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  • End of an Era: As of 2012, no more Crown Vics

    In June, Ford Motor Co. invited the heads of some of the nation’s largest police fleets to Dearborn to talk about the future of police cars.

    For nearly two decades, that market has belonged to Ford’s Crown Victoria — a vehicle that departments from coast to coast have come to respect for its toughness and reliability. Now the Crown Vic is running out of road.

    “They told us that 2011 would be the last year they build the Crown Vic,”
    …
    About 85 percent of the approximately 75,000 police cars sold in the United States each year are Crown Vics.

    The story by Bryce Hoffman in the Detroit News

    The Crown Vic has my car (it’s also the NYC cab). There was still one or two Chevy Caprices rattling around, but they were in sad shape. Now you see a fair number of Chevy Impalas.

    Back in Baltimore, I was warned that front-wheel drive isn’t practical here because they’re not as tough. And nothing in the world is driven more roughly than a non-take-home cop car.

    As a cop, I was shocked by how horrible Crown Vics handle. Especially in the rain or snow, you really had to be really careful. Plus they’re big, which makes them harder to get through tight spaces and alleys. In Amsterdam, the cops had souped-up Volkswagen Rabbits. Not very American, but man those things could fly.

  • Here’s the to 4th Amendment

    “One of the reasons we fought a bloody war against Britain was we didn’t like these soldiers stopping people on the street willy-nilly….We went to armed revolution against the strongest nation in the world in order to have these protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. They’re not technicalities. They’re real.
    …
    Indeed, the ability to seize a person’s private property is among the most awesome powers a government can wield. The authors of the Constitution cemented that notion in the Bill of Rights, decreeing in the Fourth Amendment that our right against unreasonable search and seizure “shall not be violated.”

    This afternoon, a joint legislative panel will convene at the Capitol to review a pair of reports that say some officers of the now-defunct Metro Gang Strike Force committed behavior that was “shocking” and listed a litany of abuses.
    …
    One issue legislators must wrestle with is fundamental: Was the gang task force a good idea badly executed by dishonest cops and supervisors who looked the other way, or was the whole concept — including the state’s administrative forfeiture law — fatally flawed?
    …
    By the time lawmakers re-created the elite unit as the Metro Gang Strike Force in 2005, it had become largely self-funding, through seizures and forfeitures. The more money and property the cops from the unit’s member agencies seized, the more fiscally sound the unit was.

    Not only did it put the profit motive in police work, the cops came to look at seizures as the key to the unit’s survival, the Luger report said.

    It is definitely worth reading David Hanners’ entire article in the Pioneer Press. It’s a good piece of journalism

  • Fed-up business people respond to robbery spree

    [He] was in the middle of a string of 17 robberies of city business in 22 days, police say.
    …
    [In 2005] Lomax was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. When the case came back to court on June 22, Baltimore Circuit Judge John Addison Howard gave Lomax 15 years, suspending all but five. The judge made the sentence retroactive to 2005, and Lomax was set free.

    Police say the latest crime spree began shortly thereafter

    The story by Justin Fenton in the Baltimore Sun.

  • 1,000 cameras ‘solve one crime’

    The BBC reports that one crime was solved for every 1,000 police cameras in London last year.

    The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.
    …
    David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”

    He added: “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.

    “It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.
    …
    A spokesman for the Met said: “We estimate more than 70% of murder investigations have been solved with the help of CCTV retrievals and most serious crime investigations have a CCTV investigation strategy.”

    Read the story here.

  • Argentina Decriminalizes Marijuana

    Out of the blue (at least to me), the BBC reports:

    The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.
    …
    The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.”

    Supreme Court President Ricardo Lorenzetti said private behaviour was legal, “as long as it doesn’t constitute clear danger”.

    “The state cannot establish morality,” he said.
    …
    It also marks a shift a dramatic regional shift to the decades-old US-backed policy of running repressive military-style wars on the drug trade, she adds.

    Read the whole story here.

  • Stop the war on pot smokers

    An op-ed by Tony Newman in the New York Daily News.

    While New York has a reputation as a tolerant and open-minded city and New York State effectively decriminalized simple possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana more than 30 years ago, Gotham has made so many pot arrests that it now has the unfortunate distinction of being the marijuana arrest capital of the world.
    …
    Prior to 1997, the lowest-level marijuana arrests were 1% of all arrests in the city. Since 1997, marijuana arrests have averaged 10% of all arrests in the city.

    If possession of marijuana is supposed to be decriminalized in New York, how does this happen? Often because, in the course of interacting with the police, individuals may be asked to empty their pockets, which results in the pot being “open to public view” – which is, technically, a crime.

    New York City’s marijuana arrests show stark racial disparities. In 2008, 87% of those charged with pot possession were black or Latino. These groups represent only about half of the city’s population, and U.S. government surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than blacks and Latinos. Yet blacks and Latinos are arrested for pot at much higher rates, in part because officers make stop-and-frisks disproportionately in black, Latino and low-income neighborhoods.

    Read more.

  • Teach Grammar!

    Stanley Fish gets to the issues on teaching the craft of writing in “What Should Colleges Teach?”

    I was blessed to have good English teachers throughout my Evanston public-school education. I also had good and literate parents. Collectively, they somehow taught me skills I use pretty much every day: write, type, and edit (though I must have been sick on the day spelling was taught).

    I think I’m pretty good at getting my ideas across in writing. I wouldn’t say I likewriting (does anybody?). It’s work. But I think I’m pretty good at it.

    So I never know what to do with students’ basic bad writing. I’m not an English teacher. Yet I often feel like I’m playing one in my classroom. Doesn’t anybody teach grammar and syntax? This does not seem to be an appropriate subject matter for my “Seminar in Police Problems.” Yet teach basic grammar I must. Why do I ever have to remind college seniors–as I do every semester–that sentences need a subject, verb, object, and then a period. Why is subject/verb agreement so difficult? Why do my students, class after class, insist on capitalizing the words “police officer” and many other nouns (is there some Germanic underground I don’t know about)?

    To argue that grammar and basic writing (not thought-provoking composition) should be taught in elementary and high-school is besides the point. College is a great place for teaching. And what’s more important than teaching how to write?

    Read Stanley Fish’s piece in the New York Times.

  • “People have got to get indignant”

    [Detroit Police Chief] Evans reiterated his sense that people feel Detroit is supposed to have crime. He said he goes out two nights a week and works the streets, stopping motorists who rarely have driver’s license, registration, insurance.

    “What I say is: ‘Do you drive north of 8 Mile like this?’ And they say, ‘Hell no! They’ll lock you up.’ Your conduct can be whatever you want it to be in the city of Detroit. It’s a safe haven for BS. When people feel that way about minor things, that’s the way they’ll feel about bigger things.”
    …
    Evans cites a consent decree that has governed Detroit for six years. The decree, designed to curtail police misconduct, has led to reluctance to arrest.
    …
    “Over 1,100 people being shot is getting kind of Third World to me.”

    Of course, comparing Detroit to the third world isn’t really doing justice to the third world. Third-world cities tend to have far lessviolence.

    The column by Rochelle Riley in the Detroit Free Press.

  • Bad News with Shake and Bake Meth

    “New formula lets meth users make drug in soda bottles, avoid anti-drug laws.”

    The AP story by Justin Juozapavicius.

  • Sentence Length [or lies from the Heritage Foundation]

    Sentence Length [or lies from the Heritage Foundation]

    In a Heritage Foundation foundation report by Charles Stimson and Andrew Grossman, I learned a very surprising fact:

    Convicted persons in the United States actually served less time in prison, on average, than the world average and the European average. Among the 35 countries surveyed on this question in 1998, the average time actually served in prison was 32.62 months. Europeans sentenced to prison served an average of 30.89 months. Those in the United States served an average of only 28 months.

    From “Adult Time for Adult Crimes: Life Without Parole for Juvenile Killers and Violent Teens”

    [Update/Correction:two hour later]

    I’m generally no fan of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In fact, just between you and me, I generally hate them and everything they stand for. But I wasn’t going to bring that up because I like to be tolerant and forgiving by nature. And if two of their researchers can write a good report, I’m more than happy to read it and learn.

    And though it’s rare to catch people in all-out balls-to-the-walls lies (though I’ve caught the DEA red handed on the issue of drug prices), there’s nothing too rare about academic and moral dishonesty.

    I decided to do a little fact checking, since, well, I didn’t really believe that our prison sentences were shorter. Plus I don’t trust the Heritage Foundation.

    [The actual Heritage report, by the way, is about why we should keep sentencing juveniles to life without parole. It seems like a strange cause to fight for. What do they chant at rallies? But that’s neither here nor there. I’m interested in the time people spend behind bars.]

    First read the above quote from the Heritage Foundation and think about what it means.

    Stimson and Grossman are not two fresh-faced grad students to be treated with kid gloves for bad statistical analysis. One is a “Senior Legal Fellow” and the other a “Senior Legal Policy Analyst.” And besides, they’re trying to influence policy and get more kids locked up forever.

    Plus their report claims to be all about getting the “facts” right. And much of their report resonated with the cop in me. And 10 pages of endnotes certain gives them the ersatz veneer of rigorous academic analysis.

    I copied the data (“Table 18.01: Average length of time actually served in prison”) to SPSS and crunched the numbers just like they did. Indeed, the average US sentence length is listed as 28 months and the mean length of time for the all countries listed is 32.62 months.

    But anybody who does basic stats–and if you can copy the data from a table into a stats program, crunch the numbers, and publish them, you had better know basic statistics–should see two red flags. First is the two-decimal result. The original data is rounded to the nearest month. Using two-decimal places implies a statistical precision but in fact is statistical nonsense. Besides, who really cares about 1/100 of a month (just about 8 hours)?

    The second red flag is the use of mean and not median for “average.” The difference between the two matters. “Mean” is the average in the sense of adding up all the numbers and dividing by the total number of numbers. The “median” is the point at which half the numbers are above and half the numbers below. Both “mean” and “median” are averages, but “median” is generally better for analyses of numbers that have a set minimum (often zero) on one side but are open-ended on the other side (as in, they can go up to a gazillion!).

    Take income. Medianincome is always lower than meanincome because the millionaires (the outliers at the high end) push the mean average way up. If next year everybody in the U.S. made $1,000 less but Bill Gates, one person, made a trillion dollars more, the meanAmerican income would go up by $2,000 per person! But the medianincome would go down $1,000, just like the average income.

    So if Stimson and Grossman used median, the average would go from 33 to 26 months and the U.S. would go from below average to above average. So if they’re using means, they’re either statistically ignorant of trying to pull a fast one. But no matter, I’m not going to spend time writing all of this for a difference of seven months.

    But wait… there’s more.

    2) Statistical outliers: Malcolm Gladwell didn’t invent them just to sell books. You generally shouldn’t include them in statistical analysis. The outliers here, in terms of sentence length, are Colombia, Qatar, Moldova, Latvia, and Suriname (with a mean of 90 months). Remove these four countries and the mean goes down to 23.5 months and the median to 19 months.

    Now sometimes “outliers” aren’t outliers but rather extreme case. If you’re talking about average world prison sentence length, you shouldn’t ignore America because there are more two million prisoners in America. But who cares if prisoners in Qatar serve 74 months? There are only 520 people in prison.

    Anyway, the difference between 19 months versus 32.6 months matters, but it’s still not what gets my goat.

    Oh, I’m just getting started.

    3) The table only includes 35 countries. Looking at each of these countries as equal for the purpose of statistical analysis is crazy. You’ve always got to apply qualitative common sense to quantitative analysis.

    Surinam? 665 prisoners in the whole friggin country!

    Montserrat? Montserr-who?! Where the hell is Montserrat!? What I’m trying to say is, who give a flying f*ck about Montserrat? What happens in Montserrat sure as hell must stay there because I didn’t even remember that the capital of this Caribbean island was buried in 39 feet of volcanic mud in 1995 and abandoned. The totalpopulation of this non-nation is less than 5,000!

    Give me a f*cking break. For statistical purposes, these countries doesn’t exist. The US has two-point-three-friggin-million people behind bars! Equating Montserrat with the United States is bullsh*t… and the authors of this report should know this.

    You ain’t seen nothing yet!

    4) “European average,” they say.

    Now call me crazy, or chauvinistic, or “Old-Europe,” but when I say “Europe” in terms of criminal justice policy, I mean–and I think most people understand me to mean–the rich civilized part of Europe that’s now part of the European Union. (By my calculations, Greece only joined Europe about 5 years ago.)

    It’s not just geography. It’s culture. This report counts Moldova as European. Technically, yes, Moldova is part of Europe. But technically Israel is part of Asia. And Egypt and Morocco are part of Africa. But I don’t see too many Arabs in my neighborhood calling themselves African-American.

    To say “European average” and give equal weight to (ie: not adjust for population) to Moldova and Germany is crazy. Oh, but wait, Germany and France aren’t even included in the data! How can you have a “European average” without Germany and France? No offense to Botswana and Mauritius (they’re on the list), but it’s not a world average if you don’t have Russia, China, Indonesia, or India!

    If you want to be honest, say 10 years ago Moldovan prisoners served more time than U.S. prisoners. But who gives a flying f*ck” about Moldova?! (Poor Moldova. I’m sure they’re very nice. In fact, it says right in their tourism website that Moldova is, “rich in fertile soil and in hardworking and caring people.”)

    And no matter which countries I count as European, I can’t duplicate the report’s average of “30.89” months. Seems to me the mean average for European countries included would actually be 34 months. But I’ll assume that was was just bad work rather than intentional dishonesty, since the correction would be in their favor.

    So let’s get back to the original question: do European prisoners serve more time than the U.S. average of 28 months? Here are some of the European countries listed:

    Denmark: 3

    Netherlands: 4

    Iceland: 5

    Ukraine: (yeah, what the hell, I’ll count the Ukraine as European): 5

    Finland: 8

    England and Wales: 14

    Portugal: 26

    Spain: 29

    I’d bet good money that Germany and France (which aren’t included in the data) fall somewhere between the Netherlands and England, with France being higher than Germany. That tends to be the way it is with those countries and criminal justice issues.

    So why all this type over something as minor as sentence length? Because I don’t like being played for a fool. Because I posted a lie thinking it was true. I posted it because the numbers really surprised me. I posted it because it went againstwhat I believed.

    I don’t like it when ideological groups spread lies. When people believe lies, and people tend to believe what they hear and read, the liars win. And liars, at least the ones that aren’t pathological, tend to have an agenda.

    Mind you, this is just the one paragraph I actually fact-checked. But coming from the intellectually empty and morally counterproductive Heritage Foundation, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise.