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Category: Police

  • Fewer homeless nationwide

    This is encouraging news reported in New York Times:

    The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007.
    […]
    The officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country.

    In that approach, local officials place chronically homeless people into permanent shelter — apartments, halfway houses or rooms — and then focus on treating addiction and mental and health problems.
    […]
    Until cities and states began adopting the program, many of those people seemed to shuttle endlessly between shelters, hospitals and the street.


    Homeless shouldn’t be a police problem. But as always, the buck stops with police. And if nobody doesdeal with homeless, then it becomes a police problem.

    One of the silver lining’s of the Eastern District was there wasn’t much a visible homeless population. I guess that’s the advantage to a neighborhood with so many vacant buildings. A few of the vacants were squatted quite nicely. More commonly, squatting would eventually result in a drug-related fire.

  • Officer assaults bicyclist

    Luckily somebody was filming. Uh, officers, you should always police like people are filming. Especially when you know they are.

    As a former cop and current bicyclist, I don’t get is why the NYPD is so hellbent against Critical Mass. Other cities manage just fine. Police escort. A little traffic disruption. A lot of bicyclists have a good time. Nobody gets hurt. Nothing so wrong in that.

    Here’s the article in the New York Times.

    As a police officer, I’m willing to cut police a lotof slack for aggressive behavior in aggressive or chaotic situations. I’m also willing to cut police officers a fair amount of slack for honest mistakes. I also don’t think a few seconds of video clip taken out of context should ruin an officer’s career.

    But the context here isclear. The officer, Pogan, is guilty of unprovoked aggravated assault. And as a New York City taxpayer, I don’t want to pay for lawsuits from bad policing. I don’t like it one bit.

  • Ed Norris Show

    I’ll be on the Ed Norris show (via phone) tomorrow (Tuesday) 5pm. Listen in.

  • Club 101: Baltimore Club Music Appreciation

    Since they say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, I’ve got some audio tracks so you can hear the Baltimore Club sound and the work of K-Swift, who died a few days ago.

    First and foremost, Baltimore Club Music is a beat.

    If it ain’t got this beat, it’s not club music (the droning note is a classic sample from Public Enemy No. 1). After the beat is there, it’s up to the DJ. And often the DJ plays dirty, with lyrics not fit for kids (though I’ve selected relatively clean samples here).

    But here’s what made K-Swift so damn good, so much better than the others. K-Swift was great at mixing what became known as mashing, taking, say a television theme song and putting it to a club beat.

    That’s the theme from “I Married Joan” (not what most people think of when they think of Baltimore). I love that track. A great beat, sample from left field, and always a sense of humor.

    This party spirit goes back to early days of hip-hop. I don’t know about you, but I like throwing my hands in the air and waving them like I just don’t care. It’s certainly more fun than glowering and nodding your head to brutal lyrics about a life you don’t agree with.

    K-Swift was great with the samples, they’re not all as silly as this, but I like her silly. A track called Pork Chops and Onion Gravy coins the term “Bougo,” that means bougie and ghetto at the same time. And the beat, that’s club music!

    Here’s a little sample that starts with Southpark and goes into horns. There’s a lot of horn in Baltimore Club music. I like horns.

    Put it all together and you get this. Here is one of her complete short radio mixes I loved so much. It’s not top quality, recording-wise. But it gives you an idea of the driving beat and spirit that really did make K-Swift the Club Queen.

  • RIP K-Swift, the Club Queen

    You should really play some of her music while reading this post

    I’m very sad to read about the death of my favorite Baltimore DJ, K-Swift. The poor girl was only 28 and died in a swimming pool accident. And when she started mixing a decade ago, she really was a girl in a man’s world.

    There are three stories in today’s paper. One, Two, and Three. And here’s an older story from Spin about K-Shift and the Baltimore Club scene.

    For those who don’t know, my music tastes are eclectic (but no heavy metal or guitar-driven rock, please) but various forms of club music have always been important to me.

    I got into hip-hop in 1985, when my brother forced me learn the lyrics to Krush Groovin’ (I still know them). Then in high school I got into house music from listening to Chicago’s WBMX, WGCI, and the Hot Mix 5. From about 1987-1989, I was a DJ on Northwestern University’s WNUR’s Streetbeat. I went by the name of “Peter the Piper.” Sounds kind of dorky now. But I swear it was kinda cool then.

    On WNUR we played, as they say in the Blues Brothers, both kinds of music: rap and house. Our signal was limited. And though I would often boost the power illegally, our signal never went as far south as the Loop (but that didn’t stop me from giving shout-outs to the White Castle at Stony Island and 79th).

    This was the first and at the time only radio show in Chicago to play rap music on the air. Chicago was a house town. Even today, name a single Chicago rapper. It’s not easy. [ed note: OK, I’ve been called out. Maybe it’s not too hard. Kanye West and Common are two. Still, name a third rapper from Chicago, if you can. Then think of all the rappers you know from New York and L.A.]

    At the time, we were trying to bridge the huge split between fans of rap and fans of house (can’t we all just get along?).

    I was finally kicked off when somebody caught on that I wasn’t a Northwestern student.

    Each night we had a midnight house mix. Here’s a sample from what was probably my show! Alas, I have no tapes of my show. We played mixes from Lil’ Angel on Wednesday night. I was usually on Wednesdays and Fridays, from 10 to 1AM (2 in the summer, sometimes all night, if the “freeform” host didn’t show up and I was in the mood to keep spinning records).

    Our biggest name, in hindsight, was Derrick Carter. Personally, I was partial to Lil’ Angel (he was such a nice guy and a new father last time I saw him 28 years ago) and Georgie “Mixin’” Porgie (also cooler sounding then than now).

    I fell out with hip-hop when Gangsta Rap took over. Chicago house stagnated for about a decade (hip-house, anyone?) until discovered and reborn in Europe. And in the dark years of college in New Jersey, I was very far from any good music scene. I moved to Amsterdam in 1994 and discovered the joy of the European rave scene. Techno, drum and bass, trance, gabber. I love them all!

    So it meant a lot to me when I arrived in Baltimore in 1999 and discovered a whole new style of music to love: Baltimore Club. Music is important to cops. If you’re in a car with somebody for 4 to 8 hours, what radio station you listen to becomes very important. Usually we rode alone. Radio choice was the main reason I liked riding alone.

    Most officers listened the commercial country station. Not my favorite, but I can live with it. One officer liked jazz on public radio. We got along just fine. Another liked Rush Limbaugh. We also got along just fine (though I still think there’s something very wrong about policing the ghetto while listening to Limbaugh spout his conservative crap).

    I liked to listen to NPR all night, and then Morning Edition until the short Q92 morning wake up mix came at something like 7:35. It was hard enough to find a cop interested in either station. To find someone who liked both was pretty much out of the question.

    If you policed listening to 92-Q during the summer days, as I sometimes did (and I may have been the only white cop do do so), you had the privilege of being tuned to the same station as half the neighborhood, which was kind of cool as you drove around and heard the music fade in and out.

    I think I became friends with one of my squadmates solely because of our mutual appreciation of dance music. If, in 2000, you saw two cops in a car in the Eastern going crazy to Kernkraft 400’s Zombie Nation (now so mainstream it’s played in ballparks), it was probably us.

    So all this comes back to K-Swift. She was the best. I didn’t go to Club Choices (as a white cop, I was afraid to go in with a gun, and afraid to go in without one). But I listened to her during her all-too-brief radio mixes. I have 6 of her CDs. K-Swift Volume 5 is my favorite. Too bad there won’t be any more.

  • I’m just sayin’…


    Cocaine Sustains War Despite Rebel Losses in Colombia

    …this is what drug prohibition does.

    From the New York Times.

  • You will not do that shit on my porch!

    I just chased two junkies off my stoop! This is, as they say, not that kind of neighborhood. Plus this block has something like four active and former cops living on it.

    I’m sitting here writing about drug legalization in my basement office, and I hear two guys outside the window. One goes on my stoop. I go upstairs to investigate. I see the cap comes off a water bottle and I see a needle about to come out of a sleeve.

    Mother fucker! The SOBs are about to shoot up! I haven’t dealt with junkies at my door since I lived in Baltimore (when I stepped on a load of crap one of them left and somewhat routinely had to deal with junkies shooting up and drunks pissing in my alley).

    I open the front door to get the element of surprise. I know the heavy screen door is locked and secure, but they don’t know that.

    “You will notdo that shit on my porch!” They’re kind of apologetic, but not really. They make some faggy comment, perhaps because I’m standing there in my underwear (hey, it’s hot!).

    Dumb ass New York native white guys, for what it’s worth.

    Gets the adrenaline flowing, that does. Something as simple as that.

    __________________________________

    This was “my” alley in Baltimore:
    It was fun to write “violators will be arrested” when I actually had the power to carry through on that threat personally!

    I wasn’t the only person who lived there. But I was the only person that had to take a small alley off of an even smaller alley to enter his house. I lived on the second floor and my only entrance was off the rear porch… to an alley, that connected to another alley.

    No, I couldn’t subscribe to a newspaper or get mail service. Pizza delivery was out of the question.

    But it was a nice apartment and rent was only $300/month. I also had the world’s best landlady, Miss Mary. She lived downstairs (with the front door). I’d make her spankopita and she’d leave regular shipments of paximathiaand koulourakia (delicious Greek cookies).

  • So I was battling the Drug Czar

    Me and Lee Brown (former Houston mayor, New York Police Commissioner, and federal Drug Czar) mano-a-mano in a no-holds-barred cage match! (Also known as 700 words in U.S. News & World Report.)

    I think I kick his ass. But then I would think that, wouldn’t I? And it’s not really a fair cage match. He is 70.

    Drugs Are Too Dangerous Not to Regulate—We Should Legalize Them

    The nation’s drug problems should be controlled through regulation and taxation

    Drugs are bad. So let’s legalize them.

    It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Legalization does not mean giving up. It means regulation and control. By contrast, criminalization means prohibition. But we can’t regulate what we prohibit, and drugs are too dangerous to remain unregulated.

    Let’s not debate which drugs are good and which are bad. While it’s heartless to keep marijuana from terminally ill cancer patients, some drugs—crack, heroin, crystal meth—are undoubtedly bad. But prohibition is the issue, and, as with alcohol, it doesn’t work. Between 1920 and 1933, we banned drinking. Despite, or more likely because of, the increased risk, drinking became cool. That’s what happens when you delegate drug education to moralists. And crime increased, most notoriously with gangland killings. That’s what happens when you delegate drug distribution to crooks. Prohibition of alcohol ended in failure, but for other drugs it continues.

    Law enforcement can’t reduce supply or demand. As a Baltimore police officer, I arrested drug dealers. Others took their place. I locked them up, too. Thanks to the drug war, we imprison more people than any other country. And America still leads the world in illegal drug use. We can’t arrest and jail our way to a drug-free America. People want to get high. We could lock up everybody and still have a drug problem. Prisons have drug problems.

    Illegal production remains high. Since 1981, the price of cocaine has dropped nearly 80 percent. Despite the ongoing presence of U.S. and other troops, Afghanistan has been exporting record levels of opium, from which heroin is made. Poor farmers may not want to sell to criminals, but they need to feed their families, and there is no legal market for illegal drugs. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the FARC in Colombia, and drug gangs in Mexico all rely on drug prohibition. A legal drug trade would do more to undermine these terrorists than military action would. If we taxed drugs, profits would go to governments, which fight terrorists.

    Illegal drug dealers sell to anyone. Legal ones are licensed and help keep drugs such as beer, cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals away from minors. Illegal dealers settle disputes with guns. Legal ones solve theirs in court. Illegal dealers fear police. Legal ones fear the IRS.

    Less use.Regulation can reduce drug use. In two generations, we’ve halved the number of cigarette smokers not through prohibition but through education, regulated selling, and taxes. And we don’t jail nicotine addicts. Drug addiction won’t go away, but tax revenue can help pay for treatment.

    The Netherlands provides a helpful example. Drug addiction there is considered a health problem. Dutch policy aims to save lives and reduce use. It succeeds: Three times as many heroin addicts overdose in Baltimore as in all of the Netherlands. Sixteen percent of Ameri-cans try cocaine in their lifetime. In the Netherlands, the figure is less than 2 percent. The Dutch have lower rates of addiction, overdose deaths, homicides, and incarceration. Clearly, they’re doing something right. Why not learn from success? The Netherlands decriminalized marijuana in 1976. Any adult can walk into a legally licensed, heavily regulated “coffee shop” and buy or consume top-quality weed without fear of arrest. Under this system, people in the Netherlands are half as likely as Americans to have ever smoked marijuana.

    It’s unlikely that repealing federal drug laws would result in a massive increase in drug use. People take or don’t take drugs for many reasons, but apparently legality isn’t high on the list. In America, drug legalization could happen slowly and, unlike federal prohibition, not be forced on any state or city. City and state governments could decide policy based on their needs.

    The war on drugs is not about saving lives or stopping crime. It’s about yesteryear’s ideologues and future profits from prison jobs, asset forfeiture, court overtime pay, and federal largess.

    We have a choice: Legalize drugs, or embark on a second century of failed prohibition. Government regulation may not sound as sexy or as macho as a “war on drugs,” but it works better.

  • The Eastern District and Iraq

    During any given year, a 15- to 34-year-old man in the Eastern District has about the same chance of being killed as a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq.

    That’s just wrong.

    The Eastern stats are from page 203 of my book. The Iraq stats are taken from DonHodges.com.

    I bring this up because of an interesting comment from a good reader of this blog. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to say, “fuck ’em. That’s their problem.”

    As a police officer who’s worked the Eastern, I kind of understand this. You try and help. You put your life on the line day in and day out. And nothing ever changes. Plus, for your efforts, you’ll get called a racist.

    Once I half-jokingly accused my partner of simply not liking black people, he responded passionately, “I got nothing against black people. I just don’t like theseblack people” (that’s in chapter 3 of my book, by the way).

    On the Leonard Lopate Show the other day, the host asked me, was it not true that most people I policed were “decent, hard working people.” I could not take the easy (and politically correct) path and just say “yes.”

    Here’s what I said:

    “I don’t want to be too insulting, but I do have a tough time, having policed the area, calling the people I dealt with decent people, by and large. We didn’t get along well.”

    [“But they saw you as the enemy almost immediately. Didn’t they?”]

    “Yeah, I mean, but I was. My job was to lock them up. If I were them, I wouldn’t have liked me either.” (listen to the whole interview here.)

    I don’t feel that most of the people I policed were decent people. Most people in the Eastern District may be decent, but as a police officer, you don’t police most people. You police the problem-people.

    But decent or not, we’re all human beings. And this country is founded on the idea that we’re endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life is one of the those rights.

    Even though I’m not “at risk,” I’ll keep bringing up the issue of violence, black-on-black murder in particular. I think it’s a moral issue. (I also think it’s an economic issue, but that’s another story.) I think it’s wrong to ignore this level of poverty and violence, no matter whose fault it is (and personally, I doblame the victim a lot of the time). We can do better.

    We’re a rich country. Supposedly we’re a caring country. And if you’re the type of person to ask “what would Jesus do?” go ahead and ask. I don’t know what He’d say, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be “fuck ’em.”

  • Baltiore homicide by the numbers

    Back in January, the Baltimore City Paper published a good simple analysis of homicide numbers in 2007. I was just looking at it again. As we all know, violence is not equally spread out in society. It may not be politically correct to talk about race and violence, but homicide in America is disproportionately a problem of black-on-black young male gun violence concentrated in poor communities with public drug dealing. It’s concentrated in places like the Eastern District. The question, of course, is what are we going to do about it?

    There were 282 murder victims in Baltimore City.
    261 (94%) were African-American (the city itself is 65% black).
    258 (91%) were male.
    233 (83%) were shot.
    The youngest was 2.
    The oldest was 82.
    The Eastern District took the crown this year with 50 homicides.