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Category: Police

  • NYPD Confidential

    Leonard Levitt writes a good column. He has some harsh words for the NYPD Intelligence Division and the recent NYPD/FBI/terrorism case.

    The Intelligence Division under Cohen and his crony, Assistant Commissioner Larry Sanchez, is operating as a mini-CIA with no accountability and with no model to guide it.

    Now it appears that these lone wolves appear to have mishandled the investigation into the city’s first known major terrorism threat since 9/ll.

    One can only wonder how many other terrorism suspects were the subjects of NYPD conversations with Afzali–and how many of them he alerted.

    Here’s the latest in the Times.

  • Lex Market Utz man guilty of gun sales

    Peter Hermann has the story and Nicole Fuller reports:

    Papantonakis, whose family has run the stall since 1970, admitted to The Baltimore Sun in a jailhouse interview in May that he sold guns to make ends meet but denied that he sold them to gang members, as alleged in the indictment. He also said that he did not sell the guns from his counter, though he acknowledged doing cash transactions there.

  • 70 cars down

    There are only about 130 cars on patrol at any given time.

    City officials say an unusually high concentration of ethanol in the city’s gasoline supply contributed to the breakdown of more than 70 police cars over the weekend, most of which had been repaired and returned to service Tuesday.

    More than 200 police cars fueled up at a 24-hour, city-run gas pump by the Fallsway before cars started showing problems, and nearly one-third of the Police Department’s patrol contingent was sidelined with engine trouble.

    Justin Fenton has the story in the Sun.

    Update: Peter Hermann says that the B.P.D. has about 1,200 vehicles in their fleet? Is this true? If so, where the hell are they hiding all these cars? And why do patrol officers so often have to beg and steal and duct-tape a working police car together? There are only about 135 posts in the city, for Christ’s sake.

  • Lawsuit filed by skateboarder against Baltimore police officer thrown out on technicality

    Justin Fenton reportsin the Sun:

    A lawsuit against a Baltimore police officer who was famously recorded on a YouTube video yelling at young skateboarders at the Inner Harbor for calling him “dude” has been thrown out by a city judge.

    Circuit Judge Evelyn Cannon granted a defense motion for summary judgment to dismiss the case…. after Cannon determined that it was filed outside the 180-day time frame to bring legal action, reversing an earlier decision by a different judge.

    Do you think there’s any relation between the fallout from that youtube clip, less aggressive policing in the Inner Harbor, and the recent spate of shootings there?

  • Tasering a Unarmed Legless Man in a Wheelchair

    RougueRegime sent me a link to this story in which a legless man in a wheelchair was tasered.

    This tasering could very easily have been “by the books.” And that’s what bothers me. The man didn’t comply. He got tased. The taser should be banned as a compliance device (except perhaps in situations where an officer is alone and backup is unavailable). And maybe it takes an unarmed legless man to make this point.

    This man, who may or may not have hit his wife (Let’s assume he did. Since cops went to arrest him, it’s a fair assumption that his wife had obvious signs of injury).

    There is no reason an unarmed legless man should ever be tasered.

    Ever.

    Arresting and searching a man in a wheelchair is not something any officer looks forward to. There was once a drug dealer who used roll around Wolfe St. in a wheelchair. Cops generally refused to go near him, for fear of a harassment complaint from a handicapped black man. They don’t teach wheelchair arrests or search-incident-to-wheelchair arrests in the police academy.

    So here’s a domestic violence situation where, thanks to ineffectual mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence, and officer is required to arrest a legless man in a wheelchair.

    What would I do? Key up my radio and get my sergeant. And then I would ask him what to do and how to do it. It’s called passing the buck. For the patrol officer, it’s about the only good thing to come out of the police chain-of-command structure.

    And if worst came to worst, instead of tasering him, couldn’t you just wheel guy away?

  • Amazon Mysteries and How Much I Make From My Book (II)

    I like Amazon.com. I buy a lot of stuff from them. I don’t have a good local independent bookstore. Plus Amazon brings stuff right to my door. For free. But Amazon is a strange a mysterious place.

    Authors have no website to logon to and check out how many copies they’ve sold. So I got a good feeling I’m not the only author who checks out Amazon’s mysterious “sales rank” to see how things are going (right now I’m at #13,100 — down 2,000 since the first draft of this post). But Amazon doesn’t tell you how many copies you’ve sold, just how your book is selling in relation to every other book they sell. So ultimately it’s very frustrating because it doesn’t tell you anything concrete.

    For instance, my wife’s bookhad a serious jump in “sales rank” last week. And the book isn’t even out yet! Was this the start of good things to come? Well… maybe… until we found out my mom bought 15 copies though Amazon, thus single-handedly cornering the Forking Fantastic market.

    Here’s an author’s dirty secret: unless you write pulp fiction or the New Testament (or a great cookbook), your book won’t sell much. My book, considered a decent success, has sold about 6,500 copies through June. From that I’ve made (including my advance) about $13,000 since I signed a contract in 2005. I’m not complaining, but it’s not like I can quit my day job and live on $3,250 a year.

    [Just FYI, since I believe people should talk more about how much money they make, I make 10% from paperback sales. But that comes from the price the press sells the book wholesale, and not the price you buy book. So if you really want to help me, buy 1,000 copies straight from the publisher!]

    Cop in the Hood was selling for $12.20 on Amazon (what a bargain!!!). That was a nice low price. Then about one month ago Amazon stopped discounting my book and jacked the price up to $16.91, a full four cents off the cover price. So I asked my press to ask Amazon why and they basically said, “mind your own business.”

    I couldn’t help but think my book, as a required reading, probably sells more at the start of the school semester (always be suspicious of professors who assign their own book). So they jacked up the price.

    Well now that the semester is underway and students have mostly bought their books, Amazon has resumed their full discount.

    I guess that’s their business.

    At least by next semester there will be lots of used copies out their for students to buy.

  • Baltimore, My Baltimore

    9 shot in 24 hours. 2 die.

  • Cost of Incarceration: NYC

    In 2008, New York’s Department of Correction’s budget was $978 million ($939 million of which is paid for city tax dollars). “In Fiscal 2007, the Department handled over 100,000 admissions, managed an average daily population of 13,987 and transported 326,735 individuals to court.” The average length of stay is 47 days.

    That’s $70,000 per inmate per year. Or $190 per person per night. I think it’s safe to say that Rikers Island is the world’s most expensive jail.

    You could say that Rikers gives you and a friend a double room for $383 night. But you don’t get to pick your friend. Meanwhile I can get a double room tonight at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street in Manhattan for $268. But the Holiday Inn doesn’t have the coveted LaGuardia view.

    You can see the DOC budget here.

  • Murder down in NYC

    Colleen Long has the story in the Washington Post.

    Homicides are down. They’re on pace for 457 this year, which would be lower than the many-decade low of 497 in 2007. Very impressive. Thank you, NYPD!

    This is all the more impressive since, as Patrick McGeehan reports in the New York Times, unemployment hit 10.3% in New York City, a 16-year high. Sixteen years ago, in 1993, there were 1,960 murders in the city. Take that, “root causes.”

  • 1.7 Million Drug Arrests in 2008

    LEAP says:

    A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds.

    “In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,’” said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users.”

    Last December, LEAP commissioned a report by a Harvard University economist which found that legalizing and regulating drugs would inject $77 billion a year into the struggling U.S. economy.

    Today’s FBI report, which can be found at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.html, shows that 82.3 percent of all drug arrests in 2008 were for possession only, and 44.3 percent of drug arrests were for possession of marijuana.

    Pointing to the collateral consequences that often follow drug arrests, LEAP’s Cole continued, “You can get get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction.”

    Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a 13,000-member organization representing cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who now want to legalize and regulate all drugs after witnessing horrors and injustices fighting on the front lines of the “war on drugs.”