Police

Last week, the Dearborn Heights Police Department revealed the nation’s first-ever officer uniform patch featuring Arabic script. It was designed by a policewoman named Emily Murdoch, and on first glance it might look like a gesture of inclusivity. But is this really progress – or it it, in fact, a sign of cultural fragmentation?As an Iraqi-American Muslim, I feel compelled to answer. I came to the United States after Iraq was swallowed by Iranian-backed militias and sectarian violence. I know exactly what happens when identity politics becomes the organizing principle of civic life. And the last thing I ever wanted to see in America is the export of that same toxic culture – one that thrives on division, preferential treatment and symbolic displays of power.

The first time I worked alongside the California Highway Patrol’s Dignitary Protection Section was in Beverly Hills in the late 1990s. Think swimming pools and movie stars. The setting could have been a Hollywood caricature of itself: manicured hedges, a mansion where priceless Old World paintings hung in the hallways, and a guest list that ran from President Clinton to Barbara Streisand. The rest is appropriately redacted. I was a new Secret Service agent then still learning the art of protection, but amid the clinking glasses and camera flashes, what struck me most wasn’t the celebrities. It was the calm professionalism of the CHP officers beside me.

President Trump has once again identified a critical national need: this time, it is the desperate plea for backup from overwhelmed local police, particularly in large metropolitan areas.  Under the Home Rule Act, the President possesses clear statutory authority to exercise at least temporary law enforcement authority over the nation’s capital city by federalizing the Washington D.C. police force and deploying 800 National Guard troops. The city’s own crime statistics depict a municipality raging out of control. Homicide rates have doubled in the last ten years. Washington, D.C. is one of the fifty most dangerous cities in the world and the fourth most dangerous city in the nation.

Donald Trump's press conference announcing a federal takeover of Washington, DC's police force was packed to the gills with White House reporters – many of whom live in DC and the surrounding area, and are more than familiar with the degradation of law and order in the region. But just because they know it's bad doesn't mean they want to give Trump any credit for trying to clean up the city – in fact, they're likely to attack the move from both sides. The ramifications of Trump's takeover, under Section 740's emergency rule, will have undetermined ripple effects in the capital city, but the initial reaction to it illustrates the difficult position in which it puts the president's critics.

Worldwide unrest is great for those in the riot-gear business. Shields and batons have historically cornered the market as the cutting edge in crowd control, but in recent years it’s evolved to include robots, armored trucks and drones. Milipol Paris is the homeland security expo of all expos. This is the kind of giant showroom where you will find law enforcement and private security agents checking out the newest innovations in robot dogs, armored vehicles and unmanned turrets as if they’re going from painting to painting at the Louvre. The Milipol expo comes around every two years. In 2023, you would have seen men plugged into VR headsets killing terrorists with a pistol.

So far this year, Philadelphia has seen more than two shootings a day. Among the statistics was a local rapper known as Phat Geez. Here’s the message in his song “No Gunzone”: “Killings all up in my city / Can’t get enough of it / Facing all of these problems / I cannot run from it.” Derrick Gant was his real name. Dead at twenty-eight. So now comes Cherelle Parker, only a few months into her first term as Philly’s Democratic mayor, trying to plug the dike against a flood of lawlessness. Looking across her native city, she says that too much of what she sees is never OK, no matter concerns, including hers, about “root causes.

There are probably better ways to start your fifteen-hour work shift than to hear the words: “Fire at the Renton Avenue gas station. Pump still leaking fuel. Possible injuries. Attend scene immediately.”  That was the stark dispatch that came over the radio of the King County Sheriff’s car driven by thirty-two-year-old Deputy Cy Brame, one of 720 law enforcement officers who serve the needs of half a million people living in the sprawling unincorporated areas around Seattle. I recently joined him on a characteristically drizzly early March afternoon on his beat behind the wheel of a black Ford Interceptor SUV. “You’re lucky,” said Deputy Brame, with a thin smile. “The last ride-along I had was here all day without an emergency.

A leading Republican candidate hoping to be selected for the special election to fill George Santos’s seat is currently settling a class-action lawsuit in California for unpaid wages — at least the second lawsuit for wage violations brought against his company in recent years. Mike Sapraicone, the owner of international security company Squad Security, was accused by two men of violating wage and other laws, according to a 2022 lawsuit. The lawsuit, not previously reported, is the latest revelation to emerge about Long Island’s Sapraicone, amid national scrutiny over how well candidates will be vetted by the Nassau GOP in the district, on the heels of Santos’s year-long scandal and criminal allegations.

A few weeks before Easter, a staffer for Republican senator Rand Paul was randomly and brutally attacked in downtown Washington, DC. The staffer, Phillip Todd, was leaving dinner with his friend when an assailant stabbed him four times in the abdomen, skull, brain and lungs. He suffered a punctured lung and potential brain bleeding. Todd was rushed to hospital, where he was operated on and ultimately survived the attack.   The man who stabbed Todd is a forty-two-year-old named Glynn Neal. Like many of DC’s violent criminals, Neal has a lengthy rap sheet. Virginians for Safe Communities, a nonprofit organization, detailed the man’s long history of criminal behavior.

The National Park Service cleared a major homeless encampment in downtown Washington, DC on Wednesday, a move that eased local residents and infuriated activists. McPherson Square, located just blocks from the White House, has been effectively cordoned off from the rest of the public since the proliferation of the tent city during the pandemic. The Spectator was the first to report in December that the NPS would start enforcing its no camping policy on park land in the nation’s capital. Signs went up around McPherson Square last month warning the inhabitants of the tent city that they would be removed on February 15.

Racism has become an unfalsifiable proposition. Such is the central take-away from the race industry’s tortured reaction to a brutal police beating in Memphis, Tennessee. Five Memphis officers responded to what was initially reported as a car driving the wrong way down a street. The officers’ tactics during the stop of driver Tyre Nichols, captured on video, were an abomination: while shouting contradictory commands, the officers immediately escalated their use of force without apparent cause. It was Nichols who tried to deescalate the chaos — a responsibility usually put on officers, not on suspects. The cops struggled without coordination to cuff him, while delivering gratuitous kicks, punches to the face and baton strikes.

When, oh, when will the United States catch up with Iran? Those bearded, bomb-building, Koran-quoting clerics — we underestimate them at our peril. They know enough, the ayatollahs, to get rid of their morality police who have for decades subverted Iranian civic life, as they've reportedly done this week after protests in that country continued. The morality police in Iran were known for harassing Iranians — women especially — who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Islamic purity. Yet when the morality cops apparently killed a young women for her gall in showing too much hair, public protests erupted. Morality is one thing, persecution is another, as the ayatollahs appear to have figured out. Morality requiring visible and painful enforcement can’t be sustained.

As grown up as I felt at nine, whenever my parents let me walk to school, the corner store or Prospect Park with friends, I’d have been lying through my teeth if I denied sometimes feeling afraid — even in the little slice of Brooklyn I called home. But it wasn’t the New York Police Department or endemic racism that made me anxious. In the 1990s, getting mugged or beaten up in my own neighborhood always felt like more than a remote possibility. That sense of wariness was dull and could easily be forgotten if I was distracted. But it was always there, just under the surface. That anxiety disappeared when we moved to a mostly white town in suburban Long Island. At school, no one looked like me.

There are two ways to think about Chicago. The depressing one is to follow the news. These days it’s pretty bad. In mid-May, two people were killed and seven wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd outside a McDonald’s restaurant on the Near North Side. I know the McDonald’s well. I went to high school nearby, and my three children attended the elementary school across the street. Once scruffy, the area is now affluent. Overlooking the murder site is a seventy-five-story tower where condos sell for up to $6.1 million. The building’s developer described the shootings as “isolated to [that] location.” If only. In fact, it was the tenth mass shooting in the city this year, CBS News Chicago reported.

The calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.