Justin Fenton reportsin the Sun: A lawsuit against a Baltimore police officer who was famously recorded on a YouTube video yelling at young skateboarders at the Inner Harbor for calling him “dude” has been thrown out by a city judge. Circuit Judge Evelyn Cannon granted a defense motion for summary judgment to dismiss the case….…
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RougueRegime sent me a link to this story in which a legless man in a wheelchair was tasered. This tasering could very easily have been “by the books.” And that’s what bothers me. The man didn’t comply. He got tased. The taser should be banned as a compliance device (except perhaps in situations where an…
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I like Amazon.com. I buy a lot of stuff from them. I don’t have a good local independent bookstore. Plus Amazon brings stuff right to my door. For free. But Amazon is a strange a mysterious place. Authors have no website to logon to and check out how many copies they’ve sold. So I got…
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9 shot in 24 hours. 2 die.
In 2008, New York’s Department of Correction’s budget was $978 million ($939 million of which is paid for city tax dollars). “In Fiscal 2007, the Department handled over 100,000 admissions, managed an average daily population of 13,987 and transported 326,735 individuals to court.” The average length of stay is 47 days. That’s $70,000 per inmate…
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Colleen Long has the story in the Washington Post. Homicides are down. They’re on pace for 457 this year, which would be lower than the many-decade low of 497 in 2007. Very impressive. Thank you, NYPD! This is all the more impressive since, as Patrick McGeehan reports in the New York Times, unemployment hit 10.3%…
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LEAP says: A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for…
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Randy Cohen writes in his New York Times blog: The Emmys will be awarded this Sunday, Sept. 20. As ever, among the nominees are various police programs (“C.S.I.,” “Life on Mars,” “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” “The Closer,” “Saving Grace”) built around the Hero Cop. It might be a Hero Cop with a flaw…
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Who reads this thing? And how many? I’d love to know (I’d also like to know how this correlates with the more general stat counter). If you’re reading this, please do me a favor and pick one of the categories below, then click vote. Please vote once (but just once… this isn’t Chicago). Actually, it’s…
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“A Johns Hopkins University student armed with a samurai sword killed an intruder in his garage, Baltimore police said Tuesday.” The AP story by Ben Nuckols. [Thanks to DJK!] Sept 20 Update: There’s a story by Justin Fenton with new info here.