Back in 1829 London, Robert Peel and Company said that every police officer, “should be able to see every part of his beat, at least once in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.” That’s a pretty good “response time.” Craaazy, I thought. But is it? I think there are 6,000 miles of streets…
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From the New York Times: Officer Figoski, a father of four daughters and the brother of a retired city police officer, was shot with an illegal semiautomatic weapon, Mr. Bloomberg said. He had made over 200 arrests, nearly half of them felony arrests, Mr. Kelly said. He worked out of the 75th Precinct, one of…
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Sick days and line-of-duty injury. The Secretary of State for the Home Department has directed that, in future when a Police Constable is certified sick by the surgeon, from that day till he is again certified by the surgeon fit for duty, “a deduction of 1s. shall be made from his pay each day.” In…
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You can watch the 45 minute version here. This may not be thedefinitive version, but if you care about this issue, you owe it to yourself to at least take 45 minutes from your busy life and watch a version of the whole thing. Some have said the cops are surrounded. That is after-the-fact rationalization…
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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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