May 17 of last year the NYPD issued an obscure order concerning “aided reports” — that’s when a cop responds to a 911 call for a sick person waiting for an ambulance (a “bus,” as they say here) — requiring the officer to enter the person’s information into their phone. This looks all technical and boring. When you put the…
Yesterday the verdict came out. I wrote this op-ed for the Washington Post: This current scandal is more than a case of a few bad apples, though bad apples they were. These officers acted with impunity until the FBI caught wind of their actions through an unrelated criminal investigation in Pennsylvania. A specialized police unit cannot survive for years as…
San Francisco Sgt Adam Plantinga always had good insight on policing. A few years back I posting a bunch of excerpts from his book: 400 Things Cops Know. Plantinga was interviewed recently in The Christian Century and addresses some tough issues. It’s worth reading the whole interview, but in case you don’t: There’s a 90-10 rule in law enforcement: 90…
“The corrupt and brutal ones always work together as if pulled by some magnetic force.” (Perhaps said by a Chicago cop, but I can neither cite nor verify.) I think the reason why, might be as simple as the fact that nobody likes to be given the stink-eye by their colleagues. So if most people disapprove of what you do,…
Once again an excellent Facebook post from my friend. The words are his. The idea he got from a San Fransico Police Officer: Safety pins have become a symbol of solidarity with minority groups who feel threatened by events in this country. People are posting selfies with their pins, letting those minority groups know they have a friendly and safe…
Two days ago in the Bronx, an NYPD sergeant shot and killed Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old with schizophrenia armed with a baseball bat. Deborah Danner’s death is a tragedy. It is a failure of the system. But almost immediately, the officer who shot was stripped of his badge and gun and denounced by the mayor and police commissioner. DeBlasio —…
In reaction to this Missouri law, a friend of mine asked me “why police are not standing up to the gun lobby more vociferously and effectively? It seems to me that their jobs are made immeasurably harder and more dangerous by rollbacks in gun laws such as this.” You’d think, she said, police would want fewer guns out there that…
Consider how a single pull of the trigger impacts people — reporters, cops, EMS, nurses, doctors — who are strangers to the victim in the literal sense but are forced to have a visceral connection with the dead and those who survive them. 450 people have been shot and killed in Chicago in the first two-thirds of this year; 178…
[This is a guest post by Jacob Lundy. He has ten years of law enforcement experience including street crimes, homicide, academy instruction, and consent decree compliance. He wrote this for Copinthehood.com in the hope that Baltimore can learn from what he and the City of New Orleans have gone through. The selective bolding is mine, but what follows is Jacob’s.…
Very good piece by Peter Nickeas in Chicago magazine. “Three Years of Nights: Violence convulses the city after dark. Reporting on it leaves its own scars.” It sure does. Same for policing (though for some more than others). And just another 17 years of the same and he’s have the career of a copper: It was the beginning of a…