger’s house and raped a woman at knifepoint, wanted to continue this beautiful relationship. The 21-year-old victim wanted to get him confessing on tape.

    Victim: “What do you mean, I’m mad at you? Of course, you know, I don’t know you like that, and just over here, raping me and everything with a knife in your hand. Damn! What you gotta say about that?”

    Timothy West: “Sorry. I apologize.”
    …
    Victim: “You just broke into my house, yo. I’ve never seen you before …. You try to rob me, then you rape me,”

    Timothy West: “I know, man, that s**t is crazy. I apologize, though.”

    Victim: “But do you understand what you did to me? Like, has it hit you what you’ve done to me? Like, how do you expect me to be cool with you, and just expect a simple apology. I’ve never seen you before, and you just walk up to my house with a pocket knife, and then you didn’t find anything from me, no money, so you raped me! And then you expect me to be cool with that the next day? I mean, what’s up with that?”

    West: “So, I can’t call you no more?”

    Victim: “Wow, I don’t even know what to tell you.”

    This happened in March, 2009. Why does justice take so long?

    There’s a bit more here and at the above link.

    [Update: West was acquitted]

  • What Muslims Wear

    What Muslims Wear

    My wife sent me this: Muslims Wearing Things. She would also like to point out if Muslims were going to crash Juan William’s plane, they probably wouldn’t be dressed in conservative Muslim garb. That should make Juan a little more relaxed next time he’s in an airport.

    Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s crazy that NPR fired Williams for expressing his own irrational personal fears. But no, it’s not OK to think terrorist every time you see a Muslim (or a Greek priest… I wonder what ever happened to that idiot who attacked a Greek priest because he thought he looked like a Muslim terrorist.)

    Now you may also get the willies if you think there’s a Muslims on your plane. I unfortunately suspect many if not most Americans share this fear. But that doesn’t make it right. Thinking every Muslim is terrorist is just as wrong (and absurd) as thinking every black man is rapist, every Jew is money-grubbing shyster, every gypsy is a thief, every gay man is a pedophile, every cop is a bastard, or…. you get my point. I think I’ve said enough.

    Update: In the case of the marine reservist who attached a priest for looking like a Muslim terrorist, all charges were dropped. The priest didn’t stick around America to press charges. To rehash, this idiot chased a Greek priest for three blocks and beat him with a tire iron while telling a 911 operator (listen to the call here):

    I got a guy who’s trying to mug me. … He just grabbed my f—— b—- when I got out of my car. … I just hit him with a tire iron and he’s trying to take off. He said he was going to f—— kill me. … This guy’s not gonna come back. I wanna knock him out.
    …
    He looks like a Middle Eastern guy, a Taliban guy. … He straight up looks like he came from Afghanistan … knows where I live and knows what I drive and I’m not letting him come back. I’ll kill him. I got a wife.

    So let me get this straight. This priest, who says he was lost, looked like he was from Afghanistan, tried to rob the idiot, then grabbed his balls, and then yelled “Allahu Akbar.”

    Ohkaaay.

    The prosecuting lawyer called this ‘roid rage noting the attacker is “a 220-pound pharmacy manager who blogs photos of himself flexing his muscles and had worked as a drug informant for police.”

    The attacker, after charges were dropped, says he forgives the priest. Gee, that’s mighty Christian of him.

    Here’s a picture of the attacker.


    He’s not gay at all.

  • Stupid-mobiles (II)

    The stupid mobile gets more press, this time in the Times, which has a few more details. The NYPD has ordered 30 and they cost 8,900 though that’s retail and I’m sure the NYPD pays much much less, if anything.

    For patrolling a big event or traversing big distances, T3 scooters seem like ideal tools, an energy-efficient mix of speed and agility. For navigating a semicrowded subway station, they can seem a little ridiculous.

    Most people who need to get from the Seventh Avenue side of the 42nd Street station over to the shuttle platform just hop down the quarter-flight of stairs. Some take it in a single step.

    But two officers on scooters last week had to detour to the wheelchair ramp, then daintily zigzag their way down like a fashion victim in too-high heels. Then, as they threaded their way through the commuters, going barely faster than they would on foot (but wearing tough plastic helmets just in case).

  • Back in the Days…

    Back in the Days…


    November 1922. Washington, D.C. “Woman’s Bureau, Metropolitan Police Dep’t. Telephone calls bring prompt attention.”

    From Shorpy.com.