Category: Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement
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Brace Yourselves, Arlingtonians, for SJW Law Enforcement
Liam Bissainthe’s nightmare has come true (see his blog post here), and Arlington voters nominated Parisa Dehghani-Tafti yesterday as the Democratic Party’s nominee to run for Commonwealth Attorney. In ultra-blue Arlington County (76% Clinton, 16.7% Trump), the Democratic nomination is tantamount to election. Now Arlington will become a petri dish for progressive theories on law…
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Mass Shootings a Multi-Faceted Phenomenon
Tragedy struck Virginia yesterday in the form of a mass shooting at the Virginia Beach municipal complex. The investigation into the shooter’s motive — undoubtedly tied to workplace violence — remains incomplete, but that probably won’t stop pundits and talking heads from indulging their usual tropes for and against guns. I find both sides of…
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Counseling, Jail Time, and the Cycle of Violence
Families in south Richmond have long held community cookouts at the Carter Jones Park. Last Sunday evening, an altercation broke around at a basketball/skateboard facility nearby. Gunshots were fired. Nine-year-old Markiya Simone Dickson and an unnamed 11-year-old boy were struck by bullets. Markiya died. Community members and city leaders gathered at a vigil yesterday to…
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SJWs Strike Again: Police Field Reports Are Biased
Here we go again. Today readers of the Richmond Times-Dispatch are treated to a front-page, top-of-the-fold article highlighting racial disparity… not in arrests… not in convictions… not in stop-and-frisks… but in the Richmond Police Department’s use of racial identifiers in “field interview reports.” The newspaper’s indictment: Of the 29,997 reports Richmond police officers documented in…
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Replacing One Inequity with Another
Governor Ralph Northam vetoed a bill yesterday that would have imposed mandatory minimum sentences on repeat domestic abusers on the grounds that racial minorities would be disproportionately affected. I nearly headlined this post, “Northam to Domestic Abuse Victims: Drop Dead.” I decided that wouldn’t be quite fair. But I wouldn’t be surprised if many people…
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However You Define it, Solitary Confinement is Barbarous
by William Thorpe In a recent column about solitary confinement, Richard Hall-Sizemore discredited any observations he made based upon his visits to Virginia prisons when he acknowledged that guards and correctional officials may not have showed or told him everything. “They would have if I had asked, but I did not always know enough to…
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Bacon Bits: Restored Licenses; Dominion’s Millstone Plant; RGGI
Wait. How many suspended licenses? Today’s Virginia Mercury has one of those stories that raises more questions than it answers, this one about the suspended driving license issue. My warning that there would be massive lines at DMV were groundless because, hey, these people still have their actual licenses. DMV never got them back or…
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Virginia’s Decline in Crime
One of the advantages of living in Virginia is that citizens are less likely than other Americans on average to become crime victims. The rate of violent crimes (seen above ) is about half the national average, according to data published today on the StatChat blog based on 2017 FBI crime data. The rate for…
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Courts Authorizing “Reverse Location” Warrants in Virginia
Big brother Google is watching you. Back in October, 2018, Forbes reported that a Virginia court had authorized the FBI to use a “reverse location” warrant to try to solve a series of crimes in Henrico County, Va. This warrant, also known as a geofence warrant, allows police to compel Google to provide all cellphone…
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Bacon Bits: Taxes, Crime and Schools
Cigarette taxes rarely yield projected revenues. A Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy study on cigarette taxes in Virginia has found: (1) cigarette taxes produce the most income the year they are imposed, then revenue declines in subsequent years; (2) over the long run, revenues rarely meet projections; and (3) convenience stores and small grocery stores…
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Virginia’s “Secret” Medical Marijuana Program
The doctor who should be governor. State Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant is a Republican from Henrico County. She is also a practicing physician. In this year’s General Assembly session she put forth SB1557 which expanded last year’s so-called “Let Doctor’s Decide” legislation (HB1251). What’s new? The 2018 legislation (HB1251) authorized licensed medical providers to prescribe CBD and…
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Will Virginia’s Real Recidivism Rate Please Stand Up?
In previous posts I have made much of the 23.4% recidivism rate from Virginia prisons. That’s the lowest — hence, the best — rate of all the 45 states that keep track. I’ve always construed the number as a fact that Virginians can be proud of. I have touted it as evidence that Virginia’s Department…
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Follow-up: Charlottesville Race Threats a Really Bad “Joke”
A week ago I predicted that an online threat of racial violence that resulted in the shutdown of Charlottesville public schools would prove to be a hoax, possibly perpetrated by an activist trying to bring attention to racial injustice. Well, the incident did turn out to be a hoax, although I was wrong about the…
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Hit-and-Run Journalism and the Oppression Narrative
Two days ago, I took the Washington Post and New York Times to task for uncritically publicizing the allegations of recently resigned Portsmouth Police Chief Tonya Chapman that the police department was riddled with racism. Both newspapers rushed to publication without any dissenting view or even a note of caution. Portsmouth City Council has appointed…
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When Hate Crime Equals Thought Crime
Today the Washington Post tells us that James A. Fields, Jr., the neo-Nazi who plowed a car into a group of counterprotesters at the infamous white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, is scheduled to appear in federal court for a hearing on “hate-crime” charges. Interestingly, the article neglects to tell us specifically which “hate crimes”…