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Category: Police

  • You can’t make this up. You just can’t

    Get this… this is a story about two men. So there’s this man, right? And it’s like 4am and he gets jacked in West Baltimore. A man comes up to him and pulls out a sawed-off shotgun and tries to rob him. In response, the man getting robbed pulls out hisfake handgun. Somehow, fake-handgun man takes the shotgun away from shotgun man.

    Fake-handgun man, shotgun in hand, orders the man formerly known as shotgun man to strip naked in the middle of street. Fake-handgun man takes $800 from now-naked man and then marches naked man into a nearby laundry room. There, fake-handgun man (now actually new shotgun-man) starts beating the naked man with the butt of naked-man’s sawed-off shotgun. The man wearing clothes is shouting that he’s going to kill naked man unless naked man gets moremoney. Or a cell phone. Or something.

    You still with me? Wack, wack! “You better get me some more money, bitch!” Wack. “N***a, I’m going to kill you if don’t get me some motherfucking cash or a cell phone!”

    BOOM!!! The shotgun goes off. I imagine this as a movie moment: two men; a fight; one loud gunshot.

    A pause.

    [Bang bang, I shot you down.]

    The shotgun flies against the wall from recoil and clatters to the ground. Blood is everywhere.

    The men look at each other. Who got shot? Who’s going to slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood behind him!?

    [Bang bang, you hit the ground.]

    Here’s the irony, it’s hard to give someone a good beatdown holding the butt-end of a sawed-off shotgun. There’s not enough weight in the barrel for swinging leverage. The man giving the beatdown (aka robbed-man, fake-handgun-man, man-now-holding-the-shotgun and man-now-banking-a-naked-man) is holding the barrel of the gun to better hit with.

    [Bang bang, that awful sound.]

    The shotgun round rips through the stomach of the man holding the gun. He’s dead.

    The naked man runs away and ends up in the E.R. to treat cuts he gets from running barefoot over glass-strewn streets.

    Now I suspect there’s a little more to this story than meets the eye, and the complete Sunaccount is here. A sergeant in the homicide unit says, “It is sort of like one for the books.”

    [Bang bang, my baby shot me down.]

    The death will be ruled accidental.

  • Against Prediction

    My book review of Bernard Harcourt’s, Against Prediction,was just published in the American Journal of Sociology. You can read it here.

  • What’s wrong with this picture?

    What’s wrong with this picture?

    I heard Harvard Professor Bruce Western speak tonight at New York University. A short while back I heard him speak at John Jay College and he was nice enough to give me his powerpoint presentation. I use some of it in my class.

    This is one of those slides:

    We now lock up 730 people per 100,000. And this rate is still going up. That’s more than any country in the world. More than North Korea. More than China. More than Russia. And remember that “rate” takes population into account. Hell, in pure numbers we lock up more people than China. And there are more than a billion of them.

    This massive incarceration only started in the mid-1970s with the war on drugs. Mostly affected are young black male high-school drop outs. Among this cohort, the majoritywill be incarcerated at some point in their lives. Now I know this stuff and even I find it hard to believe. I asked Prof. Western if his data on incarceration included prison andjail andarrests? Nope. Just prison.

    Doesn’t anybody care?

  • In the Big City

    The trial of the officers involved in the Sean Bell Shooting continues with lots of interesting testimony.

    The justice department declares that New York City’s auxiliary police aren’t really police. At least when it comes to paying benefits to the family of two officers killed while patrolling in uniform.

    And Governor Paterson, who I seem to like more and more, first admitted he slept around a bit. Now he says he smoked some weed and snorted some blow… you know, back in the 1970s, when it seems like everyone was doing it. This was the man to party with! Too bad I was only 8.

    The governor said, “Most Americans during that period of time tried a whole lot more than that, and then gone on and led responsible lives.”

    Does this mean he thinks people shouldn’t be locked up for drug use? Probably not. Politicians never have problems being hypocrites when it comes to the war on drugs. But maybe Paterson is different. Here’s hoping.

  • 33,541 Drug Overdose Deaths in 2005

    The Drug War Rant and Stop the Drug War turned me on to a report by the Center for Disease Control. The just released “Deaths: Final Report for 2005” (hey, it takes a while to count all the dead folk) may not be the most uplifting title, but they do breakdown the two-and-a-half million deaths in America (bet you couldn’t have guessed thatnumber).

    Here’s the shocker: 33,541 people died of drug overdoses (see Tables 21 and 22 of the report for details). The report doesn’t breakdown drug overdoses and legal and illegal drugs. But the vast majority of overdose deaths are from illegal drugs (opiates like heroin in particular) and entirely preventable.

    Nobody wantsto overdose on heroin. You take illegal drugs because you want to get high. Overdoses happen because the drug is stronger than you think. Or you get clean and relapse and forget your tolerance is down. People don’t have to die. They would live if only we regulated and labeled this very dangerous drug. Somehow our drug-policy makers have decided that maintaining drug prohibition is worth tens of thousands of death per year. Shame, drug warriors. Shame.

  • Missing. . . . not!

    New Jersey Governor Corzine signed “Patricia’s Law” mandating that police must accept—without delay—any report of a missing person. I would assert that no law named after a person has ever been good. This one sure isn’t.

    The Recordreports:

    Under Patricia’s Law, police cannot refuse to take on the case of a missing person — whether child or adult — on any basis, including if circumstances do not indicate foul play or if it appears the person disappeared voluntarily.

    Police must then take down more than two dozen pieces of information, from the person’s name to the address of his or her dentist. If the person remains missing after 30 days, police must attempt to gather DNA samples as well.

    People worry about their loved ones. But the last thing you want is police hunting down dental records because a bus is late and a cell phone is out of juice.

    The vast majority of “missing” persons aren’t missing. Missing persons come home. Traffic was a bitch. Or they had to work late. Or they’re having an affair. This is not police work. Mandating police to waste hours on useless cases is no way to help find real missing persons. And the strain on resources will hurt us all. Any law that assumes that police have unlimited resources is a bad law.

    One probable outcome is that police response time to a call for missing person will increase in to the hours. That’s what I would do. Because 99 times out of 100, that person will appear before then. And for the 1 time out of 100, it’s not like broadcasting a report one hour faster will help anyway.

  • Around when you need one?

    The Timesreports that the NYPD is to shrink to its smallest size in 15 years. That’s a little misleading because the department in never at its budgeted size. The “size” of the department would “drop” to 36,838. But the actual number of officers today is 35,800. So the department could still grow despite this “drop.” The horrible irony is that the department has been shrinking ever since 2000. You know, right before the country set on a new path of safety and security. You might think the federal government would want more New York City police to help prevent the next large-scale terrorist attack. You might think that.

    This does point to a larger issue of why there are so many unfilled positions. Word on the street is that standards in the academy have already dropped substantially. The answer, for once, is shocking simple: Starting salary: $25,100. Top pay after 5 or 6 years: $59,585. That’s not a lot to live in New York. And it’s less than most other surrounding police departments pay. You get what you pay for.

    The idea the more cops equals more safety is actually surprisingly new. For decades, at least until the mid 1990s, “experts” in the criminal justice field used a lot of trees to disprove any link between police numbers and crime. What matters isn’t so much how many police there are, but what those police officers do. But if police are doing the right thing—and that’s a big if—more police officers help. And since the early 1990s, police officers in New York have been doing the right thing more often than not.

    Nobody knows the “right” number of police to have. Ideally we’d always have more. But when you take the zero-sum world of municipal budgets into account, I think New York City has about the right numbers today. Raising the pay of police officers is an issue of fairness and an issue of getting and retaining better officers.

    It only takes one big lawsuit tomorrow—paid out of the pockets of New York City taxpayers such as myself—to negate any financial savings from cheap pay today. Saving a buck or two (or million) now will cost us more later.

  • Marginal Revolution

    Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, the people behind Marginal Revolution, a respected and well read blog, have been very kind to me (or at least very kind to my book).

    Tyler Cowen posted about my book and the Amazon pre-sales rank got a big boost (not that I check these things, of course).

  • Wild gun fight. Police shoot bad guy. Officers shot.

    This one, if the Sunis to be believed, sounds wild. Though if the Sunis to be believed, this happened in East Baltimore (you know, where bad things happen). Best I can tell it started in the Central and ended in the Northern.

    Officer Anthony Jobst, 47, was in his patrol car in the first block of E. Lafayette Ave. about 2:30 a.m. when he heard gunshots and saw a white Audi speeding away. Jobst, who was joined by four other uniformed officers, drove after the Audi and followed it for about a mile to an alley in the 400 block of E. Lorraine Ave. in the Harwood neighborhood.

    The Audi crashed in the alley, and the driver ran out and hid behind a brick wall. When officers approached him, the man opened fire, shooting Jobst in the foot and grazing the left leg of 27-year-old Officer Hadyn Gross, Bealefeld said.

    Officers returned fire, striking the man several times in the upper torso, but the gunfight was “protracted” because he was wearing body armor enhanced with steel inserts.
    …
    Back at Lafayette Avenue, where shots were first fired, police found Rico Alston, 27, with two bullet wounds to the chest. Alston was taken to an area hospital.

    He was in serious but stable condition yesterday, police said.

    [March 19 update: 88 rounds were fired. The bad guy died Monday night. The Sunreports, “At one point, the man signaled to police that he was surrendering – but police said he used the lull in gunfire to reload the Smith & Wesson.”]

  • Always the narcs getting into trouble

    Too often, almost predictably, undercover vice units are involved in scandal. Even the Sean Bell shooting has a strong narc connection.

    The Night Club Task Force involved in the Sean Bell shooting was formed in reaction to the Chelsea abduction and murder of 18-year-old Jennifer Moore. These undercover vice and narcotics officers worked to establish patterns of wrongdoings in clubs, such as alcohol sales to minors, to force closure with civil proceedings and nuisance abatement laws. Evidently they did a good job. Perhaps the unit should have been disbanded with accolades. Instead, after three months in Chelsea, commanders sent the 20 or so police officers to Queens. In the killing of Sean Bell, this unit’s undercover vice and narcotics mentality is very evident.

    In a drug arrest, it is important to find drugs on a person. Otherwise there is no case. Vice and narcotics officers are ingrained to work in ways that build strong court cases. But guns aren’t drugs. If the officers believed that Bell and his friends were going to get a gun, they should have stopped the suspects before they got to their car. But they wanted an arrest. If the men weren’t in the car with the gun, no court case would have had a change. But still, any illegal gun would be confiscated and them men would spend a night in jail

    Undercover units should be limited to operations that uniformed officers can’t handle. Because plainclothes police know and feel they are police to the bone, when performing police duties they can too easily forget or fail to convince citizens that they are, in fact, police. Badges can be bought on eBay. The flash of a shield isn’t enough, especially when a gun is involved.

    Uniformed foot patrol can work with bars and nightclubs to alleviate problems rather than sting them out of business. There is nothing about a rowdy bar that a good cop or two can’t handle. Local beat cops know the area. Officers on foot are rarely involved in controversial shootings because they are more familiar with the surrounding and less likely to be afraid. The good old-fashioned beat cop… Nobody is better at keeping the peace. Instead of drug cops trying to make a good arrest, beat cops focused on public safety would have saved the life of Sean Bell and the careers of three police officers.