If Tennessee Republican Congressman John Duncan is to be believed, we spend $860 million for the Air Marshal Service. They make an average of 4.2 arrests per year. Not per officer. But the entire agency. That works out to $200 million per arrest. Now I’m the first to say let’s not judge police by arrest…
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There’s a good article by Tom Siegfried in Science News about what’s wrong with statistics. Take the idea of statistical significance. Much of social science is based on the (very arbitrary) idea that for any given correlation, there should be a less than 5% chance of that result being due to random chance. [And as…
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An excellent essay by Chicago Police Officer Martin Preib in Chicago’s Newcity. The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago: We find them in basements, laundry rooms, on floors next to couches, sticking out of two parked cars or shrubs next to the sidewalk. It is more than gravity that pulls them down, for in…
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Baltimore homicides at 33-year low! And Frederick Bealefeld deserves credit. He’s the best commish at least since I’ve known Baltimore (which goes back now about 11 years and six commissioners). And unlike certain past commissioners (yes, Eddie, I’m talking about you), Bealefeld isn’t a felon. [note: Convicted felon Ed Norris was a chicken-shit coward bastard…
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I’ve always said the Blue Wall of Silence is vastly overrated (for reasons I’m not going to get into today). Do cops get away with murder, literally or figuratively? The short answer is no. Unless, of course, one counts traffic violation and illegal parking as murder. What I do find interesting is that the NYPD,…
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W.E.B. DuBois (pronounced doo-boyz, by the way, cause he wasn’t French) wrote about “The Talented Tenth.” DuBois was, among other things, a great American, a suffragist, a sociologist, and a Harvard grad. Had his groundbreaking The Philadelphia Negrobeen written today, I can only wonder if it would have been called, DuBois in the Hood. In…
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Ahhh, the joys of drug regulation and the strange wonders of Dutch drug policy. The ultimate crime seem to be that this place got too big for its britches. But they nailed them for keeping a stock of more than 18 ounces of marijuana. That is a limit that most if not all coffee shops…
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I just finished a excellent book by Henry Schlesinger, The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution. You may remember Schlesinger as the co-author (with Joe Poss) of the wonderful non-fiction police story Brooklyn Bounce. The Batteryis all about, you guessed it, batteries. Turns out they have a fascinating history and Schlesinger tells it…
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From a reader: “So, following the memo to pick your targets carefully when employing the Taser, Taser invents a device to fire wildly into a crowd.”
On the 2600 block of McElderry. Here’s the storyin the Sun.