I haven’t digested all this yet, but there’s an interesting little brouhaha about a recent study released by the NYCLU by Queens College Professor Harry Levine and Deborah Small. The paper is called, “Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City, 1997-2007.” The report claims that 35,000 people a year are…
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Police officers don’t go to work wanting to shoot somebody.
Buying drugs doesn’t need to involve criminals, violence, and neighborhood blight. These are pictures I took a few years back of a friend buying drugs in an Amsterdam “coffee shop.” I show it to my classes at John Jay College of Criminal justice. Amsterdam is a beautiful city of canals and old buildings. I love…
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Don’t ask police for a ride. Despite what we say, we couldgive you a ride. We just don’t want to.
I’ll be on Talk of the Nation today, after 2pm, Eastern Time.
No, I don’t “know how it is.” You’ll have to explain.
I just got an email from an academy classmate of mine. One of the nicest things about writing Cop in the Hoodis that I hear from people I miss, but with whom I had lost touch. So you know, I never left the Eastern District. I love patrol. I don’t know why, but I do.…
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Clearly something wrong happened because an innocent man was killed,” Peter Moskos, author of Cop in the Hood, and a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told TIME. “But that’s not what the system was testing. They were testing if there was reasonable doubt. I think the verdict is fair, but…
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You heard it here first in my March 6 post. My gut knows the police did something wrong because Sean Bell is dead. But what should a reasonable police officer have done? I don’t know. I never had to shoot my gun on duty. My gun was never the only thing between me and an…
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The Dutch make an interesting and useful distinction between “hard” and “soft” drugs. When a Amsterdam police officer says, “I think drugs should be illegal and dealers should go to prison,” they’re almost assuredly talking about “hard” drugs like crack and heroin. Marijuana and hashish are considered “soft” drugs and were decriminalized in 1976. The…
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