Category: Policing

Police Officer Injuries Increase and Officer Numbers Decrease

by · Apr 26, 2021 3:04 pm

Many police officers are hanging up their hats and some major city police departments are faced with serious understaffing with no real end in sight. CNN has this story on the gross understaffing of the Capitol Police, “Capitol Police Union Chairman Gus Papathanasiou said in a statement Saturday that the Capitol Police is staffed below its authorized level by 233 officers and could face larger staffing shortages as officers retire in the coming years.” The Chairman goes on to explain this understaffing in only exacerbated by the injuries sustained by officers during the January 6th riot. The NY Times published this article about the riot at the Capital that resulted, “In one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At least 138 officers —73 from Capitol Police and 65 from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington — were injured.” These are horrifically high numbers, yet there is little discussion about how to proceed in such a manner that our officers who are there to serve and protect our communities are given the tools to succeed; whether that be training, more officers, and/or improved response. 

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Let’s End Police Traffic Stops!

by · Apr 23, 2021 11:42 am

This week’s stupid idea award goes out to New York State Attorney General Letitia James who is calling for an end of police involvement in traffic enforcement.  This, of course, is in response to nationally publicized video of Daunte Wright, a black teenager,  being accidently shot by a white Minneapolis Police Officer on April 11 as he tried to drive away from a traffic stop.  For the galactically ignorant, this incident proves the narrative that white police officers use traffic stops to kill innocent black people.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald has this piece in today’s Wall Street Journal discussing why this idea wins the award.  Instead of having police make traffic stops, “the thinking goes, unarmed civilian traffic agents and speeding cameras should enforce the rules of the road.”  She notes that Oakland and Berkeley, CA, Lansing, Mich, and DC are already on board.   A 2000 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that “neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime.”   In Oakland, “nearly 60% of fatalities and serious injuries occur on only 6% of the city’s streets, overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods….Traffic deaths were up 22% in Oakland in 2020.  Most of the victims were black.”

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White House Fanning Racial Hate, Part ll

by · Apr 22, 2021 10:32 am

Sometimes ridicule does a better job of destruction than a frontal attack can hope to do.  I found that out today as Charles Cooke from the National Review mercilessly lampoons the White House’s idiotic response to a white police officer’s preventing the stabbing death of a black teenage girl by shooting her assailant (which was the only practical alternative he had).

Cooke’s piece is titled, “In Defense of Teenage Knife Fighting,” with the subtitle, “Since when do we need the cops to intervene in the recreational stabbings of our youth?”

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White House Fans Racial Hate with a Pack of Lies

by · Apr 21, 2021 4:09 pm

When the Columbus, Ohio police yesterday fatally shot a black teenager, the White House promptly labelled the action racist.  Only one thing:  The teenager they shot was in the immediate act of knifing another teenager, also black, as plainly shown on the bodycam.  It takes only minimal imagination to envision what the White House would have said if the police had not prevented the imminent, probably fatal stabbing:  “President Biden deplores that white police in Columbus, Ohio idly looked on as an innocent black teenager was violently killed.  Racist policing must end.”

When trashing the police and fomenting racial hate is your thing, the truth might need to get shoved aside, but you can always think of something. Continue reading . . .

A Tale of Two Cities (and Five More)

by · Apr 15, 2021 2:10 pm

“Murders soared as police ‘pulled back’ amid 2020 protests in major cities, report finds”  is the title of today’s story on Fox News.

Declining police involvement and arrests in the wake of protests that began in the summer of 2020 have been linked to a record number of murders in the country’s major cities, according to a recent analysis….The Unites States saw more than 20,000 murders last year – approximately 4,000 more than in 2019 and the highest number of murders nationwide since 1995 – as law enforcement “pulled back,” according to the report.

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No Charges for Officer in Capitol Riot Shooting

by · Apr 14, 2021 2:29 pm

Sadie Gurman reports for the WSJ:

The police officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol won’t face federal criminal charges in connection with her death, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
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“Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution,” the Justice Department said in a statement announcing the closure of its probe. Continue reading . . .

Perceptions of Police Shootings of Black Men

by · Apr 13, 2021 3:21 pm

A police shooting of a black man  —  clearly unjustified in this instance  —  and the reaction to it, are once again in the news.  The nature and extent of the reaction got me curious about what people actually believe about the frequency of such episodes.

As it happens, this has been studied.  The Skeptic Research Center found that, among people who view themselves as “very liberal,” more than half think the number of unarmed black people killed by the police in one year (2019) was roughly 1000 if not more.  Almost eight percent of that cohort thought the number was in excess of 10,000.

How close is that to the truth?

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Government Liability for Rights Violations

by · Apr 8, 2021 4:33 pm

(Updated April 9.) New Mexico this week enacted a bill regarding liability of public bodies for rights violations by the bodies or their officers. Despite the headline and lead sentence of this WSJ article, there are important features of this bill that make it very different from the repeal of qualified immunity that is being pressed by the anti-law-enforcement crowd around the country. Continue reading . . .

NYPD cop-killer is now helping reform the police in New York

by · Mar 29, 2021 8:38 pm

The title of this post is the headline of a mind-boggling story from New York.  The gist is in the first two paragraphs:

He fatally shot an NYPD cop execution-style decades ago in a Queens bar — and now Richard Rivera is helping reform police in upstate New York as part of a state-mandated plan launched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The cop-killer — who murdered off-duty officer and father-of-four Robert Walsh in 1981 — sits on a panel for Ithaca and Tompkins County as part of its “Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative.’’

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Covid-19 and Economic Hardship are not Responsible for Spike in Murder Rates

by · Mar 25, 2021 1:17 pm

A blog post by Hans Bader of Liberty Unyielding presents a comparison between the United States and Latin America in response to the notion that the rise in homicide rates in 2020 is a result of the pandemic and citizens being desperate for means to support themselves. Bader notes, “In reality, murder rates fell in much of the world during the pandemic. People’s situation was far more desperate in Latin America, where the pandemic left many people without adequate food, yet murder did not increase in many Latin American nations.”  While in the United States homicides greatly increased in many major cities.

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