Police

RIP Officer Rafael Ramos

NYPD Officer Ramos was just buried. Here is Commissioner Bratton’s eulogy. In honor of Officer Ramos, I’m reprinting some of what I’ve written about police funerals in Baltimore. I went to too many of them: Twenty months in Baltimore wasn’t very long, but it was long enough to see five police officers killed in the line of duty. And there…

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Police

Police Shooting Kids

Here I am on NPR’s “Morning Edition” flapping my mouth about the shooting of Tamir Rice (Cleveland kid killed by police while holding a realistic-looking BB gun): [Moskos] says mayors everywhere walk a tightrope between police and citizen outrage. He says the public needs to get more realistic about how the police work. And police need to be less tone…

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Police

Thinking beyond “the Thin Blue Line”

Read my whole piece at CNN: Most citizens can be forgiven for going through their day without thinking of anarchy or barbarians storming the gates. But many police, especially in New York City, see themselves as a thin blue line besieged by both a liberal and criminal world, neither of which they particularly like or understand. Large protests, especially when…

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Police

“The Police-Community Divide”

Best 22 minutes you’re going to hear about the current state of policing. My colleague David Kennedy on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show. I can’t thing of anything he said that I don’t agree with.

Police

Right-Wing Lies (X): Obama has never honored cops

This is the tenth (or so) in my occasional series of “Right-Wing Lies.” Now I know there are some left-wing lies, too. (It’s not true that 1 in 5 college women are raped, for instance. Nor is it true that black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than white teens.) But among my…

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Police

The Courts

Did I mention I met Sgt. Plantinga last time I was in San Francisco? Good guy. He bought me lunch. Here’s the last (for now) from Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman: You won’t feel sorry for many defendants. You figure they probably committed a dozen crimes before they finally got caught for this one.…

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