I can’t stand Michael Bloomberg. I don’t intend to vote for him, and regard his entry into the presidential race as a net loss for liberty and justice. That said, I also think that some of what’s been said in criticism of him is confused, and in some cases downright childish. Unfortunately, this is particularly true of the policy that most obviously redounds to Bloomberg’s discredit: stop and frisk. If we’re going to nail Bloomberg on stop and frisk, we need to get the issue right, or at least avoid getting it wrong. But “we” haven’t. Continue reading
Tag Archives: crime
Colleagues, Tramps, and Thieves
A colleague of mine went to India over Christmas break, and gifted me a box of Indian sweets–laddu, barfi, and the like. I gluttonously consumed two-thirds of the box a few minutes after receiving the gift. I then put the box in the fridge of our faculty lounge, thinking I’d eat the rest the next day. I open the fridge just now, and it’s gone. And no, it can’t be a mistake. So yeah, it was stolen–as in theft, larceny, crime. It was in a distinctive gift box, and was virtually the only thing in the fridge. And it had to have been stolen by a faculty member, because the door to the lounge has a combination lock known (or presumably known) only to faculty. I guess Maintenance has access as well, but I simply don’t believe Maintenance would do something like this.
What manner of depravity is this? What kind of colleagues would steal a gift out of the faculty lounge–at a Franciscan school? Is nothing sacred?
MLK: “Believe Women,” Rape, and the Worst-Case Scenario
Yesterday, I wrote a post arguing that the supposedly woke slogan “Believe Women” has some odd implications for the recent Sanders-Warren controversy. It implies that we should believe Elizabeth Warren’s accusation that Sanders is a sexist, or at least presume his guilt until he can conclusively prove his innocence. Because I take this consequence to be a reductio, I take “Believe Women” to be an absurdity. Put charitably, the original, unqualified version of the slogan has to be modified. Put uncharitably, it has to be rejected. To split the difference, it requires a bit of both. Continue reading
Notes on the Jersey City Shooting (2)
In an earlier post, I took issue with the widespread but premature tendency to “link” the recent Jersey City shooting to the Black Hebrew Israelite (or Black Israelite) movement. From what I’ve read, the tendency takes the form of inflating the shooters’ interest in the group into a “link to” the group (suggesting something like membership), the implication being that the group’s ideology helps explain the shooters’ motivations, hence explains the shooting (suggesting something like complicity by the group itself).
Statement on the Jersey City Shooting
We’re still reeling here from the Jersey City shooting, along with the string of anti-Semitic attacks that have come in its wake–eight nine in the last few weeks,* and then another one yesterday. Here’s a nice statement from Jersey-area religious leaders of various faiths. I wish there was a secular one going around, but I don’t think there is. If anyone hears of one, please mention it.
*I miscounted. Eight of the attacks were in New York City (excluding the Jersey City attack); adding the Jersey City attack makes nine. The Monsey attack makes ten.
The Guardian Angels: High Noon in Brooklyn
Diligent readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of Curtis Sliwa and his much-maligned organization, the Guardian Angels. So, depressing as the recent rash of anti-Semitic attacks in the NYC metro area has been, I was pleased to encounter this item online (ht: Chris Santo):
The Guardian Angels, a private, unarmed crime-prevention group, said it would start patrolling New York City’s Brooklyn borough on Sunday following a series of anti-Semitic attacks.
Curtis Sliwa, who founded the organization in 1979 in New York City, said the patrols would start at noon in the Crown Heights neighborhood and expand to Williamsburg and Borough Park later in the day.
There’s a lot of bad blood between the Guardian Angels and the NYPD, and between the Angels and the press, or at least the left-leaning press. A huge heap of horseshit has been written about the “vigilante” character of the Guardian Angels, or going to the other extreme, about its hapless ineffectiveness as a crime fighting organization. It all seems pointless to me. I don’t get the hostility. Continue reading
“Imprisoning a Generation”: Film Screening and Discussion (Montclair, NJ)
Notes on the Jersey City Shooting
I’ve held off on commenting on the recent anti-Semitic shooting in Jersey City, partly because I’m too overloaded with grading to comment intelligently, and partly because the facts are too sparse for comment. But confusions have already crept into mainstream reporting on the subject. Here is The New York Times. Continue reading
Police Tailgating and Entrapment Revisited
Since I’ve been revisiting so many things lately, and Roderick just posted his PPE presentation from last year (which I missed), I figured I’d revisit the topic of police tailgating and entrapment that I mentioned here last year. Down below is the (alas, rejected) abstract proposal I sent to the forthcoming PPE conference. Below the abstract, I’ve pasted a few interesting cases I’ve recently encountered of what I take to be entrapment on my account of it.
I gave an earlier version of the tailgating paper this past July at the NASSP conference in San Francisco, where it was mostly met with puzzlement. The main objection from the audience was that my account of entrapment-by-intimidation was, in some sense, too revisionary to count as entrapment. Police tailgating to induce a moving violation was, most people granted, a due process injustice of some kind–just not a case of entrapment. I was surprised to encounter a small handful of people who didn’t think that police tailgating was either entrapment or a due process injustice of any kind. But I guess weirdos like that are what conferences are for. Continue reading
Nozick, State, and Reparations
Talk of reparations has come back into common currency in American political discourse–meaning reparations to African Americans for the wrongs done to them since the beginnings of slavery. I don’t have a fully considered view on reparations (many of the arguments both for and against strike me as one-eyed), but I’ve both been surprised (and in another sense, not surprised) to hear libertarians insist so adamantly that libertarianism rules out reparations. Anyone who thinks this owes it to himself to read or re-read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, if not cover to cover, then through the end of Part I, as I did on a recent plane ride. Continue reading
