A settlement has been reached in Stinson v. City of New York, a class-action lawsuit seeking damages against the City for for making the quality of life for blacks and Latinos suck so that the quality of life in the good neighborhoods wouldn’t.

New York City has agreed to pay up to $75 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit that accused its Police Department of issuing hundreds of thousands of criminal summonses that were later found to be without legal justification, according to a signed copy of the proposed deal filed on Monday.

The summonses had been issued for typically minor offenses, like disorderly conduct, trespassing and drinking in public — quality-of-life concerns that had been a major theme of policing in New York for two decades or so.

The link is to Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s “quality of life” initiative, but this was all the rage back when Giuliani was mayor and Bratton was still police chief the first time, before Rudy fired him for being more popular than he was. Continue reading →

Nair Rodriguez has damn good reason to be angry and emotional. Her husband, Luis, was killed by police in front of her and her daughter, in Moore, Oklahoma.

The underlying facts of this killing, which never made “big” news at the time, were sadly pedestrian.

Luis, age 44, his wife Nair, and their then 19-year-old daughter, Luinahi, went to the movie theatre and together watched a movie, Robocop. The theatre served alcohol and although there were security officers working at the theatre (two off-duty game warden officers and one off-duty Moore police officer), local Moore police were summoned because of intoxicated patrons in the theatre.

However, Luis and Nair were not the intoxicated patrons. The autopsy revealed no alcohol in Luis’ bloodstream. Rather, in the parking lot of the theatre, Nair and her daughter had a dispute and Nair slapped her daughter. In fact, in the video you can hear Nair telling the officer that their daughter “has been treating us like crap” and that she was the one who had slapped her.

Continue reading →

Anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the wild west of campus sexual assault hysteria would know that the study by David Lisak was utterly, thoroughly, totally debunked. And, for a brief shining moment, it disappeared from the dialogue, relegated to the trash bin of “fake news.”

It’s back. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Stephanie Saul, takes the lead in resurrecting the myth:

For several years, researchers have been fiercely debating how many campus rapes are committed by serial offenders. A 2002 study based on surveys of 1,882 college men and published in Violence and Victims, an academic journal, found that as many as 63 percent of those who admitted to behaviors that fit the definition of rape or attempted rape said they had engaged in those behaviors more than once.

But in 2015, a study of 1,642 men at two different colleges was published in JAMA Pediatrics and found that while a larger number of men admitted to behaviors that constituted rape, a smaller percentage of them, closer to 25 percent, were repeat offenders.

Continue reading →

The posts at Fault Lines are, ahem, exceptional. If you want something to read that will really make you think, read Fault Lines. This is what you’ll find there today:

By Thomas Johnson:
SHOULD THE POLICE BE LEFT TO DECIDE WHO’S “PRESS”?

By David Meyer-Lindenberg:
ACLU TO COPS: TURN OFF THE BODY CAMS (UPDATE)

By Noel Erinjeri:
LOUISIANA’S BLUE LIVES MATTER LAW DOES NOT MEAN WHAT CALDER HEBERT THINKS IT MEANS

By Mario Machado:
SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS SUED FOR AIDING AND ABETTING ATTACK ON DALLAS COPS

By Sam Bieler:
IS POLICE REFORM OVER WITH AG SESSIONS? ONLY FOR COWARDS

By Lou Hayes, Jr.:
GETTING PAST THE CULT OF COMPLIANCE

You will not find smarter, more provocative, more informative criminal law commentary anywhere.

Actually, the phrase “alternative facts” got a bad rap. Period. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a “fact” is:

• 1:  a thing done: such asa obsolete :  feat

  b :  crime <accessory after the fact>c archaic :  action

• 2archaic :  performance, doing

• 3:  the quality of being actual :  actuality <a question of fact hinges on evidence>

• 4a :  something that has actual existence <space exploration is now a fact>

  b :  an actual occurrence <prove the fact of damage>

• 5:  a piece of information presented as having objective reality <These are the hard facts of the case.>

There are things that are susceptible to objective proof. such as whether there are five objects on a table or not. And then, there are things that are not susceptible to objective proof, such as whether there is a god. Continue reading →

There was a glorious Women’s March on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was glorious because it happened, an exercise of the right to assemble, to present grievances, to challenge the government. It was glorious because so many women, men too, turned out.

Whether they knew the mission of the March isn’t really that important. Even if it was merely to show support for their gender, it’s a perfectly sufficient reason. And if you didn’t agree, so what? They don’t need your approval to march or to express their views, whatever they may be. Nobody forced you to go, though some children might have been corralled into being props.

There was silliness, as one might expect, such as writing “messages” to no one on tampons. And someone complained about women being forced to purchase tampons when men get razors for free. Continue reading →

According to respectable journalists, President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, beclowned himself already. Not by the ill-fitting suit he wore, but by declaring that the inauguration drew the “”largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Granted, the pathological grandiosity has grown tiresome, even if it makes for fun internet memes. Nobody, obviously, is buying.

Oh, wait. That was the Women’s March. My bad. Continue reading →

Some worthless nobody named Richard Spencer* has caught public imagination because he espouses outrageous and repugnant things. In other times, he would be ignored, as there are and always have been nutjobs who say outrageous and repugnant things. They amount to nothing. They are unworthy of our time and attention. As my pal, Mark Bennett, says, attention is currency. Don’t waste it.

But Spencer stood on a street in Washington, D.C. and, inexplicably, someone put a camera in front of his face and asked him questions. During the course of the interview, someone sucker punched him.

The person who sucker punched Spencer has been doxxed (seriously NSFW and not worthy of even a click). and the forces of love and tolerance have found a new hero. Continue reading →

It makes little sense to me to be proud of living one’s life in a bubble. No one would suggest that it’s wrong of Layla Schlack to choose not to read “Dangerous” when it comes out, but to announce that you’re choosing not to read any books by white males, not because they’re not to your liking, but just because they’re written by white males, is the “hate” you profess to hate.

Milo Yiannopoulos has chosen to make himself the poster boy for outrageous political incorrectness. He was at the University of Washington as part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour.” As one might anticipate, he was not well-received by all.

Protesters outside of the event, which is part of the openly gay Yiannopoulos’ “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” assaulted attendees and threw bricks and other objects at police officers. One victim was a high school senior who said he was assaulted and paint bombed because he was wearing a pro-Trump hat.

Prior to the shooting, Seattle police had recovered hammers, pipes and flares that protesters planned to use outside of the event.

Continue reading →

It was described as a “dark” inaugural speech, while protesters burned limos and the world’s most interesting trash can.

President Trump called for the end of the “carnage.”

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. Continue reading →