Quality Policing Podcast and Blog

1 in 27

One in twenty-seven Maryland adults are current in the correction system. Twenty-seven percent of those are behind bars. This is, sad to say, about par for the national average. In Maryland, it costs $86 per day to lock a person up.

Cameras and Crime

Here’s an article in the New York Timesabout the (weak) link between security cameras and crime prevention.

Mexico and the “Failed State”

Spin this all want, drug warriors, it’s not good. From Ciudad Juárez. The whole story in the New York Times is here. It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, a retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To make clear their insistence, they vowed to…
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Strip Searches in Central Booking

These stories happen every now and then. “Respectable” person gets arrested and is shocked (shocked!) that they’re strip searched in jail. Did you not know that people get strip searched after being arrested? Well they do. Now you know. If the idea that other people get strip searched doesn’t bother you today, right now, while…
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SWAT team reform

The Sun talks about SWAT-like teams.

Reporting the Police and Naming Names

David Simon, of The Wire, Homicide, and The Corner fame, has written a very powerful article in the Washington Post. The Baltimore Police stopped releasing the names of officers involved in police-involved shootings. Personally, I like reading the names in the paper to see if it’s anybody I know. Sure I could call up a…
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Rockefeller Drug Laws Near End

With [David] Paterson in the governor’s mansion and Democrats in control of both houses of the State Legislature, an aggressive effort is under way to finally dismantle what remains of the stringent 1970s-era drug laws, which imposed stiff mandatory sentences as a way to combat the heroin epidemic then gripping New York City. Here‘s the…
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“So I killed Someone”

“So I killed someone,” Keith Phoenix, 28, told New York police detectives who found him hiding in the bathroom of a Yonkers apartment, the police said. “That makes me a bad guy?” Er, uh… yeah. It does. The story is in the Times.

Four Shot in Eastern

None killed.

B*tch, stop lying!

Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora claims that US cocaine prices have increased 100% and purity dropped by 35% since the Mexican crackdown began in 2006. Really? Let’s examine that, shall we? In April 2007 John Walters (the drug czar) said that cocaine prices had declined 11 percent from February 2005 to October 2006, to…
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