“Party is over, guys….”
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to invite the neighborhood drug dealers to your place to watch the game.
The guests staying for three days, sold drugs out of his living room, and bound and tortured the guy by pouring boiling water and pennies over his naked body.
Boiling pennies?! Where do they think of these things?
From the Washington Post:
Correction
Thursday, December 3, 2009
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.
I like his Moxie. Seriously:
“If he were a white kid from an upper middle class family he would have gotten a lawyer and some counseling,” Huckabee said. “But because he was a young black kid he got 108 years.”
Huckabee said the sentence was “far disproportionate from any other punishment in Arkansas at the time for a similar crime.”
Good shooting. Good riddance. Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper has a good analysis:
Clemmons, nursing a two-day old bullet wound to the stomach, having killed four cops already and facing at least life in prison, frantically searching for a way out of the state if not the country, and packing one of the dead officers’ sidearms, would have beyond a shadow of doubt murdered again. There and then.
He was denied that chance. Whether Clemmons was seeking cover to pull the gun and fire, or about to flee, the officer did precisely the right thing. It was not a “cold-blooded murder,” as at least one reader has asserted. It was a courageous and necessary act.
She was acquitted of more serious charges. The jury deliberated 7 days.
A bunch of stories in the Sun.
Seems like everybody in the NYPD is doing it.
And so what? The whole concept is strange to this former Baltimore police officer. So is the language.
I had three real badges when I was cop. They give you one, for your shirt or jacket. You need to pay for others. One other you need, for the wallet. I also got one more, one suitable for framing, a so-called plaque badge. The wallet badge is also a plaque badge (flat) with the pins cut and filed off. When I quit, I turned one of them in. You do the math.
But cops know that the badge isn’t the big deal. It’s the “credentials” that matter. I had but one of those. And I turned it in like a good boy.
And it’s the fault of the Republicans!
Imagine the conservative anger if Maurice Clemmons–armed robber, child rapist, messianic apocalypse believer, bad neighbor, and now cop killer–had been been granted clemency by some Democraticgovernor! Some criminal-loving cop-hating commie Democrat politician.
Maybe with proper mental health care this never would have happened. Clemmons is clearly a guy who needed to be confined in a prison or mental hospital. And maybe if it weren’t for some of the other 2.3 million people behind bars (like the drug offenders), Clemmons would still be incarcerated.
Regardless, I’m happy that the governor who commuted his lengthy prison sentence “over the protests of prosecutors” is a Republican. Do I think Mike Huckabee is personally at fault? No. At least no more than Michael Dukakis was to blame for Willie Horton.
Had Huckabee been a Democrat, Republicans would be having a field day going after him. Would a Democrat have done something differently and prevented many horrible crimes? No. But at least now I don’t have to listen to some dumbass Republicans blaming Democrats for these cops’ deaths.
[update: Huckabee isgetting plenty of heat for this.]
Or so says the Washington Post.
“Seriously,” said Bruce Merkin, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, an advocacy group based in the District, “there is a reason you don’t have Mexican beer cartels planting fields of hops in the California forests.”
Holy Sh*t! Talk about an unwelcome back to the ol’ US of A.
Guns, folks. Guns matter. I wonder if four police officers have ever been shot and killed in England. Ever. There was one police funeral in England when I was there, just two days ago. An officer who was killed when a flood-weakened bridge collapsed on him.
The Christmas crime season is the US begins. This storyfrom the NY Daily News. [November 30 Update] And the Chicago Sun Times. Street crime really does up before Christmas. Keep that in mind.
I’m in a pub in York, UK, right now. Leeds, where I’m staying, and where David Simon said he might have set The Wire if he set it in the UK, has maybe 3 or 4 homicides a year (or so I was told). Population 440,000. Baltimore, population 630,000 has more than 200.
In answer to one burning question here in the UK: Are parts of the cities becoming “like The Wire”?
No.
Baltimore (and most American cities) have more killings than the entire United Kingdom. Amazing how they manage to fend off all the anti-social drunks here without firearms. Somehow they manage.