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Category: Police

  • Meanwhile, in the Land of the Free…

    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 (it’s a shame we don’t know for sure). The vast majority are justified.

    Just today in my newsfeed there are stories about these other issues. And I’m happy they’re in the news. But these are mostly one-off issues. Bad shootings by police are such a small part of greater nationwide problems. And nobody is calling me about any of these other issues. They don’t galvanize the public. Why not?

    1) People out of jail can’t get jobs. This is a problem that affects 66 million Americans. 66 million! Oh, well.

    2) A prisoner who was going to be released this month dies because of bad health care. A dialysis technician didn’t show up for work. You know, sometimes people can’t get to work. But is our system so screwed up that there’s no backup plan? Somebody died. Others were hospitalized. Hope it doesn’t happen again. But it will.

    3) Something like 90 rounds were fired at a Sweet 16 party in Cincinnati. Just another day in the city. People be crazy. Oh, well. (Also in Cincinnati papers today parents were charged in killing their 2-year-old child. And officials identified a man, a white man with a knife, who was killed by Cincinnati police on Monday.)

    4) A professional basketball player was cut in some stupid club argument.

    5) In Ferguson, you know, that Ferguson, all of 30 percent of registered voters voted in a local election. And that was considered high voter turnout. I mean, if you’re not voting in Ferguson in this election this year… Jeeze, what can I say?

    Meanwhile, and not just today:

    5) More than two-million Americans woke up today behind bars. No other country in the history of the world has locked up so many people, by rate or numbers. I mean Rwanda is the only country that comes close, by rate. And they, it should be pointed out, had a friggin’ genocide.

    6) Best I know, villages in St. Louis County and elsewhere are still funding 30 percent of their budget through taxes, fines, and civil penalties, in effect criminalizing having no money. Similar to the guy in South Carolina who was wanted for failure to pay child support, and then killed. Oh, well.

    And this is just the news from today. And the only way we seem to be able to broach any of these issues is in relation to a questionable police-involved shooting. Here’s the problem: Even if there were no bad police-involved shootings, a few dozen people each year wouldn’t be be dead. But shouldn’t we also care that 38 Americans who are going to be murdered today. 120 Americans will die today from drug overdoses (about half prescription and half illegal drugs). 110 Americans will kill themselves today. Oh, well.

  • 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 Charleston, South Carolina, police officer is being charged with murder.

    The NYT has the video.

    As if the first seven shots weren’t bad enough… the pause and the eighth shot? That last shot, as so often happens, will doom the cop. Though in this case it’s not like the first seven were justified. But even if they were, cops have to justify all their shots. And a pause indicates a reassessment of threat. And then he shot again?

  • 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

    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 . Unfortunate I didn’t even have my real camera with me.







    Amazingly, by sheer chance, I stumbled across the site of its sister prison, the lesser known Western State Penn, just last week.

    The prison is gone. But the eagle is real!

  • 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 have such troubled community relations? Well… actually, yeah, in part. Maybe not the majority part. But certainly a partial part.

  • How much would they have pay you to do this?

    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 Firefighter Mike Shepherd. He was off-duty and just happened to be nearby. Talk about being a first responder! While other people took pictures of an exploding building, he climbed into the flames to look for and save people!

    This is what I mean about the job being different if you walk into danger. His base salary is about $77,000. How much would they have to pay you to think and react this way?

    According to the Times:

    Mr. Shepherd went up the fire escape and climbed floor by floor. At the building’s second floor, the floor was buckling. People on the ground began yelling for him to get down. He continued his ascent to the fourth floor, yelling, “Anyone here, anyone here?”

    And my eyes get a teary when I read thisabout one of the presumed dead:

    A day after the explosion, Hyeonil Kim, 59, the owner of Sushi Park, said the police and rescue workers were still not able to locate Moises Ismael Locón Yac, 27, a member of his restaurant staff. Of the 15 employees at work on the day of the blast, three were injured, according to Mr. Kim. Of those people, two remain hospitalized; one, a Nepalese man, was injured badly, he said. Mr. Kim described Mr. Locón as “earnest” and good at his job.

    “Everything I lost is just lost, nothing I can do about it,” he said. “But this friend —” Mr. Kim stopped speaking, overcome by sobs.

    Locón was from Guatemala and lived in Queens, not far from me.

    Now I’m not saying you should climb into a burning building (and don’t do it if you’re wearing polyester). Just be happy others will do it for you!

    [Also, I don’t mean to pick on that guy taking a picture. He actually did help somebody!]

  • 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 Baltimore. The mayor said, “Some people have said the work we’re doing here is blaming black men. I refuse to ignore the crisis.” The sobering facts:

    This year, all but three of the city’s 44 homicide victims were black. Last year, 189 of the city’s 211 murder victims were black. And most were young. The largest group of victims — 54 — were age 25 to 29,

  • 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 has happened in NYC in the past year. I mean, I know what most cops think is the cause: stop and frisk has stopped; marijuana arrests have plummeted; there’s more oversight of cops; De Blasio is mayor; Obama is president; Eric Holder is Attorney General; cops find it preferable to do too little rather than do to much (“if you don’t work you can’t get in trouble”).

    Some of that is just ideological sour grapes. But some of it, part of it, is true.

    What I find amazing is I don’t hear any critic of the NYPD sounding any alarm. Oh well, I guess 60 extra murder victims per year — 54 of whom, based on passed statistics, will be black or hispanic men — is a small price to pay to keep innocent people from getting harassed by the police. I for one don’t buy that equation.

    Those who opposed past police practices (and to be clear it’s not like I loved everything the NYPD was doing) seem to be very silent right now. Shouldn’t the increase in murders lead to a discussion about what police should be doing?

    I guess the same people who think the police had little if anything to do with the crime drop now just think it’s preordained that crime goes up. But it is not “written.” Why don’t I hear debate? Instead I hear a lot of silence.