Pepper Spray Me led me this story in the Chicago Tribune about, Vincent Richardson, a 14-year-old who, apparently successfully, impersonated being a police officer for five hours. And not for the first time. And not just the normal pulling-over-cars-with-police-lights kind of thing. I mean this guy patrolled with a real live Chicago police officers and…
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I went through my field notes. My first dream in which I was in uniform happened about four months into the police academy. But it wasn’t a bad dream. But then about a year after that, after about 10 months on the streets of the Eastern, I wrote this: Had another bad cop dream. Somebody…
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One thing I hated about being a cop was having work dreams. I mean, I still have them. Don’t we all? But now my dreams are occasionally about being late for class, or unable to get my things together and leave home (the latter happens quite often in real life as well). Whatever, dude. So…
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I wish more people would realize that the real world is not like TV. Problems in the Detroit crime lab.
I’m back from St. Louis. Despite growing up in nearby Chicago, I had never been to St. Louis. In my mind, I was thinking the Baltimore of Midwest: Faded industrial glory, local pride, and the answer to one of my own favorite personal trivia questions: What city of a certain size (at least a couple…
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America is more of a “guilt” culture than a “shame” culture. What does that mean? Guilt is something you feel. Shame is what you feel based on what othersfeel toward you. We want our criminals to feel remorse. That’s guilt. Ashamed to show your face in public because your grandma will think less of you?…
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Or so says the BBC. It’s not a bullet-proof bra. It’s a bra designed not be dangerous when combined with the impact of a bullet on body armor. But I do love the fact it says “police” on the bottom. It is being dubbed the new “bullet-proof bra”, a new kind of Wonderbra which could…
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Very little is known (or has been written) about rural cops. Certainly I’m very guilty of an urban bias. This could be the man to inform us. He’s planning on writing. I’ll encourage him. More good stuff: For the past nine months I have been pushing a sled in one of the poorest and most…
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This is encouraging news reported in New York Times: The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007. […] The officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted…
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There’s a quota system in place for attorneys working in the office of U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien in Los Angeles. As reported in an articlein the L.A. Times, O’Brien says: “This office does not and never will have quotas for its criminal prosecutors…. To suggest that any attorney in this office must charge a…
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