A bad police-involved shooting is a bad shooting. Now admittedly police, being armed representatives of the state, have a higher degree of responsibility than an average Joe. But my problem with the dozen or so media requests I get after something like this is perspective and selective outrage. Perhaps 500 or 600 people are killed by police America each year…
Category: Police
Well this look bad.
Very bad. For a lot of reasons. A man is wanted for arrest for unpaid child support. A cop shoots the man while the man is running away and clearly, at that moment, is not a threat. The officer then apparently picks up and moves and drops his Taser closer to the dead body? Oh, it’s all bad. The North…
30 years. Death Row. Innocent.
“According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Mr. Hinton is the 152nd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973.” You’d think people would care more.
War on Drugs In Mexico
This isn’t exactly news, but now it’s official… because it’s in the papers: “Study Finds Mexican Troops Did Not Stem Drug-War Killings“
Eastern and Western State Penns
I wrote about Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail and Prison and the Eastern State Penn in In Defense of Flogging, but I had never seen the inside of Eastern State Penn…. until now! Thanks to having written a book about prisons (to be honest, it didn’t hurt that my wife writes guidebooks, but whatev), we got a little private tour .…
Seven (7!) Percent of Oakland Cops Live in Oakland
I don’t know what the right percentage is, regarding cops living where they work. Though I am partial to 100 percent of cops living or having had lived in the city they police. But whatever the right number is, the percentage is larger than friggin’ seven percent, which is what you find in Oakland. Now is this why Oakland cops…
How much would they have pay you to do this?
Civil servants too often get disparaged. But that man on the ladder is a New York City civil servant and he is climbing up, not down. I’m no longer a civil servant, but this makes me proud just to be fellow worker for the City of New York. Here’s a video of climbing down here. Previously unidentified, he is Bronx…
Blacks against Black-on-Black Violence
This isn’t really news. But some seem to think that blacks only care about black lives murder when it’s at the hands of police. (And certainly police-involved killings seems to be the only ones that get a lot of press). But when blacks do protest and act against violence in the black community, very few seem to notice. This happenedin…
Are applicants for the police job down?
I don’t know. And that’s what I told Meaghan Corzine of CBS St. Louis. Luckily, I wasn’t her only source. It’s a good story.
Crime up in NYC (this time for real)
Compared to last year, shootings and homicides in NYC are up 20 percent. Twenty percent is a real increase. Here’s the compstat page and also a link to last week’s summary (no matter when you click the link). I don’t know why crime is up. But… I can’t help but think it’s part of (or some combination of) everything that…