There’s an article in the New York Times about officers who question the drug war… and get fired for it. LEAP, an organization I’ve been part of almost for almost nine years, is well featured. Hard to imagine a cop being fired for questioning the rationality of any other law. But the war on drugs…
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I think I’m fighting a lost cause here, but I still like the straight baton. Expandable batons are all the rage. But let me explain why I think the straight baton is better. When I was a cop, I had a 29-inch straight baton (think big stick or small baseball bat). I also trained with…
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I know as a liberal Democrat I’m not supposed to like Chris Christie. But I do admire that he speaks honestly. [I say the same about Ron Paul on war and drug policy, but Paul is a little too extreme on everything else, being a through-and-through libertarian.] I disagree with Christie on a lot of…
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Evanston, Illinois, is where I’m from. Getting caught with less than 10 grams of weed will not be an arrestable offense and won’t go on your criminal record. “It does not say that it’s okay to smoke pot, but it does say that they don’t have to live in fear of having a record follow…
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In Dublin, these neighborhoods with their uniform rowhomes remind me of Baltimore. The grittiness of Dublin was a bit of a refreshing shock after the pastoral beauty of rural Hampshire. Even though I have nothing but nice things to say about the English, in Ireland I felt like I was back on home ground. From…
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“I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police,” said Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. OK. But can’t we at least Saturday-evening quarterbackthe police? See, the problem is that these police did notmake bad split-second decisions in the heat of the moment. Technically, tactically, and legally they did nothing wrong (which doesn’t…
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I’m in Dublin. I love Ireland (though England was great, too). I received an email from the Washington Monthly (you may remember them as one of the first magazines to publish a Flogging piece) asking my opinion about the UC Davis pepper-spray incident. I hadn’t heard of it. But ignorance is not bliss. So now…
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From the Washington Monthly(called out by them… not their lie): President Obama told business leaders at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that U.S. policymakers have been “a little bit lazy” when it comes to attracting businesses to American soil. Republicans have taken this line and said the president called Americans “lazy.” The GOP attack…
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The best current/live account of what’s going on is from a UK paper. (Why is that?) The Guardian. Also, I wrote an update to my Slate article.
I just added some picture from Egypt (to a previous post). Scroll down if you care.