It’s a lazy journalist and an incompetent academic who writes a story based on the anecdotes of cab drivers, bartenders, and shoe shiners. But… I was getting my shoes shined Friday afternoon in Baltimore’s Penn Station and the shoe shiner and I were chatting. He was a black man, a bit older than me. Baltimore…
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Michael East is a veteran police officer in Saginaw, Michigan. He’s also an excellent writer. He has a new book coming out. Beyond Hope? Saginaw, not that you’d know, is a pretty messed up place of rusted industry and abandonment. It’s lost about half its population. Even Habitat for Humanity is helping tear it down.…
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I mentioned the turkey leg killing story to my classes today. Many of the NYPD officers in my class had heard the story! How? I don’t know. It really is like a police urban myth. None claimed it as a New York City story. But none had any idea where it was from.
A 30-year-old man was chased down by four women and stabbed more than 20 times early Sunday after arguing with them over a broken cigarette, sources said. Here’s the story in the Chicago Sun Times: “The slain man, Morris Wilson, was drinking with the four women at about 2 a.m. when he broke a cigarette,…
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I got Badges, Bullets & Bars in the mail and started reading it. I am amazed (maybe pleased is a better word) to find that one story — a police urban myth I constantly heard — is true. There are many crazy stories cops tell. And every squad has its own ghosts. Most of the…
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The Detroit News reports: Mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr.’s administration was dealt an embarrassing blow Friday, after his top lawyer ignited a racial flap by saying the city’s 36th District Court was “acting like a ghetto court.” Kathleen Leavey, who is white, resigned as the city’s corporation counsel Thursday, but said the comment was misinterpreted. That…
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A reader turned me on to this articleabout life in the LA Hood: “Sympathy for the Devil: Crime Stats Say L.A.’s Streets Are Safer Than Ever, So Why Are Gang Hoods Still So Bloody?” It’s by Sam Slovick in the LA Weekly. It’s long. I’ll confess, I haven’t read it all (sheee-it, man… I got…
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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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Ha! “Apparently, McDonald’s didn’t realize something everyone else did, namely that the “I’d hit it” slogan adorning a banner ad means “I fancy it sexually” in the language of its target audience, and that the slogan sounds somewhat strange in the context of hamburger advertising.”
During any given year, a 15- to 34-year-old man in the Eastern District has about the same chance of being killed as a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq. That’s just wrong. The Eastern stats are from page 203 of my book. The Iraq stats are taken from DonHodges.com. I bring this up because of an…
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