Tag: Crime

Ex Cons and the Workplace – JP Morgan CEO Wants More Opportunity

One in three American adults — more than 70 million people — have some type of criminal record. To put this in perspective, about the same number of Americans have college degrees right now.

Unfortunately, these Americans, who were incarcerated or have a conviction on their record, are essentially unable to secure good jobs in this country. Nearly half of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year after leaving prison. That is a moral outrage.

This group is ready to work and deserves a second chance — an opportunity to fill the millions of job openings across the country. Yet our criminal justice system continues to block them from doing so.

If You Paid Your Debt to Society, You Should Be Allowed to Work
Jamie Dimon
NYTIMES

Inmates on Dostoevsky

He gets up abruptly from the desk he’s been leaning on and lumbers over. “All right,” he says. “Let me have one of those Pall Malls.” I offer the whole pack. He takes three, puts one behind each ear, lights the other, and French-inhales the smoke in a way I haven’t seen for twenty years. “The first thing to understand about an execution,” he says, “is that it’s a ritual. You’ve heard that before, but probably only as a truism. There’s nothing cliché about an execution. It is a modern religious ritual, sanctified in the sense that everything represents something else. The executioner’s fee is the eye for the eye. The sacrifice is implicit in the fact that only one out of every hundred or so gets killed. The blood atonement is what the prisoner’s last meal symbolizes. Notice how the exact menu always gets in the newspaper story? That’s just some AP asshole, acting out a ritual he doesn’t even know is a ritual. He’s covering a communion.”

Dennis is a middle-class northerner, a black sheep who at the age of nineteen killed a man accidentally while sowing wild oats in a barnstorming through the South in the late 1950s. He wound up in Angola and lost his eye in a knife fight in which he killed an inmate, for which he received a death sentence. Like Rideau, who taught himself to read on the row, Dennis spent the 1960s reading everything from the New Republic to Dostoevsky. Everyone in this office has read Dostoevsky, in fact, and to a man they are convinced that he murdered someone during his youth. No one, they say, could have understood the psyche of a murderer that well without having tasted blood himself.

Solotaroff, Ivan. The Last Face You’ll Ever See

True Crime Stories – Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer

“It’s a fluke that he got caught because once the task force in 1993 was over, a case like that goes to the bottom of the pile. This is not one of those situations where there’s a team of detectives that are still working on it. Reality is not like that,” Green said.

Green said that because of the push and persistence from Margaret Mulcahy, the wife of victim Thomas Mulcahy, cops looked at it again. Detectives involved in the case from in New Jersey utilized a new fingerprint technology that their counterparts at the Toronto Police Department had been using.

“Toronto Police Service was using a reasonably new technology called vacuum metal deposition. Because of the relationships that the New Jersey police had with the Canadian police, they were aware of this technology and called in a favor,” Green said.

The detectives sent fingerprints they were able to lift from the victims and sent them to Canada. Toronto Police were able to look to see what fingerprints matched from their massive database. And, as luck would have it, they found a match from someone who was fingerprinted in Maine in 1973.

How the Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer Put in Focus the Dangers the New York LGBTQ+ Community Faces
Sal Bono
Inside Edition

50 Years of the War on Drugs

Hinton has lived his whole life under the drug war. He said Brownsville needed help coping with cocaine, heroin and drug-related crime that took root here in the 1970s and 1980s.

His own family was scarred by addiction.

“I’ve known my mom to be a drug user my whole entire life,” Hinton said. “She chose to run the streets and left me with my great-grandmother.”

Four years ago, his mom overdosed and died after taking prescription painkillers, part of the opioid epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Hinton said her death sealed his belief that tough drug war policies and aggressive police tactics would never make his family or his community safer.

Brian Mann
Morning Edition

Many a True Word is Spoken in Jest – Example of


The Seven Five (2014) Police Corruption in New York’s 75th Precinct from Documentaries

idgafmods
I let a friend stay at my place for a while, and he was always the funniest person. He’d joke about stabbing me sometimes (sounds weird, but it was always in jest).

A couple years ago he got locked up for murder on a DNA match, for a crime he committed just before living at my place, where he stabbed a guy to death. He basically used my place to lie low, and joked about it openly to our clueless asses.

PhantomOSX
Wow… were there any close calls or anything worth mentioning that stood out after you found out he was a murderer?

idgafmods
Not with me but my best friend definitely almost got stabbed, in hindsight. They got into a really heated debate about something, and my friend is a super hot-headed Italian. They basically came close to fighting and the stabby dude kept telling him “I’ll shank you” when they were face to face.

Nobody at the time thought it was anything but a bullshit threat that didn’t mean anything. Turns out he meant it all along!

Everyone’s gone Hollywood

After McCartin and Knolls deliver a synopsis of the case, they provide Krumer with the phone numbers for Luda’s mother and husband in Kiev. Start with the husband, Knolls tells Krumer, even though they were separated.

McCartin calls the manager of Luda’s apartment building. When he hangs up, he is chuckling. “You know the first thing the manager says?” he asks Knolls. “He asked me what the victim’s ‘backstory’ was.” “Everyone’s gone Hollywood,” Knolls says.

Corwin, Miles. Homicide Special

Unequal Justice, Example of

Judge Les Hayes once sentenced a single mother to 496 days behind bars for failing to pay traffic tickets. The sentence was so stiff it exceeded the jail time Alabama allows for negligent homicide.

Marquita Johnson, who was locked up in April 2012, says the impact of her time in jail endures today. Johnson’s three children were cast into foster care while she was incarcerated. One daughter was molested, state records show. Another was physically abused.

“Judge Hayes took away my life and didn’t care how my children suffered,” said Johnson, now 36. “My girls will never be the same.”

Fellow inmates found her sentence hard to believe. “They had a nickname for me: The Woman with All the Days,” Johnson said. “That’s what they called me: The Woman with All the Days. There were people who had committed real crimes who got out before me.”

In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.

Michael Berens And John Shiffman
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-judges-misconduct/

What is the strangest mystery that is still unsolved? – AskReddit

What is the strangest mystery that is still unsolved? from r/AskReddit

WhaddaFucc
An unknown group of people broke into an FBI building, and no one has found out who they are. But the best part of the story is, they did it by leaving a sticky note that said “Do not lock the door tonight” and it worked.

snekholstervegatale
Imagine being the guy who left it unlocked

billhilly008
I think that would be everyone that day…

zenkique
Last one out was the most rotten egg, though.

ohshawty
This is my favorite weird and barely known one:

Back in 2013 an unknown group assaulted a power substation in California. By all appearances it was pretty sophisticated: scouted firing positions, all casings wiped of prints, they targeted transformers so they’d take time to overheat before triggering any alarms, also knew exactly when the police would arrive.

No suspect or motive to this day, they also cut some fiber optic cables in a vault nearby. Conspiracy types think it was a dry run by Russia or possibly China to see how effective an attack like that might be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

CrazyDinosaurGuy
What kind of Transformers, Autobots or Decepticons?

BulkDiscountAbortion
Since the mystery was never solved, I’d say it’s the perfect Optimus Crime.

iPhone app is replacing the police notebook in New York

Why the N.Y.P.D. Dropped One of Its Oldest Crime-Fighting Tools
Officers’ most-used item since the 1800s isn’t the gun or handcuffs, but the handwritten activity log. Now an iPhone app is replacing it.

For more than a century, the New York City Police Department has required its officers to keep a detailed, handwritten memo book while on patrol.

“It’s basically our bible,” said Officer Ramses Cruz, who joined a platoon of officers writing down patrol assignments in oversize black leather binders at a recent afternoon roll call at the 90th Precinct Station House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Corey Kilgannon, NY TImes

‘Criminals and thugs have laid claim to downtown’: Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses and other Seattleites share their frustrations

I have worked on Third Avenue since 1996. During this time, I watched Third Avenue become an open-air market of drugs and stolen goods, and other criminal activities. I have witnessed shoplifting at nearly every store; stores close due to shoplifting; people defecate in the streets; people injecting heroin; and untreated addiction and mental illness cause heartbreaking misery. My suburban friends have stopped coming downtown.

Criminals and thugs have laid claim to downtown, and Durkan and Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best have done little or nothing to thwart criminal activity that I, or any other brave Seattle citizen, can witness — night or day — by walking Third Avenue between Pike and Pine.

Letters to the Editor, Seattle Times

see also:
Downtown Seattle businesses and employees scared, frustrated after latest shooting

Yet some employees and managers said these new measures would do little to address the deeper problems that have made the several-block area between Pike Street and Denny Way — an area nicknamed “The Blade” — into a magnet for criminals and drug dealers as well as people struggling with homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues. Many described a sense of powerlessness in the face of a constant presence of petty criminals who often seem to operate with impunity.

Seattle Times

You know it’s a good time to move when you get this email.

I’m out of here. 

January 19, 2020

Dear Residents:

We unfortunately must inform you of a troubling occurrence that took place in the community on Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Certain unidentified youth gained access to the community’s clubhouse for an unauthorized gathering during which gunshots were fired and one or two individuals were injured. The __Denver Police Dept. are currently conducting an investigation and if you have any information that might assist in the investigation, please contact the ___Denver Police Dept.___ at [REDACTED].

Unfortunately, crime has no zip code and is a problem that affects all communities. Awareness is one major way of deterring crime so we ask that you immediately report any criminal or suspicious activity by calling your local law enforcement agency, or by dialing 911 IN AN EMERGENCY. It is imperative that you call the police before contacting the management office, as time spent contacting the management office will only delay police response time. Only after reporting a matter to the police should you notify the management office of any incident.

Tabulating Crime, Difficulties With

The first problem with understanding crime is that measuring it is harder than it sounds. The Department of Justice approaches the problem in two ways. The F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, or U.C.R., solicits data from about twenty thousand law-enforcement agencies around the country. Simultaneously, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, or N.C.V.S., interviews about a hundred and fifty thousand nationally representative citizens, asking them whether they have been victims of a crime.

Both datasets have problems. An obvious one is that there’s no consensus about what counts as criminal activity. In some jurisdictions, only offenses worthy of incarceration are considered crimes. In others, fined infractions also count. (Is speeding a crime? What about manspreading, for which one can be fined seventy-five dollars in Los Angeles?) Because the U.C.R. draws its data from investigators, and the N.C.V.S. relies on victims, they can present starkly different pictures of crime. According to the U.C.R., the incidence of rape nearly doubled from 1973 to 1990. The N.C.V.S., by contrast, shows that it declined by around forty per cent during the same period. Researchers at Vanderbilt University looked into the discrepancy; they found that the upward trend in the U.C.R. data correlated with upticks in the number of female police officers, and with the advent of rape crisis centers and reformed investigative styles. It could be, in short, that a modernized approach to the policing of rape drastically increased the frequency with which it was reported while reducing its incidence. But coherent stories like these only sometimes emerge from the conflicting data.

Matthew Hutson, New Yorker

Sentencing Reform in Oklahoma

TAFT, Okla. — Julie Faircloth walked out of an Oklahoma prison near the head of a line of nearly 70 women who were freed on Monday, as part of one of the largest single-day releases of prisoners in the nation’s history.

They were greeted by screams of joy from relatives who had gathered outside the prison, a minimum-security facility southeast of Tulsa. Hugging first her mother, then her husband, Ms. Faircloth, 28, said she was overwhelmed. “I can’t even put words to it,” she said.

Across Oklahoma on Monday, 462 inmates doing time for drug possession or similar nonviolent crimes had their sentences commuted as the first step in an effort by state officials to shed the title of the nation’s incarceration capital.

 

Voters forced the hand of Oklahoma lawmakers in 2016 when, by a wide margin, they approved a plan to shrink prison rolls by downgrading many felonies to misdemeanors, including simple drug possession and minor property crimes.

Nearly 500 Prisoners Freed on a Single Day
Oklahoma has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates, but a law downgrading minor crimes is the first step in an effort to change that.
Kristi Eaton and Richard A. Oppel Jr.
NY Times