Tag: misc

Pepper Spray Me led me this story in the Chicago Tribune about, Vincent Richardson, a 14-year-old who, apparently successfully, impersonated being a police officer for five hours. And not for the first time. And not just the normal pulling-over-cars-with-police-lights kind of thing. I mean this guy patrolled with a real live Chicago police officers and fooled him, too(!?). You would think the no gun or badge thing would raise eyebrows.

To paraphrase Chris Rock: Vincent Richardson is the Darius McCollum of Crime.

I went through my field notes. My first dream in which I was in uniform happened about four months into the police academy. But it wasn’t a bad dream.

But then about a year after that, after about 10 months on the streets of the Eastern, I wrote this:

Had another bad cop dream. Somebody told me that this guy was wanted. I thought he was the [***] guy that Balto County is looking for. But this guy was a real junkie, oozing pus, guaranteed HIV +. This time I asked a guy to hand over the drugs he had and he placed vials into my hand. Except the vials had little needles on them, and one of them managed to somehow slide itself right through my skin, like a little finger piercing. I just knew I got AIDS from it.

I was a little a bit of a mess in my dream. In the dream, the guy didn’t mean anything bad. I thought it was strange that the needle could have ended up like that. I was riding with [***] and was on the top of the cop car banging on the car how I didn’t want to get AIDS.

This goes along with a dream a few nights ago about shooting someone. Don’t remember too much about that, other than it was justified. I shot the guy 5 times.

Top o’ the morning to you, too! Try waking up to that and then look forward to going to work.

One thing I hated about being a cop was having work dreams. I mean, I still have them. Don’t we all? But now my dreams are occasionally about being late for class, or unable to get my things together and leave home (the latter happens quite often in real life as well). Whatever, dude. So I’m late. Teaching dreams aren’t the end of world.

But when I worked in the Eastern District, I had dreams about the Eastern District. And the Eastern District isn’t good. It’s one thing to work there and spend most of your waking hours in the Eastern (and a few asleep ones, too). But when I left the Eastern, I wanted to leave work. And for work and the Eastern to enter my dreams, myfree time, that’s just not right.

This came to mind because last night I was talking to two John Jay College student, one a ranking police officer and the other an immigrant cab driver (I love John Jay College). The guy who drives the cab wants to be a New York police officer (and I think would make a very good one). He said he was thinking of getting a job as a correctional officer (jail guard at Rikers) until the NYPD starts hiring again. I advised against it.

Being a C.O. is not just a tough job but also a bad job. To spend most of your waking hours in jail? I don’t care if you get paid for it. You’re in jail. And then there are the dreams….

Out of the blue I asked the police officer what kind of work dreams he had. He didn’t even hesitate: dreams of being in fights and not being able to defend himself and needing to defend himself and having his gun not work. That didn’t surprise me. I actually don’t remember the details of my cop dreams. But they were something like that. They weren’t friendly. Correctional-officer dreams must be terrible.

The student who drives taxis, not surprisingly, says he dreams of being in a car accident. He rents his cab each shift. And if he’s in a accident that is his fault, he’s got to pay for the repairs.

Work dreams. Hmmmm…. It’s a good reason to be a teacher. Worst comes to worst, you’re just naked in front of your class.

I wish more people would realize that the real world is not like TV.

Problems in the Detroit crime lab.

America is more of a “guilt” culture than a “shame” culture. What does that mean? Guilt is something you feel. Shame is what you feel based on what othersfeel toward you. We want our criminals to feel remorse. That’s guilt. Ashamed to show your face in public because your grandma will think less of you? That’s shame.

Culturally, if you want “shame,” head to East Asia. Shame plays less a role in individualistic societies. We ask people not to commit crime because we hope that they (the criminals) think it’s wrong. But it’s easy to rationalize not feeling bad about your actions. Especially if, say you’re involved in “victimless crime.” It’s easy to not feel guilty about dealing drugs to willing buyers. It’s harder to not feel shame if your grandmother finds out.

I’m pro shame. I think. If it works as a deterrent. Public punishment is supposed to be shameful. I suspect that cultures that emphasize shame over guilt have less crime.

Should people arrested (for drunk driving, in this case) be posted online? Arrest records are public. So it doesn’t seem to be a problem, legally. But officially, people are innocent until proven guilty, right? Posting arrests as a matter of fact is OK. But what about posting arrest for the purpose of shaming. Is shame punishment? Should it be? These are ideas I’m trying to articulate ideas on this for my next book. So I’d love to hear your thoughts.

But the cop in me knows that people arrested are guilty.

Here’s the story in New York Newsday.

Or so says the BBC. It’s not a bullet-proof bra. It’s a bra designed not be dangerous when combined with the impact of a bullet on body armor. But I do love the fact it says “police” on the bottom.

It is being dubbed the new “bullet-proof bra”, a new kind of Wonderbra which could help protect thousands of women police officers here in Germany.

It may sound like a joke, but this is a serious matter – the policewoman who came up with the idea said normal bras can be dangerous when worn in combination with a bullet-proof vest.

“The impact of a bullet can push the metal and plastic bits of the bra into an officer’s body, causing serious injury,” said Carmen Kibat, an adviser on equal opportunities for the Hamburg-based Bundespolizei – Germany’s federal police force. “

Read the whole story here.

Very little is known (or has been written) about rural cops. Certainly I’m very guilty of an urban bias.

This could be the man to inform us. He’s planning on writing. I’ll encourage him.

More good stuff:

For the past nine months I have been pushing a sled in one of the poorest and most isolated rural counties in ****. (I also spent five months working as a reserve officer in an urban police department.) I absolutely love being a cop. It has many dull moments but wearing the badge is like having a backstage pass into people’s lives.

Working as a rural deputy is often less glamorous than that of urban cops (especially in light of shows like “The Wire”). But it has its own peculiar challenges. I work in a socially, economically, and (importantly) geographically isolated county. My first fight occurred on the top of a mountain at a meth lab explosion. My cover was twenty- five minutes away. Most of my peers in urban departments have never and will likely never find themselves in that kind of situation.[You can say that again!] I often find myself in the position of a general practitioner. I conduct my investigations from the time I am dispatched till court, since investigators are scant and reserved only for violent felonies. As a deputy I am also a coroner. I have investigated three murders and three suicides in the past nine months.

Most of my colleagues and my favorite sergeants find the 911 dispatch system and the idea of random patrol to be policies and practices out of touch with the reality of the services we can provide. I drive two-to-three hundred miles a night In the process of covering my beats as a result of these systems (ironically high gas prices are forcing the department to think about patrol in a new light). The deputies, among themselves, discuss a response system based on that of Fire & Rescue.

I have finally come to the point where I am no longer the Fucking New Guy on the force and have become largely accepted by colleagues, especially my sergeants and some of the older cops (consisting of crusty **** cops from the 80’s, former truck drivers, and an ex-high school teacher). Although still green, I am not constantly confronted by situations that leave me perplexed as to what I am to do.

This is encouraging news reported in New York Times:

The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007.
[…]
The officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country.

In that approach, local officials place chronically homeless people into permanent shelter — apartments, halfway houses or rooms — and then focus on treating addiction and mental and health problems.
[…]
Until cities and states began adopting the program, many of those people seemed to shuttle endlessly between shelters, hospitals and the street.

Homeless shouldn’t be a police problem. But as always, the buck stops with police. And if nobody doesdeal with homeless, then it becomes a police problem.

One of the silver lining’s of the Eastern District was there wasn’t much a visible homeless population. I guess that’s the advantage to a neighborhood with so many vacant buildings. A few of the vacants were squatted quite nicely. More commonly, squatting would eventually result in a drug-related fire.

There’s a quota system in place for attorneys working in the office of U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien in Los Angeles.

As reported in an articlein the L.A. Times, O’Brien says: “This office does not and never will have quotas for its criminal prosecutors…. To suggest that any attorney in this office must charge a certain number of defendants each year or face discipline is simply not true.”

Too bad he’s lying. Or at least that’s what attorneys working for him say.

The problem I have is the idea that our court system should be “efficient.” A factory should be efficient. A bicycle racer should be efficient. Justice is not supposed to efficient. It’s supposed to be fair. In the real world, prosecutorial “efficiency” is just another word for plea-bargain. And a plea-bargain is not justice.

In this case, the motivation seems to be that more prosecuted cases equals more federal funding. The Prison-Industrial Complex in action.