Epichorus

Cops and Facebook

2012-02-10T12:43:00.002-05:00

Sometimes don't mix well. From the Chicago Tribune:

According to the lawsuit, [Officer Lance] Handzel, 41, used Facebook to accuse [Captain Juan] Morado’s family of being “known gang members” who “are in the business of selling narcotics.”

Can the private sector drive down crime?

2012-02-10T09:12:00.001-05:00

A study in the February issue of Injury Prevention seems like manna from heaven for conservatives and libertarians.

Researchers looked at the rising number of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) across the U.S., which usually employ private security to monitor areas under their auspices. Their conclusion:

the implementation of BID can reduce the incidence of violent crimes likely to result in injury to individuals. The findings also indicate that the establishment of a BID by itself is not a panacea, and highlight the importance of targeting BID efforts to crime prevention interventions that reduce violence exposure associated with criminal behaviours.

It should come as no surprise that civic-minded institutions, whether corporate or non-profit, can act to improve public safety when they choose to do so.

The study offers further support of the "hot-spot" theory of policing and public safety, recently advanced by Franklin E. Zimring.

I live on the edge of a BID. My building benefits from private security patrols. These patrols don't extend down the next block of Prince Street to a pair of bodegas opposite the Ingersoll Houses. Some people in my building don't like walking down that way after dark.

(I'd not heard of the journal Injury Prevention and likely wouldn't have without the good people at the Crime Report who've been covering the John Jay/Guggenheim Conference on Crime in America)

Another reason to fear global warming

2012-02-09T10:06:00.000-05:00

A funny thing about crime numbers: When they go down, it's because of brilliant police tactics. When they go up, it's because of the weather.

It's an oldie-but-goodie:

Unseasonably warm temperatures for the first month of the 2012 have coincided with a 5.7 percent jump in major crimes citywide.
The increase is led by double-digit jumps in robberies, burglaries and grand larceny, police statistics show. Murder and rape reports are also up from the same time last year.
NYPD insiders say the only logical explanation is the unseasonably warm weather that has New Yorkers, criminals included, spending more time outdoors on snow-free streets.

Behind bars in Brooklyn

2012-02-04T19:29:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn's main jail opened up on Saturday, offering walking tours to the community.

The Brooklyn Detention Center (formerly the Brooklyn House of Detention) closed in 2003 on plans to double its capacity. Those plans were abandoned in 2010. The facility instead underwent a renovation and will begin housing inmates again this month, with a capacity for some 750 people.

The tour took visitors through the intake area, the visiting area, the kitchen, the clinic, and to a tier of cells. The only thing striking about the place is its overwhelming banality. It's like the DMV, with bars. It suggests nothing other than plodding bureaucracy. At first, every iron door and metal lattice and pane of reinforced glass seems otherworldly, but these fade into plain monotony with uncanny speed.

Most interesting were the questions from the community members. Several times I heard the same ones posed to the correctional officers and their commanders leading the tour. "Will there be murderers in here?" "What's the longest sentence?" and "How many people are allowed in the showers?"

Some of these were asked timidly, as though the questioner was aware that his or her query originated in an understanding framed by television and movies, and not reality. Some of the questions reinforced that, for most Americans, prison remains a fundamentally alien place, terrifying but perhaps thrilling.

The Brooklyn Detention Center will house men arrested for mid-level felonies and misdemeanors, who aren't able to post bail before they go to trial, or while they wait to be offered a plea. So, no murderers. Most inmates stay sixty to ninety days. Only one person in the shower cell at a time.

Many on the tour didn't understand, at first, that the men who will be housed in the BDC will not have been yet convicted of the crime for which they were arrested.

"All the inmates are innocent," said the assistant deputy warden, without irony. He saw the confusion spread across audience members' faces. "You know, until proven guilty."

Visitors were not permitted to take pictures or record video inside the prison. One guard, however, photographed the tour with a 7D, a 24-70mm f/2.8, and a long hood. That's the same setup I use at work, sometimes, to shoot in the newsroom. We chatted a bit about the camera. His Christian name is Sean, but I'm not sure of the spelling, and he wore a DoC sweater that presumably covered the badge printed with his surname. I asked him if he trained as a photographer, or if he just picked it up. He said he graduated from the New York Film Academy. He said he did mostly video, but he could do still photography as well. I asked him if he was hired to work as a DoC photographer. He said no. He'd applied to be a corrections officer, and still was.

One other thing I learned on the tour, in the jail's clinic: prison inmates are the only people in America with a constitutional right to unlimited, free, single-payer funded healthcare.

NYC marijuana deaths?

2012-02-03T12:49:00.000-05:00

Advocates for ending marijuana prohibition assert that the drug isn't linked with fatalities, the way alcohol is. That's ironically false: as long as prohibition persists, the drug could continue being linked to deaths like that of 18-year-old Ramerly Graham, shot and killed by police officers in the Bronx on Thursday:

A teenager was shot and killed by a police officer in the Bronx on Thursday afternoon after running into his home as officers pursued him.

Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said there was “no evidence that he was armed” when the officer, a member of a narcotics unit, shot him once in the upper left chest. It was unclear what had prompted the chase, Mr. Browne said...

The officer had struggled with Mr. Graham near the entrance to a bathroom, Mr. Browne said, before shooting him. A small amount of marijuana was found in the toilet, Mr. Browne said.

NYC marijuana busts

2012-02-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

For every one of these, there are 50,700 of these.

Even with the phenomenal work of WNYC's Ailsa Chang, who uncovered the NYPD's practice of making illegal arrests for marijuana possession and spurred a departmental memo aimed at changing the policy, arrests still rose.

When wrong ideas collide

2012-02-01T10:29:00.000-05:00

This Associated Press reports that Florida will close eleven correctional facilities in a bid to save money, and highlighting how the state's incorrect assumptions about crime rates collided with its wrong prescription for prime prevention:

Policymakers 20 years ago, extrapolating on then-current crime trends, expected an explosion of offenders and started building prisons. In particular, the early data suggested the rise of "superpredators," a wave of juvenile delinquents that would flood the criminal justice system in the early 2000s.

The wave, however, never happened and crime rates have fallen since 1991. Florida now has excess prison room, about 116,000 beds for 102,000 inmates - a number that's basically been flat for three years.

Cutting back on these incarceration costs will save the state $15 million, and could cost up to 1,600 jobs.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/29/2614107/fla-prison-closings-are-legacy.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cp

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Another cost of the "prison-industrial complex"

2012-01-29T22:16:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post has an excellent piece on how the closure of a state penitentiary in Maryland could kill the small town of Boydton, which relied on selling sewer services to the prison for twenty percent of its revenue.

Incarceration rates are falling, but Adam Gopnik's piece in the latest New Yorker reminds us that the U.S. currently has more people incarcerated than at any point in history, and ponders the effects of such incarceration rates on the broader society.

Liptak doesn't discuss the regional economics of the prison systems, the small towns abutting massive penitentiaries, and the parasitic nature of such relationships. It means wholesome small towns like Boydton are dependent on the mass misery of others, and the perpetuation of that system of misery.

As incarceration rates fall and prisons close, new thinking about the relationship between crime and imprisonment could push the downward trend further, faster. Liptak's piece quotes extensively from the findings of criminologist Franklin Zimring, who suggests that crime rates have as little to do with incarceration rates (a conservative tenant) as they do with unemployement rates (a liberal truism).

Zimring says that New York is emblematic of his point: As crime rates plummeted, incarceration rates also declined.

Changes in public norms regarding drugs, particularly marijuana, and the rising cost of incarcerating non-violent drug offenders are changing attitudes about incarceration and the incarcerated. The disenfranchisement of those imprisoned, or in some stage of the criminal justice system, is a rising social justice issue.

These changes contributed to the success, this year, of a bill written by New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries changing the way federal dollars, marked for prisoners, are allocated. The federal government allocates funds to localities based on the size of an area's population tabulated by the census. Such funds are earmarked for things like education, roads, and hospitals. When it comes to prisoners, the census counts them as residents of the area of their incarceration, rather than the zip code where they lived prior to their lock-up, and the place to which they most likely return when they're released. Prisoners don't use the local roads, or benefit from the local services, when they're behind bars.

Jeffries's bill proposed changing this allocation, and it passed the state legislature. Upstate Republicans representing the penitentiary towns benefiting from the status quo challenged the bill in the courts, but the courts upheld the law.

Towns that had previously benefited from what Jeffries termed the "school-to-prison pipeline" will likely be more hard-up for revenue. I don't know if there will be town crises in New York like the one described in Maryland. But if there are, they may be the inevitable symptoms of withdrawal, however slow, from an unjustifiable system of criminal justice.

Jews, gentiles, and gentrification in Crown Heights

2012-01-25T09:21:00.000-05:00

Of all the ink spilled on the topic of gentrification in the city, this has to be one of the best lines yet:

These yuppies bring pritzus to our neighborhood.

Gothamist reports that some members of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Crown Heights are getting shpilkes due to the influx of gentiles into the neighborhood. An anonymous complaint posted to the Lubavitch community news site Collive reads:

Young, upwardly mobile professionals may seem to be pleasant tenants who bring in reliable income, but they also introduce a very different way of life: new nightclubs and bars, sun tanning on rooftops, bike lanes and an increasing amount of immodesty on our streets. Some of these changes are hard to ignore; for instance, one of the sun tanning parties are visible for our young children to see from the window of a local school.

One thing confused me about this missive: Crown Heights is more or less bisected by Eastern Parkway, cutting the neighborhood into northern and southern halves. In my non-scientific observations of the area where I lived, the hassidim were cloistered mostly south of the boulevard. The Lubavitch Mecca, at 770 Eastern Parkway, sits on the south side of the thoroughfare. The northern parts of the neighborhood seem more heavily black, Hispanic, West Indian, and Caribbean. This was the place where I lived, and where most of the yuppie goyim like me drank our craft beers in our reclaimed community gardens. I didn't see many black hats on Saturdays. There was a tiny shteible around the corner from me, but the time I visited so my father could say kaddish, it could barely make a minyan. The rabbi was an import: he had to walk from Boro Park for services.

But from this anonymous plea for some sort of circling of the hassidic wagons, I wonder if there are perhaps more hassidic families living in the gentrifying parts of Crown Heights than I thought, and if there is perhaps more gentrification in the hassidic parts of Crown Heights than I previously imagined.

If I were a suspicious individual, I would wonder if there could be any connection between the complaints of "sun tanning parties" and the recent and largely unverifiable complaints of rooftop police harassment by Crown Heights residents. My former roommate, who still lives on Franklin Avenue, informed me yesterday that police officers from the 77th Precinct are still insisting, without reason or cause, that residents aren't allowed on the roofs of their own buildings.

How to lie with crime stats

2012-01-24T14:36:00.000-05:00

John Roman shoots down Charles Murray's data and assertion that the best way to keep violent crime down is to keep people locked up.

Roman's takedown is simple: He goes after Murray's use of this chart, showing the rising number of prisoners per violent offenses (in blue) and the declining number of violent offenses overall (in red).

Roman writes:

The comparison of the red line to the blue line is basically a ratio:

Violence: (Prisoner/Violence)

What’s wrong with that? This ratio has the convenient property of overstating the relationship between crime and the prison population. If violence declines, it affects both measures in a way that makes increases in imprisonment seem to be more important than they actually are.

When violence declines, the blue line goes down, of course. But, since violence is the denominator of the red line, and a shrinking denominator makes a number bigger, the red line goes up by a similar proportion.

Since Murray essentially counts violence multiple times, this approach guarantees that his argument that prison reduces crime is supported by the graphic regardless of what actually happens with imprisonment and violence.

Beyond this deception, Roman argues that Murray's chart shows a troubling trend: declining economic returns on incarceration:

The lower the [blue] line is, the less we are spending per violent crime. The line is at its minimum in the late 1970s until 1980—just prior to America’s incarceration binge. That the line goes up after 1980 is not a good thing, as Murray would have you believe, but a very bad thing—it’s what economists refer to as diminishing marginal returns to imprisonment. Every year since 1980 we have had to lock up a lot more people to maintain the same amount of violence, which means prison is getting less and less cost effective.

Lawsuit breaks RCMP 'wall of silence'

2012-01-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

The Globe & Mail reports a lawsuit is imminent alleging widespread harassment within Canada's federal police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police:

At this point, 94 current and former female members of the force from every province have asked to join the suit that is seeking damages potentially in the tens of millions of dollars for alleged maltreatment on the job.

The plaintiffs' legal team hopes the court will grant the suit class-action status, enabling other plaintiffs to come forward and join the suit. The Globe offers no detail of the type or scope of the alleged harassment, but quotes a psychologist named Mike Webster, who treated some of the female plaintiffs. Webster suggests a prevailing attitude of suspicion and silence within the RCMP:

“They are coming from an organization that creates a culture of fear and intimidation,” Mr. Webster said. “Those in command use their authority to intimidate others and discourage them from speaking out. It’s all part of the para-militaristic hierarchy that exists. That’s why so few step outside the group and criticize those in authority."

Vancouver cops acting like Seattle cops

2012-01-22T09:58:00.000-05:00

An East Vancouver man taking out the trash one morning says a police officer threw him up against a fence and tossed him on the ground. More officers showed up. One put a knee on his neck, another put a knee on the back of his legs, and the remaining officers began to kick him as he lay, pinned, on the sidewalk.

The Vancouver Police Department said its officers were investigating reports of two bank robberies. Apparently, some of them decided that Manjit Singh was a suspect, and kicks to the torso is how they treated this suspect. After the kicks, the police determined that Singh hadn't robbed one bank, let alone two. They also came to the conclusion that no banks had actually been robbed. The police department apologized. Singh may sue.

Sounds like the Vancouver police took a page right out the Seattle PD playbook, where "excessive force" has become almost synonymous with that city's police department. The department's excesses - Tasering a pregnant woman three times in 42 seconds after she refused to sign a speeding ticket and get out of her car, shooting to death a partially deaf wood-carver holding a knife used in his trade, punching jaywalkers in the face - lead to a U.S. Department of Justice review that determined Seattle cops committed civil rights violations in one out of every five incidents where officers used force. The DoJ said only a tiny proportion of civil rights violations were ever investigated by the police department, and only a small portion of those resulted in discipline for the officers involved, and when discipline was meted out, it was rarely more than a slap on the wrist. The DoJ's findings could lead to court-ordered reforms of the city's police department, what local politicians have called a federal "takeover" of Seattle PD.

The department is fighting tooth and nail to block such an outcome. One Washington state representative - who is also a Seattle police officer - has introduced a state bill that would block federal court orders mandating use-of-force requirements on local police departments unless such orders are backed by an act of the U.S. Congress.

A cynical look at this effort might suggest that some are doing everything they can to protect the police department from being forced to comply with the Constitution.

Canadian fiscal responsibility

2012-01-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

The CBC reviews the three-year existence of Stephen Harper's much-lauded Employment Insurance Financing Board, and says the million-dollar government body hasn't much to brag about:

So far, it has spent over $3.3 million for new offices, computers and furniture, well-paid executives and staff, travel budgets, expense accounts, board meetings, and lots of pricey consultants... But in all three years the board has been in existence, the Harper government has simply capped EI rates to spare Canadian workers from potentially huge premium increases. As a result, the rate-setting agency has yet to set a single rate.

All this in the name of fiscal responsibility, but:

Since the government started capping EI contribution rates, the employment insurance program has been running a deficit now totaling almost $9 billion.

Here's how the chair of the agency, David Brown, explains the inaction:

"We haven't had to do nearly as much as our original mandate intended us to do," Brown said in an interview.

But let no underwhelming performance go unrewarded:

Its published budget for the current year includes giving everyone raises, and moving the entire agency into new offices — all at an expected cost of $1.8 million.
Compensation costs include stipends and expenses for the seven appointed board members, and $244,000 for a couple of executives.
The agency's executive director, retired senior public servant Phil Charko, is being paid about $150,000 a year to work part time.

Now, all in, this isn't much more than chump change. One hopes that the culture of waste and reward described isn't more widespread. But it's another example of a Canadian government not very good at fiscal planning, atop its reputation for fiscal non-disclosure.

It's not just where you live, but how you live

2012-01-18T13:59:00.000-05:00

Every year, CQ Publishing puts out the City Crime Ranking, listing U.S. cities by their comparative feloniousness. Every year, this ranking draws an outcry from mayors of the cities ranked, who claim the numbers aren't meaningful and all they serve to do is scare of business and tourism.

This year, the American Society of Criminologists has joined with the United States Conference of Mayors to push back against the City Crime Ranking.

Janet Lauritsen, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, tells the New Haven Register:

“Knowing the city in which a person lives does not provide useful information about the likelihood of becoming the victim of a violent or property crime. Victimization risk is more strongly associated with factors such as a person’s age and marital status, their lifestyle activities, such as where they spend their time at night, and the particular neighborhood that they live in within the city. Once these types of factors are taken into account, the city itself makes relatively little difference.”

SOPA

2012-01-18T10:05:00.000-05:00

I wrote and produced this explainer video on SOPA for Reuters' new YouTube channel. Editing by Laurence Mathieu-Léger. Voice of Blake Morrison.

Beauty pageants, cont'd

2012-01-12T09:41:00.000-05:00

Remember Merlix Ventura, the beauty pageant contestant with the Leila Khaled t-shirt? Here's her answer to the question "who would you want to have dinner with, and why?"

“If it was a dead person, I would have to say Hitler,” said Merlix Ventura, a 21-year-old political science and Jewish studies student at City College, who hails from Washington Heights. “Because I am intrigued by the Holocaust and I would love to know his reasoning for the genocide.”

Perhaps even more bizarre, if it had to be a 'person from our time,' the Manhattan resident said she would chose Brooklyn City Counselor Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, who hopes to unseat Ed Towns as the U.S. Representative for New York's 10th Congressional District, where I live.

The difference between knocking on doors, and knocking down doors

2012-01-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

Police officers and civilians continue dying in armed raids targeting the homes of drug suspects, and USA Today reports that law enforcement is looking at changing its tactics.

The issue comes after a raid in Utah on the home of a former U.S. army soldier who apparently grew marijuana for his own consumption left one officer dead and five injured.

A law enforcement agency advisor named Pat McCarthy told the paper that the often-used method of
sending heavily armed officers charging into people's homes is just too dangerous for police officers.

"Cops are exposing themselves to increasing danger many times over, and it's just not necessary... The days of knocking down doors in drug cases should be over. Given what's going on now, you have to consider other options," McCarthy said.

He said law enforcement officials should focus more on attempting to lure suspects out into the open or simply "wait them out."

The paper reports that ten officers died across the country in 2011 while serving warrants or participating in multi-agency raids.

Balko already raised the issue, infuriated by the post-facto rhetoric tossed around after a tragedy that serves as justification for further raids. He goes after the DEA spokesperson Frank Smith's comments about the drug raid in Utah:

How about the fact that he hadn’t harmed a soul until armed government agents broke down his door? Reading these articles is like slamming your head against the wall. People keep dying. And the drug warriors keep taking that as confirmation that they need to double down on the policies that are exactly why people keep dying.

Headlines on this story make a big difference. While I'm a big fan of the folks at The Crime Report, who aggregate and summarize criminal justice-related news every day, they really messed up this headline.

A death, and a fire hydrant

2012-01-11T08:29:00.000-05:00

I think I've found my favorite Google Map street view spot in the five boroughs: 219 Echo Place, in the the Bronx's Mount Hope neighborhood. I love the canyon-like feel of the the road tucked in between the six-story pre-war apartment buildings, the fire escapes, and the single-family clapboard homes a few doors down.

Most of all I love the kids on the street and the open fire hydrant, and the way the cameras on the Google car captured the crystal droplets of water in the air.

View Larger Map

I checked out this address because a 64-year-old man police identified as Robert Jackson, who lived in apartment 1B, was pronounced dead at around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death.

Mount Hope has something of a rough reputation, although, like every New York neighborhood, it's dramatically safer than it was two decades ago. Property crimes have dropped dramatically, but it still has a reputation for gang-related violence. In 2010, a neighborhood gang kidnapped and tortured three teens whom they believed were gay.

Mr. Jackson could be the 46th Precinct's first homicide of 2012.

"Stop, Question, and X-ray"

2012-01-10T11:24:00.001-05:00

A new NYPD policy, and they'll charge you for the procedure.

Beauty pageants and Palestinian hijackers

2012-01-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

DNAinfo.com briefly profiled a Washington Heights woman named Merlix Ventura, who will compete in an upcoming Miss New York pageant, and maybe go on to bigger "Miss" events.

She's a student at CCNY pursuing a major in political science and a minor in Jewish studies, and when she was younger she posed wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the face of Leila Khaled, the PFLP's favorite Kalashnikov-toting hijacker:

Photo: Merlix Ventura, via DNAinfo.com

DNAinfo.com didn't remark on the t-shirt, but the photo's original caption reads: "At the age of 14 Merlix Ventura (right) co-founded a non-profit called in Da Urban Butterflies, which supports young women of color."

If you want controversy to dog your aspirations, make sure you have a photo like this somewhere floating on the Internet. Neo-conservatives didn't have any trouble dreaming up conspiracy theories when Rima Fakih won Miss U.S.A.

This story strikes me as prime Mark Tracy bait. Maybe Goldblog.
I gotta stop writing about pageants.

Baltimore murder rate hits three-decade low

2012-01-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

A new day dawning? From the Sun:

Though Baltimore is still among the most deadly cities per capita, as murder has declined more steeply across the country, the drop extends an overall downward trend in gun violence here since 2007, the year Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III took office. The 196 killings in 2011 were the fewest since 1977, and represent just the third time since the 1960s that the city recorded fewer than 200.

Let's hope they don't start pulling bodies out of vacants:

Top cops reflect on 2011

2011-12-30T14:13:00.000-05:00

Picking up from the previous post's look at two cities' crime stats from 2011, here's a look at how other major U.S. metropoli fared in the year about to end:

Philadelphia leads the U.S. in big-city murder, with the highest homicide rate of the ten largest cities in the country. Depending on how you count, at least 318 residents of Kill-a-delphia were murdered in 2011, up from 306 in 2010. City officials like to compare every year to 2007, when almost 400 people were killed in the city. That way, the mayor can say murder is down 17 percent from it's 'peak:'

Police spokesman Lt. Raymond Evers said the department compares this year's tally with 2007's to see long-range trends. "It's hard to get a trend between two years," he said.

New Orleans also saw murder rates rise. NOLA has more homicides than Philly, but the Big Easy's smaller population keeps its name off the top ten list (ditto for Detroit and Baltimore). The Crescent City counted 197 murders for the year, beating last year's tally of 175. Officials and experts still blame the hurricane:

Katrina and the ensuing collapse of schools, home life and other support structures likely played a role, says Lance Hill, executive director of the New Orleans-based Southern Institute for Education and Research, who has tracked crime trends. Children displaced by the floods returned with their families to a wrecked city, bounced from school to school and lacked mental health professionals to help them through the trauma, he says.

Chicago ended the year with an overall eight percent drop in crime, and will likely end the year with fewer murders (currently 423) than the year before (431). Even if murders climb above the 2010 level, they'll still be below levels in 2009 (459) and the appalling number in 2008 (513). The CPD saw a restructuring in the past year under Superintendant Garry McCarthy, since the election of Mayor Rahm Emanuel:

Since McCarthy took over, he has overseen a makeover in the patrol division that included shifting more than 1,000 police officers from desk jobs, lockups and two specialized units to beat patrols — a move that Emanuel had endorsed during his mayoral campaign. By beefing up the beats, McCarthy stressed the need for resources to be in the hands of district commanders with the expectation that they will be able to use them as effective crime-fighting tools within the neighborhoods they oversee.

While the citywide murder rate may have stayed flat, one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods saw murders spike. Fifty-six of the city's violent deaths went down in Englewood, and that's a 40 percent increase over the year before.

And finally, Boston: overall crime dropped eight percent, and killings fell 14 percent from the year before. But the BPD is having a rough time actually solving murders. Detectives "cleared" only 23 of 62 homicides in 2011. The city's police commissioner, Edward Davis, received a federal grant to put toward more homicide-related resources. He says he wants his detectives to study and adopt methods used across the pond :

The keys to the British model are setting strict protocols for approaching each homicide and sending teams of detectives and crime scene specialists, known as “murder squads,” to work the slaying scene in the first 48 hours while clues and witness memories are still fresh... [Ed. note: this sounds pretty ingenious]

“We asked our detectives to -review the British process to see if there’s anything that we can take away from it” Davis said. “I think this is a learning process for us right now.”

That's it. Happy 2012, all.

New York vs. Memphis

2011-12-29T10:22:00.000-05:00

New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted the last ten years as the city's safest decade, pointing to declines in all major crime categories. Crime in 2011 ticked up, barely, by 0.4 percent, from the year before. Murders were down to 502 for the year, compared with 536 in 2010.

Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the reason for the decline is clear: police work. Quoting extensively from the book "The City that Became Safe" by criminologist Franklin Zimring, Kelly says that social factors had nothing to do with making New York a safer place to live.

When it comes to crime data, Memphis's Mayor A.C. Wharton is the unfortunate victim of statistical swings that accompany small populations. Murder in his city jumped 25 percent in 2011, after a record low the year before.

In real terms, it means 118 people were killed in Memphis in 2011, up from 98 the year before. With a bit over six hundred thousand residents (about half the population of the Bronx), the city is more prone to statistical swings than the Big Apple.

There seems to be another difference, when it comes to taking credit for swings in crime.

Asked about 2010's record low number of homicides, Memphis police Deputy Chief Dave Martello said, "last year, for whatever reason -- and we don't have an explanation -- for whatever reason there was a significant number of less homicides."

I appreciate the glibness of his answer.

Prison labor and broken economics

2011-12-29T08:49:00.000-05:00

The Los Angeles Times reports that the state perhaps most linked with the phrase "ravaged by forest fires" could lose up to 1,500 of its fire fighters - because these hardy civil servants will be released from prisons.

A Supreme Court ruling ordering California to reduce its prison-inmate population may mean the transfer of non-violent offenders from state prisons to county jails, where they could be eligible for early release.

If you're convicted of burglary, drug possession, or fraud, the state of California considers you a prime candidate to clear brush and cut fire lines.

From the Times:

Fire officials say the prisoners, selected from a pool of those who exhibit ideal behavior in custody, can be as much as half the manpower assigned to a large fire... Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries (R-Riverside) said in an interview that maintaining inmate firefighting ranks is critical to public safety. Without them, he said, large fires would be likely to burn longer, causing more damage and increasing personnel costs.

California's unemployment rate in October was 11.3 percent. The state needs servants to perform necessary public safety work, but can only find a pool of employees from within the prison system. It cannot afford to hire free people. I recall Michael Lewis's Vanity Fair essay, "California and Bust:"

The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society.

Signs of a system losing the will to sustain itself.

This week the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was supposed to report to a panel of judges on its efforts to meet a December 27th deadline to reduce its prison population to 167 percent of capacity, a first benchmark step toward the court-ordered reduction to 137.5 percent of capacity by 2013.

Kinda surprised that the CDCR uses the same web platform as this humble blog. Budget cuts.

A good night's sleep

2011-12-21T13:15:00.000-05:00

Lack of sleep, and work-related sleep disorders, might make police officers' lives more dangerous - and make officers more dangerous to the rest of us.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that of the nation's 700,000 police officers, a whopping 40 percent of them suffer from some sort of sleeping disorder.

Richard Knox at NPR summarized the study's troubling results:

Officers who screened positive for a sleep disorder had a 25 percent higher risk of expressing uncontrolled anger to a suspect or citizen, and a 35 percent higher chance of having a citizen complaint filed against them.
Sleep-deprived officers had 51 percent greater odds of falling asleep while driving on duty.
One in three officers has sleep apnea – waking up repeatedly because breathing has temporarily stopped. That's at least 8 times higher than the rate among the general population.
They had a 43 percent higher chance of making a serious administrative error.

No one says police work is supposed to be easy. It can be one of the most trying jobs in the country. And despite political deference and culture of praise, most officers I suspect find their tasks go unnoticed and unappreciated.

But this study suggests that these men and women in uniform have silently dealt with a largely undiagnosed malady that poses a serious obstacle to their performance, their safety, and ours. Perhaps hiring more police officers could relieve more individual cops to care for themselves and take time to rest, properly. But the opposite is the case: police departments across the country are being spread more and more thin as budgets get continually cut.

***Updated***

Great respect to Carlos Miller, but I read this post of his differently (albeit not without outrage) after reading the study above.

"Fuck this. I'm tired of this shit"

2011-12-21T12:27:00.000-05:00

I need to hear a constitutional opinion on stop-and-frisk. I'm most recently confused by a ruling from the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Terrance Crossland claims he was standing on a street corner in the nation's capital with his cousin Joseph Womack, when a Metropolitan Police Department cruiser rolled up on them. Two cops got out of the vehicle and instructed Crossland and Womack to place their hands against a wall for a weapons pat-down. The police admit the men were doing nothing illegal up until this point. Crossland initially complied with the search, and then said, "fuck this. I'm tired of this shit."

This is where Crossland's and police accounts diverge. Police say Crossland elbowed one officer in the head and turned to fight with them. The officers tackled Crossland, kneeing him several times to get him on the ground, doused him with pepper spray, and handcuffed him. Other officers testified hearing the police say "stop resisting, stop resisting" over the radio.

Crossland says he never struck anyone. He says after the pat-down, the officers told him to sit on the ground. When he asked if he could pull up his pants first, an officer threw him to the ground, and one of the police hit him in the eye. He says he was already down when officers "maced" him, and insists he held his arms out straight when police put the handcuffs on.

At his initial trial for assaulting the officers, the defense called several witnesses who said the officers struck first without provocation.

After he was found guilty, Crossland appealed the verdict on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence that he'd intentionally assaulted the officers. He also asserted a right to defend himself against police use of excessive force. Furthermore, Crossland appealed that he should be acquitted because the initial police search violated his Fourth Amendment right against unlawful search and seizure.

The court of appeals decided there was sufficient evidence to find Crossland guilty of assault. Moreover it denied that he had any right to resist the arrest, even if the police used excessive force.

Here's the interesting part: the court stated in its ruling that it had "no reason to doubt" that the initial search was unconstitutional, violating Crossland's Fourth Amendment right. And had the officers in this search found anything illegal - drugs, or perhaps a weapon - all evidence produced would have been "exclusionary," and could not be used against Crossland. But since the search produced nothing but a violent interaction between the police and the suspect, the charge of assaulting an officer wasn't exclusionary.

Criticisms of this ruling fall along two lines: the seeming bias toward the testimony of the police versus that of the defense witnesses, and the unconstitutionality of the search.

On the bias in favor of the police, it seems that the court was unwilling to really consider this a case of police brutality. The ruling states it is simply "not credible" that "the police were out that day, randomly beating people up for no reason." Okay. But might it be credible that a pair of officers didn't react very well when the man they were searching muttered, "fuck this. I'm tired of this shit." Perhaps the court has never heard of the crime of "contempt of cop." The New York Times ran a story with a good example recently.

On the constitutionality of the search, well, you're not allowed to hit the police if they violate your rights. You have no constitutional right to violently resist an unlawful arrest. You have no constitutional right to use force if someone else violates your rights, unless you're under attack. The court believed that Crossland hit first.

But I cannot understand how a D.C. Court of Appeals found "no reason to doubt" that the manner of the search violated Crossland's constitutional rights, yet the police and courts in New York seem to have no reason to doubt that similar searches, over 600,000 of them last year, like the ones described by Nicholas Peart, are completely allowed. Constitutional rights aren't supposed to vary place to place.

Crime is down, but what does that mean?

2011-12-20T09:09:00.000-05:00

Crime is down, but unemployment is up. Crime is down, but arrests are climbing. Crime is down, and so are incarceration rates. Crime is down, and so are executions. Crime is down, but more people now carry federal firearms licenses. Crime is down, but more officers are killed in the line of duty.

Come on, make that correlation.

Here's some recent data I've no capacity to parse:

Violent crime fell 6.4% in the first half of 2011, compared with the same period last year, with declines seen in every region of the country, Federal Bureau of Investigation figures showed. The preliminary data were gathered from about 12,500 local law-enforcement agencies. (WSJ)

By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life. (NYT)

The number of police officers who have died in the line of duty in 2011 has increased 14% nationwide from last year. (CNN)

Death sentences dropped dramatically this year, marking the first time in more than three decades that judges and juries sent fewer than 100 people to death row. (NPR)

The number of people with a federal license to carry a firearm hit its highest point in more than a decade last year. (ATF)

The total U.S. prison population fell last year for the first time in nearly four decades. (BJS)

Between 2001 and 2009, the number of deaths in prison rose, but the prisoner mortality rate fell. (BJS)

Stops, frisks, guns, and safety

2011-12-19T12:57:00.000-05:00

The New York City Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" policy is by nearly all accounts racially discriminatory, offensively humiliating, and contributes to a sense of alienation and a hardening of attitudes between the police and the policed.

But does it work? Maybe.

In an opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times, Nicholas Peart described his experience as a young black male living in the city:

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Peart goes on to describe three other encounters with the NYPD, and they fit a formula. He's stopped, patted down, and released without explanation. Sometimes he's ordered to the ground at gunpoint. Sometimes he's handcuffed while cops search his shoes and socks. On one occasion he's relieved of his house keys, which officers use to conduct a warrant-less search of his apartment.

Libertarian blogger Radley Balko posted Peart's essay on Facebook with the comment, "imagine if Supreme Court justices or members of Congress had to live their lives this way."

Peart has sided with the Center for Constitutional Rights in a lawsuit against the NYPD over its racial profiling practices. In his essay, he notes the following:

Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem — a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they’re fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don’t feel safer as a result.

There is another statistic that Peart didn't mention: the record number of stop-and-frisks conducted in 2010 yielded 814 firearms. That's one gun for every 737 frisks. What is the value of that figure?

Renee Barrett, writing in the New York Daily News, looks at Lamont Pride, the man accused of the recent murder of NYPD officer Peter Figoski.

If Pride had, on the streets of Brooklyn, been stopped and frisked, cops probably would have noticed his warrants. They might have caught him carrying a gun. And another senseless death could have been prevented.

Keeping firearms off the streets and out of criminal hands is one of the paramount policies of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and he's given Commissioner Raymond Kelly clear instructions that he wants the police department to crack down. Not all the efforts are confrontational, though.

On Friday, the police department announced it collected 182 firearms through the NYPD/Clergy Gun Buyback program at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Cypress Hills:

Firearms collected through the NYPD/Clergy buyback program. Yields included 95 revolvers and 58 semi-automatic handguns. Photo courtesy of the NYPD.

More weapons collected by the NYPD/Clergy buyback program, including a Tec-9 semi-automatic, a Colt M-4 assault rifle with two 30-round magazines, and an SKS assault rifle with bayonet attached. Photo courtesy of the NYPD.

With the goal of keeping weapons off the streets, stop-and-frisk is another tool in the police department's belt. But besides retrieving weapons from those stopped, the harassment inherent in the policy may have a preventative element.

In November former NYPD Detective Edward Conlon (also the author of "Blue Bloods" and "Red on Red") told the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security that the policy works:

I think it's changed the way people carry guns. A drug dealer on a corner used to have his gun in his waistband. If somebody stepped on his toe, or he saw a rival, that was a two-second decision: the insult, to the act. Now that, because the police have been harassing these guys for a generation in New York, that gun is now on a rooftop, or it's in a bedroom, and the decision to pull the trigger is now ten or fifteen minutes, and tempers can cool off and people can walk away. So that practice has, I think, saved lives in New York City.

The harassment, of course, extends beyond the "drug dealer on the corner," to individuals like Nicholas Peart, and probably a very high proportion of the people stopped in the over-600,000 frisks conducted in 2010. In directing this harassment (whether effective or otherwise) police will go after a type of individual. It doesn't take much imagination to guess the profile of that individual. In the words of police spokesperson Paul Browne:

"Police stops comport proportionately with violent crime and save lives, most of young minority men who are disproportionately the victims of murder and other violent crime."

Browne omits the other side of the equation: that young minority men are also, disproportionately, the ones arrested, charged, and convicted of murder and other violent crime. These acts of violence are not just statistically predominant in certain demographics but in geographics as well. Some of the names of the neighborhoods are familiar, some perhaps not enough: Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, Crown Heights, East Flatbush, South Jamaica, St. Albans, the Rockaways, Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Highbridge, Harlem. The list goes on.

What's the benefit of targeting young men of color in high-crime precincts? In a small proportion of cases, individuals were arrested (frequently, and improperly, for possession of marijuana, but Kelly has told the rank-and-file to cease this practice). In a smaller proportion of cases, weapons were seized. How does this contribute to public safety? Who knows.

Crime rates across the city are up, so far, in 2011, despite stop-and-frisk. Or perhaps crime rates not up as high as they would otherwise be without stop-and-frisk. Cause and effect are funny things when it comes to police work and public safety. When crime rates fall it's because of the tactical brilliance of the officers, commanders, the commissioner, and the mayor. When crime rates rise, well, crime rates just sometimes rise.

The New York City Police Department is sticking with stop-and-frisk in the face of criticisms and lawsuits. The outrage of Nicholas Peart is palpable. Venturing a guess, I'd say many readers would be less sympathetic to Perk's case had the police officers taken a more sympathetic approach. If officers were courteous, rather than quick to draw their guns and bark orders, I suspect readers of the New York Times might be more inclined to waver. Because everybody likes safety, and everybody appreciates a polite cop (from a distance).

If the problem is one of attitude, the police department is in a good position. It can defend the policy without defending the approach. Attitude is hard thing to prove or replicate. Appeals to the Civilian Complaint Review Board will be taken with a word-against-word approach. If the officers are found to be unprofessionally discourteous, well, then it's just a few bad apples in the barrel. Never discount the weight of an officer's word against a civilian's. That's a good reason to carry a video recorder.

Another kick at the can

2011-12-17T15:46:00.000-05:00

The U.S. Congress passed a bill extending the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits for another two months, without any agreement on how to pay for either program. This delivers a firm kick to the every-heavier can o' problems that lawmakers continue to punt into the future. For a short primer on the issue of the payroll tax holiday, check out this video I scripted for Reuters.com. Graphics and editing by Laurence Mathieu-Léger. Voice of Blake Morrison.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

2011-12-16T09:31:00.000-05:00

I remember reading "Missionary Position" in high school, gripped by the author's audacity and wit. I also made use of the book as a prop: Sitting on the hallway floor, cross-legged, back against the lockers, book cover tilted for all to see.

"No, it's not about sex," I said, condescendingly, to schoolmates whose eyes popped at the title. I was reading a book that fooled you into thinking I was reading about sex, but was actually about something smart.

I like to think Hitchens would be proud that one of the people who took me to task for bringing the book to school was the institution's head teacher, a former clergyman and devout man of faith. He took me, and the book, into his office, and said he'd let my parents know that he had a problem with obscene materials in his school.

I don't know if he knew what the book was about, but I like to think he did, and this made him uncomfortable. This might have been one of the first phone calls from a school official to my house about my behaviour. I have been blessed with an intelligent, loving, and erudite mother and father. Whichever of them answered the phone didn't see eye to eye with the head teacher.

That my parents were observant Jews didn't alter their view that their son could read whatever he liked about religion or any other subject. Sex, even, in book form. Why not? The school library had Danielle Steele paperbacks. At the end of the call, the head teacher returned my copy of Hitchens, and that was that.

I went through various phases as a teenager and young adult. Hitchens was probably the first writer to un-gently inform me that ideas and images aren't simply hip or not, but have fundamental meaning. He guided my current views on social justice, religion, Israel, Palestine, socialism, and intervention.

He became newsworthy way before I started working in the news business, but he also was one of the first people I made money writing about. One of the first articles I ever published in the New York press covered a debate where Christopher Hitchens wiped the floor with Rabbi Shmuely Boteach at the 92nd Street Y. He netted me $75.

I'll miss him.

A fiscal case for closing prisons

2011-12-15T08:31:00.000-05:00

Illinois hasbeen slowly running out of money almost all year. Even with massive bondsales, and a budget signedin July, the state still needed overspent by about$8 billion which itpushed into the next year's fiscal budget.

In September, Governor Pat Quinn said he would take furthermeasures, including laying off 1,900 government workers and closing twoprisons.

A report out thisweek from the Illinois JuvenileJustice Commission suggestsclosing some prisons - specifically in the juvenile system - might hold muchgreater savings for the state. The ChicagoTribune summarizes some of the findings:

Incarceratinga juvenile offender for one year in a state youth facility costs more than$86,000, according to the report. In contrast, community-based rehabilitationprograms that the report says are more effective cost $3,000 to $8,000 perperson a year.

The success of "community-basedrehabilitation programs" isn't proven, but here's the success rate of theincarceration system:

About 40 percent of incarcerated juvenile offenders are being held forparole violations such as skipping school or violating curfew, behavior that"likely poses no threat to public safety" and taxes the system'sresources, according to the report.

This issue joins the list alongwith marijuana decriminalization and immigration reform where theintersection of "law-and-order" social conservatism and"balanced-budget" fiscal conservatism seem to collide.

The war on drugs and jury nullification

2011-12-12T16:26:00.000-05:00

It seems that David Simon is still out endorsing jury nullification as a means of changing U.S. drug laws. At a symposium in Massachusetts, the former Baltimore Sun reporter, author of "Homicide," and "The Corner," and the creator the HBO TV series "The Wire," reiterated his position. John Kelly attended the event, and reported that Simon

expressed a profound belief that jury nullification is the only way to halt the one thing that will ever stop the system from being bloated and racially distorted: treating drugs and addiction as a criminal war instead of a medical one...

Kelly correctly notes that Simon has been beating this drum for several years now.

Bottom line, Simon argued, is that the justice system won’t get past its obsession with drug-related cases until “they can't find 12 Americans to put a 13th in jail.”

The problem with Simon's approach is that when it comes to drug charges, juries don't put defendants in jail. Defendants take plea deals.
I noted this earlier when Ricardo Cortes published his illustrated guide to jury nullification. The effort is earnest, but here are the actual numbers (as of June, 2011), on drug charges and juries for New York City:

10,502 people were arrested and charged with felony possession of a controlled substance as a top charge in the city in 2010.
7,438 plead guilty to the charge or to lesser charges.
of those that went to trial all the way through to a verdict, 52 were acquitted. Twenty nine were found guilty.

Simon and those who truly want to change the U.S. criminal code might be better served doing it the old-fashioned way: changing public opinion and using that change to push legislators to change laws. We can undo laws the same way we introduce them.

Fencing police officers inside the five boroughs

2011-12-12T10:16:00.000-05:00

State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries believes that NYPD officers should be required to live within the boundaries of New York City.

Jeffries made the call amid a brouhaha over candid posts made on Facebook by police officers opposed to being detailed to the city's West Indian Day Parade. Some of the comments were racist and incendiary.

“If you live in New York City, you’re more likely to appreciate the need for racial unity and harmony in this city,” Jeffries said (reported by the New York Daily News' stellar Sarah Armaghan).

Armaghan notes that city police officers are already required to live within the city or one of six suburban counties around it. Another restriction also already exists: police officers are currently prohibited from living within the confines of the precincts where they're assigned.

Jeffries seemingly wants to change the rules on officer residency from "not too close, not too far," to "not too close, but closer." I wonder if Jeffries really believes that officers who live in Battery Park City will be more sensitive to the residents of Springfield Gardens than police who live just across the Nassau County line?

Hakeem Jeffries's Assembly district covers my address. The already-outspoken Assemblyman may be even more eager for headlines now that he hopes to unseat U.S. Representative Ed Towns as the Democratic candidate for the New York's 10th U.S. Congressional district - also mine.

Cop killed after responding to burglary

2011-12-12T08:30:00.000-05:00

***UPDATED***
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's statement on the killing of Officer Fogoski can be found here (note: these comments were delivered before the announcement of the officer's death):
Statement on the Shooting of Police Officer Peter Figoski

***UPDATED***
The New York Times reports a police officer was shot in the face and killed in Brooklyn early this morning. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told said the officer interrupted a burglary in progress a little after two o'clock in the morning in the Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn, within the confines of the 75th Precinct.

The killing in Brooklyn comes days after the murder of Virginia Tech campus police officer Deriek W. Crouse, which spurred the editorial board of the Washington Post to take note of an awful fact:

Already this year, 163 law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty, a number running 12 percent ahead of last year’s rate and way ahead of the numbers recorded in 2008 and 2009.

Make that 164.

The 75th Precinct, covering parts of Cypress Hills, East New York, and Highland Park, is one of the city's most dangerous - DNAinfo ranks it 63rd, near the least safe, of 69 New York neighborhoods. The police officers on patrol there do a tough, inglorious, thankless, and dangerous job.

MyFoxNY.com names the officer as Peter Fogoski, a 22-year veteran of the NYPD, and said he and his partner responded to a burglary call at 25 Pine Street. Two suspects allegedly surprised the officers and opened fire, when bullets struck Officer Fogoskli. His partner pursued the suspects and sustained shoulder injuries when he grappled with and arrested on the of the suspects. Another suspect remains at large. There are not any reports of police officers firing their weapons in this incident.

A political, cynical crime bill?

2011-12-10T18:25:00.001-05:00

Canada's crime rate will almost certainly continue its downward trend after the Conservative Party's omnibus crime bill goes into effect, and Harper will claim this continued trend as a party victory. It will fall to the opposition parties to argue that such an outcome is in fact illusory: the legislation will have cost Canadians billions of dollars without providing any actual improvement in quality of life or public safety. Harper may as well put billions into constructing a wall meant to deter an elephant invasion, then claim it "worked" when no elephants subsequently attack Canada.

Posted from my iPhone.

The latest price tag on Harper's crime bill

2011-12-10T13:59:00.001-05:00

$19 billion dollars, according to the Quebec Institute for Socio-economic Research and Information (IRIS):

using "the most conservative estimates," it pegs the costs of the plan to end the practice of judges handing offenders time credits — on a two-for-one basis, to compensate for time spent in pre-sentence custody — at $16.5 billion for the country as a whole, with the provinces footing $12.6 billion.

The costs associated with the omnibus Bill C-10 — providing for mandatory prison sentences for drug-related crimes and child sex offenders — are estimated by the researchers at $2.3 billion.

On top of that, the study argues annual maintenance and operation costs for prisons will reach $1.6 billion for the federal government and $2.2 billion for the provinces.
Canada's Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has stuck with his initial estimate, that the total will come to roughly $2 billion for both federal and provincial governments.

His ministry has pegged the cost of C-10 for the federal government at $78.6 million over five years. The [IRIS] study puts a $924-million price tag to that bill for the federal government only.

The lion's share of the bill's exploding costs will go toward locking up convicts for longer periods of time, instituting a regime of mandatory minimum sentencing for certain crimes, including non-violent drug-related offences.

The provinces of Ontario and Quebec have already said they will not cover the expenditures required by the crime bill, which include the costs of building new prisons.

Facebook comments show cops don't have all the answers

2011-12-08T08:58:00.001-05:00

I strongly implore those concerned with NYPD officers' hateful statements on Facebook to look beyond the worst of them and read them in their entirety.

To be sure, some of the comments were terrible, and suggest very poor judgement on the part of the officers.

From the New York Times:

They called people “animals” and “savages.” One comment said, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.”

The comments provoked a public outcry, with various elected city officials decrying the officers' behavior and demanding discipline. That pressure seems to have had its intended effect. The police department will investigate the officers for using what commissioner Kelly termed "hate speech."

It's worthwhile to look back in light of these officers' comments on the actual events of the parade on that day in September. Bear in mind that the parade has a history of erupting into bouts of gunfire. On the day of the most recent parade, the one at the heart of the subject, four people were shot and wounded along the parade route - before the parade began - and a 15-year-old boy was grazed by a bullet nearby. On top of Monday's early-morning violence, it had already been a bloody long weekend: nine people were shot on Friday, 10 on Saturday, and 33 on Sunday.

The greatest police-related activities of the day concerned a wild shootout in which three people were killed and two officers injured by gunfire, and the seemingly unnecessary arrest of a city council member. Both actions were subsequently investigated. The officers who needlessly arrested the councilman were disciplined.

Some may attempt to make a connection between the offensive comments and these two events. The arrest of City Councilman Jumaane Williams, who is black, could be further colored by officers' arguably racist comments; the shooting - which included a barrage of 73 police bullets that may have killed a bystander - seen as evidence of officers' trigger-happiness in certain neighborhoods.

Scott Greenfield asserts that the Facebook comments reveal the world through cop-goggles:

cops see everyone who doesn't have a shield differently. We, the shieldless, are the "them" to their "us." Their eyes see suspicion everywhere. Their eyes see all the bad, whether real or imagined."

Greenfield may be right about how police view the public. I'm not convinced. I note that the creator of the Facebook group tried at one point to moderate the discussion:

PLEASE KEEP IT FOCUSED. This is not a racist rant. This is about us, the cops. This is here for us. Hopefully, a big stretch here, our voices will be heard.

On the strength of this plea, it's worth giving the moderator a chance.

Read together, the comments, in fact, display a cacophonous congress of the fundamental questions of law enforcement policy and public safety.

Do neighborhood conditions drive crime, or does criminal activity drive down a neighborhood? What impact does the setting have on human behavior?

We were told that the possession of marijuana was allowed at the WIDP. No arrests were to be made even if they are smoking in front of you. I don't think the parade should be outlawed, it needs to be moved to Fifth Avenue. Now you will see changes.

Why doesn't anyone address the fact that there is no real violence at the St. Patrick's Parade, the Columbus Day Parade, the Greek Parade, etc.

This parade needs to be moved either in location or time of year, I suggest late January.

move it to Boro Park.

those who work in Manhattan South, Staten Island, and cushy Queens Houses need to appreciate where they work!!! it's ghetto training.

When an average of two to five murders occur every year and the mayor continues to allow this parade to continue... then the mayor is saying he is ok with the bloodshed because it's not Manhattan.

those who work in Brooklyn (some not all) seem to think they have an S on their chest. We all do the same job no matter where you work!

There's the question of lessons learned, and tactics, and support:

What's it going to take for the mayor to shut this down?? Obviously murdered civilians and MOS [members of the service, cops] being shot isn't enough!! I almost got trampled by hundreds of people rushing the barricade from gunshots I couldn't hear less than half a block away.

"Don't worry it's recreation gunfire", as told us by a D.I. [deputy inspector]

It's the gun companies' fault

How many times does a cop have to get hurt at this parade before the city stops giving them permits?

The PBA [police union] should file suit against the city for knowingly allowing a dangerous condition to endanger the safety of their members and city residents.

Why doesn't the NYPD brass utilize crowd control techniques like they do at Times Square on New Year's? It know it won't stop the guns but it can control the crowds.

There are not enough cops for the parade, there are not enough cops for everyday patrol.

What leaps out at me from the the officers' comments is the disorganized, impulsive outrage from what is often perceived as an organized professional force. The truth is that when it comes to crime and public safety, police officers may not have any better ideas than we do. There are no expert police tactics for endemic issues, and no satisfying answers - just a multitude of suggestions - for fundamental questions about society and safety.

Canada's crime bill may yet get a proper review

2011-12-07T18:15:00.001-05:00

The passage of the Canadian Conservative Party's omnibus crime bill hasn't yet fully set in for me, and thanks to our Senate, it might not yet set in for the rest of the country for a while.

Government Senate leader Marjory LeBreton told the CBC:

"We fully expect it will be debated in the Senate, and will go to committee, legal and constitutional affairs, and it will be there I expect for quite some time."

Perhaps review in Senate committee will better elucidate the claims that the bill will make lives particularly miserable for marginalized groups like aboriginals and the mentally ill. Perhaps it will also clarify finer points, like how much the bill will actually cost the provinces. Prime Minister Stephen Harper estimates the bill will cost $78.6 million over five years, but a Parliamentary budget officer suggested the actual bill could come to $3 billion over that period, with rising costs riding a wave of new prison inmates.

Expanding the criminal code, mandatory minimums, hidden costs, and a Senate to drag out the process. What country does that sound like?

NYPD to investigate cops saying nasty things in public

2011-12-07T12:39:00.001-05:00

In response to a recent outcry over statements made on Facebook by New York City police officers, Commissioner Ray Kelly issued this statement:

It is disturbing when anyone denigrates a community with hateful speech. It is unacceptable when police officers do it. Despite the assertion of First Amendment rights in social media cases, the Police Department reserves the right to discipline behavior it determines to be unbecoming of a police officer or detrimental to the service, especially when it is disrespectful of communities that officers have taken an oath to protect.

That is why I directed the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau to investigate allegations that police officers were responsible for comments associated with the annual West Indian Day Parade. IAB has determined that 20 offensive comments were associated with names that match those of police officers. It has begun the process of interviewing those officers and, where necessary, subpoenaing computer records. The results of the IAB investigation will be submitted to the Department Advocate for the possible administrative charges.

It is encouraging that Internal Affairs may at least investigate what its officers say, if not what they do.

85 years old, wheelchair-bound, gashed, bleeding, strip-searched

2011-12-05T08:32:00.001-05:00

Via McBrooklyn and the New York Daily News, a super-sized serving of Goldblog bait out of JFK Airport:

Lenore Zimmerman, 4-foot-11 and in a wheelchair, said TSA officers brought her to a private room, pulled down her pants...Her walker banged against her leg and left a bleeding gash which soaked her sock. The wound was exacerbated by the elderly woman's use of anticoagulants. A medic had to treat her injury and she missed her flight.TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said “proper procedures were followed.”

NYPD targets its own investigator

2011-12-03T19:30:00.001-05:00

The New York Daily News broke the news that the NYPD is bringing charges against one of the investigators in the ticket-fixing scandal.
On the face of this and the story the next day in the Times, I think Detective Katakofsky ought to be nominated to lead the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau rather than have to fight for his job.
In short, Katakofsky was investigating allegations of ticket fixing at a Bronx precinct. He suspected his partner of leaking information about the investigation. He did a little test, which strengthened his suspicions. Now he faces administrative charges for checking her out.

His lawyer's take:

the internal charges were intended “to punish someone for uncovering information that the department didn’t want to hear.” [His lawyer] said the Police Department had been embarrassed by the disclosures about ticket-fixing and was now “trying to hurt the detective” who helped bring the case.

"Unsubstantiated" complaints

2011-11-28T12:26:00.001-05:00

At the beginning of the month a New York Times editorial asked of the NYPD, "can they police themselves?" The piece focused on the Internal Affairs Bureau's track record in rooting out and prosecuting police corruption. One thing the Times editorial missed is the role of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

The folks at City Limits (who just launched their Brooklyn bureau) today put up an examination of the CCRB, and how what little strength it has has been sapped:

Some say the real flaw lies not in the board itself but in its lack of resources and investigative power. Over the last three years, the CCRB has had its budget cut by over $2 million, according to board documents, and its staff reduced by 43 people. According to its latest report, there were 104 investigators employed by the CCRB this year, to cover the 3,107 complaint cases that were received between January and June.

Reporter Jeanmarie Evelly does a wonderful job walking readers through the CCRB protocol and how it butts up against an NYPD bureaucracy governed in large part by the executive decisions of Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Small government vs. Greater Israel

2011-11-25T20:28:00.001-05:00

The winner of the Republican presidential primary will very likely be two things: (a) a crusader for reduced government authority and power, particularly when it comes to ~~corporations~~ taxes, and individual and property rights, and (b) an advocate for Greater Israel.

These two policy tenets, one domestic and one foreign, do not seem the least bit contradictory to any of the potential primary winners (apologies to the House Representative from the great state of Texas): Government taking your hard-earned money, your guns, your property, is criminal. Courts should protect your rights, not the government's power to take your property away. Israel is an all-important ally, and without exception decisions made in Jerusalem will be supported in Washington. The expansion and maintenance of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem will have the backing of the United States.

About those settlements: I've just begun reading The Lords of the Land (Nation Books, 2007), by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and in the book's introduction the authors detail a report from 2006 based on Israeli government information.

This report found more than 40 percent of settlement land in the occupied territories had been private lands owned by Palestinians and that 130 settlements were established wholly or in part on lands that the state itself had determined to be "private." The settlers took control of these lands, but it was the state that had confiscated them. (p. xiii)

I doubt you'd find any GOP contender posed with the question of eminent domain ready to say the government should be able to snatch your land, your home, your fields. Well, except for Newt Gingritch, but only when it applies to Muslims.

A Brooklyn bar Mitt-zva

2011-11-25T10:36:00.001-05:00

Yossi Gestetner reports that the erstwile - and likely future - Republican presidential nominee will visit Brooklyn's cloistered Hassidic community sometime in December (H/T The Brooklyn Politics Blog).
Gestetner's source tells him Romney will descend on Boro Park, where he plans "to meet with a group of wealthy Orthodox Jewish donors to familiarize with them and to discuss issues of concern to the Orthodox Jewish community."

But of course, in politics nothing is free: Team Romney is expected to pick up $100,000 in contributions during the “meet.” This is not much money for a presidential candidate who is foreseen by some as the very likely winner of the Republican contest, but $100,000 sure covers the gas and tolls from midtown Manhattan to Boro Brooklyn.

Romney is polished enough not to make the same mistake with the machers that Carl Paladino made when soliciting a rabbi. Still, Mitt may want to review Daniel Miller's rules covering the “Five Things Politicians Should Never Do In Boro Park:”

1- Don’t take a fringe Rabbi with you. When you go to Boro Park you have two options: you can either bring one of a handful of mainstream Rabbis with you (mainstream means that the Rabbi has at least 1,000 followers; not like the Rabbi who Paladino brought who on a good day has a minyan of ten followers). Alternatively, you can bring one of only two influential elected officials in the community: Assemblyman Dov Hikind or Councilman David Greenfield. They’re pros who would have never allowed the visit to spiral out of control. By showing up with a fringe right-wing Rabbi, Paladino essentially guaranteed that Boro Parkers would not take him seriously and turned his visit into a side-freak show.

2- Don’t bash gays. This is the major mistake that many politicians outside of Boro Park make. They think that Boro Parkers care about social issues. They’re wrong. Boro Parkers care about social-service issues not social issues. As far as they are concerned, violating shabbos, eating pork and gay marriage are in the same category – transgressions of Jewish law. But Boro Parkers aren’t trying to convert the world, they’re only trying to improve theirs.

3- Don’t insult their Rabbis. Paladino read from a prepared statement where he insulted two prominent rabbis in two ways: 1. He did not refer to them as “rabbis,” he simply referred to them by their name. This is a cardinal sin in a place where even the elderly are referred to by venerated titles. 2. He accused them of selling out for supporting a candidate who doesn’t oppose gay marriage. He should have read rule # 2. Or even rule # 1. An insider would have explained that the Rabbis supported John Heyer for City Council instead of Brad Lander to prove that they control votes – NOT to win the race. In fact, the Rabbis were offended by Brad Lander’s overall liberal political views primarily because of his extreme left-wing views on Israel (Lander is of the Soros/J-Street/Peace Now persuasion). They weren’t trying to win a race, they were trying to send another local politician (Assemblyman Dov Hikind who had endorsed Brad Lander) a message. The Rabbis sent their message: Heyer won 85% of the votes in Boro Park.

4- Boro Parkers are NOT amish. Everything you say WILL be recorded. There are more cell phones, digital recorders and flip video recorders in Boro Park per capita than any other place in the world. This is because there is no religious prohibition on these items, but there are on other items like televisions. As a result, Boro Parkers compensate on banned items by having more of the permitted gadgets than anywhere you will ever visit.

5- NEVER campaign in a synagogue. Boro Parkers treat synagogues as the holiest of holiest places. Any kind of conversation, other than prayer or studying torah, is strictly prohibited. That is why politicians coming to Boro Park only go to a synagogue to receive a rabbi’s blessing – never to campaign. If a politician is campaigning they are doing so in a rabbi’s home (usually his study). Another reason to stay away from synagogues – they have mandatory separate seating areas to prevent men and women from socializing while praying (although they routinely mingle outside of synagogue where there are no prayers). You can never bring a woman into a men’s section or a man into a women’s section. Seeing as how most politicians come during a weekday when traditionally only men are attending synagogues (as opposed to Shabbos when men and women are attending) you will only frustrate your female staff and the reporters following you around because they will not be allowed in the men’s section.

In other campaign news in the five boroughs, Newt is set to visit Staten Island.

Happy U.S. Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T10:50:00.001-05:00

I'm back in Canada for my favourite U.S. holiday. Some links to a few stories from the cities I call home

The New York Police City Police Department has issued a memo to all employees instructing them not to interfere "unreasonably" with journalists doing their jobs. The memo from Kelly's office does not change NYPD policy: it merely restates it. This sort of thing happens every few years.

A lawsuit asserts that an NYPD traffic stop in the Bronx resulted in police officers smashing a motorist's window, slapping him with five misdemeanors, a violation, a summons for reckless driving, and five traffic tickets, and manhandling the motorist to the point that, a year later, he still suffers back pain. He also got a face full of pepper spray and 16 hours in a holding cell. Police officers processed him through the system; he spent only two hours in the precinct and the rest in booking. A lawyer for the motorist asserts the traffic stop was motivated by police quotas. (Side note: this piece is written by the Voice's Graham Raymond, the reporter who gave voice to Adrian Schoolcraft's battle with the NYPD over quotas at Brooklyn's 81st Precinct. Graham is one of the best police reporters in the business.)

On the subject of traffic stops, Toronto police officer found guilty for a pretty awful thing. Best line in the article: "Evidence presented in court suggested the driver was suspected of being involved in drug activity because he was carrying two cellphones. It was later learned he was a cellphone sales representative." (H/T NPMSRP)

A B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled the country's polygamy law is constitutional, but said that minors should not be charged. Should minors be allowed to marry in the first place?

Four former mayors of Vancouver agree: lifting a drug prohibition will lower gang violence.

Canada's Mormons, Muslims, and the criminal code

2011-11-23T10:44:00.001-05:00

A B.C. Supreme Court judge prepares to hand down a ruling on the constitutionality of Canada's 121-year-old ban on polygamy today in a case that has repercussions beyond the tiny townlet where the case began.

What started as a criminal investigation into allegations of abuse and human trafficking in Bountiful, B.C., turned into a constitutional challenge after prosecutors failed to secure convictions on polygamy charges against two men, members of a fundamentalist Mormon community, in 2009.

The constitutional challenge has drawn the interest of Canada's law enforcement community, women's rights activists, and Canadian Muslims.

Former judge and retired politician Wally Opal says the issue has the potential to remake the country:

If we find that polygamy is legal and the section is unconstitutional, there is nothing stopping people from coming in and I think that's contrary to our standards as Canadians.

The immigrant harangue is interesting coming from Opal, a first-generation Canadian of Indian descent, except that the "people coming in" likely means Muslims, not fundamentalist Mormons. Muslims may be one of the only remaining religious group respectable politicians can warn against. The suggestion of an influx of Muslim immigrants carries beneath it a concern over national security. (Side note: Muslim Bedouin men in Israel may take multiple wives, but that country lacks a constitution.)

An spokesperson for an Islamic center in Scarborough told the Canadian Press that polygamous marriages already exist within the Canadian Muslim community, and that the ban violated personal and religious freedoms:

If the three adults -- the husband, the first wife and (the other) women -- have consent, I don't think the government should interfere in this.

Consent is the key word, especially in religious communities practicing polygamy, writes Mindelle Jacobs:

any stirrings of free will are stamped out from the time these females are toddlers...Polygamy is simply incompatible with equality and basic human dignity. It’s soul-destroying and merely feeds the deranged dictates of pathological egotists.

But the law enforcement perspective is for me the most intriguing. In attempting to prosecute two men for violating the ban on polygamy in 2009, a court heard "stories of psychological control, physical violence and sexual abuse from former residents."

The polygamy law, the government says, is the only way to prevent and punish such crimes in a closed religious community that shuns outside scrutiny and where the plural wives themselves are unwilling to co-operate with police.

In effect, outlawing polygamy gives law enforcement a tool to prosecute individuals within closed, cloistered communities when convictions for alleged crimes like child abuse, rape or sexual assault may be harder to get. It's like outlawing the possession of drug paraphernalia in an effort to lock up drug traffickers.

Having such a law like this on the books lets prosecutors, in theory, threaten members of a community with charges unless they cooperate with an investigation into more serious charges. But it keeping a law on the books even if it's no longer intended to be enforced for its own ends. Maintaining an expansive criminal code in such fashion sometimes has unintended consequences, like when this Saratoga man can't sell a water-purifying solution because one of its ingredients can be used to manufacture crystal meth (H/T Radley Balko).

The strength of this argument seems undercut by the fact that prosecutors failed to secure convictions for the the two men charged with polygamy in 2009. Prior to that, charges were last laid in 1937. The last convictions were over 100 years ago.

If the judge strikes down the ban, it could go to the B.C. Court of Appeal, and the federal government could send a reference case to the Supreme Court of Canada. I suspect that Prime Minister Stephen Harper might fight it. He seems to prefer more criminal laws, not fewer.

Israel's "libel law" ignites protests, aunts

2011-11-22T15:26:00.001-05:00

Two thousand people rallied in Tel Aviv to protest the Knesset's proposed "libel law," which would institute a regime of heavy fines - regardless of damage caused - for libelous statements. Critics say the law is an attack on freedom of expression.

Leaders in the Israeli media held an emergency conference on what they call a sweeping assault on the freedom of the press.

One of the protesters was my aunt. She writes:

Here I am at tonight's demonstration against all the anti-democratic legislation... Wrote my own posters... At least a bit of an outlet for my rage! Can you use it Zach? Just kidding, but I knew you'd be proud. Many hugs.

NYPD shootings hit record low in 2010

2011-11-22T11:40:00.001-05:00

Data out today from the New York City Police Department show the lowest number of police-involved shootings in 2010 since the department began keeping track of the numbers forty years ago.

The New York City Police Department has faced down a slew of scandals of late - ticket fixing, gun smuggling, planting drugs, pepper spraying, to name a few - but it's a remarkably disciplined organization when it comes to the judicious use of lethal force.

Notwithstanding the high-profile killings of unarmed civilians, like Shem Walker, Sean Bell, Patrick Dorismond, Amadou Diallo, Ousemane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Jr., the department is defined not by the barrages of bullets loosed but by the restraint its officers show every day.

NYPD spokesperson Paul J. Brown wrote the following in an e-mail on Tuesday:

Police officers shot and killed eight individuals last year compared to 93 in 1971. Another 16 were shot and wounded last year, compared to 221 in 1971. This, despite the fact there were five thousand fewer officers then, or approximately 30,000 in 1971, compared to 34,700 today. Officers were armed with six-shot revolvers then, compared to 16-round capacity semiautomatic pistols today.

I find this particularly noteworthy:

In 2010, there was an average of 34,565 police officers in the NYPD, of whom only .15 percent (52 officers) intentionally discharged a firearm at a subject.

There are a lot of police officers in the city. I find it reassuring to know that it would be very, very hard to find one who had fired his or her weapon.

U.C. Davis and "hands-off" policing

2011-11-21T10:01:00.001-05:00

The now-infamous video of Lieutenant John Pike of the U.C. Davis police force slowly, casually crop-dusting dozens of seated, passive student protesters with pepper spray brought up these thoughts from Peter Moskos in Washington Monthly:

Some people, perhaps those who design training programs, think policing should be a hands-off job. It can’t be and shouldn’t be. And trying to make policing too hands-off means people get Tased and maced for non-compliance... And if police need to remove these students, then the police can go in four officers to one protester and remove them. Lift them up and take them away. Maybe you need one or two more officers with a threatening baton to keep others from getting involved. It really can be that simple.

U.C. Davis campus Chief of Police Annette Spicuzza justified the use of pepper spray, saying that protesters "were cutting the officers off from their support. It's a very volatile situation."

Scott Greenfield responded: "what did they need support for? I suppose they could get hungry if they stood there long enough. Or perhaps a wrist could be sprained if they were to do something risky to wrists."

Spicuzza was placed on administrative leave in the wake of the controversy. She may still keep her job. The campus and the police may launch a review of the use of pepper spray as a law enforcement tool, a growing concern as questions emerge on the use of pepper spray and Tasers. Arming police officers with an arsenal of "non-lethal" weapons may likely result in the their increased use, because non-lethal encounters make up of the lion's share of what police officers face in their line of work. Among the lessons demonstrated at U.C. Davis is that the indiscriminate use of pepper spray can be outmatched by the proper use of video.

P.S. - "Pepper spraying cop" has become an internet meme, with a Tumblr account (H/T Adam Serwer)

Inching closer to CSI

2011-11-18T15:19:00.001-05:00

Too much murder-of-the-week TV, especially when fantastic science leads to closed cases has produced a "CSI Effect," among juries, a term coined in 2008 by criminologist Monica Robbers:

the phenomenon in which jurors hold unrealistic expectations of forensic evidence and investigation techniques, and have an increased interest in the discipline of forensic science.

A survey of U.S. households television-viewing habits and perceptions of the criminal justice system found that seventy million households watched at least one of the three versions of CSI each week. Moreover, among those surveyed:

46 percent expected to see some kind of scientific evidence in every criminal case.
22 percent expected to see DNA evidence in every criminal case.
36 percent expected to see fingerprint evidence in every criminal case.
32 percent expected to see ballistic or other firearms laboratory evidence inevery criminal case.

CSI is a show about police detectives. It doesn't show the court proceedings, like it's antecedent Law & Order, but it's primary impact is on the court room. Jurors may be more inclined to believe that police detectives have all the technological wizardry they see on TV, and expect magical results.

Well, maybe police detectives are getting close. I think this is pretty cool. But the images are pretty awful.

Caped Canadians

2011-11-16T13:37:00.001-05:00

On the subject of masked superheroes taking justice into their own hands, three Canadian teens from my home province have decided lure to adult men over the Internet with the promise of sex with an underage female.

From the CBC:

In one encounter, the teens lured a man — who thought he had been corresponding online with a 15-year-old girl — to a restaurant, and two of the teens confronted him while wearing Batman and Flash costumes.

Check out their series, modeled on NBC Dateline's "To Catch a Predator":

Be like Spider Man, minus the masked vigilante part

2011-11-16T08:40:00.001-05:00

If you've been to a community meeting concerning crime and public safety (and chances are you haven't), chances are you've heard someone in law enforcement extol the importance of cooperation between police and civilians.

Usually the civilian head of the meeting tells the assembly that the community is the "eyes and ears" of the police department, and they need us to help them. The commanding officer of the precinct recites the mantra, "if you see something, say something." A representative from the district attorney's office implores community members to come forward and work with the police and prosecutors to ensure that those arrested are properly charged, rather than turned loose.

The rhetoric hit a new level at a meeting Tuesday night of the 88th Police Precinct Community Council. The head of the NYPD's Community Affairs Bureau (and highest uniformed black officer in the department) Chief Philip Banks III, exhorted the need for active community participation in ensuring the safety of their streets.

"Look at the story of Peter Parker," Mr. Banks said, entirely without irony or humor.

"He saw a robbery going on, and he didn't lift a finger to stop it. He just sat quiet. And then what happened? That same robber came back, and killed his stepfather [sic]. He did nothing, he sat quiet, and he paid a price," he said.

"We need to learn from the story of Peter Parker," Mr. Banks said.

Mangling the backstory of a Marvel super hero might have been safer ground for the head of Community Affairs. He didn't venture into the flashpoint issue of the NYPD's controversial "stop, question, and frisk" policy targeting black and Hispanic men in poor neighborhoods, and how it might fray the relations between a community and the police.

It might be a subject too close to Banks; his predecessor in Community Affairs (also then the highest ranking black officer in the NYPD), Chief Douglas Zeigler, was sitting in his department-issued SUV in 2008 when two white plainclothes officers rolled up on him and "dealt with the chief in a discourteous manner." Hey, check out the handsome man on that byline!

Brower Park, yes. Rooftops? not so much

2011-11-15T09:58:00.001-05:00

While Crown Heights residents might grumble about police harassment of their rooftop recreation, those who object continue, for now, to remain online and anonymous. No one mentioned it at a meeting of the 77th Police Precinct Community Council on Monday.

Well, the subject of police officers on rooftops did come up, but in a different context. Deputy Inspector Elvio Capocci described efforts to stop a rash of auto break-ins along Lincoln Place. He said the department was using "bait cars."

"We have cops on roofs watching," he said.

Maybe someone will bring up the rooftop harrassment issue at Tuesday night's Crow Hill Community Association meeting.

Deputy Inspector Elvio Capocci faced criticism from only one community resident, who claimed she'd been repeatedly harassed by the same man, but police hadn't made an effort to either protect her or apprehend the suspect.

The rest of the meeting consisted of the usual laundry list of public safety and property crime prevention recommendations: thieves are snatching electronic devices from strap-hangers and pedestrians, so watch out. Don't leave valuables in your car if you want to keep them safe. Don't leave windows open or doors unlocked.

One resident commended Mr. Capocci on his efforts at reining in gang activity in Brower Park. One resident in the audience put up his hand, asking what exactly "gangs," were. "I didn't grow up in Brooklyn," he said.

"Kids from the neighborhood are all in crews," Mr. Capocci said.

Mr. Capocci described one such group, the Brower Boys as "a crew that thinks the park is theirs, but it's our job to tell them it isn't. We're going to take it back."

"They just want to shoot dice, smoke joints, play basketball, and drink. Parents and families in the area don't appreciate that," Mr. Capocci said. But the problems extended beyond quality of life.

"They snatch phones and sell them, or smash car windows, you know, acts of vandalism. It's when they run into each other that it gets ugly. Sometimes shots fly," he said.

Police and public misconception

2011-11-14T12:27:00.001-05:00

City police departments in the U.S. have reacted in different ways to the "Occupy" movement and its encampments, and the protests may not be remembered for anything as much as their confrontations with law enforcement.

Over at Slate, Peter Moskos looks at the encounters from the police perspective. He's sympathetic to the officers on the front lines, but unforgiving of their misdeeds. His strongest point is when he hammers the public naivete about the motives of law enforcement:

Occupy protests complicate matters by bringing a segment of society—a white middle-class segment—into, what is for many, first contact with police authority. If you think of police as coming whenever you call for help, you may be surprised to learn that police do not work for you. Officers work first for the police department and then for the city that pays them. A force designed to maintain order and the status quo will never sing Kumbaya with protesters who combine a desire for change with a privileged sense of agency and entitlement.

Moskos writes that some police may, like many unionized public-sector employees, sympathize with elements of the "Occupy" movement. But a job is a job:

one does not have to dig too deep in the rank-and-file to find conditional sympathy for Occupy. But to ask if police have sympathy for Occupy protesters is to ask the wrong question (akin to asking waiters if they’re hungry on behalf of their customers). Police work is not about sympathy but getting the job done, pleasing the boss, and going home in one piece.

Rooftop rights and wrongs

2011-11-07T12:14:00.000-05:00

Police officers have been patrolling apartment rooftops in Crown Heights and harassing residents who dine and drink on these proletarian patios, according to reports from local blogs.

But the way neighborhood residents have responded to this issue has so far failed to elicit a response from the police or a change in policy; moreover it reveals a poor understanding of police procedure and community activism.

Nick Juravich, author of "I Love Franklin Avenue" posted one such complaint from a reader:

Two cops approached my roommate and me while we were eating dinner on our roof and gave us the option of choosing what fine we wanted, which was a $500 ticket for trespassing on our own roof or an open container ticket for drinking a glass of wine with our meal.

The complaints seem, on their face, legitimate: in many cases the residents have landlord permission to access the roofs, which means they shouldn't be cited for trespassing. And the rooftops constitute private property, so those enjoying their wine beneath the stars should not be cited for having an open container.

The individual who wrote in to Mr. Juravich seems to have been unjustly harassed. He or she goes on to make this suggestion to Mr. Juravich: "I was wondering if you'd be interested in composing some sort of conversation on the blog in regards to the issue."

I suspect this means something like "host a forum." That's a nice idea, but for two things: (1) anonymous Internet fora do not have a record of changing institutional policy, and (2) very real fora exist for such a community discussion in the forms of organizations like the Crow Hill Community Association, the Community Board 8 Public Safety Committee, and the 77th Police Precinct Community Council Meeting.

The best thing about bringing a complaint to such bodies is that you can usually pose it to the commanding officer of the 77th Police Precinct himself, Deputy Inspector Elvio Capocci. He'll listen to you, and respond. At one such meeting, I saw a young woman stand up and address Mr. Capocci about being harassed on her rooftop. But she wasn't prepared.

Mr. Capocci asked her two questions: if she could tell him the date of the incident and identify the officers who she claims harassed her. She could not. Mr. Capocci shrugged and said he would try to follow up but he needed that information to figure out exactly why there were officers on her roof, and why they behaved the way they did. It wasn't a satisfying answer, but had the finality of ink stamped on paper. The woman sat down.

This is where ignorance about police procedure and naivete about social change come together. At "I Love Franklin Avenue," Mr. Juravich writes,

This problem of what we might call the "culture of policing" goes straight to the top, where [police commissioner] Ray Kelly, [mayor] Mike Bloomberg, and the rest of the top brass promote it unchecked behind desks and podiums.

That might be true, but it doesn't matter. You don't get to vote for police commissioner, and Bloomberg isn't seeking a fourth term. If you firmly believe the problem is at the top of the chain, then you're admitting little ability to change it. But if you learn the way the chain links together, you can get your issues addressed. You need to learn to work the system, which ain't fun. But it starts with a few important things that require action from the point of contact with the police.

From the point of confrontation, you're likely going to have to ask the officers a few questions, and you might feel uncomfortable doing so. They may try to make it more uncomfortable. Deal with it. Be patient, courteous, and firm.

The most important thing you can do in any confrontation with a police officer is get his or her name. The name will be written on the left breast, beneath the badge.

Next, get the badge number: four digits printed right onto the shields affixed to the officer's breast and the front of the cap. It's good if the officer sees you writing his or her name and number down. Not a bad idea to ask the officer to verify that name and number.

Finally, look at the officer's collar for his or her precinct command. It'll either be digits indicating a city precinct, or a series of letters indicating a specific command. If you live in and around Crown Heights, it'll most likely read "77" for the local precinct, or "PBBN," meaning Patrol Borough Brooklyn North, or "BNTF" meaning Brooklyn North Task Force. It's important that you note this designation. Again, a good idea to confirm the designation with the officer.

Note that NYPD commanders with a rank of lieutenant or higher will not have numbers on their badges nor their collars: they instead can be identified by their rank and by what's called tax registration number. They are required to provide this information when asked.

Get the name, the badge or tax number, the command, and write down the date and time. If you're issued a summons or fine, that's too bad, but it means you have official documentation as well, which can strengthen your case.

With this information, call your precinct. Ask for community affairs, and tell them why you're calling and tell them you want an answer as to why you were issued the summons, why a certain officer was on your roof at such a time, and say you expect a response. They may not follow up, but you will need to.

Call you city councilor's office. They usually have good relationships with the local police and will take note of your complaint and may make an effort to figure out why police officers were on your roof, and why they acted the way they did.

Finally, go to your community board, neighborhood association, and police precinct community council meetings and question your commanding officers about these incidents. Don't expect a satisfying answer immediately: but armed with all the details of your encounter you deny a commanding officer the chance to say he or she can't follow up without further information.

Just because you insist you want to know why officers acted the way they did doesn't mean you'll get an answer: Police officers may be patrolling roofs for good reasons, and issuing summons for bad reasons. They could be trying to meet ~~quotas~~ production goals, or they could be misinformed about the laws they enforce, or they could be jerks.

It's not likely you'll get an admission of any of these. But you will be doing everything you can to send a signal that such behavior will be noticed, and recorded, and held to account. That's a very good way of ensuring that at roll call, the commanding officer will tell his tour that certain behavior doesn't fly any more.

Most people who get bothered and ticketed by a police officer will swallow it, take the fine, and then grumble about it to their friends and maybe put some anonymous anger on an Internet message board. It's pathetic, but it makes sense. Most of the people complaining about rooftop harassment haven't any experience with cops.

So get schooled, and pass the schooling along.

*Update: An earlier edition of this post misspelled Nick Juravitch's name on three occasions. The spelling has been corrected above.

What a story

2011-10-04T15:57:00.000-04:00

I've got a piece in my hometown paper today. It's a piece that tells the story of how two guys got together to figure out how to tell the story of someone who told the story of his father telling him a story.

The story of how I came to write the story begins in Lester B. Pearson airport, when I bumped into Ryan Nadel. We both faced big flight delays, so he told me about a project he hoped to get started with Art Spiegelman.

Good story.

One side of Canada's penal system

2011-09-16T16:27:00.000-04:00

The CBC reports that a convicted killer escaped from custody and is on the loose in Saskatchewan. Said killer was being held in a minimum-security facility called the Willow Creek Healing Lodge. And while prison officials have now alerted the public to the killer at large, they haven't yet released a photo of the convict, citing "privacy concerns."
Oh, Canada. I'm off to Ottawa tonight.

It's pronounced "go-shay"

2011-08-05T13:34:00.000-04:00

and it might be the worst Jewish genetic disorder you never heard of.

Drug law reform is no bedtime story

2011-06-30T10:22:00.000-04:00

The man who illustrated the satirical hit book "Go the F**k to Sleep" has published a free booklet called "Jury Independence Illustrated" calling on Americans to challenge the war on drugs by acquitting those charged with possession.

Ricardo Cortes hopes the pamphlet will encourage adults called for jury duty in drug cases to vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented at trial. Cortes cites the precedent of John Zenger who, in 1734, published a letter critical of the colonial governor of New York and was charged with seditious libel. While Zenger didn't deny that he'd published the letter in violation of the law, the jury acquitted him because they found the law unjust.

This is how Cortes suggests everyday Americans fight back against the war on drugs. He's not the first person to push for acquittals. The call for jurors to automatically clear individuals charged with drugs caught a boost in 2008 when the writers behind the hit HBO drama The Wire penned a piece for TIME laying out their position on the issue:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

In this manner, individuals opposed to current drug laws hope to needle the system into reform. Cortez's booklet puts the practice in heroic, even patriotic perspective, but there are a few problems with this approach, which might betray an ignorance of the criminal justice system.

First, if an entire panel of jurors votes to acquit a person who is clearly guilty, the judge can and likely will nullify the jury's verdict on the grounds that no reasonable jury could conclude that a man found with three hundred grams of heroine was not guilty of possessing said heroine. The judge could then proclaim a guilty verdict.

Second, if a single activist juror insists that the drug laws in a case are unjust and refuses to sign on to a guilty verdict despite eleven others who disagree, the jury is hung, and the judge will declare a mistrial. This means the same defendant, so valiantly defended by a single juror, will face trial again, potentially without an advocate in the box.

But the biggest problem with this approach to juror activism is the simple truth that, in the U.S., there are very few drug trials. Most people charged plead guilty. For those concerned about the impact of drug legislation on swelling prisons and bloated budgets, they ought to realize that those who go to jail are only rarely sent there by juries.

Here are the numbers for New York City:

10,502 people were arrested and charged with felony possession of a controlled substance as a top charge in the city in 2010.
7,438 plead guilty to the charge or to lesser charges.
of those that went to trial all the way through to a verdict, 52 were acquitted. Twenty nine were found guilty.

These numbers are from the New York State Department of Criminal Justice Statistics and the Computerized Criminal History System.

It's important to note that these numbers do not track individual cases: The people who plead guilt in 2010 aren't the same folks arrested and charged that year, and those who got a verdict from a jury were likely arrested and charged over a year earlier.

Interestingly, the number of individuals in this charging category has dropped off significantly in the past three years: 13,369 were arrested in 2008; 12,496 in 2009; 10,502 in 2010.

Guilty please have likewise dropped: 9,082 in 2008; 8,667 in in 2009; 7,439 in 2010.

But the number of guilty verdicts and acquittals has barely moved. In sum, a few activist jurors disrupting a few drug trials might get some attention, but it might not gum up the system.

A different campaign approach might be much more effective: getting those charged with possession to demand a jury trial. The first thing it would do is back up the courts- by several years.

"It would come to screeching halt," said Jonathan Marks, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City. "There would be tremendous strains on the criminal justice system. It would be completely unworkable."

Second, it would make jury duty de rigueur for most of us registered voters. That would be for both trial jury duty and four-week grand jury duty. Productivity would drop as the need for jurors drew eligible candidates from their day jobs and forced them to endure the protocols of criminal court.

That might be the societal strain needed to get popular, political, and bureaucratic sentiment behind reform of the country's drug laws. It would quite literally force the system to choke on what it'd bitten into.

Of course, that would mean organizing the accused and charged into a broadly coordinated program of civil disobedience. It would mean asking those accused to risk lengthy periods of incarceration rather than plead guilty to lesser charges. The system currently survives as it does because of the plea bargain.

While advocating juror nullification may be a noble ideal for the anti-drug law crusaders, and a place from which to organize consensus against the current prohibition, it's far-fetched to think activists at a few trials will somehow impede the gears of the criminal justice system.

A return to the three-fifths solution

2011-06-29T08:28:00.000-04:00

State legislators in New York are fighting over a captive demographic: ready for the pun? Prisoners. Lawmakers don't want votes, they just want bodies.

State legislative districts are determined by population, and prisoners are counted as part of the population where they're incarcerated. In New York, an overwhelming proportion of prisoners come from the five boroughs. Most of them end up incarcerated upstate.

This amounts to a transfer of democratic enfranchisement from New York City residents to those who live in and around towns with prisons. This transfer takes place on the backs of the disenfranchised felons behind bars.

The more residents in an area, the more state legislative sway it holds. For the Republican districts upstate, this prison population bulks up their voting power in the legislature.

But a bill signed into law by former governor David A. Patterson would 'transfer' this population from upstate prison towns and reallocate the prisoners to their district of residence prior to incarceration.

Now, several upstate Republicans senators have sued to kill the law. The Wall Street Journal reports the suit claims the law aims to move "a phantom population of...prisoners...from upstate Republican districts to downstate New York City Democratic districts."

Perhaps the best solution brings together the wisdom of Solomon and the pragmatics of slavery: divide each non-voting prisoner in two: three fifths to their home district, where they won't vote while away, and two-fifths to their "guest" district, where they won't be a burden while incarcerated.

Grant's last photo, and killer, released

2011-06-29T07:25:00.000-04:00

Two-and-a-half years after an Oakland transit cop shot and killed Oscar Grant on a train platform, Grant's mother will receive a $1.3 million settlement ending a federal lawsuit for the wrongful death of her son.

BART officer Johannes Mehserle killed Grant on New Year's Day, 2009. Video taken by multiple witnesses shows Mehserle stand up over a prostrate Grant and fire a single shot.

Mehserle was put on trial for murder. In his defense, he claimed he meant to use his Taser to subdue Grant.

Via Carlos Miller and Pete Brook, we recently got a look at a key piece of evidence in the trial: the very last photo Grant ever took, from his cell phone, showing Mehserle standing over him, Taser in hand.

According to Demian Bulwa, an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, the photo was used by the prosecution to show that Mehserle knew his gun from his Taser (he'd used the latter twice before that same night).

A jury acquitted Mehserle of murder charges, but found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter. He was fired from his job, lost his pension, and sentenced to two years in prison last July.

The $1.3 million settlement to Grant's mother comes on top of a $1.5 million payment the transit agency made to Grant's daughter. Further lawsuits by other members of Grants family are in the pipeline.

Johannes Mehserle was released from prison earlier this month, having served a little less than half his sentence.

The million-dollar settlement contrasting with the relatively light punishment has provoked a great deal of debate on the double standard given law enforcement in the use of lethal force, particularly vis-a-vis black men.

I like Carlos Miller's takeaway: "If there is any lesson we learned from this story, it’s that we shall never leave home without a camera."

Covering Fort Greene Fest

2011-06-27T16:13:00.000-04:00

The good folks behind The Local, a blog covering Fort Greene and Clinton, let me cover an all-day concert for them. Check out the photos.

Talib Kweli likes forgettable sci-fi movies

2011-06-24T09:57:00.000-04:00

"You stressing time and follow the Roman calendar/these people into cloning like Gattaca"

"Writing rhymes in my captain's log, Black Star date/MCs fake like Egyptian gods in Stargate"

"We sell crack to our own out the back of our homes/smell the musk in the dusk, and the crack of the dawn/we go through episodes too, like Attack of the Clones"

"Your brain is like a cage, you're a slave and that's why they loving you/this is The Book of Eli that start with a K-W"

Talib Kweli performed in Red Hook Park on Wednesday, June 22,

part of Celebrate Brooklyn 2011 (Photo: Zachary Goelman)

Forty years of drug war produced swollen prisons, much debate, and perhaps little else

2011-06-20T21:42:00.000-04:00

I tried to analyze the debate on drugs, incarceration, and crime for Reuters' "The Great Debate" blog. Check it out here.

"Crowd-sourcing" surveillance after Vancouver's riots

2011-06-17T07:52:00.000-04:00

I wrote about the Vancouver riots for the Reuters Mediafile blog. Check it here.

Baltimore as the set for America's drug war

2011-06-15T15:10:00.000-04:00

Shortly after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requested a renewal of the HBO series The Wire, series creator David Simon retorted that he'd do so if the Department of Justice would, in exchange, "address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive, and dehumanizing drug prohibition."

Give The Wire credit for introducing a broad swath of the public to the the politics, policies, and problems with drug law enforcement. But more than that, the show made the city of Baltimore the stage to which we turn to re-up on the latest news on war on drugs.

It may be fitting then, that on the fortieth anniversary of the drug war, retired Baltimore Police Department Major Neil Franklin took the opportunity to decry the policy.

"It's time to finish picking up bodies and move in another direction. Think about this. No more drive-by shootings and running gun battles in our streets," Franklin told Baltimore's WBALTV.

His comments come after his organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, published a report calling the war on drugs a failure.

The Wire established Baltimore in the popular mind as the ground zero of drug law enforcement and reform. And ideas from that city continue to flow.

Peter Moskos, associate professor of law and police science at John Jay, is a former Baltimore city police officer. His second book, In Defense of Flogging, is a clever critique of U.S. prison policy. His first book, Cop in the Hood, is a study of his experience as a foot soldier in the front line in the drug war. And when Moskos graduated from the police academy, Neil Franklin was his commanding officer.

Florida law may funnel welfare recipients into prison

2011-06-07T21:19:00.000-04:00

A new law in Florida requires adults applying for welfare to undergo drug screening.

"It's not right for taxpayer money to be paying for someone else's addiction," Governor Rick Scott told CNN on Sunday.

Applicants who fail a first drug test are precluded from receiving welfare for a year. Applicants who fail a second time face a three-year suspension.

The rationale of such an edict, summed up in Scott's words, is ideologically pure. It exhorts a moral system: a refusal to reward bad behaviour.

But this thinking misses an important, and highly cynical, view of the social safety net, especially when it comes to drug addiction. As long as there are drugs, there will be addiction; and as long as drugs are prohibited by law, the criminal justice system will be the primary vehicle used by the state in its relations with drug users.

What moralists like Scott miss is the fact that for drug addicts, welfare is more than a social safety net. It's a bribe. A direct one. A depressing and fatalistic and cost-effective policy that reduces crime by paying off potential criminals.

This isn't the raison d'etre of welfare. It has no relevance to the vast number of welfare recipients who are simply poor folks who can't find jobs.

But when it comes to drugs and poverty, if prison is the stick, welfare may be the carrot. What won't a drug addict do for his or her next fix? Put differently, how does a monthly allowance reshape the criminal activity of a junkie?

Scott may successfully save money kicking drug addicts off of welfare. Residents of Florida may pay a subsequently higher price as drug addicts begin to subsidize their habit through stolen car stereos, snatched necklaces, and wallets taken at knife-point. Then the dollars saved on welfare, and then some, may be spent on the exceedingly more expensive criminal justice system, most notably on the incarceration of drug addicts booted from the welfare rolls.

Scott, and those who share his views, should very clearly understand that taking drug addicts off welfare may mean placing drug addicts in prison.

The governor is currently on a five-day trip to Canada. During his time in Montreal, he may want to visit the city's heroin injection clinic. A study of such clinics in Canada found that "illicit heroin among participants use dropped 70 percent," that the number of participants who committed crimes dropped from 70 percent to 30 percent, and that clinic users' spending on heroin plummeted.

A Canadian lesson in profiling

2011-05-17T11:22:00.000-04:00

A civil trial has begun in Hamilton, Ontario, over what strikes me as a very U.S.-style discrimination suit against that city's police department.

Eight years ago police officers arrested Michael Dixon. According to the Hamilton Spectator,

Dixon, an exhibit installer, was working in Toronto the night of the historic power outage across southern Ontario and beyond, on Aug. 14, 2003. At 1:14 a.m. on Aug. 15, 911 dispatchers received a call that a shorter white man wearing light-coloured sneakers was breaking into the Edwin Pass Jewellery Store on John Street South.
At the same time, Dixon was on a GO Transit bus returning to Hamilton. He got off at the Hunter Street bus terminal and began walking home when Mann and Beaulne, then officers with the Break, Enter, Robbery and Auto Theft (BEAR) squad, chased the burglar and ended up arresting Dixon at gunpoint in a parking lot along Hunter.

Dixon is black. Nonetheless, police held him in custody for three and a half days. According to Dixon, they did not attempt to contact the driver of the GO bus to verify his alibi. Nor were they apparently bothered by the contradiction in melanin between Dixon and the alleged perpetrator.

Please watch the video of Dixon's interrogation below, especially for the part where the detective says, "The evidence I have is, frankly, conclusive and overwhelming. So I’m not even going to ask you if you did it. What I have to ascertain is what kind of guy you are. Whether this is, that you're like a serial burglar, and this is what you're doing all the time, or whether this is a one-off thing because of the power cut and everything that was going on tonight.”

It's not the last problem the Hamilton police have had with race-related misconduct.

There is one very un-American element of this discrimination suit that I should point out: Dixon is asking for a mere $180,000. I don't think suits against cops in the U.S. clock in below seven figures.

In unrelated instances suggesting Canadian cops gone wild, it's been a rough week for mounties in my home province. An RCMP officer on Vancouver Island is being charged with assault for shooting an unarmed man during a traffic stop, four mounties have been charged with perjury relating to the Taser death of Robert Dziekanski, and three Kamloops RCMP officers are facing charges for watching, and not intervening, while two females in custody engaged in sex.

And in the nation's capital, an Ottawa woman is suing cops in that city for $975,000, alleging they bashed her head against a cruiser and ripped her clothes off and kept her in lockup overnight before charging her with assault, resisting arrest, and assaulting police. But charges against her were dropped.

Marche de le Perp

2011-05-17T10:11:00.000-04:00

The scrum of reporters covering the arrest and arraignment of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn included the Wall Street Journal's Tamer El-Ghobashy, one of New York's finest police reporters, who posted a link to the story on his Facebook page with the comment, "NYPD...perp walking him like he's your local stick up kid..."

The indignity of this photo suggests to me that by the time police were through processing the IMF chief at the East Harlem headquarters of the Manhattan Special Victims squad, DSK had not only exhausted whatever friendly political connections he'd had in the city, but had engendered some enmity as well.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I've been at perp-walks before, and even very minor dignitaries can sometimes swing a more dignified (read: less visible) transfer while in police custody.

I remember sitting outside of Brooklyn's 67th Precinct for hours waiting for police to march New York State Senator Kevin Parker from his holding cell inside the station to a sedan, and then by car to central booking.

The senator faced felony assault charges for attacking and smashing the camera belonging to a New York Post photographer. Given that it wasn't Parker's first arrest for assault - including a previous arrest for punching a traffic cop in the face - I didn't expect the police department to show a great deal of sympathy to the man in custody.

So it came as some surprise when a detective with the department's office of the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information - its PR division - announced to the assembled press outside the precinct that the senator had already been moved to his jail cell for the night. They'd loaded him into a car in the precinct lot, and taken him out quietly. (He was recently sentenced to probation.)

It may be unsurprising that a local pol with local connections has enough schlep to skirt the perp walk, even with his prior record. But it came as a bit of a surprise to see the head of the IMF marched, in cuffs, in full view of the cameras, to a vehicle destined for lockup.

When this scandal and subsequent arrest landed on the desks of the police department's commanding officers on Sunday night, I would understand if their first instincts were to protect this high-profile suspect. You never know who his friends may be, and a deputy inspector could sink his or her career by being careless with such a sensitive subject. The default, in my experience, would be to keep DSK away from the cameras. Heck, reporters would understand.

But the short parade from the SV squad building to the sedan says to me that someone - maybe from the mayor's office? - called in and asked cops to make sure the French dignitary got the same treatment as "your local stick up kid."

Also, I highly recommend following Tamer on Twitter. His dispatches from Egypt and north Africa this winter proved that there is no better journalist than an old-school shoe-leather reporter fluent in his surroundings.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Careful with those incarceration stats

2011-05-11T12:48:00.000-04:00

A report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that immigrants make up a smaller proportion of the incarcerated population (4.1%) in the U.S. than they do the general population (6.9%).

Peter Moskos came across this statistic (even though the report came out last year) and wrote about it over at The Agitator:

Did you know immigrants have lower rates of crime than native-born Americans? Non-citizens, illegal immigrants included, are much less likely to be in prison than US citizens. Immigrants, by and large, have lower rates of crime than red-blooded Americans.

But Moskos needs to be careful when drawing a line from incarceration rates back to criminal behavior, especially when discussing a demography with particular characteristics. Immigrants charged with felonies may face deportation proceedings, for instance, and not face incarceration in the U.S. for crimes committed. Additionally, crimes committed within immigrant communities may be underreported if the victims risk their visas by coming forward. (While not explicitly about immigration, a story in the New York Times reports on a rash of illegal Chinese gambling-parlor robberies that only recently came to police attention.)

Moskos points to an interview on the website of the Wall Street Journal with sociologist Tim Wadsworth, who says the crime rate in cities drops as immigration picks up.

I'm unconvinced by Moskos's use of percentages of those incarcerated and studies of declining crime rates to paint a picture of the relation between immigrant populations and criminal activity. I don't doubt some of the reasoning he brings to his case:

I would hazard a guess that it’s some combination of working harder to stay out of trouble, good family values (including perhaps religious values), and self-selection (people who have the desire and means to get to the US, legally or not, may be the cream of the crop compared to those left behind).

But I think Moskos makes a far stronger, and far more interesting argument about crime, punishment, and incarceration in this essay previewing his forthcoming book, In Defense of Flogging.

I very much enjoyed his first book, and look forward to reading his second.

Realtor Gives Back to Neighbourhood

2011-05-10T08:57:00.000-04:00

Its name.

The Prospect Heights Patch reports that behemoth real estate firm Corcoran Group will restore Washington Avenue to its former role as the boundary between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights in the firm's marketing materials.

After a Wall Street Journal article stating that realtors were renaming parts of the area (inventing "ProCro") sparked a backlash in the chattering Internet cloud, New York Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries proposed legislation penalizing real estate firms who engage in neighbourhood renaming.

So chalk up a victory for blustering urban populism. Hat tip to my esteemed colleague at the Green Peugot for this story.

A new paradigm of accountability

2011-04-26T08:25:00.000-04:00

An officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has been suspended from the force while under investigation in the beating of a civilian. The officer, Derek Colling, has been suspended without pay since April 1st.

The victim of the beating, Mitchell Crooks, went out onto the street of his neighborhood in Las Vegas one night in March and filmed LVPD officers responding to a reported burglary.

Both Crooks and Colling have been in the news before. Crooks, for filming Inglewood police officers beating a 16-year-old boy in 2002. Colling, for killing a mentally ill 15-year-old who was waving a knife, in 2009. Colling shot him in the head.

After Crooks stepped out to film the police officers on March 20th, Officer Derek Colling asked Crooks to turn off the camera. Crooks refused, at which point Colling allegedly kicked and punched Crooks in the face and chest and arrested him.

Allegedly, because in the video we cannot see the blows. We can only hear Crook's screams and pleas, and hear Colling warn that he could deliver a "world of hurt." Please watch the video at the bottom.

It shouldn't shock me, but it does, that almost two decades after Rodney King some officers still fail to grasp that with the proliferation of consumer video recorders, they are less and less likely to get away with excessive use of force.

Seth Greenfield puts it best:

Though the issue surrounding the right to photograph and videotape police would seem to be sufficiently well known and understood, even by those dumber-than-bricks cops who just don't like it when someone ignores their authority, there are still a few cops who can't seem to grasp that it's not only lawful, but going to bite back very shortly.

Video here:

Urban political populism

2011-04-21T10:06:00.000-04:00

New York Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries alleges that real estate agents are slapping syllables together in an effort to rename neighbourhoods and raise rents. Jeffries is so incensed that he's writing state legislation aimed at limiting labeling:

Mr. Jeffries’s outrage was set off by reports that real estate agents were using the name ProCro to peddle properties on the border of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, an area within his district. He also said the name “sounded silly.”

The name ProCro stirred up discussion in February after it appeared in a Wall Street Journal article titled, "Prospect Heights Edges Into Crown Heights." But the Journal was a bit late on this story: about two years ago I moved into a fantastic apartment on Franklin Avenue and St. John's Place, but in the Craigslist post the landlord inaccurately said the apartment was in Prospect Heights, rather than Crown Heights.

The Journal article gave superficial treatment to a substantive issue, and set the tone for the subsequent backlash. A filmmaker posted this stupid video (at bottom), featured on Gothamist, of folks on Franklin Avenue 'reacting' to the notion that they lived in a neighbourhood called ProCro.

Nick Juravich, one of Crown Heights' most devoted bloggers, took issue with the video linked to on Gothamist for mocking the fake name along with the real residents:

If this is all one big joke, as the introduction suggests, it misses an opportunity to actually engage residents about the exercise of power that (re)naming wields. Sure, there's potential value in satirizing a Wall Street Journal article that helps to reify such a name change, but ultimately, the joke's not very funny, and there are ways to provoke these conversations as a reporter without reducing your subject material to farce.

Regardless of its impact on real estate prices, renaming something indicates possession. So it's understandable that residents might resent labels imposed externally. Franklin Avenue residents got stirred up late last year when some businesses on the strip wanted to co-name part of the street "Panama Way."

The sense of ownership among the residents of Franklin Avenue for their neighborhood is linked in no small part to their sense of accomplishment over two decades. "Franklin Avenue has a name," a neighborhood block association member told the Daily News. "We need to keep going with that success story."

Crown Heights was so saturated with drugs and crime in the late 1980's that a squad of corrupt cops were able to openly rob and extort street dealers for years before being caught. The neighbourhood was rocked by black riots against Hassidic Jews in the early 1990's. So when a sudden, city-wide drop in murders began and the city experienced a flowering of economic growth at the start of that decade, nowhere in the city felt the change more than Crown Heights.

Neighbourhood efforts at improvement may not have led the upturn in public safety and economic prosperity, but they lent locals a sense of investment in the improvement. That outside interests want to capitalize on neighborhood gains but wrench the name away from the locals stirs their ire.

While Juravich's dismay at the media reaction resonates with this former Crown Heights resident, he and I parted ways over Jeffries' declaration of war against forces renaming neighbourhoods.

Neighborhood change doesn't start with renaming a hood, and somehow gagging realtors' imaginative efforts at labeling places won't reel in real estate value.

When I moved into the Franklin Avenue apartment two years ago, I thought it somewhat ridiculous for the landlord to advertise the place as Prospect Heights. This wasn't mere geography, although traditionally Washington Avenue has divided Prospect from Crown Heights. It was a matter of neighborhood scene: On my block we had African hair braiding salons, and the clothing shop on the corner sold Coogi. I lived above a jerk chicken spot. The corner bodega offered single Newports for seventy-five cents, and there was an NYPD Skywatch tower parked at the intersection. The bar across the street was named I-95, served soul food, and played hip hop and reggaeton.

My roommate and I didn't move to Franklin Avenue because we thought we were moving to Prospect Heights; we and everyone like us moving into the neighbourhood were doing so because the neighbourhood sported reasonable rents, excellent access to transit, nearby groceries, and felt more or less neighbourly. It was a good area, and it was improving. But, I thought calling it Prospect Heights was a goofy attempt to convince apartment-seekers that the place was in a whiter, more bourgeoisie neighbourhood.

Any cynicism I had about the landlord's re-labeling vanished when it became clear that I wasn't a drop in a bucket; I was part of a tsunami. Over the course of the summer, a beer garden grew around the corner, and expanded into a gourmet burger restaurant. An organic coffee shop opened up next to it, and then another one opened up the block. A fresh juice and smoothie place opened its doors at the end of July. The jerk chicken shop closed, and is scheduled to be replaced by a wood-oven pizzeria. More young, thin white adults like me showed up on the sidewalks, and the city soon installed new bicycle racks along the avenue.

I'm sure that the influx of people like me into the area raised concerns among some previous residents. Rising rents put pressure on residents and undercut their economic security. They lost familiar institutions and businesses. And they saw an infusion of new public investment for basics like public safety that they didn't seem to merit before people like me moved in. Neighborhood change never stops, either, and if trends continue, the gentrifiers could soon be priced out of Franklin Avenue as glass condos sprout between the rowhouses.

But if Jeffries hopes to somehow tap into these grievances, in an appeal to 'nativism,' by assigning blame for these serious and powerful trends remaking lives in his district, he's falling short of properly addressing these issues.

Jeffries, and everyone in Crown Heights, would love to see positive growth, but they fear dispossession. And rightly so: many people in Brooklyn live on razor-thin cost-of-living margins, and rent price hikes can put them out of home. Jeffries' reactive attempt at regulation showcases the dearth of real neighbourhood protection. Defending the people of the district may require stronger residential and business rent controls, better public safety enforcement for all, and local employment incentives. But these things require legislative fights, and strident dedication. They may not be priorities for a catatonic state legislature or a disempowered city council or a mayor who defends tax breaks for millionaires.

This is why the discussion over the name ProCro is so frustrating; the fact that it's going on suggests a public awareness of vital residential issues but a dearth of faculty to respond.

Update: My former Franklin Avenue roommate writes:

There's also the question of where change is coming from. Tony Fisher has owned that corner for decades. The juice bar guys are hardly white outsiders. Ron of the pizza place certainly is, but at the anti-pawn shop rally [City Councilor] Tish James said something like "this neighbourhood doesn't need a pawn shop. It needs more sit-down restaurants" and there was loud cheering from the crowd.
There's this woman, Japonica Brown-Saracino, who writes about "social preservation" as an alternative discourse to gentrification.That is, people who move into neighbhourhoods because they LIKE them and they want to live there, not just housing speculations.... it's important to recognize that gentrification is not just one monolithic thing, it happens in different forms and has different effects.

Compelling writing on the gentrification of Crown Heights here.

Crown Heights Locals React To "Pro Cro" from Gregory Stefano on Vimeo.

Could NYPD corruption scandal touch Kelly?

2011-04-18T09:10:00.000-04:00

From two of the best police reporters in the city comes the news that as many as 400 New York City police officers could be charged for fixing tickets in a corruption probe.

According the New York Post,

The department will charge cops internally in all 12 Bronx precincts -- and possibly other boroughs -- for allegedly helping out friends and family by "losing" paperwork and missing court dates. In turn, parking tickets, moving violations and quality-of-life summonses would be dismissed in court or vanish before ever getting near a judge.
Officers found guilty in department trials could get fired, lose benefits, or be reprimanded or warned.Those who tampered with documents might face criminal charges of obstruction or filing a false instrument, while cops who took money could be hit with felonies such as bribery. Two NYPD lawyers were recently transferred from the department's legal bureau to its advocate's office, which handles departmental trials against officers, and told to expect hundreds of cases, according to a source in the unit.

This could be the widest corruption scandal of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's current term. It's unclear now how high up the chain of command this probe will go, but a crusading district attorney, comptroller, or attorney general could try to push this to the forefront of a campaign to unsettle, or even unseat, some of the top NYPD brass.

The striking thing about this probe is that it seems, on the face of it, to charge cops for something most people frankly assume cops do anyway: making summonses disappear for friends and family. I don't think anyone is surprised or particularly scandalized by the notion that police officers might get traffic tickets erased as favors for buddies and buddies' wives and kids and neighbors.

It might be relatively easy to demonstrate that such behavior is part of the "culture" with the police department, and it might be relatively easy to point fingers at senior chiefs for allowing such a culture to persist.

I'm waiting for a statement from Commissioner Kelly on this probe. The man has been talked about as a potential 2013 mayoral candidate, and a wide-ranging corruption scandal could taint his current popularity. A Village Voice story from last year examined Kelly's record against his popularity, suggesting that he stood to make a run for the city's top spot, despite a streak of authoritarian and opaque policy. Trouble seems to slide off him like grease from Teflon.

Chatter about a Kelly run for mayor hasn't dissipated, and got a mention in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, in an article about potential candidates.

But the bureaucrats in positions to charge the NYPD with malfeasance, and possibly point some of the blame at Kelly, may wait and take the temperature of public reaction to this probe as more information comes to light. The public may not particularly mind the fact that officers are willing to make relatively minor offenses disappear. Some may like the idea that a friendly cop might help them avoid a costly summons.

That 400 officers might be charged in this probe sounds like a lot: it's a bit over one percent of the uniformed force. It's far to early to say that this probe will deplete the strength of the department, but worth noting that it comes as the number of police officers in the city is dropping, and the force is being stretched thin.

The NYPD has about 6,000 fewer uniformed officers than it did ten years ago, and the mayor announced last week plans to delay a class of 540 police cadets scheduled to begin in April due to budget constraints.

"It was all about dis"

2011-04-17T14:14:00.000-04:00

This YouTube video was posted on Thursday. I sent the poster a message asking for more information, and haven't yet received a reply. Watch it for yourself below.

The only extra info I could gather from the video is that the police are from Patrol Bureau Brooklyn North, meaning this could have taken place anywhere in a broad belt stretching from Carrol Gardens and Greenpoint to East New York.

The altercation called to mind a passage from Richard Price's novel "Clockers," one of the greatest works of American fiction of the 1990's. A housing cop in the fictional city of Dempsey expresses remorse at an arrest made simply because he'd been disrespected. It cuts right to the bitter, zero-sum game between the police and the policed in the theater that has become a tragic banality in modern law enforcement.

You know, I'll tell you what the whole shouting match came down to. Dis. It was about dis. The kid disrespected me by raising up in my face. I dissed him by throwing him up against the fence and doing the Johnson check. He dissed me by walking off. I dissed him by flicking his hat in front of his people. He dissed me by giving me a shove. The mother comes along, she disses me by snatching the keys. I dis her by making fun of her wheeze. Everything's dis. Because, you know, out there all you got to your name is your heart. You got a crowd around you, you got to show heart. Not just them but us too. We go in, we don't show heart, we let ourselves get dissed, Jesus Christ, they'll be all over us, we might as well disband the unit, you know what I'm trying to say? The whole thing is a trap. You got a crowd around you, you best got act the part or you're nothing. It's unfortunate, but them's the rules. I don't know, I see the kid around, I see the mother, I don't say we're friends now, but like everything's cool more or less. We all understand everybody did what they had to do and... you know, life goes on.

Two conclusions from this post, points I probably make ad nauseum: carry a recording device, and read Richard Price.

Policing "low-risk populations"

2011-04-15T08:48:00.000-04:00

This video of a six-year-old girl subjected to an enhanced pat-down by a TSA official has elicited outrage from the usual sources across the Internet.

Scott Greenfield says if this were his daughter, "chances are exceptionally good that I would be in custody." Jennifer Abel calls the video "softcore child pornography," and accused the TSA agent, at length, of pedophilia. Radley Balko appends the video to a work-in-progress, titled "the terrorists win, chapter six bazillion."

The TSA, fanning the flames of fury, responded with all the sensitivity of a bureaucracy, stating on its blog that "some folks are asking if the proper procedures were followed. Yes. TSA has reviewed the incident and the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures."

The agency tried to assuage the outrage, promising it was looking for new protocols:

recognizing that terrorists are willing to manipulate societal norms to evade detection, TSA has been actively assessing less invasive screening methods for low-risk populations, such as younger passengers, while still maintaining a high level of security.

The notion of “low-risk populations” is what caught my eye. I suspect that most of the uproar over this video, and over the enhanced screenings in general, arise from folks who consider themselves members of a low-risk population. Of course, it helps that the subject of this particular video is a white female child – described by Jennifer Abel as reminiscent of JonBenet Ramsey.

The enhanced screenings from the start were similar to the ‘stop, question, and frisk’ policy employed by the New York Police Department in so-called “impact zones” across the city. Except that the folks patted down by cops never elected to take a flight, they’re just going about their day. City police stopped 601,055 people – a record number – in 2010. And while I haven’t seen any video of police officers thoroughly frisking small children, I’ve seen cops lift babies from strollers, tell old women to raise their arms, and instruct many, many black men to empty their pockets. Many of these stops occur in "impact zones," areas of high crime relative to the rest of the city. Frequently the residents themselves ask their representatives for more police officers to boost public safety, but resent the indignity they face under police procedure. Likewise, we want security aboard our airlines, but don’t want the groping.

Those who follow the debate over the NYPD policy know that the police department tout the results of ‘stop, question, and frisk.’ The department says they took 8,000 weapons off the streets – mostly knives – by stopping people. Police say that a little under one in ten people stopped were arrested. Perhaps this level of effectiveness has convinced the majority that this is sound policy. (Homicides were up, year-over-year, despite the increase in police stops in 2010.) In comparison, there have been zero terrorist attacks aboard U.S. airlines since the implementation of the TSA’s enhanced pat-downs, but this isn’t cited as proof of the policy’s effective deterrence.

Anger over the NYPD’s ‘stop, question, and frisk’ policy never provoked outrage nearing that of the enhanced pat-downs. It’s the subject of at least one civil suit, an ACLU campaign, and some academic study, but little else. I can’t help but wonder if this issue remains low-volume because NYPD stops do not impact the “low-risk population” who face the TSA pat-downs, and because the people being stopped and frisked in New York are now so used to being policed as “high-risk” that they have come to accept this status.

It seems that the uproar over the TSA pat-downs is at least in part the result of introducing an under-policed “low-risk population” to general law enforcement procedure.

Journalism and government bureaucracy

2011-04-05T08:23:00.000-04:00

This piece in Nieman Reports by Samantha Swindler, the former managing editor of the Times-Tribune in Corbin, Kentucky, is inspiring and nails down the most important topic I didn't see covered in J-school.

Swindler describes how a joke in the newsroom led a reporter to request the local sheriff's evidence log. The sheriff's refusal forced journalists to use the attorney general's office to get the documentation, and compare it against reports of weapons, drugs, and cash seized by the sheriff's office.

A suspicious, and seemingly staged, break-in of the sheriff's office, a subsequent investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. and the Times-Tribune's tenacious reporting led to the indictment and removal of the sheriff who'd used seized drugs, guns, and cash as a personal slush fund.

The process of this reporting jumps out. Reporters navigating the legal and bureaucratic system produced this journalism, and it's an example of the highest exercise of our craft.

Process is something journalists seem to pick up on the job. I learned the routines of crime scene investigation and criminal court proceedings from visiting too many crime scenes and courtrooms. Nothing in my j-school education pushed me to demonstrate knowledge of these fundamental, if mundane, elements of bureaucratic process.

We had one great course on journalism and law, but in my recollection of journalism coursework, we spent a lot of time talking about the ethics of printing a photo of a U.S. marine weeping over the body of a dead comrade.

Forget the high-minded discussions of journalistic morals. The debate about coverage of race and class ought be kept in the cafeteria. Leave the nostalgia for the heyday of American journalism, with required readings by Robert Caro and Hunter Thompson and Joseph Mitchell for a book club.

Teach this: local government. Tell them they need to learn that shit, and learn it good.
Check out the interview with Swindler with NPR's On the Media.

Doing this can get you arrested

2011-04-04T14:36:00.001-04:00

Two lawsuits filed last week allege police officers arrested and charged civilians for doing nothing.

A suit filed in a New Jersey federal court by the ACLU alleges two Newark police officers arrested a 17-year-old high school student, Khaliah Fitchette, for obstruction of justice.
According to the ACLU, the incident occurred aboard a city bus:

The [bus] driver called Newark Police to attend to a man who had fallen on the floor several rows in front of Fitchette. When Newark Police Officers Noemi Maloon and Lloyd Thomas boarded the bus, Fitchette started to record the scene using the video capability of her cellphone. Fitchette was standing approximately 10 feet away and was not obstructing or interfering with police activity. Maloon spotted Fitchette recording the scene and demanded she turn her phone off.

When Fitchette refused, officers arrested her, seized her phone, deleted the video, and took her to a juvenile processing center. According to the Star-Ledger,

Fitchette’s case marks the third time in as many years when Newark Police have been accused of mistreating residents who were attempting to film them.

Separately, a private security guard is suing officers with the New York Police department, who she says arrested her for not helping them apprehend a suspect.

The guard, Anyeris Reyes, says she was at her post at a door inside a building in Washington Heights when she witnessed two plainclothes police officers, part of a narcotics squad, struggle to subdue a suspect. After more officers responded to the scene and placed the suspect in custody, the plainclothes cops berated Reyes for not coming their aide. They arrested her, charged her with 'refusing to aid a peace or police officer' (a class-B misdemeanor), and took her to the 33rd Precinct. She claims she injured her ankle while in custody.

According to the New York Daily News, the NYPD declined to comment and have launched their own internal investigation. There may be a great deal more to both of these stories, and press releases by the ACLU and civil litigators ought be treated as such.

Carry a recording device, everywhere

2011-03-28T14:33:00.000-04:00

I once saw a police officer with the Bronx's 42nd Precinct, in the midst of an arrest and a pat-down, tell a passer-by to "put that fucking camera phone away, now."

Cops in New York never tried that on me, with an NYPD press card hanging around my neck, but they were ready to try intimidation on civilians with video recorders.

I suffered a bit of that harassment at the G20 meeting in Toronto, where a police officer stuck his BlackBerry in my face as I held up a Flip camera to record another officer patting down and searching a pedestrian.

"Now I got a picture of you, too," he told me.

I get why recordings can make police officers nervous, but I'm appalled when the "two-party" consent laws in some states (meaning that unless a recording has the consent of everyone recorded, it's illegal), meant to protect civilian privacy, are used to prosecute civilians recording police officers in action.

Radley Balko at Reason is one of the best journalists hammering at this issue. Check out the video below. Here's the key quote:

I think it's great that police are monitoring themselves with cameras and microphones, and I think it's great that citizens can also add their own cameras to keep police accountable. Now, I think it does give rise to the perception that things are getting worse, because we're now becoming more aware of police abuse. Traditionally, the police narrative of what happened was the official narrative, and that's the narrative that prosecutors defer to, that judges defer to, it's usually what juries believe, and now there is this very powerful weapon that citizens have to challenge that narrative.

Call me old-fashioned

2011-03-27T12:45:00.000-04:00

A commenter posting under the name “Anonymous” asked me to address a line in a Reuters article about the Jerusalem bombing which killed one and wounded dozens on Wednesday.
The line, in the fourth paragraph of the story, reads:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike.

This line came to my attention after journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, writing on his blog at The Atlantic, decried Reuters’ wording in a post titled “Dear Reuters, You Must Be Kidding”:

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a "terrorist attack"? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a "teachable moment." Or as a "venting of certain frustrations." Or as "an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy." Or perhaps as "a very special episode of 'Cheers.'" Anything but "a terrorist attack." I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as "an exercise in urban renewal."
The mind reels.

I soon saw links posted to Goldberg’s blog by friends of mine on Facebook, and one posted it to my wall, asking me to inveigh on the issue.

But first, a caveat:
The writer is not authorized to speak on behalf of Reuters. The opinions stated on this blog are that of the author alone.

Reuters has a simple rule, that I like, regarding the modifier "terrorist:" we only use it when we're quoting someone using it. I don't know why editors established this directive, but as a journalist I respect it for two reasons:

1. The word “terrorist” speaks to motives, and while motives may be obvious in the case of a bomb placed in a civilian area where we've seen a previous pattern of bomb attacks claimed proudly by organizations committed to using bloody and murderous violence in pursuit of political goals, we don't report on motives until the motivated announce it themselves, or others opine on the motives. In the meantime, we use other, better descriptors. Like "bomb," "exploded," "killing a woman," "shattering the windows of a nearby bus," and "coincided with an upsurge in violence on the Gaza border." We let Israeli and Palestinian officials, our readers around the world, and bloggers at the Atlantic call it terrorism. This defense sounds like effete equivocation. But it's also consistent and responsible.

2. Words have meanings, and words have meanings in different contexts. Rather than engage in a debate over whether "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," I think Reuters decided to let readers debate this issue. Our readers across the globe can label the parties to an action like this however they wish. If they identify with the sort of individuals who detonate an explosive device aimed at killing commuters purely because those commuters are Israeli and Jewish, Reuters don't let those readers off the hook by glorifying this action or justifying it. We just describe it.

I don’t have anything more to add to this subject. I’ve never covered a terrorist attack, or written about one for a news organization, so I’ve not been party to the editorial process that goes into crafting a piece like this.

The only comparison I can draw on comes from my time covering homicide in New York City. When a 13-year-old boy is hit in the head by a stray bullet at a Harlem block party after a dispute breaks out between gang members, I attributed the details of the shooting to detectives on the scene. “Stray bullet leaves 13-year-old in critical condition, police say” is the headline. The person arrested for this crime isn’t called the shooter, he or she is called the alleged shooter, or the suspect.

This experience reinforces for me the rule Reuters has about using a loaded term like terrorist. Call me old-fashioned (I’ve been doing this journo stuff for serious for a whopping five years) but that’s where I come from.

Now, purely as a reader, I wonder about something else in that line of Reuters copy: "Israel's term for a Palestinian strike."

First, I think Israel uses the term "terrorist attack" to describe bombs in civilian areas like this almost everywhere around the world (except maybe when they kill folks like Imad Mughniye and Iranian nuclear scientists), and second, "Palestinian strike" sounds like civil unrest and violence, harking back to the Palestinian General Strike against the British Mandate and the Yishuv in 1936-1939.

Full court press

2011-03-26T16:07:00.000-04:00

The writer is not authorized to speak on behalf of Reuters. The opinions stated on this blog are that of the author alone.

On Thursday, I saw this Facebook status update, written by a person living in Canada:

In the last 3 days over 70 missiles were fired into Israel. A bomb was strapped to a phone booth at a Jerusalem bus station, killing one and seriously injuring 3 others. Last week a Palestinian terrorist walked into the house of the Fogel family and murdered Rabbi Fogel, his wife and 3 of his 6 children with a kitchen knife. None of this has been given media coverage. Put this as your status to show your support

Uninvited, I posted comments on this status update, starting what I believe in the language of the Internet is called a “flame war:” a bitter back-and-forth between individuals committed to engaging in a public, digital screaming match.

At stake for me here, the reputation of the press. I work for the Reuters news agency, and I take the business of news very seriously. Justified or not, I feel proud when my company does its job well, and guilty when it does its job poorly.

As such, I still imagine the egg dripping from my face when I recall that in the battle between Israel and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006, a photographer working for Reuters was found to have doctored photos of the destruction, manufacturing smoke where they was none. (Reuters fired the employee, and wiped all of his work from the company’s photo archive. Yimach sh’mo.) Then in 2010, Reuters republished pictures of wounded Israeli soldiers held by activists aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara. It turned out those pictures were cropped to cut out Israeli blood and activists’ blades.

Reuters isn’t perfect, and neither is the press at large. I take and dish out criticism when we fail. My personal feelings about this are why I dove into the Facebook fight so enthusiastically.

In a comment on the status, I pointed out that the rocket attacks on Sderot, Be’er Sheva, and Ashkelon, the murders in the settlement of Itamar, and the bombing attack in Jerusalem were all covered by the mainstream media. I posted links to back this up. I said that perhaps these events did not receive as much coverage as some would have liked, but pointed out that increased coverage of Israel may mean less coverage of the nuclear reactor in Fukushima or the pitched battles in Misrata. In reply, I was told:

Zach your comment makes no sense no one is talking about giving the horrible disaster in Japan less coverage... You had to search quite a while to find any info that did not come from Israeli media. TV, print press and online media had nothing for a while. So media coverage was not there from the beginning...

It took me minutes to compile a list of links from mainstream news sites attesting to these agencies’ coverage. They almost all have easily-searched archives. But this didn’t preclude another from stating:

you literally have to search for hours to get any decent info on any of this!!

No acknowledgement that there was foreign press coverage, and that these news reports are readily available. Also, no understanding that there is a finite amount of news coverage in an hour, on the top page of a news web site, in a newspaper, and that more of one topic usually means less of another.

I suspect that in the information age (or whatever age we now live in) people spend so much time ‘connected’ that they presume that they will be automatically alerted of significant events.

It’s nothing new to observe that people who care about issues do not care to keep themselves informed. They do not sit through a full newscast, but keep cable news on in the background. They do not scroll through different sections of a news website, but glance only at the top stories. They look at the front page of the paper on the magazine stand, but don’t flip through it. Although one can program Yahoo! and Google to filter and find news on subjects important to us, they do not avail themselves of this powerful information tool.

That they choose to blame a functioning press despite their dysfunctional approach to news caught me by surprise. They feel entitled to the information they think they need. If they do not get it, they blame the provider.

It goes further.

There seems to be, for many, a troubling misunderstanding of what journalism is, and how it works.

The commenter who objected [falsely] that the only information available on these events in Israel came from the Israeli media was not criticizing the Hebrew press. He was angry at the [again, false] notion that domestic news in Israel wasn’t being given coverage by the international press as he perceived it from Canada.

This sense, that events in Israel ought to be hoisted high up on international news bulletins - at least in the U.S. and Canada - was more strikingly apparent in this similar status update by a person living in Israel:

NEWS FLASH: Family in Boca Raton, Florida massacred in their sleep. Bomb hits bus #74 outside D.C. Convention Center injuring dozens and killing at least one; 70 rockets and missiles continue falling on New York City over three days. Outrage... oh, wait, wrong country. All this happened in Israel and not in the U.S. No outrage.

The world is silent. So repost.

First, if it’s not clear, the poster isn’t saying that there wasn’t “outrage” in Israel. There was. The author of this post objects to the alleged lack of outrage in the English media, and in the U.S. in particular.

It goes further. Provoked by my uninvited comments on this status update (the poster even wrote “I have the right to post something without you feeling the need to challenge it comment after comment”), pointing out that there was ample coverage of these events, the person who posted this status wrote:

It's not about the volume of coverage, it's about the nature of it. Some of the foreign media questioned the attacks and their terrorist nature. Almost as if they were justified.

This back-and-forth attracted the attention of our respective acquaintances. One sent me a private message on the subject. This person, who lives in the U.S., was “taken aback that even you could not or would not recognize the bias in response to the Itamar attacks,” when five members of a Jewish family living in a West Bank settlement were butchered in their beds, presumably by Palestinian assailants.

This person who wrote me the message said some of the context included in the reporting - that the family lived in a settlement, that settlements are in disputed territory, that Israel vowed to punish the perpetrators - diminished the crime, complaining:

It can't just be an article about the killings, it also has to insinuate and give the reason for the attack as if maybe there is some excuse for it.

Why can’t an article about Jewish settlers in the West Bank murdered by Palestinians just be an article about the killings?

In the U.S., we read articles about killings. I’ve written a few about people murdered in New York City. If the killings can be put in some context - a man killed trying to break up a fight, a father shot dead on Father’s Day, an army vet gunned down by police officers - it’s included in the story.

We also read about mass murderers, like Nidal Malik Hassan, and Jared Lee Loughner. Who they killed, and why, is the subject of a great deal of analysis.

So the murder of Jews in Itamar would necessarily include speculation on the motives of the killers vis-a-vis the killed. But it goes further.

We’re talking as Americans (and Canadians) about an event that occurred overseas. There's a reason the coverage of the murders made its way to the International section of the newspaper: newspaper editors determined that this event is relevant to readers not least because it is part of a larger ongoing historical conflict in an important part of the world.

The outcry, then, is because the foreign press covers events in Israel as though they take place in a foreign country, rather than at home in New York, or Tucson, or Vancouver. There may be mortar attacks in dozens of places around the globe, but a mortar attack on Sderot ought to treated like an attack on San Diego, and not like an attack in Mogdishu or Baghdad.

Essentially, the argument states treating Israel like another country, rather than as a home country, dehumanizes its residents and distorts the reality on the ground. This shows not only a seriously flawed understanding of how the press operate, and discloses a clear double-standard, but admits a comfortable and acceptable level of apathy toward events in countries not granted “home” status.

So repost.

There's no rehabilitation for cops, just salaries

2011-03-21T08:06:00.000-04:00

Police officers involved in some of the most sensational allegations of police brutality in New York City's recent history have been stripped of their guns but kept their pay.

In a jaw-dropping scoop from two of the New York Post's best police reporters, it turns out that the cops who shot and killed Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Timothy Stansbury, Jr., are among the 300 officers, detectives and supervisors assigned to the "rubber gun squad."

These cops have been placed on "modified duty:"

Hundreds of officers, detectives and supervisors who have killed or assaulted people, violated civil rights, beat up their wives or girlfriends, driven drunk or hurt bystanders languish on modified duty -- including one who's been sidelined for 12 years -- while still being paid their full salaries.

These men and women have no weapons and are not allowed to respond to emergency calls. If they see criminal activity, they are supposed to dial 9-1-1. In salary, these members of the department cost taxpayers $22 million, annually.

Just a refresher, for those who don't recall: The police who killed the unarmed Diallo, Bell, and Stansbury were cleared of charges. The department championed them for acting appropriately and effectively. But to place these men on permanent modified duty suggests that they are at the same time irredeemably useless as law enforcement officers.

Do these officers exemplify the department's professionalism, or are have they shown themselves to be not only flawed, but beyond rehabilitation? If they're beyond rehabilitation, why are taxpayers paying Kenneth Boss $104,526 to explicitly not serve and protect the public?

***UPDATE***
I believe that despite its feverish interest in celebrity skin, the New York Post still knows a good story when it finds one, and it's reporters include some of the best in the city. Editorially though, this particular story seemed an interesting crux between the paper's almost unflinching support for the NYPD and its vitriolic hatred for public spending and government waste. I wonder if the editors swallowed their pride at having defended the cops now on modified duty with a sugary spoonful of anti-public-sector union glee.

No need to jail corrupt cops

2011-03-16T07:00:00.000-04:00

Jail sentences don't deter police corruption, according to one Brooklyn criminal judge, so corrupt cops shouldn't go to jail.

Brooklyn Supreme Criminal Court Justice John Walsh sentenced former NYPD narcotics detective Sean Johnstone to five years' probation on Tuesday. Johnstone was convicted of conspiracy after he was recorded saying he'd under-reported amounts of illegal drugs he seized, and used the drugs to pay off informants.

"I have yet to see a jail sentence deter a public official from misconduct," Walsh said at the sentencing, according to the New York Post.

Johnstone was snared in a probe of the Brooklyn South narcotics squad in 2008. Part of the probe included a sting operation by the Internal Affairs Bureau and an undercover posing as a drug dealer. Two Brooklyn cops were charged with stealing 40 bags of crack cocaine and $250 in cash from the undercover. Johnstone was fired from the police department after his conviction.

Prosecutors argued that Johnstone deserved jail, saying his misconduct tainted the police department and threw into question hundreds of arrests and convictions. According to the New York Daily News, the Brooklyn district attorney's office was forced to dismiss 270 drug cases in the wake of the scandal.

But Justice Walsh opted for a lighter sentence than prison, on the grounds that "removal from society and rehabilitation were not issues for Johnstone and jailing him would not prevent more corruption."

Leaving aside the questions of removal from society and rehabilitation (and ignoring the question of punishment), Walsh's casual dismissal of the doctrine of criminal deterrence is surprising.

Deterrence is a huge part of the American criminal justice system, and the principle behind the Rockefeller laws and other mandatory minimum sentences and a great deal of the jurisprudence behind capital punishment.

New York City faces a police corruption scandal about once a decade, going back forty years: The Knapp Commission hearings after Serpico blew the whistle in the early 1970's; the 'Buddy Boys' scandal at Brooklyn's 77th Precinct in the late 1980s; the 'Dirty Thirty' Precinct in Washington Heights in the early 1990's, and now a South Brooklyn narcotics squad.

If Walsh thinks that this series of police corruption cases proves that deterrence doesn't work when it comes to cops abusing their authority, then I wonder if he believes it ever works.

Can he believe that long sentences for possessing felony weight cocaine deter others from holding and moving narcotics? Forgive the understatement, but there are more drug arrests and convictions in New York City than there are police corruption scandals.

Perhaps Walsh doesn't believe deterrence works at all. But to suggest that it works selectively raises questions about his selection. One could argue that police officers might be more likely deterred from malfeasance through jail sentences than other offenders: Police officers know well the sort of people who go to jail; they are frequently exposed to the type of person alongside whom they risk incarceration; they have options other than criminal behavior (if you buy into the notion that society drives certain groups toward crime).

Deterrence is the foundation of our illegal drug policy: it fills our prisons, forces our officers to arrest non-violent drug users, it slaps lengthy criminal records on and stymies the economic opportunities of a huge proportion of black and Hispanic men. According to a Drug Policy Alliance Report, arrests for marijuana alone cost New York City $75 million a year.

In the face of this, it seems odd when a judge decides to suspend the principle for a crooked cop.