This op-ed by Heather Mac Donald is the one I wanted to write. But I didn’t. And she did. The point, one could say rather simply, is that police matter as a force for crime prevention. That simple concept is why I decided to study policing and then became a cop. In the mid 1990s…
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Justin Fenton on solving homicides in the Sun: A couple of decades ago — the last time the city saw so much killing — Baltimore’s homicide unit closed more than 70 percent of its cases. Veterans talk of returning to the office from a crime scene to find a fistful of tips waiting for them.…
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Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore State’s Attorney, keep emphasizing that she comes from a family of cops: To the rank-and-file officers of the Baltimore City Police Department, please know that these accusations of these six officers are not an indictment on the entire force. I come from five generations of law enforcement. My father was an officer.…
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A good piece of journalism in the Sun: In Baltimore, where there are an estimated 19,000 heroin users, including 9,500 chronic users, annual spending on the drug is estimated at least at $165 million. … When the brothers of one local kingpin were kidnapped, he came up with $500,000 for ransom. When investigators searched a…
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You’re a police officer in the big city. This was your life’s dream. You like to help people. Once on the job, you realize it wasn’t all you hoped, but you still do the best you can. You have a prisoner in the back in your vehicle. It was a minor offense. But the law…
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I still can’t believe this guy got shot down by a cop playing whack-a-mole with his service weapon. The D.A. said: The evidence in this case shows the shooting to be accidental, and possibly negligent, but not criminally so. “This shooting is not justified, but also not criminal.” I don’t know if I buy the…
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I don’t say that lightly. There have been some bad ones. Click on this link or you can jump to about 0:50 sec on this: Andrew Thomas, the victim, a drunk driver, is paralyzed. He is white. So is Paradise, California. 1:35: “I got a male in the car refusing to get out.” Maybe, you…
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Here’s a report with some numbers on the problem of untreated mental illness and police response. Bottom line, according to these numbers: About two percent of Americans have untreated severe mental illness. Those two percent of people account for 10 percent of police responses, 20 percent of those behind bars, and 25 percent of fatal…
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She’s the former prosecutor who has taken to writingabout her former office and its overreaching prosecution of the six Baltimore cops who in the neighborhood when Freddie Gray died in police custody. Here’s her latest: I said in my first blogon Freddie Gray, days after Mosby sensationally announced her charges, that she was setting up…
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This is what the War on Drugs looks like. Just another day. From the Chicago Sun-Times: One of Chicago’s most notorious informants — who provided drug tips to the police while secretly killing and robbing people and doing drug deals — was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his information with the approval of…
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