Cop brags about seized drug theft The New York Daily News reports that two narcotic detectives here caught after bragging on their own wire about stealing bags of seized cocaine. Corruption always involves drugs. But rarely in such idiotic fashion.
A student of mine went down to Baltimore and took some pictures of the Eastern. I don’t get there much anymore, even when I go to Baltimore. I don’t know anybody who lives there. In most ways, the Eastern looks like it hasn’t changed at all. In one big way, it’s changing a lot: the…
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For all the press police-involved shootings get in New York City, there are a lot more shootings in Baltimore if you take the difference in population into account (almost an equal number if you don’t). Baltimore shootings don’t get much press because the city isn’t a media center and Al Sharpton doesn’t live there. Instead,…
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“Peter Moskos, a sociologist by training, somewhat inadvertently became a police officer. Cop in the Hood is the fortuitous and fascinating result. It gives the reader the real dope from someone with the training and ability to put the street into the larger context. Highly recommended.” –Alex Tabarrok, George Mason University, cofounder of marginalrevolution.com. “Cop…
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The New York Times has an article by Al Baker, “Handcuffing the Wounded: Tactic Hits a Nerve.” I read that article with interest. Police don’t have the option to nothandcuff a suspect. I always thought that officers should have some (limited) discretion to not handcuff suspects. For instance, you’re patrolling, minding your own business, and…
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I know my classes are topical, but I wish people didn’t have to die to make it so. Yesterday I class I talked a police-involved shooting in Brooklyn and the overuse of Tasers. Today a bunch of students sent me these links about a man’s death in Vancouver after being Tasered. Proving exactly what I…
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An unarmed man was killed by police Monday in Brooklyn. Here’s the New York Times account. This isn’t going to start any riots. Trust me. By all reasonable accounts, this was a “good” shooting. It always sounds bad to describe the shooting of an unarmed man as “good,” but in police parlance, “good” and “bad”…
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Today’s New York Times has an article about a gang member being convicted under anti-terrorism laws. The only thing that surprises me is the surprise. The article states: “Other states have used their terrorism statutes, which were seen as largely ceremonial when they were introduced because major terrorism cases were likely to be prosecuted by…
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There’s a piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine with an interesting link between lead and crime. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes wrote a paper linking the crime drop in the 1990s to getting the lead out of gasoline in the 1970s. This is hardly conclusive, but it is interesting. There’s still a lot of lead…
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Well the second claim is true even if the first claim is a bit of an exaggeration. For anybody who has ever turned a PhD dissertation into a book (uh, if you’re reading this, odds are you have), you may wonder, just how different was my book from my dissertation. Hopefully a lot, because dissertations…
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