An op-ed of mine to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post: This one is different. Walter Scott was killed — shot multiple times in the back — by North Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager last weekend. Scott, already running away, was no threat to the officer when the first shot was fired. He was even…
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Here’s video of the initial Walter Scott car stop. (Yes, his brake light was out.) But what I love, which I suppose is kind minor in the grand scheme of thing, is how fucking amazing this drawling dispatcher is. She is bad-ass and calm. “Shots fired. He grabbed your taser. Suspect is down,” she drawls,…
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Good article by Tom Blackwell in Canada’s National Post: “If we point to the officer and say, ‘You did something wrong,’ we all feel a lot better, and it’s concrete,” said Marcia McCormick, a criminal-law professor at St. Louis University. “But when the problem is the system — you have racism without racists…. It doesn’t…
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It was an odd feeling to be made-up and mic’d and then walk off the set of a TV show. I had just rushed (on a Citibike, no less) from AP’s studios on 33rd and 10th (for Dutch TV) to midtown. It’s a studio I’m very familiar with (though not the show). I was rushed…
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A bad police-involved shooting is a bad shooting. Now admittedly police, being armed representatives of the state, have a higher degree of responsibility than an average Joe. But my problem with the dozen or so media requests I get after something like this is perspective and selective outrage. Perhaps 500 or 600 people are killed…
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Very bad. For a lot of reasons. A man is wanted for arrest for unpaid child support. A cop shoots the man while the man is running away and clearly, at that moment, is not a threat. The officer then apparently picks up and moves and drops his Taser closer to the dead body? Oh,…
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“According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Mr. Hinton is the 152nd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973.” You’d think people would care more.
This isn’t exactly news, but now it’s official… because it’s in the papers: “Study Finds Mexican Troops Did Not Stem Drug-War Killings“
I wrote about Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail and Prison and the Eastern State Penn in In Defense of Flogging, but I had never seen the inside of Eastern State Penn…. until now! Thanks to having written a book about prisons (to be honest, it didn’t hurt that my wife writes guidebooks, but whatev), we got…
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I don’t know what the right percentage is, regarding cops living where they work. Though I am partial to 100 percent of cops living or having had lived in the city they police. But whatever the right number is, the percentage is larger than friggin’ seven percent, which is what you find in Oakland. Now…
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