I recently finished reading Fox Butterfield’s excellent All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence. Amazingly researched (Butterfield is a Class-A journalist), this 1996 book follows a culture of violence and its transference over time from white slave owners in the historically f**ked-up county of Edgefield, South Carolina to Willie Bosket…
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OK you gun fans (and I know you’re out there), explain this to me: I read in the paper today that licenses for concealed handguns have almost doubled in Florida since 2005. “Interesting.” I thought. “I wonder what’s happened to crime.” So I checked. Murder, robbery, and burglary are all up. Now I know this…
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One of my students told me that police took 14 guns off the streets of Harlem last night. This after the annual African-American Day Parade. Seven people were shot (give or take one or two). This isn’t in any of today’s papers. Say what?! The parade ended in the afternoon. The tough kids come out…
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If you’re a published author, maybe you check Amazon.com sales rank (gosh, of course *I* never do). You can read this, this, or this. My book topped out at 500 (that’s pretty good) and is currently hovering around 15,000 [update: 50,000]. That means there are 14,999 books selling better than Cop in the Hoodat Amazon.com.…
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Hey, my book is now available through Amazon’s Kindle. I’m not exactly certain what that means. But I do know it makes me slightly hipper and more likely to be read by tech geeks commuting by train.
Dolan Cummings of Culture Wars has written the best review of my book. I don’t mean the most positive review (though I’m very glad he liked my book); I mean the best written review. They sure writes good with that there English language in England. Along with being the first to juxtapose me, Venkatesh, Homicide,…
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Crime alert tip provided by I Can Has Cheezeburger.
The New York Timescame out today with an editorialagainst lowering the drinking age. That surprised me, especially from a paper that says we’re not winning the war on drugs. I started drinking when I was 15. Most people do. Seems to me that the legal drinking age for beer and wine should be 16 or…
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A Baltimore reader emailed me this: Michael Verdugo is a police officer in Florida who was on the HGTV show Design Star. He’s openly gay and a porn blog revealed that five years prior to becoming a police he was in a gay porn film. The police department he is in suspended him to investigate…
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Jack Cole, the founder of LEAP, has an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe. WAR AND RACE dominate the presidential campaign, but one nation-shaping war with profound racial consequences eludes the political radar: the drug war. I was a frontline soldier in this self-perpetuating, ineffectual effort that has swallowed more than a trillion tax dollars and…
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