Cops

For years I worked as police reporter for the Washington Times, spending long hours in squad cars in various cities getting to know cops well. Now I listen to nice white people in the suburbs, and self-assured voices from NPR, talking about the police. They know nothing of the world where the police work. They …

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_George_Floyds In my police-reporting days   Question: Was their anything racial in Floyd’s death? That is, is there any reason to believe that if Floyd had been a white petty criminal and drug addict,  but otherwise identical to Floyd, would Chauvin have behaved differently? Accounts differ. By some he is said to have been …

It’s funny. For the better part of a century we have had the Drug War, useful to politicians, heavily funded, but producing no results. Prices of drugs have remained about the same or gone down. Drugs are one of those things like poverty and climate change that everybody is against but that never change. The …

America does not have a race problem. It has a black problem. The other races work, meld, contribute, study, and often intermarry. Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, Lebanese. Given the huge size of the Latino influx, the low level of friction is remarkable. America is not on the brink of a racial explosion against any of the …

The system of criminal justice doesn’t work too well. A cause of this dysfunction is the notion that criminals can “pay their debt to society,” and then be all better, as if crimes were purchases made on a credit card. Say that a marginal human wielding a bolo knife crawls through a window, burglarizes the …

Chicago–The SWAT team of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police was getting ready to make a forced entry at a house belonging to dope dealers. The room filled with guys in Ninja gear-ballistic vests, pistols in tactical holsters, riot guns, what have you. SWAT operations may look spontaneous, but they aren’t. They’re planned like a football …

Cook County Jail, Chicago–They come up, one at a time, from the innards of this place, in handcuffs, sometimes in leg chains, wearing the tan pajamas that are the uniform here. The jail is huge, 9000 prisoners including 850 women, most of the population being black with some hispanics and a few whites. Most are …

Chicago–I spent the other night in the city, chatting with a cop, buddy of mine, who has seen as much of the criminal-justice system as any man I know. I don’t say he speaks for all policemen, but I think many would agree with him. Some of his comments may be of interest. “There isn’t …

Sometimes the kids get to you. I was riding with the Cook County Sheriff’s anti-gang unit sometime back. We were driving through the hopeless fourth-generation welfare towns that surround Chicago – Markham, Robbins, Ford Heights, what have you. These drab little burgs are almost entirely black, heavily dependent on public assistance of one sort or …

Chicago — When Bill Plahm of the Child Exploitation Unit of the Cook County Sheriff?s Police hands you a photo of a six-month old baby with an adult penis in its mouth, you can develop a dim view of kid porn and pedophilia. They are nasty. For Plahm, who spends his life posing as an …

It was after ten on Friday night in Arlington and I was riding with Officer Matt O’Brien and absolutely nothing was happening. Nobody was in the streets. The weather was cold. The criminals, who lack strength of character, were hiding indoors. O’Brien told me that nothing would happen until just before his shift ended, so …

Having written this column for many years now, I find myself wondering at times, “Whence?” and “Whither?” and “Wherefore?” and “To what end?” What have I gotten out of it, and what, if anything, have the readers gotten? Sure, I’m making a buck, which we all have to. But there’s more to it than that. …

Let’s see. The Puerto Rican celebration in New York turned into turned into a rape fest, and the police were denounced for not stopping it. In Philadelphia, a black shot at cops, the cops thumped him, and the NAACP sued. The rules are fairly clear by now. If white cops do anything to misbehaving minorities, …

Some months ago I wrote that cops in a lot of jurisdictions have decided that the current climate of hostility toward the police has led officers to keep their heads down — i.e., not to do anything that could result in criticism by the racial lobbies. Because this column also appears on my web site …

real-life story of the DC cops. I’m going to keep it vague because a civil suit looks probable. I was in Northwest last week with friends to celebrate a new job one of them had. After dinner for grins we went for a beer at a local girly bar. A buddy of mine, call him …

had hoped to spend the summer running columns from my recent trip to Chicago, which gives a picture of big-city policing that Washington can’t. As it happens, however, the growing racial problem, in which cops are declining to risk arresting blacks for fear of being prosecuted, has upset the apple cart. My email on the …

A country deserves what it tolerates, and will assuredly get more of it,” said my favorite political commentator (me). He has also asked, “And this is supposed to help blacks?” Across the country the rabble rampage—Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and mobs sacking stores. They are by no means all black. Whites participate in the vandalism, …

The other day I was doing some target shooting at a private range with a cop I know, and we started talking about the very common dislike of cops found throughout society. Which got me to thinking. A few observations: There is a clear difference between the sexes in attitudes toward the police. White women, …

In re race and the behavior of police: Reporters and writers of editorials seem to lunge instinctively for the superficial, preferably embodied in easily remembered buzz phrases. One such is “racial profiling.” The implication, and assumption, is that blacks are being targeted for reasons of racial hostility by the police. Generally this isn’t true. If …

Mountings. Large ones. Fog, too. We caught the seven-o’clock goat-and-chicken out of Kat, my daughter Macon and I, two porters, and our trusty guide Karna. A Nepalese rural bus is not the Stork Club. It is much better, depending on your nerves. For eight hours we bounced higher into the Himalayas with the tires a …