Manuel Teran, Terrorist Cop Shooter, AKA Alleged Transgender “Tortugita”
Manuel Teran came from Venezuela to get a taxpayer-funded education at a college in Florida and engage in terrorist actions. After slightly (middle-aged) infiltrating the groups that sponsored him, I came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with his head. Maybe congenital. Maybe drugs. Maybe obsession. Maybe sheer laziness. Maybe a total lack of education. He wrote and sketched like a six-year-old. ...
First, a controlling fact. California’s much-reviled “three-strikes” law bears no resemblance to what you’ve read about it in the news. How much no resemblance? Lots of no resemblance:
There is a great website by Mike Reynolds, an expert on California’s three-strikes law and its application (application being 95% of the law, no matter what they tell you in school). I urge you to read his site and support his efforts: ...
Is crime really dropping in Chicago? Not long ago, the public would have been forced to rely on some pretty unreliable sources for an answer:
From sources like that, you get contradictory numbers like this, in the Chicago Sun-Times: ...
Last week marked the fifth anniversary of Jessica Lunsford’s murder. Nine-year old Lunsford was kidnapped, raped, and buried alive by her neighbor, a convicted sex offender.
You would think the anniversary of Lunsford’s horrific murder would give rise to thoughts about our failure to protect her and other victims of violent recidivists. You would think reporters would cover stories about early release of sexual predators, lax sentencing of sexual predators, and failure to punish sexual predators. You would think that, but you would be wrong. In Florida’s “prestige” media, the St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald, Lunsford’s death is treated as a cautionary tale — not cautioning against the fatal practice of going easy on child rapists, mind you, but scorning those who are trying to prevent similar crimes from happening again. ...
What’s the matter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
In the last year, the residents of Atlanta stood up and declared that they do not want their city to be a place known for crime, where murders and muggings are taken in stride. They declared that one murder, one home invasion, is one too many. They partnered with the police — ignoring the headline-grabbing anti-cop types who perennially try to sow divisiveness. ...
http://www.safe-atlanta.org/www.novictims-atlanta…
Tina, thank you for this post and encouraging people to consider how to react to something BEFORE it happens. I wanted to share with you two free, non-commercial resources located in the very neighborhood where those incidents take place that can help people take constructive steps to secure their homes, protect their families and live their lives: ...
Remember this?
Well, according to the data that we have, there are some neighborhoods where the data don’t go along with what has actually transpired in their community. We’ve had reductions [in crime] in a lot of those neighborhoods. And then, some of the neighborhoods that we’ve had an increase in burglary and property crimes, those neighborhoods haven’t had a large outcry. . . I think they just respond to what they hear. And a lot of times, perception to them is reality. ...
It is good to see politicians in Atlanta responding to (as opposed to studiously ignoring, or denying) the crime crisis. But now that we’ve gotten their attention (no small accomplishment), how does the city really move forward to make residents safe?
The Atlanta Police Department has a fascinating series of charts on their website, showing fifty years of statistics for various crimes in the city. Go to this page and click on “Part I Crime: A Fifty Year Retrospective.” Immediately, what jumps out is that crime is down since that horrible time in the early 1990’s, when crack cocaine was burning a fat fuse through certain neighborhoods — especially the housing projects. If you compare 1989 to 2009, it is easy to say, yes, crime in the city limits is not as bad now as it was then. ...
Back in the 1980’s, when I was living in upstate New York and deciding where to go to college, New York City beckoned as an obvious choice: the schools, the libraries and bookstores, the Village. I went down to Fordham for a campus visit. The next day, I returned home, appalled. The grounds were beautiful, but the neighborhood was so dangerous that security guards would not allow students to leave campus in groups smaller than 12. Fordham was gated and patrolled like an embassy on enemy soil. The streets a few blocks away looked like a war zone, and the subways surrounding it were filthy, subterranean toilets filled with more or less aggressive lunatics trying to catch your eye.
I know, I know: I was a wimp for not wanting to become one of those tough city denizens, Blondie-tough, the type who didn’t blink as they negotiated the human detritus piled up in the streets. I was also a serious long-distance runner, and I couldn’t imagine living in a place where you needed to recruit 11 other people just in order to walk down the street. And then, parks were off limits for runners at any hour of the day. Even in the nicer parts of Manhattan, normal people went about their business only by studiously pretending they were not stepping over some zoned-out junkie passed out in a pool of vomit as they made their way from the subway to the street. ...
Seven teens were shot last week outside a school offering summer classes in Detroit. Three were in critical condition. A week earlier, another girl was shot in the chest outside another school.
Now the police are having trouble getting anyone to cooperate with them. “The taboo against snitching is worse than the taboo against shooting,” the Detroit Free Press reported yesterday. ...
Chicago:
In Chicago, something interesting is happening as “twittering” and blogging and e-mail bring in first-hand reports that deviate from official versions. It is hard to whitewash incidents of violence and rioting when people are reporting them in real time and police are going back over their incident reports to compare notes later. ...
From Marcia Killingsworth’s always informative blog, Intown Writer, this story of keeping career criminal Andre Grier off the streets. For now, at least:
[R]ecently, CourtWatch Coordinator Janet Martin and one of our community prosecutors Assistant District Attorney Kimani King alerted us to State of Georgia vs. Andre Grier 09SC77314, a case coming before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy L. Shoob. ...
What can be done about crime in the neighborhoods around Georgia Tech? As reported by the AJC, the youths who have been arrested — and the ones who are yet to be caught — are perhaps the most dangerous type of criminal: immature and armed. As James Fetig, an administrator at Georgia Tech, observed:
“[o]ne concern is the age of the criminals. Police tell us they are between 16 and 19,” Fetig said. “This is not a time when young men tend to consider consequences. We are very concerned that one of these robberies could go terribly wrong and have terrible consequences.” ...
I have been watching the growth of court-watching in Georgia, and it is encouraging to see the practice taking hold. Nothing will change on the streets until public scrutiny is brought to bear on the courts, where evidence abounds that judges have been breaking and bending the intent of Georgia’s sentencing laws with no professional consequences whatsoever.
No consequences for judges, even when they actually violate Georgia’s sentencing laws. No prosecutor dare complain when a judge cuts an illicit deal with an offender — because the prosecutor must appear before that judge, or one of that judge’s peers and colleagues, every single day. You can’t be critical of judges and be effective in the courtroom. So there are no consequences for judges, even when their decision to overlook the law or their failure to do their jobs with appropriate diligence results in preventable murders, like the killing of Dr. Eugenia Calle. ...
Midtown Atlanta Neighborhood Association safety chair Randall Cobb, commenting in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about two stabbings in Piedmont Park, got it right:
“Crime has not gone down in the city, no matter what the city says they’re doing,” [he said] noting a spike in Midtown break-ins and armed robberies since 2007. ...
I found this quote on the website for the Larimer County, Colorado District Attorney’s office. It is a neat sentiment: well-intentioned, not overly ambitious. It is, in other words, a fitting description of the aims of victims’ rights laws.
It is also utterly untrue. ...
From today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A string of mishaps — including uncertainty about whom to call, voice mail messages left unanswered for hours and previous false alarms — combined to help double-murder suspect Derrick Yancey remove his ankle monitor and escape house arrest, according to a report issued Wednesday. . . ...
A thoughtful column by Atlanta Journal Constitution writer Rick Badie on the ways people are changing their lives to deal with the threat of crime. It raises a question: is crime really more prevalent because the economy has gone south? The kids (and they are kids) and young adults running robbery rings and invading homes to steal televisions aren’t doing these things on their hours off from some legitimate work, and there has been absolutely no reduction in levels of support available from social services, so (unlike the rest of us) they aren’t being squeezed in their home lives.
This is a criminal subculture. If anything is making them seem more aggressive now, it is police furloughs and the collapse of the courts. Backlogs in court hearings, ever more intense pressure to let people go on first, second, tenth offenses, cases simply being dropped because there aren’t the resources to try them — this is what puts more, and bolder, criminals on the streets. ...
Maybe I’m just touchy because this neck of the woods is not far from where my own rapist traipsed in and out of prison for twenty-plus years, but what precisely does it take to get sitting judges (not to mention certain journalists) in Tampa Bay to take the threat posed by sexual predators seriously?
First there’s Dr. Rory P. Doyle, who fled the Tampa Bay area after a judge permitted him to go free on bail after being charged with two counts of child molestation. Astonishingly, Doyle is being treated to similarly indulgent judicial scrutiny in Ireland, where he has again been released to the streets while awaiting extradition hearings. Then there’s nurse Richard Chotiner, who was released on bail pending an appeal that could take months, or years, after being convicted of lewd and lascivious battery of a mentally-disabled 23-year old. Chotiner was released without electronic monitoring by Hillsborough Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett. Releasing Chiotiner without considering public safety is especially egregious when you consider the details of the crime for which the nurse was convicted: ...
With a hat tip to Chris, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Fulton Inmates to be Released Before Trial,” by Steve Visser. It’s worth quoting extensively, to grasp precisely what is being done:
Fulton County court officials say they can save taxpayers $5.5 million a year by releasing suspected criminals from jail — inmates whom judges have balked at freeing because of the likelihood they would commit another crime before their trials. ...
THE average citizen hardly needs to be persuaded that crimes will be committed more frequently if, other things being equal, crime becomes more profitable than other ways of spending one’s time.
–James Q. Wilson, “Thinking About Crime” Atlantic Monthly, September, 1983 ...
The problems created by crime are so vast, and crimes are so numerous, and the arena of agencies created to address them are so dysfunctional and interwoven, that it is maddening to look at the police chiefs and the courts and the lawyers and the mayors and the prisons and the prisoners and the legislators and not just throw up your hands and say: “There’s nothing I can do.”
This type of despair is what drives us to crumple on the couch and switch on the Nancy Grace and pretend that what we are doing is watching somebody doing something real about “the problem of crime.” ...
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, never one to shirk at the job of preserving her reputation, wrote recently in the AJC that people should not complain about things like violent home invasions because crime used to be worse in Atlanta. ...
Introduction
What follows is a preliminary effort to piece together Shamal (aka Jamal) Thompson’s long and troubling journey through Georgia’s broken criminal justice system prior to February 17, 2009, the day he murdered* an innocent cancer researcher named Eugenia Calle. Ten months earlier, a DeKalb County Superior Court Judge named Cynthia J. Becker let Thompson walk free from what should have been a ten-year sentence for burglary. She did so on the grounds that he was a first-time offender. ...