Quality Policing Podcast and Blog

I love a parade!

Two police officers who chased and Tasered a 76-year-old man driving a tractor in [Glenrock, Wyoming’s, annual Deer Creek Days parade] have been fired. … Police say Grose, who was driving an antique tractor in the parade, disobeyed Kavenius’ traffic command. That led to a short pursuit and the Taser use. … Grose, a retired…
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The Day the Police Came Crashing Through His Door

In the Washington Post, Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD, writes about his experience: I remember thinking, as I kneeled at gunpoint with my hands bound on my living room floor, that there had been a terrible, terrible mistake. … In the words of Prince George’s County Sheriff Michael Jackson, whose deputies carried…
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NYPD Confidential

Leonard Levitt writes a good column. He has some harsh words for the NYPD Intelligence Division and the recent NYPD/FBI/terrorism case. The Intelligence Division under Cohen and his crony, Assistant Commissioner Larry Sanchez, is operating as a mini-CIA with no accountability and with no model to guide it. Now it appears that these lone wolves…
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Lex Market Utz man guilty of gun sales

Peter Hermann has the story and Nicole Fuller reports: Papantonakis, whose family has run the stall since 1970, admitted to The Baltimore Sun in a jailhouse interview in May that he sold guns to make ends meet but denied that he sold them to gang members, as alleged in the indictment. He also said that…
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70 cars down

There are only about 130 cars on patrol at any given time. City officials say an unusually high concentration of ethanol in the city’s gasoline supply contributed to the breakdown of more than 70 police cars over the weekend, most of which had been repaired and returned to service Tuesday. More than 200 police cars…
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Lawsuit filed by skateboarder against Baltimore police officer thrown out on technicality

Justin Fenton reportsin the Sun: A lawsuit against a Baltimore police officer who was famously recorded on a YouTube video yelling at young skateboarders at the Inner Harbor for calling him “dude” has been thrown out by a city judge. Circuit Judge Evelyn Cannon granted a defense motion for summary judgment to dismiss the case….…
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Tasering a Unarmed Legless Man in a Wheelchair

RougueRegime sent me a link to this story in which a legless man in a wheelchair was tasered. This tasering could very easily have been “by the books.” And that’s what bothers me. The man didn’t comply. He got tased. The taser should be banned as a compliance device (except perhaps in situations where an…
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Amazon Mysteries and How Much I Make From My Book (II)

I like Amazon.com. I buy a lot of stuff from them. I don’t have a good local independent bookstore. Plus Amazon brings stuff right to my door. For free. But Amazon is a strange a mysterious place. Authors have no website to logon to and check out how many copies they’ve sold. So I got…
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Baltimore, My Baltimore

9 shot in 24 hours. 2 die.

Cost of Incarceration: NYC

In 2008, New York’s Department of Correction’s budget was $978 million ($939 million of which is paid for city tax dollars). “In Fiscal 2007, the Department handled over 100,000 admissions, managed an average daily population of 13,987 and transported 326,735 individuals to court.” The average length of stay is 47 days. That’s $70,000 per inmate…
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