Tagged: police

When shots were fired before midnight on April 18th, curious, concerned people tracked the dramatic killing of one Boston marathon bombing suspect, and the tense manhunt for his younger brother throughout the night. Many watched and listened through online streaming and social media, others followed the intense action on Boston police scanners; some 180,000 people were tuned in to the scanner feeds during peak traffic. And then, it stopped…

In July of 1965, New York City Detective James McDonnell was called to the Western Union Office at Grand Central. A man posing as a detective was there with a 14-year old runaway boy. The kid’s father suspected something fishy when asked to wire twice the amount necessary to fly the boy home and called the cops. McDonnell quickly figured that the sharply dressed man was impersonating a cop and called for back-up.

In 1993, the New Hampshire Supreme Court overturned a murder conviction for a man named Carl Laurie, because prosecutors had not disclosed that one of the police detectives on the case had an issue in his personnel file that might have raised questions about his credibility.

Today the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, and each New Hampshire county attorney, keeps what is called a “Laurie List," a record of law enforcement officers whose credibility could be called into question were they to testify in criminal trials.

Anyone who’s been online looking for DMV hours, or tried to download a fishing license application knows that government websites are rarely a good time.  No frills, no eye for design – just a lot of dense, complicated information and a wealth of webified bureaucracy.  So, imagine our surprise when we saw posts on AdWeek and Ad Age praising the beauty and functionality of the Milwaukee Police Department website.  The site was designed by ad agency

Monitoring police stops by smartphone. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the city’s use of so-called “stop and frisk” searches by police.  Critics say the subjects of stop and frisks are disproportionately African-American and Latino men, which they call evidence of racial profiling. Today two New York City Council members said they’re introducing a measure to create an independent inspector general to oversee the N.Y.P.D.  to review policies and conduct.

However much he saw of the world, Ernest Hemingway’s economical style of writing is often referred to as the iceberg theory…meaning that only one-eighth of the story behind a narrative needs to be above water.  We were reminded of this when we found the article "The Art of the Police Report" last year in the Writer’s Chronicle. The article drew lessons for crafting powerful prose from police reports filed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.