Monday, December 01, 2008

Stuff to read while I'm busy

While I'm focused elsewhere today, let me point readers to several stories I'd blog about in more detail if I had more time:

Creative sentencing
The Rockwall Herald Banner recently published a column by a local attorney on creative sentencing practices, their benefits and limits.

Gone to the dogs
The Houston Chronicle has a feature on dogfighting and a new PR campaign by the Houston PD aimed at combating it.

Extra credit
Student internships at the local jail?

Snitch rules
The ACLU Blog of Rights not long ago published a blog post on several interesting subjects related to informants and snitching, including a discussion of " Pearson v. Callahan [which] presents the question of whether the Fourth Amendment is violated when police enter a home without a warrant after an informant inside signals to police that a crime, usually a drug deal, is taking place." See the group's friend of the court brief on the case.

Broken windows
At Reason magazine we see what may be the strongest empirical evidence yet arguing in favor of the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention.

A murdered reporter and the case for open-sourced intelligence
The murder of a crime reporter in Juarez, reported by the Dallas News Crime Blog, reinforces my sense that law enforcement needs to change strategies and utilize "open-sourced" intelligence to combat drug cartel violence. After all, the journalist was killed for reporting information that, for the most part, is already known to the government.

Girls not gone so wild
Also from the Dallas News Crime Blog, we discover that fewer girls were arrested last year than a decade ago, a trend that flies in the face of recent media coverage.

More East Texas jail building
Harrison County's Sheriff is telling commissioners they have no choice but to build additional jail space.

See also excellent recent blog coverage at The Back Gate and at the newly redesigned Defending People.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd love to see some statistical analysis of how girls and women are arrested - specifically how many men arrest how many women. In Galveston this summer two male officers (one was Aaron Ausmus) collaborated with a Police News photographer to do a "photo shoot" of their arrest of a woman. This included pictures of the male officers handcuffing the woman outside (while she was wearing only underwear-like nightdress) - staged for the camera. It had the feel of soft core pornography. There were many gleeful pictures of the officers. One picture of the woman's handcuffed hands from behind was captioned "criminal jewelery."
Here's a link:
http://www.galvestonpolicenews.com/screenprint.cfm?newsletterid=10864

As you all know, there have been problems in the past where women are harrassed by male officers.

Anonymous said...

Sorry - here's a clickable link:
Here's
a link to the police news piece, which I found really distasteful and disrespectful