Not yet. But the sky did get a little lower in NYC last month. Over the 28-day period ending 4/6/14, compared to 2013, the number of people shot increased 40 percent (101 vs 72). The increases were found, not surprisingly, in the Bronx (27 vs 18), Brooklyn North (28 vs 17) and Queens South (12 vs 6).
Cause for alarm? I don’t know. But my eyebrow is raised…
Still, for the year, shooting and murders are a bit lower than last year.
One of my life’s great regrets is that I can’t for the life of me imitate the Baltimore accent. And I love the Baltimore accent. Well, I’m not the only one who has trouble with those sounds that go from DC to Philly. This is actually about the Philly accent, but a lot of it applies to Baltimore, too.
Plus, the author, Arika Okrent, I went to high school with her. And she’s as cool as any Klingon speakeryou’ve ever met!
Not too long ago I sent my Greek Americans book to John Kiriakou. He’s a proud Greek American and about as close to a political prisoners as we have. In his own words:
I’m one of the people the Obama administration charged with criminal espionage, one of those whose lives were torn apart by being accused, essentially, of betraying his country. The president and the attorney general have used the Espionage Act against more people than all other administrations combined, but not against real traitors and spies. The law has been applied selectively, often against whistle-blowers and others who expose illegal, corrupt government actions.
After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s waterboarding torture program in 2007, I was the subject of a years-long FBI investigation. In 2012, the Justice Department charged me with “disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.” I had revealed no more than others who were never charged, about activities — that the CIA had a program to kill or capture Al Qaeda members — that were hardly secret.
Eventually the espionage charges were dropped and I pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: confirming the name of a former CIA colleague, a name that was never made public. I am serving a 30-month sentence.
After getting my book, Kiriakou wrote me back a nice thank-you note (hand-written, of course) so I then sent him another book of mine, In Defense of Flogging. I figured he has plenty of time on his hands to think about incarceration. Kiriakou mentions me in his his latest missive from Loretto Minimum Security Federal Prison. It’s a good read, if for nothing else his concise summary of prison religions and having to deal with pedophiles in prisons. The latter includes this:
Loretto’s “Education” Department scheduled a prisoner-led class last fall called “Quantum Physics.” Nobody bothered to check whether the prisoner-teacher was qualified to teach a course on quantum physics, nor did anyone request a lesson plan. As it turned out, the gay prisoner-teacher’s only degree was from the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College. The course had nothing to do with quantum physics. It was a self-help pity party for pedophiles, and it sought to help them expand their rationale of denial, with the theme from “Rocky” playing in the background all the while. The teacher began the course by chanting, “We’re homos and we’re chomos! We’re homos and we’re chomos!” (“Chomo” is short for “child molester.”) One African-American prisoner, who expected to learn something about quantum physics, got up, shouted, “This is fucked up!” and walked out. Otherwise, it was a very popular class among a certain demographic. I’m not kidding.
The Dissenter has been publishing Kirikou’s letters under the heading: Letter From Loretto. They are worth reading in their entirety.
Here is a brief summary of one:
[Kiriakou] has learned “how to cook methamphetamine.” He has learned how best to steal food from a cafeteria to cook food “using only a live electrical wire and a garbage can full of water.” He has learned how to smoke “spitarettes,” which cost $10 each and are cigarettes made with chewing tobacco spit out by prison guards and dried and rolled up with toilet paper.
He concludes, “The country already is home to an increasingly large population of uneducated, untrained, unreformed, pissed-off ex-felons who are not going to just sit around hoping to win the lottery. Lacking prospects for employment, they’ll do what they do best—commit crimes.”
“For the pedophiles, they will leave prison emboldened by the fact that they spent their entire sentence among like-minded sickos without once being challenged about their perversions.”
This the type of prison disparaged as Club Fed. I wouldn’t want to take a vacation there.
Here’s a copy of one of his thoughtful thank-you letters to me. John Kiriakou will probably be getting a copy of Cop in the Hood for Easter.
Neill Franklin, once my commanding officer and now my friend (and coauthor) featured in Vice Magazine. I love Vice Magazine. And just because I’ve also been featured in it.
A nice New York Times video piece about the coming of the “superpredators” who never came. File under C for crack babies?
From the Times:
What happened with the superpredator jeremiads is that they proved to be nonsense. They were based on a notion that there would be hordes upon hordes of depraved teenagers resorting to unspeakable brutality, not tethered by conscience. No one in the mid-1990s promoted this theory with greater zeal, or with broader acceptance, than John J. DiIulio Jr., then a political scientist at Princeton.
DiIulio was also a very good professor, by the way. I got an A in his Politics 240 class.
As John DiIulio says, “Demography is not fate, and criminology is not pure science.”
I’ve never heard such uniformity in belief from police officers that crime is going to go up in New York City. Why with stop, question, and frisks down and a liberal mayor in charge, it’s almost like they want crime to go up just so they can say, “we told you so” and reminisce about the good ol’ days of Giuliani (when crime was, by the way — though going down rapidly — much higher).
Perhaps a level of fear and oppression is lifting from parts of the city… I don’t know. Perhaps that is good. Perhaps it will lead to wilding and chaos. I don’t know. But until crime does go up… when the next Compstat report is publicly released it will show it was a bad week in NYC, with 9 murders. This will negate much of the year’s improvement over last year. And winter was indeed very cold.
So it would be nice to get through a long hot summer before stating with confidence that crime isn’t going up. And if crime does go up in New York, let’s keep the focus on police tactics and police citizen interaction and not blame the usual gobbledygook of liberal “root causes.” (If the crime drop in the 1990s showed anything, it’s that crime can plummet independently of improved social and economic conditions. Poverty can make you miserable; it does not turn you into a mugger.).
Regardless, right now crime is not going up. So until it does, it seems silly to run around like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling.
This may be the best argument for a residency requirement I’ve ever seen.
You know what “ghetto” is? When two groups who are oh-so similar — really with everything in common, objectively, and perhaps a bit misunderstood by society — forgot their brotherhood and trade blows with each other because of some perceived slight.
Or maybe it’s just in “their” nature to like a good scrap. And the spectators in said ghetto? Brother, sisters, wives, baby’s mommas and the like? They cheer on the fighters because they’re, I don’t know, “animals.”
This was in Nassau County, but I haven’t seen such a good brawl since I was on 700 N. Port. Or the 1700 block of Crystal.
Look, I love a hockey fight as much as the next guy. But this embarrassment was at a f*cking-charity-hockey-game! I only point this out because if this event were a basketball game with black folk fighting, countless people and The Blazewould be filled with racist comments about “their” culture.
Idiots do in fact come in all races. But this hits home because I actually live on Long Island (geographically, at least) and these guys police my city.
Oh well, fools fighting does make a great spectator sport! Too bad my taxes pay for their dental plan.
Hell, the Finest and Bravest haven’t had such a good slug-fest since they were on the pile of the WTC together after Set 11th.
One would expect to see illegal weed sales diminish in states with legalized marijuana. It hasn’t happened overnight. But I suspect it will. From USA Today.
…And Bratton is right. Should be the end of the story, despite what you’ll read in the Postand the Daily News.
More interesting is what is buried in the Daily News story:
Police made 12,495 stops between October and December — down a staggering 86% from 89,620 during the same time period in 2012. And of the stops during the last quarter of 2013, 16% resulted in an arrest. That’s up from 6% over the same period in 2012.
Raising the hit-rate of stops is a great indicator that more stops are based on actual real articulatable reasonable suspicion (you know, what is legally required) and not just quota pressure (er, productivity goals). 2,000 arrests from 12,500 stops is better than 5,400 arrests from 90,000 stops. Of course if these data simply mean more stops are unrecorded, this “improvement” could mean nothing…
