If you’re a right-winger who wants to call the European social-welfare state “socialism,” so be it. Use whatever word you want for a system that provides housing and health care and education, helps poor people, and keeps the streets safe. I’ll take it. Take the Netherlands, as Russell Shorto does in an excellent article in…
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Peter Hermann reports in the Baltimore Sun. Top brass always says patrol is the backbone of the police department. They lie. Roughly half of the police department is assigned to the patrol. When you need officers, you take them from patrol. Backbone my ass! What kind of organization knocks out its own vertebrae? When officers…
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Al Baker reports in the Times: Any officer stopping a person in the street must tell the person “the reason, or reasons, why it occurred,” according to a letter from Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. The policy took effect April 23, according to a departmental order to revise the police patrol guide.…Street stops jumped to…
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So says New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Sewell Chan of the Times reports. Unfortunately for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Judge Graffeo’s decision contains details that can be used as instructions for bending MetroCards to get free rides. The judge devoted her entire first section, more than two pages, to explaining the…
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The Obama administration said it favors shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. … Under current law, a person caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine gets the mandatory minimum sentence of five years, while it takes only five grams of crack cocaine to trigger the same sentence. … “Our stance on this is…
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Strange Queensday Attack in the Netherlands. In the BBC video, notice the first police officer on the scene rides a bicycle. Not a car. Not a man on foot. But a cop on a bike. If the goal is rapid response (at least for short and medium distances), we need more bikes.
There’s a one-day conference on Safe Injection Facilities (a legal place where addicts can shoot up) at John Jay College on May 22, 2009. The conference organizer is looking for somebody to provide a law enforcement perspective. Any police out there interested in talking about what police officers think about such programs? Email Rick Curtis.…
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In the New York Times. Instead of fighting a war we can’t win, we could buy the drugs. Burn it if we want. Sell it if we’re smart. It would be cheaper and better than sending soldiers into harm’s way. Perhaps just $300,000,000 a year. That’s what they say the Taliban makes in drug profits…
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I wishit weren’t always the Narcs. And now, because I’m older and wiser (and somewhat shamed by comments to other posts), I’ll add that it isn’t allnarcs. Most narcotic officers do their job and do it well. But corruption always has a vice link. Always. Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker write in the Philadelphia Daily…
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Here’s a dumb recipe for a photo-op: take one 747, fly it low around Manhattan, circle around a bit, and follow it with two F-16 fighters. Who was the idiot that thought of this brilliant idea? This is pretty inexcusable. And it sure better not turn up in an “Obama 2012” campaign ad. The Police…
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