NYPD Officer Ramos was just buried. Here is Commissioner Bratton’s eulogy. In honor of Officer Ramos, I’m reprinting some of what I’ve written about police funerals in Baltimore. I went to too many of them: Twenty months in Baltimore wasn’t very long, but it was long enough to see five police officers killed in the…
Read more
Here I am on NPR’s “Morning Edition” flapping my mouth about the shooting of Tamir Rice (Cleveland kid killed by police while holding a realistic-looking BB gun): [Moskos] says mayors everywhere walk a tightrope between police and citizen outrage. He says the public needs to get more realistic about how the police work. And police…
Read more
Read my whole piece at CNN: Most citizens can be forgiven for going through their day without thinking of anarchy or barbarians storming the gates. But many police, especially in New York City, see themselves as a thin blue line besieged by both a liberal and criminal world, neither of which they particularly like or…
Read more
A friend (and former student) of mine, Officer Musorov, just posted this on facebook. You might see him on the streets of Crown Heights. He makes me proud! “When the Rhetoric of scandal — rogue cops, racist cops, and so on — becomes the received idea, when we are so engrossed by exceptions that they…
Read more
Cops turning their back on Mayor DeBlasio.
A quote from me in an interesting article by James Reinl in Al Jazeera. I go on to say: “Some people honestly believe that cops don’t shoot white people and don’t give tickets to white people for minor issues. This view is demonstrably false,” Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore lawman and academic at John Jay…
Read more
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.
From Citilab. As a taxpaying city resident, I don’t like having to foot the bill for bad behavior. (I also don’t think cities should be so quick to settle.) My solution is give whatever money the city is now paying out to the police department budget. Raise the police budget by that much. And we’re…
Read more
This is the tenth (or so) in my occasional series of “Right-Wing Lies.” Now I know there are some left-wing lies, too. (It’s not true that 1 in 5 college women are raped, for instance. Nor is it true that black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than…
Read more
Did I mention I met Sgt. Plantinga last time I was in San Francisco? Good guy. He bought me lunch. Here’s the last (for now) from Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman: You won’t feel sorry for many defendants. You figure they probably committed a dozen crimes before they finally…
Read more