Now I wasn’t there, but as I understand it… A pothead and occasional seller in Las Vegas, let’s call him “Vegas Cole,” is sitting with his pregnant fiance on a Friday night watching TV. Police bust down the door and shoot and kill him. Just another day in the drug war, right? Police did find…
Read more
We went on a “hidden harbor” tour Tuesday evening that went through NY Harbor and down to Port Elizabeth (by Newark Airport). Industrial decay… working harbor… good stuff! It was a beautiful evening. But as a harbor, compared to Rotterdam, it looks like Single-A. The guide said the biggest six harbors in the world are…
Read more
That’s the result of a study by Bruce Taylor and Daniel J. Woods of PERF in Police Quarterly. You can’t read the whole article without a subscription, but here’s the abstract (CED = taser, to you and me): The Conducted Energy Device (CED) weapon holds the potential to reduce injuries for officers/suspects. However, the dearth…
Read more
Four years after it happened. One of the worst happenings in the War on Drugs.
I wasn’t going to post on this… perhaps other than to say it’s absurd that we’re debating the right of a people in our country to build a house of worship. It’s kind of like debating legal segregation. Haven’t we moved past this a long time ago? (Or not so long ago in the case…
Read more
This is the guy shot 20 times by the police. One week later, he’s out of the hospital. How is that possible!? From the Times: The police have arrested Mr. Alvarez on charges of attempted murder, attempted assault in the first degree, criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree and criminal use of…
Read more
In the course of writing Cop in the Hood, I researched what I thought was the bombshell statistic that, conservatively estimated, more than 10 percent of the men in the Eastern District are murdered between the ages of 15 and 35 (pp. 219-220). That bomb sure was a dud. Maybe everybody already knew. I like…
Read more
The key to combating [Mexican Drug Cartels], said Alonzo R. Pena, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputy assistant secretary for operations said, is to go after their money — money used to corrupt officials and to buy weapons. William J. Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said…
Read more
Horn tooting time. Just two-and-a-half years after the publication of Cop in the Hood, (the academic world can move at a glacial pace) the American Journal of Sociology reviewed Cop in the Hood. Well worth the wait, I’d say, as the review by Profesor Andrew Papachristos is very favorable: “Ethographic chutzpah…. Perhaps the best sociological…
Read more
It’s yesterday’s news that Adrian Schoolcraft is suing New York and the NYPD for $50 million. It turns out, amazingly, that this isn’t the first Schoolcraft vs. P.D. lawsuit. No, it’s not the first. It’s not even the second. Turns out that Adrian’s father, Larry Schoolcraft, was also a police officer. In Fort Worth, Texas,…
Read more