Plenty to do in Amsterdam… thanks to GVB, Amsterdam public transportation. But I’m really posting this because it’s starring… my mom! It’s also produced by my brother (and he’s the questionably hetero one in the video). This may be the slickest ad ever for public transportation (with the old Detroit People Mover song as a…
Read more
Heather MacDonald has an op-ed in the New York Times. You know, on police issues we probably agree 75-80% of the time. And yet I’m always left frustrated and strangely disappointed by her writings. She’s too predictable. And her writing lacks depth as she simply sidesteps the main points of the opposition. I generally agreewith…
Read more
LEAP has made a parody of the Mac vs. PC ads, but about the war on drugs.
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more