And Ronnie “Skinny Suge” Thomas get sentenced to 20 years in the Federal Pen. Ronnie was the not-so-smooth talking star and co-producer of the 2004 “Stop Snitching” video which had its moment of fame when basketball player Carmelo Anthony was featured in the first DVD. From the Sun: “Eight other people associated with the videos…
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I don’t really have a problem with the first two minutes. The suspect, Walter Harvin, was aggressive and uncooperative. Harvin pushes Officer London at 0:26 and has to go. I turns into a messy arrest, but that’s sometimes how it is. As much as I don’t like tasers… tasing this guy sure would have saved…
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The more of these tapes I hear, the more I think how good these secretly recorded NYPD officers sound. And this is the best [read: worst] they could come up with? To me it shows what a good job most men and women in the NYPD do. In the latest batch, particular kudos to Lt…
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Seems like the city got off easy by having to pay $870,000 and promise to do the right thing. About 100,000 people were arrested each year in first half of the 2000s. Last year the number was down to about 70,000, which is still a lot. By comparison, New York City had 341,000 arrests in…
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Here’s another simple number we should know but really don’t: What’s it cost to arrest somebody? Seems like it matters (at least to the taxpayer) if the choice is between a citation and an arrest. Part of the problem in figuring this out is that the expense is divided between different departments, jurisdictions, and budgets…
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But just a bit, according to Heather C. West at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. At the end of 2009, state and federal correctional authorities had jurisdiction over 1,613,656 prisoners, an increase of 0.2% (3,897 prisoners) from 2008. Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. Non-citizens (not all of…
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From Kingston… Dudas in custody! The New York Times story. (The New York Timesapparently has no reporter in Jamaica, since the dateline is Mexico City. Though non-byline credit is given to stringer Ross Sheil). Here’s the story in the Jamaica Observer. But The Gleanerreports: No End to Emergency. [Now ask yourself if this was worth…
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An interesting art project. The story in the New York Times: The origins of the show can be traced to 2001, when Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, a sociologist researching the relationship between H.I.V. and drug use, first glimpsed the packets in an empty building in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where addicts would shoot up. Immediately, he…
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No it wasn’t. This is the story of poor 40-year-old Robert Dziekanski. He was flying first time, to visit his mother and emigrate to Canada. He didn’t speak English. She told him to wait by the luggage carousels. He did. She couldn’t get in there and waiting outside for hours, thought he missed his flight,…
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My quote of the day comes from Solomon Peeples, 86, a former director of NYC’s Bureau of Pest Control Services. He was talking about rats: “They jump two feet from a running start; they can fall 40 feet onto a concrete slab and keep running…. We’re no match for them, as far as I’m concerned.…
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