Al Baker reports in the Times:
Any officer stopping a person in the street must tell the person “the reason, or reasons, why it occurred,” according to a letter from Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. The policy took effect April 23, according to a departmental order to revise the police patrol guide.
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Street stops jumped to 508,540 in 2006, from 97,296 in 2002, according to data from the police, and reached 531,159 last year, the most on record.
So says New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Sewell Chan of the Times reports.
Unfortunately for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Judge Graffeo’s decision contains details that can be used as instructions for bending MetroCards to get free rides. The judge devoted her entire first section, more than two pages, to explaining the magnetic coding of the cards, how the machines read the cards, and how, in essence, to foil the system.
The Obama administration said it favors shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine.
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Under current law, a person caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine gets the mandatory minimum sentence of five years, while it takes only five grams of crack cocaine to trigger the same sentence.
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“Our stance on this is we shouldn’t be lowering the penalties on crack. We’ve always talked about bringing the powder-cocaine penalties up,” said Gene Voegtlin of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which includes 20,000 police chiefs and executives.
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“We believe the remedy would be to increase the penalties for powder cocaine so all criminals are treated equally,” said James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents about 325,000 uniformed officers.
The whole story by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal.
I don’t want to overstate this point, but I would like to place it on the table: I don’t think there’s much difference between powdery crack cocaine and clumpy powder cocaine. And lab tests don’t distinguish between the two because they’re both cocaine.
I pity the man who gets caught in the ghetto with 5 grams of powder cocaine in a crack vile or two.
Strange Queensday Attack in the Netherlands. In the BBC video, notice the first police officer on the scene rides a bicycle. Not a car. Not a man on foot. But a cop on a bike. If the goal is rapid response (at least for short and medium distances), we need more bikes.
There’s a one-day conference on Safe Injection Facilities (a legal place where addicts can shoot up) at John Jay College on May 22, 2009.
The conference organizer is looking for somebody to provide a law enforcement perspective. Any police out there interested in talking about what police officers think about such programs? Email Rick Curtis. It will be fun, interesting, and good place to network with academics and public health people. They need a good law-enforcement perspective so that it’s not all just preaching the choir.
In the New York Times.
Instead of fighting a war we can’t win, we could buy the drugs. Burn it if we want. Sell it if we’re smart. It would be cheaper and better than sending soldiers into harm’s way. Perhaps just $300,000,000 a year. That’s what they say the Taliban makes in drug profits (though I suspect it’s higher). But instead, we’ll fail to end the drug trade and push more farmers into poverty and the hands of the Taliban.
I wishit weren’t always the Narcs. And now, because I’m older and wiser (and somewhat shamed by comments to other posts), I’ll add that it isn’t allnarcs. Most narcotic officers do their job and do it well. But corruption always has a vice link. Always.
Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker write in the Philadelphia Daily News:
RED FLAGS were everywhere. Something wasn’t right.
Search-warrant applications read like form letters. A confidential informant made drug buys across the city, sometimes just minutes apart, defying the laws of physics….
Yet police brass apparently failed to notice.
Again and again, supervisors in the Philadelphia Police Narcotics Field Unit signed off on cookie-cutter applications for search warrants, which are now the subject of an expanding FBI and police Internal Affairs Bureau investigation.
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[After allegidly being robbed by police officers during a drug raid] The 5-foot-1, 110-pound Lu, who had no criminal record, was hauled off to jail for selling little ziplock bags.
Read the whole story here.
Evidently, raiding and closing ghetto Korean corner stores for selling small ziplock bags is now standard operating procedure. All part of the war on drugs.
“The store is closed for six months or so, but on that corner, or one, two blocks away, drugs are sold and guys are armed,” said Patrick Carr, a Rutgers University sociology professor. “They say quality of life – whose quality of life are we talking about?
“With the store closed, who will sell diapers, milk and bread?”
Laker and Ruderman have written a series of articles on Tainted Justice.
Legalizing drugs would be the quickest way to keep police clean. More bureaucratic layers of red tape is not the answer.
Here’s a dumb recipe for a photo-op: take one 747, fly it low around Manhattan, circle around a bit, and follow it with two F-16 fighters.
Who was the idiot that thought of this brilliant idea? This is pretty inexcusable. And it sure better not turn up in an “Obama 2012” campaign ad.
The Police Department acknowledged that it had been notified about the event but said it had been barred from alerting the public. “The flight of a VC-25 aircraft and F-16 fighters this morning was authorized by the F.A.A. for the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty with directives to local authorities not to disclose information about it but to direct any inquiries to the F.A.A. Air Traffic Security Coordinator,” the Police Department said in a statement.
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“New York City police were standing right there and they had no knowledge of it. The evacuations were spontaneous. Guys from the floor came out, and one guy I talked to was just shaking.”
The story in the Times.
At least the presidential campaign is over so we don’t have politicians running around New York City to wrap themselves in the American flag at Ground Zero before leaving town to bash the entire city as un-American.
Does the rest of the country really see New York City as just a patriotic prop or a filthy den of unpatriotic immigrants, liberals, and Jews? Really, now… we’re good people. And we live here. Please stop pissing on us.
I thought it was just Baltimore where I needed this sign:
I don’t know if I should be proud or ashamed I love ViceMagazine. It’s anti-consumer attitude is completely and unashamedly support by consumer culture and slutty American Apparel ads.
I don’t know how to describe Vice so I won’t. Let’s just say it’s eclectic and, among other things, sometimes provides a wonderfully unsanitized view of the world. Yes, there is some female nudity in pretty much every issue, but the only thing it has in common with Playboy is that I’ll say I read it for the articles.
And, oh yeah, Vice is supposed to be free. But then you have to go to the right stores, none of which, evidently, are in my neighborhood. So I’m one of those losers that actually subscribes to Vice.
The current issue–loosely based on tech–features homemade explosive devices (from the Anarchist Cookbook), pictures on making Scottish Haggish from live deer to cooked meat, a photo-documentary on guest workers in Dubai, and lots more.
When I started reading Vice I just liked the hipster attitude (and the occasionally topless hipster girl). But then I came along this article and I realized the magazine was for real. Yeah, that’s the prison in the Philippines where the guy makes all the inmates do massive dance numbers (and seems to have a harem of women prisoners on the side).
Where is all this going? Two good stories of note. The first is what I would call honest drug education about synthetic opiates. I can say no because other people said yes. It’s effective not despite, but because it admits that heroin’s high is as pleasant as “swimming through a sea of warm blankets fresh from the euphoria dryer.”
The second story is about shipping drugs from South America in purposefully designed torpedoes.
We all know that submersibles are now used to transport drugs. But how many magazines interview the guy who “spearheaded the project”? I’ll be damned if I didn’t learn a thing or two (though I already know the war on drugs won’t be won).
To give you some idea of the money involved (and why it’s scary to think that criminals and terrorists profit from drug prohibition), in 2000 a kilo of coke cost this guy $2,100. He sold it in Mexico for $8,000 (and more in the U.S.). At three tons per torpedo, that’s a profit of more than $17,000,000 per shipment.
At the time the street value for cocaine in the U.S. was $161 per gram or $161,000 per kilo. If you want to price it that way (as does law enforcement because it sounds cooler for the evening news), each shipment had a street value of $483,000,000. What wouldn’t you do for $483 million. Now that’san economic stimulus.
Anonymous posted a comment on the previous post: I can’t wait for the fudged numbers of the NYPD Comp-stat to be exposed…”
Boy, there sure is a lot of chatter about the fudged numbers in the NYPD (and I’m talking about chatter from NYPD officers). I didn’t hear this nearly so much even just a few years ago. It seems that downgrading crime is becoming part of NYPD culture. And that’s a shame because it takes away from the hard work of the NYPD in actually decreasing crime.
But I don’t believe the homicide numbers are fudged. According to the latest official crime stats (week of 4/13/09 to 4/19/09), there have been 109 murders this year compared to 142 at this time last year. That’s a 23 percent drop. That’s a real drop. That’s not playing fast and loose with the numbers. That’s saving lives.
And if the other numbers go down in sync, the drop is probably real even if the numbers aren’t. Sure, maybe felony assault and grand larcenies are a lower than reality would indicate. But if you think about it, as long as the errors are consistent month to month and year to year, those errors don’t have much of an effect. The shame is that any effort put into lowering stats is kind of wasted because you have to keep cooking just to keep even. Once you start cooking the books, you can’t stop. At least not without what will look like a big one-time increase in crime.
To police officers I offer this bit of unsolicited advice: call it like you see it. Nobody can make youdowngrade crime. Except when they do. Then write the facts as you believe them in the narrative and keep a separate list of notes documenting when, where, and who ordered you to do what.
If the books are being cooked, one day it will boil over in scandal (and until then it chips away at a culture of honesty and integrity). And when the shit does hit the fan, the brass will cover theirs while throwing a few others under the bus.
They’ll be covering theirs; you need to cover yours.