Cops: Photos of 4-year-old boy with overdosed adults show heroin scourge https://t.co/Q4H3iFxYGf
— L.A. Times News 24/7 (@latimesfirehose) September 9, 2016
Malia Obama won’t be able to roll her way out of this one https://t.co/V7iWLhwEMx
— New York Post (@nypost) August 10, 2016
Twerking now smoking pot? What type of example is Malia Obama setting for young kids in America?
— Watch Clinton Cash (@JaredWyand) August 10, 2016
🐸☕️ pic.twitter.com/eOPTxJZOjV
Remember when Obama said Trump was a bad father? Malia Obama has been caught smoking weed. https://t.co/BQ9u20XDBk
— Milo Yiannopolous ✘ (@NimbleNavgater) August 10, 2016
Johson recently found his "dream job" as CEO of Cannabis Sativa, a publicly traded company that markets weed products. "We want to be the Dom Perignon [of marijuana]," he explains. Johnson is also the chairman of the nonprofit Our America Initiative, which advocates for balanced budgets, defense cuts, drug policy reform, and improved ballot and debate access for third-party candidates.And, of course, once he became the "libertarian" nominee, he had to issue the obligatory repudiations of the wacky weed. See, "Libertarian Johnson would not use marijuana as president," and "Gary Johnson: 'I've stopped using marijuana' during White House bid."
There almost had to be something wrong with this picture: Rolling Stone magazine, still bruised from erroneous reporting about campus rape, scores an exclusive interview with escaped Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán.Keep reading.
The interview conducted by tough-guy actor Sean Penn and posted on the Rolling Stone website late Saturday fueled several journalistic misgivings. An editor's note said Guzmán was given right of refusal after reading a finished version, and some names had been changed. The magazine said Guzmán, who does not speak English, asked for no changes.
Ceding such control to Guzmán was professionally "inexcusable," wrote Reuters reporter Andrew Seaman, who chairs the ethics committee for the Society of Professional Journalists, in a blog Saturday night. The New York Post cited the same reason in labeling Penn "El Jerko."
Questions remain about whether the magazine's efforts to secure the interview in October helped law enforcement recapture the renowned prison escapee on Friday. An unnamed Mexican federal law enforcement official told the Associated Press that the Penn interview assisted its efforts.
Penn, in the article, makes clear he worked hard to avoid being noticed by police.
Other journalism analysts said the Guzmán interview was a bona fide exclusive or scoop — aside from the ethical issue of giving him the right to change the article — and could help restore the nearly 50-year-old magazine's tarnished image.
"Rolling Stone needed this story," said Samir Husni, professor at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the school. It was crucial for the magazine to show it remains a major player in journalism, he said.
"They are still a very relevant magazine doing such a great job that very few are actually doing," Husni said Sunday.
He said the decision allowing an actor to conduct the interview was a classic Rolling Stone mix of pop culture and journalism..
Sean Penn shot to fame playing a high-school stoner who wanted to do anything but engage with the world.A classic Hollywood useful idiot.
Now, more than 30 years after his breakthrough role in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the two-time Oscar winner is as well known for his off-screen political activism as he is for his intense on-screen performances.
Mr. Penn’s meeting with Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, revealed on Saturday, is the latest example of the 55-year-old actor inviting controversy by making high-profile visits with figures who are at odds with the U.S. government.
Mr. Penn’s interview with the drug kingpin follows the actor’s style of reporting—sparing no detail about the arrangements getting there or his emotional impressions of the man before him. “In what would be a seven-hour sit-down, I saw him without that smile only in brief flashes. As has been said of many notorious men, he has an indisputable charisma,” wrote Mr. Penn.
Over the past 20 years, Mr. Penn, with a mix of outrage and irreverence, has traveled to countries about to be attacked by the U.S., pledged support to Communist leaders who decry America and criticized the U.S. government for its handling of domestic affairs.
The “El Chapo” meeting, recounted by Mr. Penn in an article for Rolling Stone magazine, isn’t the first time the actor has taken on a provocative assignment for a publication.
In 2008, Mr. Penn recounted his meetings with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Cuban president Raúl Castro for The Nation magazine.
Mr. Penn’s dispatches read like a travelogue sprinkled with diplomatic purpose; he writes of having mechanical difficulties on the plane ride there and then of asking Mr. Castro if he’d be willing to meet with President Obama.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Penn said Sunday the actor wasn’t commenting at this time...
Actress Kate Del Castillo urged 'El Chapo' to use his power for good, brokered meeting with Sean Penn https://t.co/9cGSJzsL4q
— L.A. Times World (@latimesworld) January 10, 2016For the first time in more than a decade, all categories of crime rose across Los Angeles in 2015 as police struggled to get control of the problem, according to LAPD data.More.
Violent crime in L.A. climbed 19.9% and property crime increased 10.3% through Dec. 26 compared with the same period last year, according to the police data. It marked the second year in a row that violent crime rose, but the first time since 2003 that both violent and property crime rose.
The increases follow more than a decade of steep declines in crime, particularly in homicides. Police officials said the recent upswings should be viewed in that larger context.
“We ask people to keep this in perspective,” said Assistant Chief Michel Moore, who oversees the Los Angeles Police Department's crime-tracking unit. “The city is not on fire, the city is not falling into the ocean.”
Still, the increases have sparked concern in neighborhoods across the city, including Southside areas that have seen jumps in gang-related homicides as well as more affluent areas where residents have complained about thefts and car break-ins...
Murders and shootings have spiked in many American cities—and so have efforts to ignore or deny the crime increase. The see-no-evil campaign eagerly embraced a report last month by the Brennan Center for Justice called “Crime in 2015: A Preliminary Analysis.” Many progressives and their media allies hailed the report as a refutation of what I and others have dubbed the “Ferguson effect”— cops backing off from proactive policing, demoralized by the ugly vitriol directed at them since a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., last year. Americans are being asked to disbelieve both the Ferguson effect and its result: violent crime flourishing in the ensuing vacuum.Still more.
In fact, the Brennan Center’s report confirms the Ferguson effect, while also showing how clueless the media are about crime and policing.
The Brennan researchers gathered homicide data from 25 of the nation’s 30 largest cities for the period Jan. 1, 2015, to Oct. 1, 2015. (Not included were San Francisco, Indianapolis, Columbus, El Paso and Nashville.) The researchers then tried to estimate what 2015’s full-year homicide numbers for those 25 cities would be, based on the extent to which homicides were up from January to October this year compared with the similar period in 2014.
The resulting projected increase for homicides in 2015 in those 25 cities is 11%. (By point of comparison, the FiveThirtyEight data blog looked at the 60 largest cities and found a 16% increase in homicides by September 2015.) An 11% one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalent decrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs. Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11% homicide increase as trivial.
Several strategies are employed to play down the jump in homicides. The simplest is to hide the actual figure. An Atlantic magazine article in November, “Debunking the Ferguson Effect,” reports: “Based on their data, the Brennan Center projects that homicides will rise slightly overall from 2014 to 2015.” A reader could be forgiven for thinking that “slightly” means an increase of, say, 2%. Nothing in the Atlantic write-up disabuses the reader of that mistaken impression. The website Vox, declaring the crime increase “bunk,” is similarly discreet about the actual homicide rate, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. Crime & Justice News, published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, coyly admits that “murder is up moderately in some places” without disclosing what that “moderate” increase may be.
A second strategy for brushing off the homicide surge is to contextualize it over a long period. Because homicides haven’t returned to their appalling early 1990s or early 2000s levels, the current crime increase is insignificant, the Brennan Center and its media supporters suggest, echoing an argument that arose immediately after I first documented the Ferguson effect nationally.
“Today’s murder rates are still at all-time historic lows,” write the Brennan researchers. “In 1990 there were 29.3 murders per 100,000 residents in these cities. In 2000, there were 13.8 murders per 100,000. Now, there are 9.9 murders per 100,000 residents. Averaged across the cities, we find that while Americans in urban areas have experienced more murders this year than last year, they are safer than they were five years ago and much safer than they were 25 years ago.”
The Atlantic is similarly reassuring about today’s homicide rate: “The relative uptick”—which, again, the magazine never specifies—“is still small compared with the massive two-decade drop that preceded it.” True enough, though irrelevant—good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn’t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year’s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.
The most desperate tactic for discounting the homicide increase is to disaggregate the average. “Fears of ‘a new nationwide crime wave’ are premature at best and wildly misleading at worst,” asserts the Atlantic, because the “numbers make clear that violent crime is up in some major U.S. cities and down in others.”
But such variance is inherent in any average. If there weren’t variation across the members of a set, no average would be needed. Any national crime increase or decrease will have counterexamples of the dominant trend within it, yet policy makers and analysts rightly find the average meaningful. The Ferguson effect’s existence does not require that every city experience depolicing and a resulting crime increase. Enough cities—in particular, those with significant black populations and where antipolice agitation has been most strident—are experiencing murder increases that cannot be ignored.
Baltimore’s per capita homicide rate, for example, is now the highest in its history, according to the Baltimore Sun: 54 homicides per 100,000 residents, beating its 1993 rate of 48.8 per 100,000 residents. Shootings in Cincinnati, lethal and not, were up 30% by mid-September 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. Homicides in St. Louis were up 60% by the end of August. In Los Angeles, the police department reports that violent crime has increased 20% as of Dec. 5; there were 16% more shooting victims in the city, while arrests were down 9.5%. Shooting incidents in Chicago are up 17% through Dec. 13...
Nearly 500 people were arrested this weekend at two electronic music festivals in Pomona and San Bernardino, authorities said.More.
On Sunday, the second and final day of the Halloween-themed HARD Day of the Dead festival at the Pomona Fairplex, 162 people were arrested, according to figures released early Monday morning by the Pomona Police Department. An additional 148 people were arrested on Saturday.
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Authorities in San Bernardino arrested about 180 people at Escape: Psycho Circus, a two-day festival that began Friday at the National Orange Show Events Center.
At the Pomona rave, which featured headliners such as Skrillex, Deadmau5 and Hot Chip, most were arrested on charges of public intoxication, possession of illegal drugs or being under the influence of a controlled substance, police said in a statement. About 100 people were arrested on charges of carrying fake identification, authorities said...
Part of being clear-eyed about reality requires all of us to stare—and stare hard—at what is happening in this country this year. And to ask ourselves what’s going on.I'm not holding my breath, but keep reading.
Because something deeply disturbing is happening all across America. I have spoken of 2014 in this speech because something has changed in 2015. Far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years. And let’s be clear: far more people of color are being killed in America’s cities this year. And it’s not the cops doing the killing.
We are right to focus on violent encounters between law enforcement and civilians. Those incidents can teach all of us to be better. But something much bigger is happening. Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being American cities—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas.
In Washington, D.C., we’ve seen an increase in homicides of more than 20% in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of 600,000 souls, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.
And who’s dying? Police chiefs say the increase is almost entirely among young men of color, at crime scenes in bad neighborhoods where multiple guns are being recovered.
That’s yet another problem that white America can drive around, but if we really believe that all lives matter, as we must, all of us have to understand what is happening. Communities of color need to demand answers. Police and civilian leaders need to demand answers. Academic researchers need to hit this hard...
At a White House discussion about improving the relationship between police departments and black Americans, President Obama declared that “the moment is here.”Yes, they hate them, and they want them dead --- exactly the opposite of Obama's mealy-mouthed words.
He meant a chance for big change, and that’s the problem. The change he and his allies are achieving is like throwing gasoline on a raging fire.
Consider that at about the same time the nation’s first black president was speaking to police chiefs and prosecutors, a group called Black Lives Matter was denouncing police brutality in Times Square, real and imagined. In another sad coincidence of timing, they marched as the city was mourning the murder of NYPD Officer Randolph Holder, the fourth New York City cop killed in 11 months.
Officer Holder was black, as is his alleged killer, but that mattered not a whit to the protesters. One told Fox News that she hopes Holder’s family “realizes that his life is included in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan.”
“We’re talking about black bodies being persecuted across the world,” she added.
This is nonsense on steroids, yet these are the president’s shock troops. Obama and confidante Valerie Jarrett earlier met with the radicals leading the Black Lives Matter movement and encouraged them to keep going, the group has said.
Obama, at last Thursday’s event, praised the group again while also claiming that “everybody understands that all lives matter.
Everybody wants strong, effective law enforcement. Everybody wants their kids to be safe when they are walking across the street. Nobody wants to see police officers who are doing their jobs fairly hurt. Everybody understands it’s a dangerous job.”
His saying so doesn’t make it true. The anti-police movement sweeping urban areas proves that many people actually don’t want strong law enforcement, and don’t have any respect for police work. Many, including those Obama met with, appear to hate all cops.
Today's cover: Quentin Tarantino rants at "stop police terror" rally https://t.co/ypCCXr4CPb pic.twitter.com/f8XXHWJ3uq
— New York Post (@nypost) October 25, 2015
