I enjoyed attending “New Directions for New York: A Public Health & Safety Approach to Drug Policy” sponsored at the New York Academy of Medicine and the Drug Policy Alliance. I was speaking on the Harm Reduction – Coordinating Strategies panel. Unfortunately, because I broke one of my rules and wrote on the back side of a copied piece of…
Tag: police culture
$815,000 for fired Seattle-area cop
Mike Carter of the Seattle Timesreports: A former Mountlake Terrace police sergeant whose views supporting the decriminalization of marijuana led to his dismissal in 2005 has won his job back and an $815,000 settlement from the city and Snohomish County. However, Sgt. Jonathan Wender will not return to the streets. In addition to the financial settlement, the city has agreed…
True Confessions
A review written by me of The Thin Black Line: published in the Washington Post’s Book World. It’s a collection of stories told by black law-enforcement officers. Not a great book, unfortunately. But the review is well worth reading: THE THIN BLACK LINE: True Stories by Black Law Enforcement Officers Policing America’s Meanest Streets. By Hugh Holton. Reviewed by Peter…
Bad economy = more traffic tickets
Traffic tickets go up when local government revenue falls. Is that a surprise? Not really. Here’s the story in St. Louis Today. The study, by Thomas Garrett and Gary Wagner, quantifies it: “Controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in…
Less overtime = More murder?
Messing with police overtime is like messing with a dog’s food. You better makes sure it doesn’t come back to bite you. “It’s like our heroin,” one cop says in Cop in the Hood, “it’s just something we need.” The root of the problem is that half the department is assigned to patrol, chasing radio calls. So when it comes…
Cops and Nurses
I’m not the first to point out that cops and nurses have a lot in common. This is from a nurse/midwife: I was reading your book today on the train and thinking about cops and nurses. I was a one-woman nurse academy for the last year and it’s such a maddening process. I had to teach new nurses: 1) the…
Mass cops protest
Why not have road construction flagmen be cops? Yes, it’s a bit of a scam. But police have to make overtime some way. And better to pay a cop than pay a union private construction employee. Without this overtime, I wonder if arrests will increase. Read about it in the Boston Herald.
Wrongfully Convicted Cop Freed
From John Kass and the Chicago Tribune: What bothers the Mettes—and just about every other cop—is that there were no protests on Mike’s behalf. Liberal university professors didn’t write angry op-ed pieces demanding justice. The crowd that fights wrongful convictions wasn’t interested, either, perhaps because Mike wasn’t some violent gangbanger with a rap sheet as long as his leg. He…
Lieutenant in Taser incident commits suicide
I just heard on the radio that Lieutenant Pigott, the lieutenant who, one week ago, ordered the man on the awning in Brooklyn to be Tased, shot himself. That’s very sad. The lieutenant, I believe in good faith, made a bad decision that violated departmental rules. Allpolice officers violate departmental rules. I know I did. And not always in good…
Police aren’t soldiers
And soldiers aren’t police. Going from the armed forces to a police department may seem like a natural transition. It’s not. A different mentality is needed. Most soldiers can make the transition. Some can’t. De-emphasizing the military aspects of police departments would help. Here’s an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle about the problem for some soldiers’ reentry into the…