Police Issues

PREDICTIVE POLICING: RHETORIC OR REALITY?

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:15:41 GMT

“Are we doing anything new or innovative with this data or are we just doing it better and quicker?”

By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Lincoln police chief Tom Casady’s remarks probably led to a few gasps. Still, as the plain-spoken Nebraska native pointed out at a National Institute of Justice symposium last November, the focal topic, predictive policing, was nothing new: “It is a coalescing of interrelated police strategies and tactics that were already around, like intelligence-led policing and problem solving. This just brings them all under the umbrella of predictive policing.”

BREAKING NEWS

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:08:59 GMT

* Worried about the quality of the eyewitness evidence, Ohio governor commutes killer's death sentence * Feds sue Arizona sheriff, demand he cooperate in civil-rights inquiry * California A.G. wants to return possibly wrongfully convicted man to prison because he appealed too late * Illinois corrections chief out after early-release program tanks * Chicago gang leaders walk out of meeting with police and the Feds * Estranged husband shoots, kills five then takes own life * Three men shot dead in West Hollywood were reselling marijuana bought at pot clinics

WHO DESERVES A BREAK? AND HOW WOULD WE KNOW?

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:33:01 GMT

When Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Bill Evans issued an instructional memo setting out a fictional encounter between a deputy and a Christian college student with an “illegal folding pocket knife” (let’s call it a switchblade) he didn’t expect that the document would ricochet around the country at the speed of the Internet.

BEFORE JET BLUE THERE WAS MAJOR DYMOVSKY

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:20:09 GMT

Aleksei Aleksandrovich Dymovsky was fed up. During his years as a cop in Novorossiysk the 32-year old chief of detectives had grown weary of the moral depravity that pervades Russian policing. It wasn’t just about taking twenty bucks here and there to supplement the meager pay, a temptation to which even he had succumbed. No – it was about a lot more, from staging arrests and searches for the sole purpose of extorting cash, to brutalizing suspects, to “solving” crimes by forcing persons who were innocent to confess.

SAY SOMETHING

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 22:50:09 GMT

Connecticut state trooper William Taylor was overseeing dispatch at Troop H on the morning of August 3rd. when a call came in from the man who just gunned down eight co-workers at a Manchester liquor warehouse. It seemed that the killer couldn’t wait to justify his brutal act, nor bemoan his bad fortune in not slaying more.

DANCING WITH HOOLIGANS

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:19:07 GMT

Last month a Seattle cop decided that jaywalking on his beat was getting out of hand. No more breaks! Spotting a flock of young evildoers dashing across a busy highway (they ignored a pedestrian overpass fifteen feet away) he corralled the group. They were mouthy and uncooperative. One, a 19-year old girl, tried to walk off, and when he moved to stop her she pulled away.

R.I.P. COMMUNITY POLICING?

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:50:05 GMT

Having suffered for years through the mind-numbing rhetoric of community policing, your blogger was thrilled to attend the panel entitled “A New Professionalism” at the June 2010 conference of the National Institute of Justice.

Sparks flew from the very start as Christopher Stone, Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School took on – hold your breath – community policing. Placing himself firmly in the ranks of the contrarians, he criticized its “cacophony” of purpose, uttering in public what many have whispered for years, that by absorbing (some would say, greedily) every other strategy that came along its proponents had blurred the concept beyond recognition.

EXTREME MEASURES (PART II)

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:35:24 GMT

Everyone knows that they can be stopped by police for a traffic infraction. What many don’t realize is that officers can detain them at length for other reasons, and with far less justification than is required for an arrest. Barring a last-minute decision by a Federal judge, Arizona cops will soon be taking that authority in an unprecedented direction.

THE KILLERS OF L.A.

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 21:17:21 GMT

From all the hoopla surrounding the arrest of the “Grim Sleeper” (so dubbed because after an unexplained hiatus he supposedly rose to kill again) one would think it marks the end of a decades-long quest to capture the city’s most murderous evildoer. Well, think again. Thanks to DNA, LAPD detectives have arrested three – that’s right, three – serial killers in the last four years, and Lonnie Franklin isn’t necessarily the most prolific.

WHAT'S MORE LETHAL THAN A GUN?

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 01:06:31 GMT

May and June were terrible months for the California Highway Patrol. On May 7 Officer David Benavides lost his life when his patrol aircraft crashed. One month later, on June 9, motorcycle officer Phillip Ortiz was on a freeway shoulder writing a ticket when he was struck by an errant vehicle; he died from his injuries two weeks later. On June 11 CHP motorcycle officer Tom Coleman was killed when he collided with a truck during a high-speed chase. On June 27 the toll reached five when two officers, Justin McGrory and Brett Oswald were struck and killed by vehicles in separate incidents, McGrory while citing a motorist and Oswald as he waited for an abandoned car to be towed.