The contrast between this well written piece about a murder victim in the Bronx and that BS pieceabout a murder in Baltimore is striking. Not surprisingly, Al Baker is on the byline of the good piece (Benjamin Meuller is first on the byline): Over nearly three decades, Mr. Perez held court on this block of…
Read more
Sometimes the police-are-bad set can be so casual in their negative assumptions about police you just might miss it. But it’s worth calling out, because accepting these lies is damaging, potentially lethal if you’re in a high-crime neighborhood. This is buried in Kate Crawford’s article in the New York Timesabout artificial intelligence: Police departments across…
Read more
My piece over at CNN: Those who have not been following the trial assume there was some justification to the state’s charges. This assumption may be too generous. The prosecution not only failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but as presented, the facts failed to show even evidence of a crime.
One point of Broken Windows policing is that it requires police discretion and intelligence. Yes, rules are important so police act without the bounds of the law, but just because something is against the rules doesn’t mean it’s a Broken Window worthy of police attention. Similarly, just because something is a Broken Window wouldn’t necessary…
Read more
There’s a report out by the newfangled NYC Department of Investigation Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD (you know, OIG-NYPD, for short): “An Analysis of Quality of Life Summonses, Quality of Life Misdemeanor Arrests, and Felony Crime in New York City, 2010-2015.” The report is surprisingly good, in terms of data analysis and…
Read more
The branches of the poisonous tree got pruned a bit. The Supreme Court says that if a cop makes a kinda illegal stop — “mistaken” is the word the Court uses — and then arrests the person after a warrant check, and then finds drugs in a post-arrest search, the drugs are admissible in court.…
Read more
One thing that may be worth considering is the position of former commissioner Anthony Batts and current Commissioner Kevin Davis as to whether or not the officers should have been criminally charged in the first place. Perhaps Batts thought of Gray’s death as more of civil issue (which was the correct position) and Batts pushed…
Read more
I’m calling this trial for the defense. Now I’m only following on twitter, so take this with a grain of salt, but the trial of Goodson — the most culpable of the officers on trial for the death of Freddie Gray — is not going well for the prosecution. Judge Williams told the defensethat they…
Read more
First published many years ago. I’ll just keep doing so. Tom Tomorrow, one of my favorite cartoonists, summarizes gun control and killings quite well. Click through to read. “Barring some seismic realignment in this country, the gun control debate is all but settled–and your side won. The occasional horrific civilian massacre is just the price…
Read more
Too good of a headline to pass up. And nice picture, too. From the Daily News.