“Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has reassigned the 135-officer Narcotics Strike Force to more general crime-fighting duties.” This from Andrew Maykuth and Barbara Boyer’s article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I’m all for it. The Commissioner called the department “overspecialized.” Right on! “It may be disappointing to you,” he said. “A lot of people thought my…
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If you’re stinky, please take a bath.
I was on National Public Radio’s “On Point” today. You can listen to it here. It’s a quick hour.
Pulled from the shelves! Indeed, if you don’t already have a copy of Cop in the Hood, odds are you’re not getting one for a couple of weeks. No, I didn’t fake the whole thing. No, the book isn’t a safety hazard. No, there’s nothing substantively wrong with the book. But the book is an…
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These kind of headlines, this one from the BBC, always crack me up… and make me sad. Why? Do you feel safer? This guy’s death won’t mean shit. Some other drug lord will take his place. I nominate his second-in-command. I mean, really… Does anybody think that killing some bad guy is going to win…
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For those interested in an honest police perspective on shooting (and not shooting) people, I recommend Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force by professor and former police officer David Klinger. It’s a lot of 1st-hand accounts of deadly force incidents. And it’s good stuff. You can read an excerpt here.
You can listen to my appearance on the Talk of the Nation radio broadcast.
I haven’t digested all this yet, but there’s an interesting little brouhaha about a recent study released by the NYCLU by Queens College Professor Harry Levine and Deborah Small. The paper is called, “Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City, 1997-2007.” The report claims that 35,000 people a year are…
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Police officers don’t go to work wanting to shoot somebody.
Buying drugs doesn’t need to involve criminals, violence, and neighborhood blight. These are pictures I took a few years back of a friend buying drugs in an Amsterdam “coffee shop.” I show it to my classes at John Jay College of Criminal justice. Amsterdam is a beautiful city of canals and old buildings. I love…
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