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Category: Police

  • Trial of Officer London

    I don’t really have a problem with the first two minutes. The suspect, Walter Harvin, was aggressive and uncooperative. Harvin pushes Officer London at 0:26 and has to go. I turns into a messy arrest, but that’s sometimes how it is.

    As much as I don’t like tasers… tasing this guy sure would have saved both officer and suspect a lot of trouble. Neither mace nor baton worked (though I can’t see the mace).

    Yet again, this shows the problem with expandable batons. They don’t really work. They cause pain but they don’t have stopping power. And they sure look bad when in use, wacking people again and again. The unpopular straight baton, which is much more like a small baseball bat, is a much better tool. It’s cheaper, too.

    But after minute three? After the cuffs are on? You can’t give a guy an ass whuppin’ because he’s yelling, “I’m going to kill you” and you think he deserves it. You can’t beat a guy till he shuts up.

    We’ll see what the jury says.

    [And the hits at minute 8, necessary at the time, should never have needed to happen because Harvin should not have been able to get up and charge the officer.]

    Here’s the story in the Timesand the Post.

  • Schoolcraft Tapes

    The more of these tapes I hear, the more I think how good these secretly recorded NYPD officers sound. And this is the best [read: worst] they could come up with? To me it shows what a good job most men and women in the NYPD do.

    In the latest batch, particular kudos to Lt Rafael Mascol, who offers some pretty good suggestions as to how Officer Schoolcraft could get higher job evaluation rankings. He offers him other tours. And he says, “Go out there answer some more radio runs. Do some more summonses. Write more reports. Do more proactive work. If you’re have trouble seeing activity, we can put you with a more active officer who can see the activity and maybe point it out to you.”

    It’s that last part I really love. And he’s not saying this sarcastically. He’s trying to help.

    Even if Schoolcraft’s basic point may be correct (that crime is being downgraded), and despite an order to talk with his sergeant, he did leave an hour early saying he didn’t feel well. You can’t just walk away from work as a police office. It’s called going AWOL. If he did something violent or had a heart attack, the NYPD would have been held responsible.

    Even Chief Marino sounds reasonable. Schoolcraft certainly sounds sane, but it’s understandable that he has to go to the hospital to get checked out. He was complaining of chest pains, for crying out loud!

    He didn’t have to get EDP’d (or EP’d, as we say in Baltimore, or, in normal lingo, declared crazy and getting taken to the hospital). It sounds like he could have gone on his own free will as a medical patient. Instead, he said was going to lie there until he felt better. So he went as a mental patient.

    The idea of throwing a guy in a mental ward because he’s got evidence against the brass sounds great, but it’s not what you hear on the tapes. Did he need to be kept locked up for days? I don’t know. But that’s on those doctors and not the NYPD.

    Of all these “secret recording,” I couldn’t find one of them that says anything that isn’t common knowledge or makes the speaker look bad. Most of them make the speaker look good!

    Here’s Part 1, 2, 3, 4 in the Village Voice. And Lenny Levitt’s most recent take. And my first post on the subject.

    (Update with working links to all the posts on Schoolcraft.)

  • Baltimore Arrest Settlement

    Seems like the city got off easy by having to pay $870,000 and promise to do the right thing.

    About 100,000 people were arrested each year in first half of the 2000s. Last year the number was down to about 70,000, which is still a lot. By comparison, New York City had 341,000 arrests in 2009. That means the Baltimore arrest rate is about 2.5 times higher than the rate in New York City. Of course, Baltimore has a murder rate about six times higher and has a lot more public drug dealing. So it’s not easy to conclude what that all means.

    When I was a cop, I had a half-hour meeting in City Hall with a certain high-ranking elected official. At one point I remember telling him, “You know, you can’t arrest your way out of this murder problem.” He looked at me quizzically and said, “Why not?” Anyway…

    Perhaps the days of locking people up for just standing around are over. But police need an “or-else” to get people to follow lawful orders. So if loitering arrests decline, I predict arrests for disorderly conduct (the catch-all charge in New York City) and failure to obey a lawful order will go up.

  • Cost of Booking

    Here’s another simple number we should know but really don’t: What’s it cost to arrest somebody? Seems like it matters (at least to the taxpayer) if the choice is between a citation and an arrest.

    Part of the problem in figuring this out is that the expense is divided between different departments, jurisdictions, and budgets (police, courts, sheriff, jail, prosecutor, and public defender). Another problem is there’s not a simple turnstile that you pay to go through. There is some economy of scale, I would presume. In other words, reducing arrests by 10 percent would not cost the cost by 10 percent.

    An article in the Arizona Republic today mentions some dollar figures. I’m not sure where they’re from or how they were come up with, but here they are: “Bookings cost $192 per suspect and the city must pay about $72 per day for each inmate housed in county jails.”

    Now keep in mind Maricopa County is Sheriff Joe land and spends very little on jail. Rikers Island in New York City, by contrast, costs $190 per day. Regardless, jail figures are pretty easy to come up with because, well, they have a budget.

    It’s the booking cost that is more interesting and much harder to determine. Same with the cost of a court appearance. Still, for someone who spends a night or two in jail, the cost of each arrest is at least a couple hundred of dollars. Throw in a court appearance and we’re probable pushing a grand.

    [Anybody know if these figures are out there somewhere and I just haven’t found them?]

  • Prison Population Up

    But just a bit, according to Heather C. West at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. At the end of 2009, state and federal correctional authorities had jurisdiction over 1,613,656 prisoners, an increase of 0.2% (3,897 prisoners) from 2008.

    Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.

    Non-citizens (not all of whom are illegal) make up 4.1% of the prison population.

    [And congrats to Jim Lynch, my colleague at John Jay College, who just got confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He’s a good man and up to the job.]

  • Breaking News!!!

    From Kingston… Dudas in custody!

    The New York Times story. (The New York Timesapparently has no reporter in Jamaica, since the dateline is Mexico City. Though non-byline credit is given to stringer Ross Sheil). Here’s the story in the Jamaica Observer. But The Gleanerreports: No End to Emergency.

    [Now ask yourself if this was worth the lives of like a hundred people, including many police officers.]

    Now the real question is whether or not Dudas will make it to the US alive or be killed like his father was.

    [And if you just miss good ol’ Jamaican dialect in print (nothing to do with Dudas), you can read this.]

  • Art Imitates Heroin Brand Names

    An interesting art project. The story in the New York Times:

    The origins of the show can be traced to 2001, when Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, a sociologist researching the relationship between H.I.V. and drug use, first glimpsed the packets in an empty building in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where addicts would shoot up. Immediately, he said, he was struck by the fact that the images on the glassine envelopes served as advertisements.

    In New York, for some reason, heroin is sold in little glassine bags or envelopes. I found that strange coming from Baltimore where heroin is sold in gelcaps. In New York they also wait “on line” rather than “in line.” And in New York they have no friggin’ idea how to make a crab cake.

    Regional differences… crazy.

  • 2007 Vancouver Airport Taser Death “Not justified”

    No it wasn’t.

    This is the story of poor 40-year-old Robert Dziekanski. He was flying first time, to visit his mother and emigrate to Canada. He didn’t speak English. She told him to wait by the luggage carousels. He did. She couldn’t get in there and waiting outside for hours, thought he missed his flight, and went home. He waited around for many hours. Then he went a little bonkers. Four officers confronted him and wanted to use their toy. Either that or they were too wimpy to confront one unarmed person. Regardless, they tased Dziekanski for non-compliance, killing him.

    From the story in the National Post.

    Dziekanski, who spoke no English and had never been on a plane before, was unable to find his mother upon arriving at the airport. He remained in a secure customs area for nearly 11 hours and then, appearing dazed and delirious, began throwing around furniture, prompting the 911 call.

  • Man vs Rat? “Man does not stand no chance”

    My quote of the day comes from Solomon Peeples, 86, a former director of NYC’s Bureau of Pest Control Services. He was talking about rats: “They jump two feet from a running start; they can fall 40 feet onto a concrete slab and keep running…. We’re no match for them, as far as I’m concerned. Man does not stand no chance.”

    The runner up is Esther Bark, 50, who has seven daughters and said, “To suddenly put them in an open-minded place is not good for them.”

  • Cockfight raid in N.M.

    Police in Deming, N.M. raided a cockfight. People ran away. Birds, live and dead, were recovered. How much you wanna bet the live birds will now be killed?

    It’s not like I get too worked up over it either way, but I think it’s a shame that New Mexico banned cockfighting in 2007. It was something special about the state and there is a long tradition of cockfighting that predates New Mexico’s entry into the United States. Hell, it predates the United States!

    Here’s the state’s Q & A on banning cockfighting. It’s actually a pretty good Q & A, but I’m not convinced by any of it.

    Plus, there’s not too much going on in Deming “Home of pure water and fast ducks” New Mexico. And fighting cocks is better the cooking meth. If guys want to raise beautiful birds and bet on them while they kill each other? Fine by me. Besides, I’ve bet at a cockfight. I didn’t understand all of it. But clearly these people cared deeply about it. And it was kind of beautiful.

    I’d prefer to be fighting cock than a Perdue Chicken.