Police

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.

Police must investigate every theft. This is the message from the Home Secretary as the government heralds an agreement from all 43 police forces in England and Wales to follow up on any evidence where there is a ‘reasonable line of enquiry’. In practice, that means the police should investigate low-level crimes such as stolen bikes, phones and shoplifting when there is reasonable lead such as a GPS tracker, CCTV footage or a doorbell video. As I noted earlier this month in a cover piece for the magazine, ‘investigate every crime’ doesn’t sound like a particularly novel concept. It raises the question: Why weren’t police investigating every theft? Over the past few years, forces – including the Metropolitan Police – have largely given up on low-level crime.

The data breach at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which has seen the personal details of all serving officers and just under 2,500 civilian staff accidentally released as part of a response to a Freedom of Information request, is the sort of grotesque, IT foul-up normally reserved for the realms of satire like The Thick of It.  There is a slim chance that any officers in the Province will be laughing. The attempted murder of DCI John Caldwell in front of his young son in Fermanagh earlier this year underlined acutely that dissident republicans hellbent on killing police officers ‘haven’t gone away you know’, to quote Gerry Adams.

In a few weeks’ time, police across the country will receive a new order: ‘Investigate every crime’. It may not sound like a novel concept, but over the past few years forces – including the Metropolitan Police – have largely given up on low-level crime. Austerity was seen as a reason to ignore burglaries, thefts and minor assaults if officers believed there was little chance of identifying a suspect. But now a new theory is about to be put into practice: that investigations will lead not just to more convictions, but to more deterrence.

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.