As more and more states legalize marijuana, New York City still leads the world for arrests for possession of the evil weed. You might wonder who actually thinks it’s a good idea to arrest people for a decriminalized amount of marijuana. Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins: “If the current practice of making arrests for both possession and sale of…
Category: Police
Better Policing Equals Less Crime
This is a no-brainer to many, but a lot of people — usually those who don’t like police — still deny or diminish it: cops matter. And national trends are the result not some crime-related miasma but of the collective work in individual cities and neighborhoods. Camden, NJ, is worth paying attention to. I haven’t been following it too closely,…
Strike against cop cameras
When I was cop, boy did I joke about things I wouldn’t want seen on youtube. It might be a tad overgenerous to say what I said were even jokes. But I laughed. I still do. When I get a message on my answering machine that says, “Pete, will you stop touching little boys and pick up the phone!” I…
Those pesky facts
What if everything you thought about Michael Brown was wrong? Do you believe in evidence? Science? Evolution? Global warming? Can new evidence change your opinion? Is your conviction that a police officer killed an innocent surrendering black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, so strong that facts and evidence simply do not matter? Might you accept that there are racial injustices in…
Score one for cop’s camera
KOB Albuquerque reports how a lapel camera protected an officer against a woman’s false accusations that he sexually assaulting her.
Brrrr… it’s cold outside
I can’t help but notice — now that another long hot summer is done and a commie mayor and Al Sharpton are running the show and the police have been thrown under the bus and Obama is president and the ACLU stopped letting police stop criminals and there’s no more stop question and frisk and there’s independent oversight and body…
If crime doesn’t pay, why is it so expensive?
And in case you were wondering, the cost of housing a prisoner in jail on NYC’s Rikers Island is now officially $100,000 per year! You get what you pay for, they say. $1.1 billion dollars. 42 percent higher than seven years ago. “During the same period, there was a 124 percent increase in assaults on the staff by inmates at…
Bootlegging: for cigarettes, alive and well in New York City
Story in the New York Times: The toothpick pressed a hidden button that released a large magnet that kept a secret compartment locked. Deputy Davis lifted the front of the row of shelves like you would the trunk of a small car, and inside were rows and rows, all different brands, of contraband. Not narcotics or pills, but unopened packs…
“Why we need to fix St. Louis County”
Well said by Radley Balko in the Washington Post: When a local government’s very existence depends on its citizens breaking the law — when fines from ordinance violations are written into city budgets for the upcoming year as a primary or even the main expected source of revenue — the relationship between the government and the governed is not one…