Swamy Pete, the gypsy scryer, looks into his crystal ball. With eerie music in the background and an echoey voice, Swamie Pete makes a bold prediction: In the future, in fact tomorrow at exactly 19:00 hours eastern time, crime will not happen. The crystal ball says that for maybe three hours, somehow people will manage…
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Denying the Ferguson Effect and any link between policing and crime has become almost a cottage industry in some circles. It’s sort of the liberal equivalent of conservatives denying climate change and, er, on the small chance it is changing, any link between global warming and human activity. Sure, the world may be warmer. But…
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Out of 12,000 Chicago Cops, 124 are responsible for a third of misconduct lawsuits settled by the city since 2009, costing $34 million. The Tribune(behind a paywall unless you good for the article) reports that 82 percent of the department’s officers were not named in any settlements. (Keep in mind that a good chunk of…
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There’s something bordering on the absurd when newspapers write stories about police racism based on claims like, “90 percent of those arrested are African-American while African Americans make up only 65 percent of the population.” The assertion, sometimes explicit and sometimes implied, is that cops are racists hunting black men. Same thing with papers that…
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I received a courtesy call from John Jay’s legal department about a FOIL (freedom of information law) request made for my records. One person, whom I won’t name but I presume reads this, wanted A) my letter of appointment and B) to know how much I make. You’ll have to trust me that I did…
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To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, “All policing is local.” But that doesn’t mean that something in one town can’t have an effect on policing nationwide. And a trend can be large and worrisome — and national — without being universal. That’s why they call it a trend. I don’t know what’s going on everywhere (or even…
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Usually I focus on the Eastern District, because that is where I policed. But I was looking at stats for the Western District, where Freddie Gray died. Homicides in the Western went from a long-time record low (but still shamefully high) 21 in 2014 to a record high 66 in 2015. Holy mackerel, that’s a…
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Like Dan Aykroyd, I continue to “embrace the police,” here in Catania, Sicily. (Though I’m currently in Malta.)
I and Nick Selby wrote this one for the Washington Post.
There’s a nice article about Alice Goffman in the Times magazine. Overall it’s a great piece about Alice Goffman, who has written one of the best sociology books ever, and the state of sociology in general. One line I find funny is the assertion that she “panders to audience expectations” by this description of a…
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