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  • 40 killed over weekend in Ciudad Jaurez

    In response, lawmakers in Mexico have called for the banning of… a video game.

    Meanwhile, the NRA kills a law aimed at limiting gun running to Mexico.

    If the rising death toll was a sign in 2009 that drug gangs were weakening, what does the rising death toll say about how weak the drug gangs must be in 2011? 40 deaths in one weekend in one city?! Victory must be very very near.

    For the victory party, I’ve already got my cervesa, my “misión cumplida” banner, and my Chapo Guzmán piñata all ready to go. You just bring the guacamole and tell me when to cue the mariachi band. Because man, we’re going to have ourselves one craaazy fiesta loca!

    Ay yi yi.

  • Non-violent drug offenders don’t end up in prison…

    …except when they do.

    Patricia Marilyn Spottedcrow, who is serving 10 years in prison, has been taken away from her four young children and husband, and has ended her work in nursing homes because of $31 in marijuana sales. On Dec. 31, 2009, Spottedcrow and her mother, Delita Starr, 50, sold a “dime bag” of marijuana to a police informant at Starr’s home.
    …
    [The now retired judge said:] “By not putting the grandmother in prison, she is able to help take care of the children.”

  • The Racial Reality

    Using the Baltimore Sun’sfun interactive homicide chart, these are the sad and politically incorrect totals for 2010:

    223 homicides: 202 black (91%), 13 white, 5 Hispanic, 1 Asian, 2 unknown(?).

    Overall, the 2009 population of Baltimore is estimated to be 63% African American and 33% white. So roughly, the black homicide rate (50) is eight times the white homicide rate (6.2 — which isn’t that much higher than the national average of 5.4 per 100,000).

    Is there a moral? I don’t know, but certainly we can do better. It’s also clear you can’t talk about this homicide problem without talking about race, and people don’t want to talk about race. Merely broaching the subject can get you labeled as racist. Who wants that? And hell, why should you care? It’s just “them” killing each other, right? And maybe you, no matter your race, moved out of the city a long time ago precisely to get away from this problem. It’s certainly an understandable reaction. But it’s not part of the solution.

    Unless we do something major in terms of changing our drug policy, investing in police, and yes, even spending money on job creation, the killings will continue. These are choices we make. And mostly we choose to do nothing. So the killings continue.

    This isn’t a local problem; it’s a national disgrace.

  • Move cops to higher-crime districts

    So say the Chicago ministers. Generally, such a move would a good idea. You certainly wouldn’t want to move the cops to lower-crime district.

    But if this happens, don’t be surprised next year when more blacks are arrested and more tickets are given to blacks.

    For what’s it’s worth, one Rev. Marshall Hatch of New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church seems to have a pretty understanding of police and politics:

    On Friday, the ministers released an open letter to Daley and held a news conference outside his office at which they called on the lame-duck mayor to take advantage of the freedom his new status provides and deliver on a promise he made in 2003. They argued that Weis also has nothing to lose, since all four of the major mayoral candidates have vowed to dump him.

    “The timing will never be as good as it is now. This is something they are in a position to do without having to worry about political backlash.”

    Hatch added: “There’s a qualitative difference between beat officers in the community as a part of the fabric of a community and tactical, SWAT strategies that tend to have the adverse effects of criminalizing large parts of communities of high crime and high risk.”

    Well said, preacher.

    Now about the politics. The article in the Sun Times goes on to say:

    Political pressure from aldermen who stand to lose police officers has kept the city from redrawing the boundaries of police beats or otherwise reallocating police resources since the late 1970s.

    The Fraternal Order of Police has said it intends to strictly enforce a contract that, according to the union, could sharply limit Weis’ ability to reallocate officers from one police district to another.
    …
    Last month, mayoral front-runner Rahm Emanuel tried to halt any effort to shift police resources. Emanuel said he was determined to “find policies that unite” the city and argued that shifting officers from lower-crime districts in his North Side political base to higher-crime districts on the South Side and the West Side would only divide Chicago.

    Riiiight….

  • Fewer Cops in San Fran

    The usual. State and federal tax cuts. Local budget cuts. Union workers get screwed. The full story is here.

    Because of the city’s ongoing budget woes, no police academy classes are scheduled for next year, which means that instead of the 1,861 sworn officers who were working for the department in July 2010, retirements and resignations will drop that number to 1,745 by June 2012
    …
    “I can’t say that the crime rate will rise because we lose officers … but all creative ideas will be on the table,” [Interim Chief Jeff Godown] said.
    …
    The department could even be forced to eliminate its popular community policing foot beats and “put the officers back in cars to answer radio calls.”

    Well that’s not very creative. Why is foot patrol (and mounted) always the first thing to go? Partly because most cops don’t take foot patrol seriously. It’s just “hug a thug.” And horses area bit for show (but what a show!).

    Foot patrol officers can answer calls, too. And they should. I’d even be for mounted units on radio patrol. Why not? I thought we needed to be creative. Are two-person units on the table (does S.F. uses two-officers per car? I don’t know)? Have one officer per car. If I policed solo in the Eastern District, you can do it, too. And if you need to cut units, why not less car patrol? That’s always the last to go. I wonder why.

    I think I know:

    The public don’t notice if you cut a few patrol cars. So it’s a pretty useless threat to make. But if you threaten to sell the horses to the glue factory… then everybody is up in arms. So when times are tough, the P.D. can’t say, “We’re going to cut cars, response time will go up slightly. It won’t affect crime.” Instead, the police department threatens: “You’re gonna cut police funding? Then you won’t see officers walking the beat. Cut us more? We’ll go back to reactive policing and nothing else. Still not enough? We close your police station.” It actually is a real threat. But it’s not real leadership.

  • Username and Password, please

    I got this over the transom:

    A police “accreditation manager” (whatever that means) is revising his “social networking policy” so that potential applicants, as part of their background investigation, must sign an affidavit listing any social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn) they belong to and give their passwords to these sites so the department can snoop.

    Is this becoming standard? Do we approve? I’m pretty sure I don’t approve.

  • Immigration and Big Brother Government

    Maybe you want the government to crack down on immigrants. And maybe you don’t like Big Government all messing in your personal business. Well you probably can’t have it both ways.

    Because in the name of cracking down on criminal immigrants, well, the Feds are getting a bit more involved in local law enforcement: “By September, they were weighing ways to penalize states or police departments that did not participate, like cutting off their access to all criminal fingerprint databases.”

    What the government does today to pressure states and cites and local police departments (and employers) in the name of immigration enforcement (or drugs, or terrorism), they’ll do tomorrow for whatever they want. It always works that way.

    Personally, I think this is oh-for-two: bad policy anda bad way to enforce it. But who ever listens to me?

  • Got Raw Milk? Get raided.

    It’s like a new drug!

    “He wondered aloud why the state won’t let him pursue his preferred way of life.”

    That’s an Amish guy s talking about his illegal product… raw milk.

    When police, guns drawn, raid raw milk producers, it’s enough to make me a Libertarian.

    Here’s the story by Jordan Heller.

    Nolt’s resistance, which has been well-documented, has earned him a rather grand moniker: “the Rosa Parks of the farmers’ rights movement.”

    Though shy about the comparison, Nolt doesn’t disclaim the nickname. “What were we to do? Agree to their falsehood? Or just stand upon the truth? And we chose truth.”

    There’s video at the above link, too.

  • On the downside…

    “Marijuana farming in Calif. forest harms animals, pollutes water.” That’s not good. Of course the problem, once again, is that it’s illegal. We could make it legal.

  • Getting rid of police horses: bad

    I’m not a horsey boy. I don’t like horses. They scare me a bit. Plus, I’ve very allergic to horses and try and stay far away (though I do like biking by the horses on Central Park South on my to work).

    Regardless of my dislike for horses, I think every big police department needs a few big four-legged creatures (elephants would be cool, too). Police horses do a lot of good, both in terms of very real crowd control:

    The added visibility of the city’s mounted officers was helpful last May when two Times Square street vendors wanted to report smoke rising from a crude car bomb on 45th Street, which ultimately failed to explode. “They looked around,” he said, “and the first thing they saw of anyone in authority was two mounted police officers, who responded and cleared the area of bystanders before the bomb squad arrived.”

    And also in terms of positive P.R.: “Nobody ever tried to pet my police car, but they line up to pet my horse.” Neither is to be laughed at. Plus, there’s a lot of history here, too.

    But because of budget cuts, many departments are getting rid of their mounted units. It’s a real shame. Especially when it’s not about cost as much as it is about priorities:

    “We had to balance it against being able to keep officers in the patrol cars, and making sure we had enough officers on hand to answer emergency calls,” said Assistant Chief Chief Bob Kanaski of San Diego.

    I refuse to believe that one morepatrol car outweighs the benefit of having oneofficer on horse. And hell, if need be, have officers on horses answer calls. You can always tie the horse to a lamppost. Why not? And think how cool it would be.