Category: Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement
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Thinking Sensibly about Virginia State Police Salaries
Virginia State Police troopers would receive a $7,000 pay raise — a 22.3% boost for starting salaries — under a budget proposal that also would provide a 3% pay raise for all state employees, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The dramatic pay hike comes in response to deteriorating morale and a surge in state trooper departures. Is…
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Headline of the Day
Headline from today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Lakeside man charged in rape of 9-year-old boy; roommate charged earlier this month with bestiality.” File that story under, “What’s this country coming to?”
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Thinking Correctly about Corrections
by James A. Bacon In 2015 the Commonwealth of Virginia spent $1.13 billion operating state prisons holding 25,000 inmates. Is the state spending too much imprisoning people, or too little? Could it spend the money better? Those are questions we need to ask as Virginia faces a future of chronic fiscal stress. As I have…
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Virginia’s Meth Epidemic Is No Joke
by James A. Bacon My son, now in college, has a running joke when his mom and I call to see what he’s been up to. Not much, he deadpans, except for cooking up some crystal meth. An amusing gag for an affluent suburban family where no one imbibes anything stronger than a cabernet sauvignon. But…
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Virginia’s Political Class as Criminal Class
Del. Richard L. Morris, R-Suffolk, has been charged with 14 counts of violence against members of his household, including offenses of cruelty and injuries toward a minor, as well as assault and battery against a female relative, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Three of the charges stemmed from allegations that Morris had physically assaulted a boy relative Sept.…
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Don’t Short-Change Our Troopers
by James A. Bacon The Virginia State Police face a severe manpower shortage: Veteran police are resigning faster than recruits can be trained. In the first nine months of this year, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 103 sworn employees and 76 civilian employees have left the department. Meanwhile, applications to join the state police have fallen…
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A Measured Approach to Restoring Felons’ Civil Rights
by James A. Bacon Virginia Republicans have excoriated Governor Terry McAuliffe for endeavoring to issue a blanket restoration of civil rights to ex-felons. So, what’s their alternative? First and most important, Republicans are submitting their proposals as bills that can be reviewed, debated, and amended. The process is transparent, and the public will have a chance to…
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Dude, Really?
Opera singer Krista Clouse was arrested last week by Alexandria police officers for performing on the street. Well, technically, she was arrested for using a speaker system without a permit. City Manager Mark B. Jinks later apologized for the way the situation was handled, noting that Clouse should have been issued a written order to stop singing.…
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Virginia’s New Debtor’s Prison
by James A. Bacon Damian Stinnie, a 24-year-old African American living in Charlottesville, grew up in the foster care system in Virginia but managed to graduate from high school with a 3.9 GPA. Living with his twin since aging out of foster care, he has worked nearly full-time as a sales clerk at Walmart and,…
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Educating Teens on Interactions with Police
by James A. Bacon As part of his broader 21st-Century Policing Initiative, Attorney General Mark Herring has unveiled a program to educate teens on their rights and responsibilities in interacting with law enforcement. The idea is to keep situations from escalating to the point where the safety of either the youth or police is put in…
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Here’s Hoping Herring Succeeds with his “Equal Justice” Initiative
by James A. Bacon State Attorney General Mark R. Herring has launched a statewide initiative that has garnered less press attention than it probably warrants: an “equal justice” program that includes “implicit bias” training for police officers, updating of academy training materials, minority officer recruitment, and improving interactions between law enforcement and young people. The rollout…
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Which Is More Fundamental: the Restoration of Felons’ Rights or the Constitutional Separation of Powers?
by James A. Bacon Imbued with a sense of righteousness over the loss of voting rights for convicted felons, Governor Terry McAuliffe is unrepentant about his decision to restore those rights to more than 200,000 ex-felons by executive decree. In a statement released Friday, McAuliffe decried a Virginia Supreme Court decision ruling that blocked his…
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A Different Kind of Police-Kill-Unarmed-Black-Youth Story
by James A. Bacon Chesterfield County has its own cop-shooting-and-killing-an-unarmed-black-youth story, but it has generated little controversy — presumably because the police officer was himself black, thus side-stepping the racist-white-cop narrative. It is instructive to read the account of court testimony in the policeman’s trial to get a sense of the ambiguous situations in which police…
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When Bubbas Go Bad
Once upon a time, Bristol Virginia Utilities in far Southwest Virginia was lauded as a spunky, small-town electricity and water utility that provided high-speed Internet services to an under-served population. Now, as the Roanoke Times describes it, the company’s “culture of corruption, entitlement and greed,” has been laid bare. So far, nine former utility executives, board members and contractors…
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Rule by Edict Comes to Virginia
by James A. Bacon A persuasive moral case can be made to restore the civil rights of former felons. Once a man has served his time and repaid his debt to society, he should be allowed to participate fully in that society. As Governor Terry McAuliffe stated Friday in announcing his restoration of civil rights to…