From Montclair SocioBlog. Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows: * South Carolina – 50th * North Carolina – 49th * Georgia – 48th * Texas – 47th * Virginia – 44th If you are wondering,…
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From Mother Jones. Worth a look. If you don’t support “income redistribution,” can we at least stop redistributing income from poor to rich? A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household.…
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This may not be news to anybody who was old enough to read in 1975, but Joseph Wambaugh writes a good police story. I just finished reading The Choirboys, 38 years after it was written. It’s about a bunch of police in Los Angeles: “They were just policemen. Rather ordinary young guys, I thought” It…
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Texas just executed its 466th murderer in the last three decades (not surprisingly, the guy being executed was black. Black murderers are much more likely to be executed than are white murderers.) But I’m not here to defend murderers. I’m not even really even against the death penalty. (As long as we can be certain…
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So here’s the longer storyin the Sun. What I don’t get (there’s a lot I don’t get), is how could officers get a kick-back of $300 per car? The tow company would need to charge more than that. And the article says that approved towers are only charging $130-$140 dollars. When I needed to tow…
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I know it’s important, but I’m a bit clueless here. Can somebody explain to me just what collective bargaining means? Why is it important to unions? And what would happen if it were taken away?
Here’s the story in the Timesand in the Daily News. The difficulty is that any benefits and harms of aggressive stop and frisks are not only found in aggregate numbers but also in the individual incidents. Some of these stops are good. Some aren’t. So how do we tell the difference? How do we keep…
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A “dozen or more” B.P.D. arrested?! Peter Hermann of the Sunreports: a federal corruption probe that involves an improper relationship with a Baltimore towing company, sources said. … The officers were arrested today at the police academy after being called in under the guise that their firearms needed to be checked. … Multiple sources say…
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There might be some good lessons here. Too often we only look for lessons when things go wrong. It’s probably better to look for lessons when things go right. Here were tens of thousands of people protesting and counter-protesting… and it all happened without an arrest.
This year, nationwide, 15 officers have been killed by gunfire (out of 30 total line-of-duty deaths). This puts us on pace to expect 105 officers to be shot and killed in 2011. Compare this with 59 firearms deaths in 2010, 47 in 2009, 40 in 2008, and 66 in 2007. Is this a trend? It’s…
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