Damn good (5,500 word) read in Esquire by Don Winslow: Okay, I’m going to say it: The heroin epidemic was caused by the legalization of marijuana. … Weed was a major profit center for [the Sinaloa Cartel], but suddenly they couldn’t compete against a superior American product that also had drastically lower transportation and security…
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Yes, the NYPD and others politely asked people to not shoot each other at J’Ouvert this year. The New York Postquotes a police source as saying, “I guess this is the de Blasio crime prevention program.” In Brooklyn, pre-lent pre-dawn J’Ouvert is followed by the massive (like one-million people massive) Caribbean Day Parade (which has…
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Consider how a single pull of the trigger impacts people — reporters, cops, EMS, nurses, doctors — who are strangers to the victim in the literal sense but are forced to have a visceral connection with the dead and those who survive them. 450 people have been shot and killed in Chicago in the first…
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[This is a guest post by Jacob Lundy. He has ten years of law enforcement experience including street crimes, homicide, academy instruction, and consent decree compliance. He wrote this for qualitypolicing.com/ in the hope that Baltimore can learn from what he and the City of New Orleans have gone through. The selective bolding is mine,…
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John McWhorter on the developing taboo of using the phrase “black-on-black crime.” (Spoiler alert: “We need to nip the burgeoning of this new and useless taboo in the bud with all deliberate speed.”): “What’s wrong is to refer to black on black crime as evidence of something uniquely pathological about black people. … [But] to…
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A nice homage to John Timoney in the New York Times. Among other things: In 1972, New York officers fired 2,510 bullets and killed 66 people. By 2014, there were 288 shots fired and eight people killed. What happened? Mr. Timoney said that in 1972, the department put restrictions on when officers should shoot their…
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Turns out the cop who once rapped “Imma start a riot like it’s Baltimore” turns out to be prophetic! But all joking aside, this cop who shot and killed an armed and dangerous man was from the community. More than 1,000 people have circulated a 2014 image, shared by the Milwaukee Police Department, identifying and…
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My colleague Eugene O’Donnell, former cop and prosecutor, writes in The Crime Report about “The ‘Post-Policing Era’ in America: How Will We Cope?” I don’t actually think we are entering “a post-policing era,” but it’s certainly likely we’re going to see police responding to forces asking them to do much, much less of the coercive…
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A nice critique of quantitative data over at City Observatory. It’s about transportation planning, but the lesson can be applied to anything, especially policing: Reliance on data to solve complex problems is subject to what’s sometimes called the “drunk under the streetlamp” effect: An obviously intoxicated man is on his hands and knees on the…
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Very good piece by Peter Nickeas in Chicago magazine. “Three Years of Nights: Violence convulses the city after dark. Reporting on it leaves its own scars.” It sure does. Same for policing (though for some more than others). And just another 17 years of the same and he’s have the career of a copper: It…
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