This is an email I received from (someone I believe is) an Oklahoma Police officer. He answered my question — why does Oklahoma lead the nation in people killed by police? — very well. It’s knowledge I don’t have, and I can’t say it better myself. He agreed to let me reprint it here, anonymously:…
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Uh, it’s his own gun. But headline aside (writers don’t write the headline), I like to think I make some good points in this CNN piece about Robert Bates, the Tulsa County “reserve deputy” who thought his gun was a Taser and shot and killed a criminal.
A 73-year old man, Robert C. Bates, liked to play cops and robbers. He thought he was going to get to Tase a bad guy. But instead of holding his Taser, Bob was holding his personal gun. Bang. You’re dead. Oops. Bates wasn’t a real cop. He was a “reserve deputy sheriff,” which isn’t necessarily…
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An op-ed of mine to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post: This one is different. Walter Scott was killed — shot multiple times in the back — by North Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager last weekend. Scott, already running away, was no threat to the officer when the first shot was fired. He was even…
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I don’t know what the right percentage is, regarding cops living where they work. Though I am partial to 100 percent of cops living or having had lived in the city they police. But whatever the right number is, the percentage is larger than friggin’ seven percent, which is what you find in Oakland. Now…
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Civil servants too often get disparaged. But that man on the ladder is a New York City civil servant and he is climbing up, not down. I’m no longer a civil servant, but this makes me proud just to be fellow worker for the City of New York. Here’s a video of climbing down here.…
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I don’t know. And that’s what I told Meaghan Corzine of CBS St. Louis. Luckily, I wasn’t her only source. It’s a good story.
My latest piece at CNN.com is up. They titled it: “Why would you want to be a cop?” I speak to a lot of police officers, retired, on the job, and soon-to-be. Anybody who knows cops knows it’s in their nature to complain (there’s an old barb about there being just two things cops don’t…
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Sometimes it’s important to remember how you got to Point B from Point A to where you are today. You don’t just stumble into a system like Ferguson’s where the city tries to get 30 percent of it’s total budget from fines, citations, and court fees. Ferguson isn’t unique. I just stumbled across this article…
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Three years ago I wrote about the problem of “procedural justice.” If you’ve misplaced your copy of William Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, just read Leon Neyfakh’s review in the Boston Globe. Procedural justice still matters because the Presidential Report places emphasis on it: “Police and sheriffs’ departments should adopt procedural justice as…
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