Western District Officer McAndrew retires after 50 years of service. From the Sun:
He had no idea that he would carry this passion for 50 years of service. Asked how many police commissioners he had served under, McAndrew smiled, and said: Everyone.
(anybody know his sequence number!?)
From the Village Voice, debunking everybody from Ashton Kutcher to CNN and the New York Timeswho repeat the absurd claim that there are “between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today!”
We examined arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation’s 37 largest cities during a 10-year period.
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Law enforcement records show that there were only 8,263 arrests across America for child prostitution during the most recent decade.
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Compare 827 annually with the 100,000 to 300,000 per year touted in the propaganda.The nation’s 37 largest cities do not give you every single underage arrest for hooking. Juveniles can go astray in rural Kansas.
But common sense prevails in the police data. As you move away from such major urban areas as Los Angeles, underage prostitution plunges.
And keep in mind that while a 17-year-old drug addict busted for turning tricks in Baltimore is not, shall we stay, on the straight on narrow. She is not a child sex slave.
Generally I support the goals of prison reformers. Prisons are not supposed to be torture chambers that destroy the lives of all who enter. So I support efforts to make them better. But in my book I compare that to asking for comfier seats on the train to Auschwitz. It’s kind of missing the big picture.
But this guy seems truly delusional. From The Week:
Yes, we have a prison problem, but Moskos assumes that prisons are just violent holding cells, a theory that “has been thoroughly discredited.” Unlike the “judicial brutality” he proposes, correctional facilities “expend resources for 24/7 custody, care, rehabilitation and retraining” to help criminals come back to society.
What world is he living in?
Turns out he’s the policy and compliance director for the Minnesota Sex Offender Program.
According to the Star Tribune:
Minnesota has civilly committed 554 men and one woman to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP), designed to treat paroled sex offenders until they are no longer dangerous. … But the system’s spiraling cost and lack of measurable success are causing growing unease. Twenty four offenders have died, but no one has been permanently released.
“Come now, E.B.! It’s time for us to venture out and continue our study of early 21st century society…”
“Aww. Can’t we just stay in and do our research online?”
“I’m afraid not… to truly understand a people and culture, we must walk among them! Document their daily routines and observe them in direct face to fact interactions.”
Fine advice from Jim Meddick’s excellent Monty.
The New York Timeshas an article about the absurd sentence (150 years) Madoff received. Why is absurd? Not because he doesn’t deserve it. It’s absurd because Madoff was then 71 years old! Seems to me a good defense of flogging:
Judge Chin’s recollections resurrect all the anger, shock and confusion that surrounded Mr. Madoff’s crimes, and provide a rare peek at the excruciating pressure faced by a judge who had to balance the law, the public’s emotions and his own deeply held beliefs while meting out a sentence that was just and satisfied the court’s need to send a message.
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“I’m surprised Chin didn’t suggest stoning in the public square,” [Madoff said].
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Judge Chin noted in the interviews that 20 or 25 years would have effectively been a life sentence for Mr. Madoff, and any additional years would have been purely symbolic. Yet symbolism was important, he said, given the enormity of Mr. Madoff’s crimes.
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But he decided that a term of 150 years would send a loud and decisive message. He felt that Mr. Madoff’s “conduct was so egregious,” he said, “that I should do everything I possibly could to punish him.”
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By the time Judge Chin entered his chambers on the morning of Monday, June 29, he had decided what his draft was missing, he said. In explaining how the 150-year sentence was symbolically important, he had neglected to include a third, crucial reason: retribution.“A defendant should get his just deserts,” Judge Chin remembers thinking.
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Judge Chin read his passage on retribution, which, after the length of the sentence itself, appeared to have the greatest impact. In the headlines and news accounts that followed, the words “extraordinarily evil” seemed to be everywhere.
No rehab. No bettering of the soul. Punishment.
In New York, a 150-year sentence would, should Madoff live to be 221-years old, cost me and other good citizens of the Empire State more than $7 million. There has got to be a better way.
One cop I worked with would constantly get into foot pursuits. For the rest of us, it was kind of annoying, especially for those of us who hated running. What frustrated me was that these pursuits were entirely preventable. The problem was this officer would see a kid he wanted to stop and say, “Come here!” Naturally, not being a fool, the kid would take off running.
If I wanted to stop somebody, I would calmly walk right up to him and grab him. If I wanted to talk to someone, I would politely ask, “Can I talk to you for a second?” and lead him away from his friends. I can’t remember these tactics ever failing.
Here is some good tactical police advice from, of all places, Mother Jones:
Consider why barking the command “Come here!” doesn’t really work. Thompson explains in his article,
You have just warned the subject that he is in trouble. “Come here” means to you, “Over here, you are under my authority.” But to the subject it means, “Go away—quickly!” The words are not tactical for they have provided a warning and possibly precipitated a chase that would not have been necessary had you, instead, walked casually in his direction and once close said, “Excuse me. Could I chat with [you] momentarily?” Notice this question is polite, professional, and calm.
And it works.
That’s the bullshit detector going off after seeing this:
Expert: 40,000 – 50,000 slaves currently in U.S.
How much you wanna bet he just made up that number?
Being exploited for cheap labor does not automatically mean you’re a slave.
Have we forgotten what slavery was?
“Police: ‘Jackass’ star Ryan Dunn was drunk and driving over 132 mph.”
I guess it’s not surprising. But it is sad. I love Jackass!
The decisionjust seems to be just a general free-speech issue. They compare video games to books:
Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones.
Just because there’s a new media doesn’t mean there’s a new exception to be carved out of the 1st Amendment. I like our Court in general on 1st-Amendment issues. It’s all too rare to see the government limiting the power of the government (unlike, say, in cases involving the 4th Amendment). Here’s what I think is the meat of the Court’s decision:
We have long recognized that it is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and dangerous to try. “Everyone is familiar with instances of propaganda through fiction. What is one man’s amusement, teaches another’s doctrine.” Winters v. New York (1948). Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection. Under our Constitution, “esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature . . . are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority.” US v. Playboy (2000).
But I still don’t understand why nudity is worse than violence. For speech to be banned, it needs to be obscene. But I don’t follow this logic:
Because speech about violence is not obscene, it is of no consequence that California’s statute mimics the New York statute regulating obscenity-for-minors that we upheld in Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629 (1968). That case approved a prohibition on the sale to minors of sexualmaterial that would be obscene from the perspective of a child.
Why is violence somehow less obscene than, say, a naked woman?
But the best part of the decision? This attack, in a footnote, directed at the court’s worst justice:
JUSTICE THOMAS ignores the holding of Erznoznik, and denies that persons under 18 have any constitutional right to speak or be spoken to without their parents’ consent. He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none.
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Our point is not, as JUSTICE THOMAS believes, merely that such laws are “undesirable.”… Such laws do not enforce parental authority over children’s speech and religion; they impose governmental authority.
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This argument is not, as JUSTICE THOMAS asserts, “circular.” It is the absence of any historical warrant or compelling justification for such restrictions, not our ipse dixit, that renders them invalid.
Damn, yo! This is a full-on Supreme Court Smackdown! (And now I gotta look up ipse dixit.) Why didn’t Scalia just straight up call Thomas an idiot? Oh, wait, he did.
I also like that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books are now officially enshrined in constitutional law (I admit: I “turned back.” Didn’t we all?). Says the Court: “All literature is interactive.”
And Scalia, who lives up to his reputation as the liveliest writer on the bench, has one final dis for one those idiotic over-reaching psychological studies:
One study, for example, found that children who had just finished playing violent video games were more likely to fill in the blank letter in “explo_e” with a “d” (so that it reads “explode”) than with an “r” (“explore”). The prevention of this phenomenon, which might have been anticipated with common sense, is not a compelling state interest.
Here’s the story with the video.
Here’s the story about the inevitable backlash to anybody who talks about the harms that guns cause to people in our cities. They tend to be ad hominem.
Kudos for not being afraid to talk about race. Yes folks, racism used to not only be legal, but mandatory. And yes folks, that still matters. Even today. Even with a black president. Even if you’re sick of hearing about it. And no folks, bringing this up does not excuse crime. Nor does it mean you’re a racist.
Shall we continue?
From the Sun Times:
McCarthy went on to say that in the debate about gun control, there has to be “a recognition of who’s paying the price for gun manufacturers being rich and living in gated communities.”
McCarthy told parishioners an anecdote about a brutal night of killings in Newark, N.J., where he was previously head of the police department. McCarthy said that after he got home that night, he turn on the TV to relax, and tuned in to Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
“She was caribou-hunting and talking about the right to bear arms,” McCarthy said. “Why wasn’t she at the crime scene with me?”
P.S. I’ve met McCarthy at John Jay College. I like McCarthy… But, chief, you know it’s wrong to be stepping on casings at a crime scene. You shouldn’t be there messing up the crime scene in the first place! (But maybe he was speaking figuratively.)