I just finished a excellent book by Henry Schlesinger, The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution. You may remember Schlesinger as the co-author (with Joe Poss) of the wonderful non-fiction police story Brooklyn Bounce. The Batteryis all about, you guessed it, batteries. Turns out they have a fascinating history and Schlesinger tells it…
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From a reader: “So, following the memo to pick your targets carefully when employing the Taser, Taser invents a device to fire wildly into a crowd.”
On the 2600 block of McElderry. Here’s the storyin the Sun.
I’m proud to announce that “professor” has joined the list of overrated careers that already includes “police officer.” Boy, I sure know how to pick them! So says U.S. News and World Report.
Evidently, the MTA (New York’s subways and buses) could raise enough money to prevent massive service cuts if they could only collect the fare from 27 million dollarsof fare evaders. Meanwhile, the NYPD arrests more people for misdemeanor drugs possession (half of those for the lowest level of marijuana possession) than it does for fare…
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I always like academics who can explain things simply. I rarely find any greater knowledge or meaning hidden behind esoteric words and jargon-filled academic prose. Here’s Professor Jay Livingston on the difference between ethnography and survey research. While it’s not a distinction that most non-academics give two-beans about, it’s a great description. From A Shot…
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Turns out that Billy Shane Harrison, the officer who killed Ayers, didn’t (and doesn’t) actually have police powers. He let his firearm training lapse. Oops (and from TV news). Maybe if this drug officer had had proper training, oh, I don’t know, he could have figured a better tactical way of stopping an innocent man…
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This was taken down for a while but is now back up. The funniest YouTube video I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s only hilarious if you are or were a cop and don’t speak German. But I think it’s probably funny regardless.
Lenny Levitt poses an interesting question is his weekly column: From 2004 through 2009, [New York City] police have had nearly three million stop-and-frisk encounters, which involve patting people down or questioning them. Virtually all of those stopped are black or Hispanic. In 88 per cent of the cases, the people searched or questioned were…
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Barely. And the population of federal prisons grew 3 percent. But still… “Fewer State Prisoners” is a headline that hasn’t been seen since 1972.