"America's largest open-air mental hospital," that's how Oceanside police spokesman Bob George described this run-down coastal city between Camp Pendleton and the surfer towns of North San Diego County. I called it the Slum by the Sea. Despite the miles of beach and the beautiful old Spanish mission and the Southern California weather, Oceanside was a honky tonk Marine Corps town on the west side of Interstate 5 and a sprawling mess of trailer parks and starter-home suburbs to the east.
I spent a lot of time at Bob's desk in the back of the OPD headquarters. Sometimes it was as a police beat reporter, sometimes it was as the [...]
In the saga of the Miami Beach cop shoot-out fiesta that took place on Memorial Day, during one of the country's biggest African-America party weekends, at which cops shot a driver they said had a gun, injuring bystanders and arresting witnesses: here is an eyewitness videotape that is really wild! I would describe the incidents in the last third of this tape as incredibly bad, what with the cops pointing guns and screaming at innocent eyewitnesses, and "incredibly bad" is really saying something, as the video begins with a full-on barrage of gunfire.
There's a million dollars in New York City cop cars just sitting in Jersey, after the big airport security plan sort of fell apart (shock), and the tabloids are hopped up about it. But anyone who lives withing two blocks of a precinct house can tell you that's the tip of the 9/11 money influx iceberg. They've like, run out of places to store cop cars. Also, anyone who's seen one of those extremely annoying "terror parades" that involve like 10 cruisers going up Sixth Ave at rush hour with their sirens on… to nowhere. Oh, gosh, jeez, there so many cars! Won't someone say something? (Over the weekend [...]
"A candlelight vigil is planned to remember the life of a bull elk that was shot and killed by an on-duty Boulder police officer who has since been placed on administrative leave." —Apparently it's no longer okay for cops to murder an elk that was peacefully hanging around.
The New York Times thinks it maybe saw something… so it's saying something. In a Sunday afternoon post titled "Video Appears to Show Wall Street Protesters Being Pepper-Sprayed," the paper's City Room blog embedded a video—originally posted by YouTube user USLAWdotcom—and offered a delicate take on the proceedings.
I can't help but feel giddy schadenfreudeish glee that the Italian PD has suffered a major blow to their unctuous swagger since their obscenely expensive 200 mph Lambo Gallardo got smithereened by a Seat, a Spanish car that's basically a toy Audi. And the ill dork Easter egg has to be that the design director at Seat is Luc Donckerwolke, who used to work at Lamborghini and DESIGNED THE GALLARDO. I know! Circles rule. Man, "Jersey Shore" better NOT get cancelled because now I'm pumped.
NYPD honcho Ray Kelly lost his minnnnnnd last night. He appears to think that not enough poor and/or black people are out in the streets demanding more stop and frisk, so that there will allegedly be fewer murders and shootings right now. Stop and frisk in New York City already engages about 3/4 of a million people this year—and it would have pretty much "zero" effect on how there were 16 murders in New York in the course of five days earlier this month. (Also, of those murders, three were mothers killing their children, and one was a crazed stabber shot by transit cops.)
"Two policemen are recovering after they were shot by fellow officers as they tried to arrest a man on child pornography charges outside a crowded move theatre.
"The incident happened as undercover officers tried to apprehend the unarmed man in the parking lot as he left a screening of Harry Potter in Plainville, Connecticut." —SEO DREAM CRIME. DID SOMEONE INCEPT THIS???
Pop quiz: what's America's seventh-largest metropolitan area and also its number-one most crazy? Here's a story, though, as these sort of things generally are, it's a bit impenetrable. The distilled version: Miami's police chief agreed to let the department star in a docusoap pilot about the hot and steamy life of cops in the City. But then he saw a cut of it, and saw that it was totally crazy—and learned it was produced by the Mayor's son!—and withdrew his participation. What a good guy! Except that was all lies, as his emails later proved. He had already known that the Mayor's son had recused himself from the [...]
