Peter Hermann has the story and Nicole Fuller reports: Papantonakis, whose family has run the stall since 1970, admitted to The Baltimore Sun in a jailhouse interview in May that he sold guns to make ends meet but denied that he sold them to gang members, as alleged in the indictment. He also said that he did not sell the…
70 cars down
There are only about 130 cars on patrol at any given time. City officials say an unusually high concentration of ethanol in the city’s gasoline supply contributed to the breakdown of more than 70 police cars over the weekend, most of which had been repaired and returned to service Tuesday. More than 200 police cars fueled up at a 24-hour,…
Lawsuit filed by skateboarder against Baltimore police officer thrown out on technicality
Justin Fenton reportsin the Sun: A lawsuit against a Baltimore police officer who was famously recorded on a YouTube video yelling at young skateboarders at the Inner Harbor for calling him “dude” has been thrown out by a city judge. Circuit Judge Evelyn Cannon granted a defense motion for summary judgment to dismiss the case…. after Cannon determined that it…
Tasering a Unarmed Legless Man in a Wheelchair
RougueRegime sent me a link to this story in which a legless man in a wheelchair was tasered. This tasering could very easily have been “by the books.” And that’s what bothers me. The man didn’t comply. He got tased. The taser should be banned as a compliance device (except perhaps in situations where an officer is alone and backup…
Amazon Mysteries and How Much I Make From My Book (II)
I like Amazon.com. I buy a lot of stuff from them. I don’t have a good local independent bookstore. Plus Amazon brings stuff right to my door. For free. But Amazon is a strange a mysterious place. Authors have no website to logon to and check out how many copies they’ve sold. So I got a good feeling I’m not…
Baltimore, My Baltimore
9 shot in 24 hours. 2 die.
Cost of Incarceration: NYC
In 2008, New York’s Department of Correction’s budget was $978 million ($939 million of which is paid for city tax dollars). “In Fiscal 2007, the Department handled over 100,000 admissions, managed an average daily population of 13,987 and transported 326,735 individuals to court.” The average length of stay is 47 days. That’s $70,000 per inmate per year. Or $190 per…
Murder down in NYC
Colleen Long has the story in the Washington Post. Homicides are down. They’re on pace for 457 this year, which would be lower than the many-decade low of 497 in 2007. Very impressive. Thank you, NYPD! This is all the more impressive since, as Patrick McGeehan reports in the New York Times, unemployment hit 10.3% in New York City, a…
1.7 Million Drug Arrests in 2008
LEAP says: A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one…
Good Cops, Bad Cops… and Bad Emmys
Randy Cohen writes in his New York Times blog: The Emmys will be awarded this Sunday, Sept. 20. As ever, among the nominees are various police programs (“C.S.I.,” “Life on Mars,” “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” “The Closer,” “Saving Grace”) built around the Hero Cop. It might be a Hero Cop with a flaw — a drinking problem, a…