“We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national surveillance state!” As told to us by a cartoon (“This Modern World” by Tom Tomorrow).
Copinthehood.com has moved to qualitypolicing.com
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Tuesday One-Two Punch (or lash)
The Blaze(that’s Glenn Beck)
and Metro(that’s subway). Metro is new material.Oh, and there’s a third punch. Let’s call it an uppercut. The Takeaway (National Public Radio) 7:45 AM (which is really the worst possible hour of the day for me to do anything. If it were any early, I’d just stay up all night and be much happier.
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Flogging on CNN
I’ll be on CNN, Sunday, from 7:30 to 7:35pm (Eastern Time) with Drew Griffin. I get to sport the suit I got made for me in Thailand. I’ll probably even wear a tie. If you miss the broadcast, don’t worry, you’ll be able to see the same suit again the next time I’m on TV.
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“You Rascal”
I like when Clarance Page calls me a “rascal”! He writes in the Chicago Tribune:
When Peter Moskos’ new book landed on my desk, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a treatise on crime and punishment or some sort of kinky sex manual.Its title: “In Defense of Flogging.”
You rascal, I thought. Moskos, a former Baltimore cop who teaches law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, knows how to catch our attention.
It’s not giving away too much to say that Moskos doesn’t really want to bring back flogging. But he doesn’t like our correctional system, either. And as long as we insist on fooling ourselves with well-meaning fantasies like the “war on drugs,” he says, nothing is going to get better.
There already are about 14 gazillion other books that will tell you that. So Moskos uses the horror of flogging to focus our minds on the greater horrors that have resulted from the prisons that were invented to replace the lash.
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Against that backdrop, Moskos’ startling invitation to reconsider the whip, cane and cat-o’-nine-tails doesn’t sound so preposterous. At least it gets us thinking.Read the rest here.
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A Barbaric Hoax?
Mansfield Frazier write in The Daily Beast:
At first glace, the title of Peter Moskos’ new book, In Defense of Flogging, strikes you as a barbaric hoax being perpetrated by some sort of right-wing ideologue or kook. In fact, it initially appears to be an idea so outrageous, so provocative, as to not even rate a second thought; something to immediately be dismissed out-of-hand. Indeed, how can anyone—who considers themselves the least bit humane—even consider such an outdated form of punishment as flogging, even for the most serious and monstrous of law breakers?But Moskos, an assistant professor of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a former Baltimore cop to boot, is painfully serious (pun intended). And the timing for his book could not be better, considering a recent Supreme Court decision that upheld a ruling ordering California to release about 46,000 inmates in an attempt to relieve its overcrowded prisons.
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Moskos writes that both ends of the political spectrum should look approvingly upon flogging as a substitute for prison. “If you’re a conservative, flogging holds appeal as efficient, cheap, and old-fashioned punishment for wrongdoing… it’s a get-tough approach… and nothing is tougher than the lash. If you’re a liberal and your goal is to punish more humanely, then you must accept that the present system is an inhumane failure.”In Defense of Floggingforces the reader to confront issues surrounding incarceration that most Americans would prefer not to think about. While Moskos makes a compelling moral argument for allowing those convicted of crimes to be given a choice, he might have been better served if he had made it a financial argument instead. Most American taxpayers will willingly allow someone to be flogged into insensibility if it means they’re going to save a few bucks.
Speaking about timing, I spend about four pages in my book talking about that Sheriff Joe Arpaio, specifically how his “get-tough” policies don’t work. So that S.O.B. better not quit on me! (I do begrudgingly applaud him for at least coming up with some ideas that are liked by inmates–and yet the same ideas are often derided by liberal critics as cruel and barbaric!)
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Corporations are people too!
Explain something to me.
Campaign donations aren’t supposed to buy politicians, right? Because that would be bribery. But corporations give money for “access” or some other BS like that, right? And you can’t limit the money they give to politicians, because, say the courts, corporations are people too.
And corporations are usually legally bound to maximize profits for their shareholders, right? So any donation from corporation to politician must therefore be shown to increase the corporation’s profits. Corporations don’t spend millions on lobbyist because they want to do a public good through tax reform. So say a company gives a million dollars. Then they must get more than million dollars back in legislative action or inaction. If not, they wouldn’t be fulfilling their legal obligations to their shareholders.
You give politicians money, they do something, and you get your money back and then some. This is just bribery, right? Except it’s legal. Hell, it’s more than legal: it’s constitutionally protected.
I am missing something?
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Call me old-fashioned…
…But something always bothers me when police break down your door and kill you. Doesn’t seem necessary.
update:
The tactics here are terrible. Why are they standing in front of the door? I wouldn’t answer a call for a lost lolcat without standing off to the side. In fact, even today, 10 years later, I still do.
And what’s with that last extra shot? “Pop.” Did he flinch?
I’ve also read that they didn’t let paramedics in for a while because the scene wasn’t secure. The whole point of entries like this is to make the scene secure. Or is it just to play with toys.
I have no idea what kind of guy the dead guy was. And to some extend I don’t care. If was so potentially dangerous, why wasn’t it no-knock raid? And if it wasn’t, why not ring the doorbell? As the old joke goes, “It can’t hurt.”
When the man inside his own home was shot by police officers who busted down his door, the home owner (OK, maybe he was a renter) was holding a gun. The safety was on. Now I’m not a fan of guns, but if I still had one and somebody busted down my door, damn right I would be carrying it. And my gun didn’t have a safety.
Further update: This is from The Agitator:
This isn’t like watching video of a car accident or a natural disaster. This doesn’t have to happen. You’re watching something your government does to your fellow citizens about 150 times per day in this country. If this very literal “drug war” insanity is going to continue to be waged in our name, we ought to make goddamned sure everyone knows exactly what it entails. And this is what it entails. Cops dressed like soldiers breaking into private homes, tossing concussion grenades, training their guns on nonviolent citizens, and slaughtering dogs as a matter of procedure.
The action starts at around 6 minutes into the video.
And please keep in mind, it’s not like we’re suddenly winning the war on drugs because of these tactics.
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“I swear to uphold…”
When I was a cop, I rather enjoyed swearing to uphold the constitutions of the United States and Maryland. It seemed like quite an honor. (Even if the actually oath was done very matter-of-factly in some cubical by a woman who didn’t seem to care. And honestly, I’ve never read the Maryland Constitution.)
Oath Keepers is an organization set up to persuade America’s police officers and soldiers to refuse to carry out unconstitutional orders. Fair enough. But somehow it’s considered controversial and right wing.
There’s an interesting interview with the founder, Stewart Rhodes, in Reason magazine.
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What about the children!?!
Anybody who hears hears crap like “200,000 to 300,000 US youth are victims of sex trafficking” and believes it needs a tune-up in the department of B.S. detection. I don’t know why people love to believe made up stats and then discount real ones that matter (eg: poverty, prison, homicide).
One headline read, “HUMAN TRAFFICKING INDUSTRY THRIVES IN PORTLAND METRO AREA.” But when the reporter dug deeper:
She soon found an even bigger story: none of it was true…. In short, every single statistic that advocates and politicians had used to justify Portland’s label as a “hub” of child sex trafficking fell apart.
In City Pages, Nick Pinto looked at the methodology behind the “stats.” It’s a how-to in how not to do research. For instance, in trying to determine the scope of underage prostitutes, they looked at pictures of ads in the back of local newspapers. And then they guessed the age of girls in the picture. As to prostitution’s increase, they counted online classifieds featuring “young women” over time. More adds meant more child prostitution. Then they threw terms like “random sample” and “balanced by race and gender” in the mix. Are you kidding me!?
Of course it’s not like the people coming up with these numbers care about the truth (“think of the children!”):
It’s now clear they used fake data to deceive the media and lie to Congress. And it was all done to score free publicity and a wealth of public funding.
“We pitch it the way we think you’re going to read it and pick up on it,” says Kaffie McCullough, the director of Atlanta-based anti-prostitution group A Future Not a Past. “If we give it to you with all the words and the stuff that is actually accurate–I mean, I’ve tried to do that with our PR firm, and they say, ‘They won’t read that much.’”
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Despite these flaws, the Women’s Funding Network, which held rallies across the nation, has been flogging [ed note: how dare they besmirch the good name of flogging!] the results relentlessly through national press releases and local member organizations. In press releases, the group goes so far as to compare its conjured-up data to actual hard numbers for other social ills.“Monthly domestic sex trafficking in Minnesota is more pervasive than the state’s annually reported incidents of teen girls who died by suicide, homicide, and car accidents (29 instances combined).”
The first defense of lies is common sense. Education comes a close second. And perhaps third is not taking moral ideologues too seriously.
Ultimately the answer to limiting the harms from prostitution is, oh, let me wind up the old Victrola and play that broken record: “legalize and regulate [skip] ‘galize and regulate [skip] ‘galize and regulate [skip] ‘galize and regulate….” Man, where do I find these 78s?
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Unarmed cops taken on by knife-wielding man
A friend sent me this link which shows a bunch of unarmed cops confronting (and running away from) an armed suspect. Had this happened when I was a cop, I would have shot him. No doubt. And slept well. But these cops couldn’t shoot because they don’t have guns. And in the end everybody got home alive. Interesting.