I got Badges, Bullets & Bars in the mail and started reading it. I am amazed (maybe pleased is a better word) to find that one story — a police urban myth I constantly heard — is true. There are many crazy stories cops tell. And every squad has its own ghosts. Most of the…
Read more
This is a shame. And stupid. One guy escaped. So what? From the Newark Start Ledger.
In the Kansas City Star by Tony Rizzo.
It turns out you can fight City Hall. In 1857 they did. And won. It turns out that if you’re City Hall, you can’t fight the State House. The winner of this brawl at City Hall between two competing police departments got to be New York’s Finest! The mayor was arrested and New York State…
Read more
Too bad a story about an honest Liberian customs officer is news. But hell, if I made $15 a month… I would probably take the $20,000 bribe. So I guess he’s a better man than me. And they did give him a medal. And $1,000.
Baltimore Crime turned me on to this: Spotcrime maps every shooting in Baltimore (City and County) for 2008. Hit ‘start’ at the top left. Whether you want Turning of the sound to hear the bang bangs is up to you. At the time of this writing, I’m still only in October. I can’t tell if…
Read more
The New York Times reports on crack babies… not! You know, for what it’s worth, one of my favorite students confided in me that he was crack baby. He was all right.
Pepper Spray Me led me this story in the Chicago Tribune about, Vincent Richardson, a 14-year-old who, apparently successfully, impersonated being a police officer for five hours. And not for the first time. And not just the normal pulling-over-cars-with-police-lights kind of thing. I mean this guy patrolled with a real live Chicago police officers and…
Read more
When I was a cop in Baltimore, I kind of assumed I was the only active police officer going for a PhD at one fo them fancy graduate schools. I wasn’t. I’ve also assumed I’m the only former Baltimore police officer to write a book based on time in the Eastern District. I’m not. I’m…
Read more
At the closing of Obama’s inauguration, Joseph Lowery said these controversial words: “We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace…
Read more