From Rolling Stone: The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government. An ordinary person who has a problem…
Read more
The Constables are not, in any instance, to ask for a Christmas-box from any of the inhabitants upon their beats; if any money is offered to them as a Christmas-box they must report the circumstances to their superior officer, who will ask permission from the Commissioners for them to receive it as in other cases.…
Read more
Ron Smith was a newspaper columnist and radio host on WBAL in Baltimore. He died two days ago. Ron was a conservative and a libertarian. Suffice it to say, I’m not. We agreed on a few issues–like the stupidity of the war on Iraq and the war on drugs–but we disagreed on a lot more.…
Read more
If Radley can do it… Hydra, Greece.
Back in 1829 London, Robert Peel and Company said that every police officer, “should be able to see every part of his beat, at least once in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.” That’s a pretty good “response time.” Craaazy, I thought. But is it? I think there are 6,000 miles of streets…
Read more
From the New York Times: Officer Figoski, a father of four daughters and the brother of a retired city police officer, was shot with an illegal semiautomatic weapon, Mr. Bloomberg said. He had made over 200 arrests, nearly half of them felony arrests, Mr. Kelly said. He worked out of the 75th Precinct, one of…
Read more
Sick days and line-of-duty injury. The Secretary of State for the Home Department has directed that, in future when a Police Constable is certified sick by the surgeon, from that day till he is again certified by the surgeon fit for duty, “a deduction of 1s. shall be made from his pay each day.” In…
Read more
You can watch the 45 minute version here. This may not be thedefinitive version, but if you care about this issue, you owe it to yourself to at least take 45 minutes from your busy life and watch a version of the whole thing. Some have said the cops are surrounded. That is after-the-fact rationalization…
Read more
There’s an article in the New York Times about officers who question the drug war… and get fired for it. LEAP, an organization I’ve been part of almost for almost nine years, is well featured. Hard to imagine a cop being fired for questioning the rationality of any other law. But the war on drugs…
Read more
I think I’m fighting a lost cause here, but I still like the straight baton. Expandable batons are all the rage. But let me explain why I think the straight baton is better. When I was a cop, I had a 29-inch straight baton (think big stick or small baseball bat). I also trained with…
Read more