My (straight) brother in Amsterdam sends me this email with the subject, “blue is pink.” In Amsterdam, the gay pride boat parade is for everybody:
Happy Gay Pride!
Do the police not have a gay parade boat where you come from?
The inflatable hat is a nice touch. Caption on the boat says, “The police are for everyone,” meaning, as I interpret it, gay cops and gay citizens.
Andrew
It’s crab feast time of year. I’m off to Baltimore. Crabs will get ate. Beer will get drunk.
In Harpers, Dan Baum has the best piece you’ll ever read about carrying a concealed gun. Why is it the best? Because it doesn’t fall into any of the usual left-wing-hate-guns right-wing-love-guns cliches.
Along with guns, Baum likes rational drug policy, bicycles, hats, food, and my book (we have much in common). He’s, you know, your typical gun-loving liberal Jewish boy from New Jersey (errr).
Baum is also the author of the sleeper hit Smoke and Mirrors and the much acclaimed more recent Nine Lives.
Alas, this article is only available by subscription so you’ll have to run out to your local newsstand a buy the current issue of Harpers. It’s worth it. [Update: here’s a pdf of the article] Here’s an excerpt, not from the article, but from his gun blog:
I like guns for a lot of reasons: I hunt, I enjoy the sensual pleasure of manipulating their exquisitely exact mechanisms, I’m drawn to the history they evoke, I enjoy the elegant geometry of marksmanship. But I can’t pretend that guns aren’t at their heart instruments of lethal violence.
There may be some dark “real” reason that I like guns lurking under there — something about my penis, perhaps, or a latent desire to dominate others by force. It may also be that I like guns for all the reasons I think I like guns. What is clear is that most of my friends, who tend to be liberal Democrats like me, don’t get it. Neither, quite frankly, do the liberal Democrats in office who keep trying to impose restrictions on a device — and a culture built around the device — that they don’t understand.
It’s not an Onion headline; it’s real.
The New York Times has a link to Omar Thornton’s call.
[Update: And the police officer who answered the call gets kudos.]
The UK’s Daily Mailreports how two very criminal families, over the course of four decades, have cost taxpayers £37 million ($59 million).
The families were members of two notorious gangs in Birmingham, the Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew.
The total cost to the public of these two gangs – as opposed to only the two families themselves – is thought to be nearly £190 million.
The £37 million includes the cost of police investigations, lawyers, trials and prison for murders, attempted murders and serious injuries inflicted by three generations from the pair of gangster families.
But it does not count the cost of medical care of victims, of undetected crimes by the same families, of their more minor crimes, or the cost in money or harm to their victims.
…
Nor does it take into account the state benefits claimed by the families, the education and extra teaching required by their children, their own burden on the NHS, or of providing them with council houses.
Is thisreally news? No. But then again… if somebody else’s daughter were arrested, I’m sure Giuliani might have something to say. Suffice it to say, she’s no alter boy.
I’d file this in the right-wing hypocrisy cabinet (which is similar to but takes up slightly more space than left-wing hypocrisy cabinet). If your big thing is family values, perhaps you’d be wise to pay extra special attention to your own, first.
I’ll file this one right between “Cheney, draft dodger (better things to do)” and “Homophobe politicians (gay).” And the latter is right before “Limbaugh, Rush (four-time defender of traditional marriage… and junkie).”
New York Representative Anthony Weiner writes aboutwhy he got angry on the house floor.
Good on ya, Tony. It’s a shame that those who wrap themselves in the flag and take “patriotic” photo-ops in my city won’t put their money behind their mouth.
These are adopted from my field notes:
It’s 1am and ______ and I are on the way to John’s Express to pick up a pizza I ordered 10 min. earlier. They said they’re closing at 1am. I’m hungry. We’re going south on Broadway past Monument and the Hopkins folks are waving to us. I wave back. But they really want us to stop. “Son of a bitch!” I say.
The Hopkins security tells us that a woman with them there has been raped. I suspect she wasn’t. But it’s not an obvious failure-to-pay case so I think it may be real. I talk to the woman and ask her what happened. She was with a guy and says, “I feel as though I was raped.” The cop in me knows that the “I feel as though” means it didn’t happen. Still, it’s my job to figure out what did happen.
She says, “We was just kicking it.”
So I start asking the important questions. These questions might seem insensitive to some. But these are questions that need to be asked. And it’s my job to ask these questions. I can be sensitive, but I’m not a rape counselor. I’m investigating a potential crime.
“What is he to you?” A friend.
“Where did you meet him?” On Central.
“How long have you known him?” I just met him.
“What were you doing on Central?” Walking.
“Where did this happen?” Over down there a few blocks.
I ask some more questions. All in all, she’s pretty straight with me. And she doesn’t look bad for a 25-year-old (later I find out she’s 19). She tells me she wanted $20 and got $5. They have sex. It’s never clear to me exactly how consensual this was. But what she’s most upset about is not the perhaps forced sex but that he took her jackets before kicking her out. And not just one jacket, but three. It’s cold out.
I ask her–sincerely, not sarcastically–what she wants. “I just want my jackets back,” she says. That’s not an answer I was expected. But at least this, I think, we can do.
My partner and I go to the place where whatever happened happened. I knock on the door and someone else answers the door. Then the guy in question comes down stairs. I get him alone and say, “Look, this woman is saying some very serious things. [I don’t use the R-word because I want to cover my own ass, but I make it pretty clear] … She’s also saying all she wants is her jackets back. Why don’t you make this easy for all of us and find her jackets and give them to us. Then we can go and leave and everything is cool.”
First the guy says he doesn’t know her. Then he says she was with his brother, who left [not very convincing]. Then he goes out the back [luckily he came back] and comes back with three jackets. We take the jackets and leave.
We give the woman back her jackets and she thanks us.
We tell the woman she should quit her crazy lifestyle and wish her the best.
And then we go on our way. I make it to John’s Express at 01:20 and get my pizza.
Best of all (from a cop’s perspective), because the call was on-view and not called in, there was no paperwork.
Did I handle this by the book? No. Was the woman raped? Hard to say. Could I have locked him up? Yes. Could I have locked her up? Certainly. Should I have locked either up? I don’t know. But I didn’t.
She wanted her jackets back and I got them for her. I felt strangely satisfied at how I handled this situation. Was I right?
While I was out, there’s been a bit of a brouhaha over a Sunreportthe fact that “since 2004, Baltimore has led the country with more than 30 percent of rape reports marked ‘unfounded’ by detectives, meaning police believed the victim was lying.”
And though I applaud Bealefeld for his generally sensitive handling of this issue, forcing officers to call a detective or a sergeant whenever somebody utters the R-word isn’t really going to help matters.
It’s not politically correct to say so, but of course many supposed rape victims in Baltimore are not, in fact, raped (more on that below). Certainly that’s no solace to those who areraped and not taken seriously by the police, but I suspect false reports of rape are related to Baltimore high level of poverty and heroin use more than anything else. Perhaps that is why Baltimore’s stats are so out of sync with other cities. I’d bet–if rape stats were reliable across jurisdiction, which they’re not–that false rape claims would be directly proportional to poverty levels, drug addiction, and thus the number of women turning tricks. Of course you could turn those stats around and say that cops just don’t care about poor drug-addict rape victims.
It’s certainly true that some patrol officers cops are probably horrible at dealing with rape claims in the city. What can one really expect from some poorly paid 22-year-old macho guy straight out of the suburbs and the academy? And certainly a few cops can’t fathom that a prostitute on the job can be raped. And yes, most cops will do their best to talk everybody, potential rape victims included, out of going to the hospital because of the inevitable hours of waiting involved.
But all that said, what too many non-police don’t realize is how many lies and how much gray exists in the work police deal with every day. That’s the real, un-politically correct world cops know all too well and navigate all the time.
One time when I was police there was an actual stranger on young-woman-walking-down-the-street-going-to-work kind of rape. It’s the only one like that I can remember from my brief time on the street. I was surprised at how all we normally cynical cops swung into action and worked hard to catch the bad guy. At the time, I asked a few in my squad why they suddenly cared so much about this rape as opposed to all the others “rape” victims we deal with. “Because she really was raped,” was the generally answer. And the fact she was a working girl and not a “working girl” also mattered.
So if this woman was “really raped,” what does it mean to be “not really raped”? The obvious example is a woman turning tricks who isn’t paid. She’s pissed off and says she was raped. It’s like the guy buying drugs, who gives money, gets nothing, and calls in a robbery. How often does this happen? Quite frankly, a lot. There may have been a crime, but it’s not what the call came out as. And it doesn’t help matter than the “victim” has also committed an arrestable offense.
The “failure-to-pay” victim doesn’t really want to go through the rigmarole of being a rape victim. Hell, she wasn’t raped. She consented. She just wants her money. Short of that, she wants the guy who stiffed her to spend a night in jail. It’s a reasonable request morally, but not legally. What is the cop supposed to do?
Another problem is that some women, at least in Baltimore’s Eastern District (especially those who are familiar with the system) simply don’t want to deal with hassle of being a rape victim. Going to a hospital to get examined and going through the ordeal of a “rape kit.” What’s the point? Especially if your attacker was an intimate or a John. These women want justice, but it’s not a kind of justice police can provide.
Let’s say you’re having an affair and don’t want to leave. And then on the way home to your main man you sober up and realize your fling is going to talk. How often does this happen? More often than you probably think. Or let’s say you really are raped. You have a drinks and make out a little with your ex. When you want to leave but he says no and forces you to have sex. Either way you call police and an officer shows up.
The officer asks some tough questions because the officers assumption is that you’re not telling the whole truth. Why? Because nobody tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s the officers job to figure out some version of the truth. And when this happens, you, the rape victim, have a decision to make.
Option one is to officially become the rape victim. You’re going to have to answer police questions, get intimately tested at the hospital, and then go through the criminal justice as a victim. Option two is to talk with friends or family or a councilor, maybe have a stiff drink or three, cry, and then take a very long shower and try and get some sleep. Which would you choose? Which is the better option? I have no idea.
And when I was a cop, after I presented option one, I didn’t think it was my place to criticize a woman for choosing option two. If a woman says she doesn’t want to go through with testing and criminal prosecution, who was I, a young man, to tell her otherwise. What do I really know about such matters?
What can or should the police do in these cases? It’s not police’s fault successful prosecution demands a rape test. It’s not police’s fault that crimes have to proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not the fault of police that people sometimes lie.
I may provide an interesting example tomorrow.