I’ve always said the Blue Wall of Silence is vastly overrated (for reasons I’m not going to get into today). Do cops get away with murder, literally or figuratively? The short answer is no. Unless, of course, one counts traffic violation and illegal parking as murder. What I do find interesting is that the NYPD,…
Read more
W.E.B. DuBois (pronounced doo-boyz, by the way, cause he wasn’t French) wrote about “The Talented Tenth.” DuBois was, among other things, a great American, a suffragist, a sociologist, and a Harvard grad. Had his groundbreaking The Philadelphia Negrobeen written today, I can only wonder if it would have been called, DuBois in the Hood. In…
Read more
Ahhh, the joys of drug regulation and the strange wonders of Dutch drug policy. The ultimate crime seem to be that this place got too big for its britches. But they nailed them for keeping a stock of more than 18 ounces of marijuana. That is a limit that most if not all coffee shops…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more