I made a thing for Radley Balko at the Washington Post on Qualified Immunity. Some people had questions about it over on my comic, which was about something completely different. One of the WaPo pages mentioned the elimination of the KKK under President Grant. Wait I thought that the KKK...
This has been another one of those years with a heightened awareness of police violence against unarmed black men. Awareness is a good thing. Understanding, however, is better. You can’t solve a problem until you know what the problem is. The problem isn’t really racism, though. The problem is fear. These shootings...
NYC’s Police Commissioner Ray Kelly wrote a piece for today’s WSJ titled “The NYPD: Guilty of Saving 7,383 Lives” and subtitled “Accusations of racial profiling ignore the fact that violent crime overwhelmingly occurs in minority neighborhoods.” In it, he makes a great case for the fact that his cherished stop-and-frisk...
The Facebook post above was posted to Reddit earlier today. We don’t know if this is an accurate copy or not, the internet being what it is, but it’s close enough to what we’ve heard actual officers say that it is useful to illustrate a couple of points. First, the...
If you belong to a certain population, who cares if you get arrested for no reason? Certainly not certain parts of the NYPD, according to former detective Stephen Anderson. If there’s an arrest that needs to be made, and you don’t have a guilty person to arrest, you just “arrest...
Real nice, Google. Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics. Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?” Leaving...
When we were kids, the police were the good guys. They were who you could turn to if you got lost. They were the ones who protected us from the bad guys. They were on our side. When we were kids, of course, we learned a simplified version of reality....
You’ve probably all seen the video by now of the motorcyclist recording himself speeding down a Maryland road, only to get pulled over by a plainclothes cop who leaps out brandishing a gun and otherwise behaving inappropriately. And you’ve probably heard how the motorcyclist is now facing trial on charges...
“There has been a spate of particularly brutal and senseless attacks on the police,” according to Eugene O’Donnell, professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a former police officer and prosecutor. “It seems to me, [there is] an unprecedented level of disrespect and willingness to challenge...
For as long as we can remember, the word on the street has always been that cops cannot lie. So if you’re doing a drug deal with an undercover cop, and you ask him point blank if he’s a police officer, then he has to tell you the truth. He...
So Jacki called the cops on her man. She didn’t mean for him to go to jail, really. But it was a stressful situation, and this was the best way she could think of to get back at him. It felt great, and having the cops on her side — having...
“Nathan, when you become mayor, I’m gonna be the first volunteer for your security detail.” This was a detective speaking, back when we were an ADA in the Manhattan DA’s office. My office, as usual, had about five cops in it. I liked this detective, and asked how come he...
Our friends at the Cato Institute forwarded this to us, and it looks like it even might be halfway decent. The folks at Flex Your Rights are about to release a new DVD, “10 Rules for Dealing with Police.” It looks like a primer on how the police can lie...
I love reading Scott Greenfield’s blog Simple Justice. He posted a good one the other day called “Another Prosecutor Loses Her Virginity,” about a former prosecutor, Rochelle Berliner, now a defense attorney, who just came to the realization that cops sometimes lie. Her epiphany was published in Saturday’s New York...
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