Random News and Notes 8 August
We start in DC. There is a story there that seems to be going a bit under the radar. A DC police commander has been suspended for fudging the crime stats.
. . . Residents report otherwise, but the STATS and the SCIENCE suggest that the city is safer than it’s been in years! Just one problem: At this very moment, a D.C. police commander has been suspended and is getting investigated for allegedly tweaking crime stats to make them look lower than reality. And D.C.’s police union says that his suspension is just the tip of the iceberg. The union says its investigation has revealed that cops all over the city are routinely pressured by command staff to downgrade felonies so they don’t appear on the MPD or FBI’s violent crime database statistics. How much of the “crime drop” is just Democrat machine politicians lying to the public?
I suspect this is part of a larger pattern of conduct within the DC metro PD. I’d bet this is only the first of many suspensions and eventual firings for senior DC cops.
In a related note, President Trump has ordered a surge of federal law enforcement into the District.
Agents from the U.S. Park Police, FBI, DEA, ATF, and ICE will all patrol the streets of Washington DC for at least the next week.
A judge in Baltimore just gave a man convicted of two counts of assault zero jail time. 28 year old Patrick Brice attacked two men outside a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic back in 2023. The video is hard to watch.
Richard Schaefer, 84, and Mark Crosby, 73, were protesting outside the abortion mill when Brice attacked them unprovoked. A jury convicted Brice of two counts of two counts of second-degree assault and reckless endangerment.
Assault 2nd in Maryland is generally a misdemeanor, but can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in the slam. Brice had been indicted on two counts of Assault 1st, which is a felony, but the jury aquitted on one and didn’t deliver a verdict on the second. The Prosecutors asked for the max sentence, but the judge, Yvette Bryant, refused saying she had no proof Brice meant to cause harm. She instead gave him no jail time.
No comment.
This one just came over the transom as I was getting ready to hit publish: The DC Appeals court has just vacated the contempt order against the Trump admin out of DC circuit Judge James Boasberg’s court.
That’s a convoluted way of saying the DC appeals court just handed Trump and his admin a big win.
In case you don’t remember, Boasberg tried to order the Trump administration to bend to his will over deportations and making planes return after his orders were issued. He then tried to hold the admin in contempt and threatened to appoint his own prosecutor to press the charges.
If you want better analysis than you’ll get from me, check out the thread above from Prof. Cleveland. She’s one of my personal go-to accounts for this kind of thing.
On a very quick and cursory scan, it seems that the DC appellate panel does not care for the way Boasberg going about things and reined him in fairly sharply.
