Quality Policing Podcast and Blog

What do you expect?

“The longshoremen were paid $50,000 to $100,000 for unloading a single duffel bag of cocaine.” I’m glad nobody has offered me that kind of money for that kind of work, because I don’t know what I would do. Meanwhile the tunnel from Mexico business is booming, which is an unfortunate but inevitable result (along with…
Read more

Man tells cops coke in buttocks is not his

I’m telling you, you can’t make this stuff up!

Seven Shots

I read this book by Jennifer Hunt. I loved this book. I’ll tell you more about this book… but only when I’m done writing mybook. On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Service team from the NYPD raided a terrorist cell in Brooklyn and narrowly prevented a suicide bombing of the New York subway that…
Read more

A well worn Maglite

“My God,” I said on seeing this over the weekend, “how many people you hit with that thing?” “A bunch!” He reckoned he picked up this baby in 1985. It got twenty years of service after that. When I was police, this gentle and soft-spoken man had been a cop longer than I’d been alive.…
Read more

Where your tax money goes

This has been making its rounds on blog (I got it from Ta-Nehisi but the original source is The Third Way.) So if you want to balance the budget without raising taxes, where would you start? If wikipedia happens to be factually correct at this moment, we’re spending more on mandatory programs than we get…
Read more

Tyranny?

Any thoughts on Radley Balco’s post?: So yeah. Tyranny. If there’s more tyrannical power a president could possibly claim than the power to execute the citizens of his country at his sole discretion, with no oversight, no due process, and no ability for anyone to question the execution even after the fact . . .…
Read more

Prop 19

Here’s Neill Franklin, executive director of LEAP. He’s also my former commanding officer, friend (though not when he was my former commander), and co-author.

Gladwell on Strong and Weak Ties

I’ve written: It’s to our shame as [academic] writers that the average Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker piece is more thought provoking than 95 percent of journal articles. If we can’t explain ourselves to others in a style both illuminating and interesting, we won’t and don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Here’s that kind of article.…
Read more

Looking back from the future

“Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering,” says Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Washington Post. Thinking of that, Pete Guitherobserves: I think it’s clear that the drug war is one of those travesties that will be reviled in some way by future…
Read more

A fresh start with a new State’s Attorney?

People normally don’t get very excited over the elections of a State’s Attorney. But the recent election lose of Patricia Jessamy (and victory for Gregg Bernstein) is the most exiting crime-fighting development in Baltimore in many years. Peter Hermann has a good story in the Sunabout the potential for corporation between police and prosecutors. In…
Read more