Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts

Marijuana Legalization: Bad For The Cartels, Better For All

by Hillary Bricken.        Marijuana legalization has already led to many benefits in the United States, ranging from increased tax revenues to decreased cannabis use by minors. Marijuana legalization is also putting a dent into what the Department of Justice calls the “greatest organized crime threat to the United States,” the Mexican drug cartels.    ... MORE

There’s No Evidence Of A ‘New Nationwide Crime Wave’

by Radley Balko.    Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute posited that we are in the throes of a “new nationwide crime wave.” She blamed the chorus of police reform advocates and critics of police brutality since the Ferguson protest last summer. She claimed the criticism and efforts to hold police    ... MORE

Dreadful Criminal Justice System Destroyed Kalief Browder

by Scott Schackford.   Elizabeth Nolan Brown linked to a piece at The New Yorker this morning about the suicide of Kalief Browder, 22, who spent three years at Rikers Island, often stuck in solitary confinement, without ever seeing a trial. The journalist, Jennifer Gonnerman, originally dove deep into Browder's case back in October, and it's worthy  ... MORE

The Department Of Homeland Security Just Dumped 3,700 Illegal Immigrant ‘Threat Level 1’ Criminals In Our Streets

by Stephen Dinan.    Most of the illegal immigrant criminals Homeland Security officials released from custody last year were discretionary, meaning the department could have kept them in detention but chose instead to let them onto the streets as their deportation cases moved through the system, according to new numbers from Congress.    ... MORE

VIDEO: Why Libertarianism Is So Dangerous

Thomas Sowell: Paying The Price

Imposing kinder, gentler policing.    Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters. Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double  ... MORE

Radley Balko: The Ongoing Criminalization Of Poverty

Many police departments have inappropriate goals. A series of reports over the last few weeks have shed more light on the increasingly predatory enforcement of misdemeanors across the country, and how this trend disproportionately hurts the poor. The first report comes from an area familiar to readers of The Watch — St. Louis County,      ... MORE

John W. Whitehead: The Government Is On The Warpath

Time for ‘We the People’ to circle the wagons.     In an age of overcriminalization, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do. Yet it used to be “we the people” telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the         ... MORE

Radley Balko: The Increasing Isolation Of America’s Police

How did it get to us versus them.   Politico has put up a fascinating profile of Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which is the country’s largest police union. More than anything, the profile highlights how law enforcement is politically positioned in a way that basically immunizes them from criticism and oversight.      ... MORE

In A Politically Correct World, The Bible Is Hate Speech

by Mike Masterson.  I'm not interested today in unleashing yet another onslaught of name-calling and who-can-outslander-whom. We see plenty of that destructive behavior swirling around us. But the way I see it in this grossly politicized, increasingly divided country we've allowed to manifest, the following issue raises a question that must be asked and     ... MORE

Entitled To Loot: Why Are There Riots In Baltimore?

by Michael Hurd.    Nothing happens in a vacuum. It’s easy enough to call the rioters in Baltimore “thugs;” and it’s entirely true. But when they take the actions they do, they are acting on ideas. Personally, they are acting on their own impulses and emotions. But even their own, thuggish, range-of-the-moment impulses and emotions rest on ideas.     ... MORE

FBI Lies May Have Led To Execution of 14 Innocent People

The Washington Post reports:  The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s   … MORE

Jacob Sullum: Walter Scott Shooting Highlights Cops’ Contempt For The Citizen's Right to Record Police

Harassing camera-carrying bystanders needs to stop.  Even before it became clear that Feidin Santana was witnessing what local authorities now describe as a murder, it took guts for him to record the police encounter that ended in Walter Scott's death. Santana, who was walking to work at a barbershop in North Charleston, South       ... MORE

George Will: When Everything Is A Crime

Congress has work to undo.   What began as a trickle has become a stream that could become a cleansing torrent. Criticisms of the overcriminalization of American life might catalyze an appreciation of the toll the administrative state is taking on the criminal justice system, and liberty generally. In 2007, professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law   ... MORE
  

Walter E Williams: Selma And Voting Rights

Today's problem not about discrimination.  March 7th was the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the first attempt by black protesters to march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery to demand voting rights. Their march was brutally halted by Alabama state troopers acting under the orders of Gov. George Wallace. The protesters weren't     ... MORE