This article in the Times is worth reading. Of note: the most discretionary arrest in NYC, Dis Con, down 91 percent. Meanwhile the courts are close to empty. “This proves to us is what we all knew as defenders: You can end broken-windows policing without ending public safety,” said Justine M. Luongo, the deputy attorney-in-charge…
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Conor Friedersdorf has a excellent piece in The Atlantic, “The NYPD’s Insubordination—and Why the Right Should Oppose It.” [And just for the record I did scoop the New York Post, albeit only be a few hours.] There’s lot here that doesn’t fit in our normal political divide. And I love that cognitive dissonance! You’ve got…
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Best 22 minutes you’re going to hear about the current state of policing. My colleague David Kennedy on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show. I can’t thing of anything he said that I don’t agree with.
I stumbled across this column by Harry Siegel yesterday in the Daily News while getting my shoes shined. It’s bar far the best thing I’ve read in a while about the current state of crime and New York City. Read the whole thing. But here are some highlights: Pay no mind to the shrill voices…
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In a comment Kyle W was kind enough to get me going about the situation in which a Manhattan resident Kang Chun Wong suffered injuries after an officer attempted to give him a jaywalking ticket and Mr. Wong seems to have tried to walk away. Mr. Wong is 84. I wasn’t there, so it’s hard…
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Last week I mentioned“the army of junkies outside Lexington Market.” My tender New York eyes were a bit shocked by 20 people shouting and 20 other people nodding in what I call the “junkie lean.” You can’t expect decent people or caring parents with children to walk a gauntlet of junkies to go shopping. They…
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This article in Slate by Justin Peters is perhaps not the stupidest thing I’ve ever read on policing. But it is the stupidest thing I’ve read about Broken Windows since Bratton was announced as the next NYPD commissioner about 20 hours ago. Peters writes, “Broken-windows strategies and zero-tolerance policing strategies go hand in hand.” Well,…
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James Q. Wilson passed away yesterday. From The Chronicle of Higher Education: James Q. Wilson’s Practical Humanity James Q. Wilson made me a cop, even though I never met the man. I think I heard him give a conference talk once. Many say that Wilson, who died Friday after a battle with leukemia, was a…
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Here’s a great interview from Investigative Voice with Baltimore homicide detectives Irving Bradley and David Hollingsworth. You had to be an actor. I had to convince you, what I was telling you to do was the right thing to do. Even though before I got you, you had torn out every window in the neighborhood,…
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OK. I’ll be honest. I had never heard of the guy either. But it turns out he might be responsible for America’s great crime drop (not that he ever claimed such a feat). But he did hire Bill Bratton to run the New York Transit Police, and that was perhaps the start of it all.…
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