Literal treatment of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.”
Median home price in Detroit falls to $7,500. No, that isn’t a typo.
It’s a deal!
Ryan Grim has more on Eric Holder and medical marijuana raids.
The Wire’s creator and former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon gets pissed at what an awful job the paper is doing holding the city’s police department accountable. So he dusts off his journalist’s hat and goes out to do the job himself.
From my backyard, a businessman in Old Town Alexandria spends $350,000 renovating his store, only to have the city reject his permits. So he rents the store out to a sex shop in the middle of touristy King Street. Awesome, I say.
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 11:52 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under General Criminal Justice, General Drug War, Police Professionalism.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
TheAgitator.com
Too bad Simon seemed dismissive of blogs :(
That Old Town thing is awesome :)
Wow! $7500! If we just unionize the entire country, everyone will be able to afford “The American Dream”. The Employee Free Choice Act promises to bring precisely this kind of prosperity to every city in the country.
7500? Just wait until mid 2010 when you’ll be able to flip it or 3000!
I love that Old Town story. I hope that there is nothing they can do about it, too.
It’s a deal!
Funny thing is, you’d have to be liquored up to want to kiss one of those broads.
I thought I remembered a story on reason.com about a contributing problem to the housing in Detroit being that housing is too durable, i.e. it never gets worth knocking it down and rebuilding, especially in low priced neighborhoods. Therefore, you get a lot of really cheap inventory that nobody wants to live in, because it’s too old, rundown, and essentially worthless.
And the Old Town story is really great. Guy jumps through all their damned hoops, involves the preferred architects and the city’s stupid heritage board, and STILL gets shot down after going through the whole process. So screw ‘em. Publicize this story and let people know the reason they have something that they don’t want is because they drove out something they do want.
People are such idiots, tho, they won’t realize the real cause.
On that last item, I have to laugh that the sex shop (or is it sex shoppe) is going to have a monopoly in the area granted by the city in their attempt to prevent that kind of “disgrace” in the future.
From the store owner’s perspective that would be something like: “Whip me, spank me, but PLEEEEEEZ don’t throw me in the brier patch!”
Oops. I should have said from the shop renter’s perspective.
Sex shop – “Actually, I was hoping for a fast-food chain because I thought that would be more annoying to the city.” Classic.
I wonder if Le Tache will sell the Obama dildo?
I thought it was well-understood that cities building sports stadiums is a way to transfer taxpayer dollars to the owners of sports teams? I would guess the sports stadiums are not something to be proud of, but part of the problem. Of course, it’s possible that these were built with private money, but somehow this doesn’t seem likely.
@ #5… You beat me to it.
My thoughts were exactly. I’d have to be hammered to even go near one of those “ladies”.
Cheers.
I’m sure another reason for Detroit’s low home prices is the abysmal city leadership. If I were mayor of Detroit, I’d do whatever I could to encourage gainfully employed people to buy houses in the city. But the current city government seems determined to discourage people instead: for example, if you’re one of the minority of people in Detroit with an actual job, you’re penalized with special city income taxes. And I daresay the property taxes you’ll pay your first year are more than you paid to buy the house.
So they go out of their way to make sure nobody with any semblance of a future would want to live in the city, then scratch their heads in consternation when nobody wants to live there.
I’ve been to Detroit and $7,500 seems high.
BTW, (off topic)
PEW report released today, 1 in 31 people currently somewhere in the US corrections system (jail/prison/parole).
Link to report (pdf) here: http://tinyurl.com/bt72rm
#5 and #12-
Is there really enough liquor in the WORLD to get you liquored up enough to kiss them????
From the Old Town story:
Had I been the reporter, my question to that neighbor business would have been, “Are you aware that the building’s owner didn’t originally want to rent to a sex shop? He wanted to renovate the building to accommodate his sport hunting and fishing store, but after following the advice of the city’s Architectural Review board, the city still refused him the permits.” And, it seems that a natural follow-up question might be, “Do you now wish the city had approved the owner’s permits for his sport hunting and fishing store?”
For $350K, he could have bought 46 median Detroit houses and have $ left over.
I actually get along pretty well with lawyers.
First, we shoot all the architects.
For the record, Comerica park, home of the American League Tigers, was paid for by the owner of the team, Mike Illitch.
Ford Field, home of the worst frachise in NFL history, was paid for by taxpayers.
__________________________________________________
Props to the guys (original owner and sex store proprietor) for tweaking the incompetent and arrogant bureaucrats (AKA leeches) noses.
Re: Detroit housing prices -
Auto insurance is way more expensive than in the ‘burbs.
The school system vies with D.C. for worst in the nation.
Crime is rampant.
Your prospective neighbors are the ones who couldn’t afford to leave or are real damned stubborn.
An East side block goes something like this -
Boarded up house
Vacant lot
Burnt out house
Vacant lot
Occupied house in disrepair
Crack house
…
Repeat.
No. I am not exaggerating.
Hell yeah, yet another reason to like David Simon. Going for the libertarian hatrick, he was.
Adam W., it doesn’t seem to me like he was being dismissive of blogs, really. More that he wasn’t buying the bullshit notion that newspapers are dying out because of them.
Which is what’s killing the local dailies. I can and do get a write-up on Obama’s SOTU address or the latest missile attach in Pakistan on-line, I can’t get in depth local investigative journalism or human interest stuff there. Not so long ago, the Detroit News had a full page devoted to each of three biggest metro counties daily with one or two others occasionally included.
They don’t do that anymore. I don’t buy it anymore.
#11: Ford Field is kinda an exception, in that yes, paid for by taxpayers (which sucks), but did help to revitalize a part of downtown. Before Ford Field, the Lions used to play in the Silverdome, which was a good 40 miles outside of Detroit proper, in one of the….well, I hate to use the term suburb, because Pontiac is a small city in its own right, but the point is the Lions didn’t play in Detroit, so people never came to Detroit.
When Ford Field came, they built it right next to Comerica Park, and then also built an opera house and generally created an entire business district, which regularly brings in people from the suburbs(which is part of Detroit’s problem–the people in the surrounding areas don’t want to visit there) to the stadium/theatre district, which totally revitalized a very run down, pretty bad area. 20 years ago, you wouldn’t want to go into that area without an armed escort. Nowadays, it has great restaurants, a nice park, cool buildings…it’s a huge change, and part of that was bringing in the stadiums.
Point is, yes, paid for by taxpayers, but actually did some good for the city.
For as much as people rag on Detroit, if you compare it to how it was 25 years ago….well, there’s no contest. You can actually visit the city nowadays. You couldn’t when I was a kid.
As an example:
http://homes.point2.com/US/Michigan/Wayne-County/Detroit-Real-Estate.aspx?&SortField=Price&Page=4
Salvo,
I stole my neighbor’s car this morning, but I used it to get to work.
Re: The Sex Shop
Alexandria Commonwealth’s Attorney S. Randolph Sengel said his office has received enough complaints about the store that he is looking at legal options. Virginia law allows for courts to declare sexual material obscene and to ban its sale, he said.
—Wouldn’t it be, by community standards, not obscene if the shop is doing well and locals are patronizing it?
“And there’s another piece of Zarlenga real estate that might start causing buzz. He owns a shuttered, dilapidated building several blocks away at Princess and Royal streets. Some of the broken windows have been patched with duct tape.
“As far as I’m concerned, that corner will always be an eyesore,” Zarlenga said. “That’s a little slice of revenge.” ”
Fitting!
If I owned Detroit, and Hell, I’d rent out Detroit and live in Hell.
In science, we are always exhaustive about how we label and collect our data because it’s difficult to get. The saying goes, “Analysis is cheap. Data is expensive.” Once you have the data, you can analyze it a million ways, but you need to get it first and it needs to be good. It seems that that’s what’s going on with papers to some degree.
Anyone can opine. Collecting the basic facts to make those opinions valuable is boring and expensive and is why we need reporters more than editorialists. Unfortunately, everyone likes editorializing more.
Matt, you are forgetting the essential mathematics of American morality laws and enforcement. Permit me to demonstrate:
Where:
* the number of citizens who do not wish to be subject to outdated morality laws or enforcement thereof is represented by X; and
* the number of citizens who are in favour of such laws and enforcement to ensure that their own religious or socio-neurotic views are imposed on the rest of the population is represented by Y, then
Y > X, irrespective of the actual numbers involved. For example:
and so on.
Okay, the superscript thing didn’t work. To restate:
X(squared) X(to the third power),
and so on. An example:
Where X represents 400 citizens and Y represents 89 citizens, Y > X within this political and social mathematic because “decent” people are worth more than “perverts”, and “perverts” means “anybody who isn’t totally freaked out by their own sexuality or that of others”.
FUCK the lack of a preview, FUCK it I say! The system is treating the “greater than” symbol as an HTML coding tag.
Ah, fuckitalltohell, you all get the joke anyway.
Perhaps I’m just cynical and suspicious of police… but there is a LOT wrong with the Traci McKissick case.
Two incidents… One in 2005, one in 2009.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/blog/2009/02/withholding_names_of_police_wh.html
2005: in a traffic stop, she jumps into the suspect’s car after he shoves her partner into an oncoming car. She then struggles with him in the car, he takes her gun and tosses it out the window. Gun never recovered. All charges against the suspect are later dropped amidst allegations that the police altered incident reports and the other officer involved, Jack Odom, was arrested for assaulting a man outside a Federal Hill pizza shop.
http://www.policeone.com/officer-misconduct-internal-affairs/articles/122862/
That incident report is entirely unbelievable, who jumps into the passenger seat of a fleeing suspect’s car? Yeah, these ain’t dirty cops.
Then the 2009 incident:
Tracey responds to a domestic dispute and is somehow overpowered by a 61 year old man (A little guy, too!) Backup arrives and our brave forces of blue blow the perp away in a hail of gunfire. The weird part? No details of any kind. No statements by witnesses as to what happened. So… where’s the other half of the domestic dispute? Can’t have a domestic dispute with yourself.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-identity0219,0,1887887.story?track=rss
Awesome report, huh? No names. No accountability, no transparancy. Good job, Baltimore! … NOT!
Ah… more details:
“Police said the 45-year-old stepped on Officer Traci L. McKissick’s hand at the direction of his uncle in an attempt to disarm her. The younger Forrest was arrested at the scene and charged with assault and disarming a law enforcement officer. He remains jailed without bond.”
(The ‘45 year old’ is a relative of the man killed…)
and:
“A police source with knowledge of the investigation said detectives believe the backup officer’s shot was made at close range and was ultimately the fatal shot. They also believe McKissick fired all of her shots into one of Forrest’s legs, in rapid succession, while she was still engaged with the man.”
These statements are mutually exclusive. What, did McKissick use her Jedi skills to rearm herself? Who fired first?
What really happened?
Doh! Forgot to link the last article:
http://www.policelink.com/news/articles/97253-officer-challenges-officer-involved-shooting-policy?page=3&utm_content=artmini&utm_source=policelink.com
Off-topic, but I have to say I haven’t seen this happen before…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090302/ap_on_re_us/states_rights_stimulus
Could it be not everyone is a zombie?
I don’t think that Simon was dismissive of blogs. I think that he just pointed out the reality: that most bloggers are more IF Stone than, well, police reporters. They review the documentary record, highlight it and perform an invaluable service in doing so. Where they are able to provide first-hand information (”I was there and so and so didn’t say “enter” he said “able!”) then they do that well, too (often waaaaaaaaay better than the print media who, sometime in the past twenty years, started to believe that lazy-ass misquotation and fact-fucking was a right bestowed by God).
Fact is, police reporting is very dirty fingers, time-intensive work. You need to pay somebody to do it; they won’t do it on their own time, hence the need for newspapers to do it.
This is where J sub D, above at #23 is quite correct in his analysis of why people stop buying local papers. If I want to know what happened in Ottawa or Washington or Paris, no problem, I can get that on the net; the big-picture stuff is always covered. It’s the dirty-fingers local stuff that is what people want in their paper, and it’s what they are first to lose when the newspapers decide what’s “necessary” or “profitable”. I don’t subscribe to my local paper because it’s next-to-fucking useless at this sort of thing. If it wasn’t I’d have it delivered every day and would go through it cover-to-cover before breakfast.
Re: liquor pic. Quit lyin. You know you’d hit it.
re the liquor chics- is that the new NORML poster? if so, drugs will NEVER become legal…
#17 That actually makes sense, which is why no journalism major would ever ask the question.
I have no sympathy for either the city or the neighboring businesses. They cornholed a business owner, he’s just returning the favor. And the city attorney is going to find himself cornholed over 1st amendment issues unless I miss my guess.
Re: sex shop: My kid’s daycare is across the street from an adult video and novelty store. No breakdown of social order here. Somehow, I think Old Town Alexandria will survive.
I’m gonna get on my sexist soapbox. I’ve noticed quite often on cops that the smaller female cops tend to be the quickest on the draw. They can’t intimidate anyone with their size so they resort to higher levels of force much more quickly. But to not hire someone because of the by-products of their sex (i choose not to say gender) such as smaller and weaker physical bodies is criminal. Woman are physically inferer to men when it comes to strength and other traits. Yes you can find exceptions, but if this weren’t essentially true, we would never have sports segregated by sex.
I know I could be dead wrong, but it seems like the same woman police officer who couldn’t hang physcally in sports with her male colleagues is expected to equal their physical prowess when subduing suspects and so forth. It would be criminal if a police officer had to go for their gun, because they’re not strong enough to effectively use non-lethal force. In my crusty ol’ opinion another failure of “equality at any cost” thinking.
IN RE Holder: well, maybe there’s hope for the SOB.
I just remember his asst grilling my bro in District Court and his needing three shots of straight Scotch afterwards. No legal violation on his part.
Re the White Wedding video: this is fun, but this one is ever so much better. Azz100c takes the original video and the original vocal track, strips out the instrumentals, and lets Microsoft Soundsmith autogenerate a new instrumental track in a random genre. Net result, a hillbilly banjo-pickin version that might be called Shotgun Wedding.
The Crazy Train Polka is also excellent.
“It would be criminal if a police officer had to go for their gun, because they’re not strong enough to effectively use non-lethal force. In my crusty ol’ opinion another failure of “equality at any cost” thinking.”
I’ve read (and if anyone has studies supporting or contradicting, please post) that female officers tend to be more sucessful at deescalation in the first place: i.e. the situation never comes to require force in the first place. That in itself might be a sexist position, I don’t know. If true though, the problems with physically smaller female officers may be balanced by their other capabilities.
Tommy, being a girl this may sound strange, but I’m actually in agreement with you. I’ve never understood why so many states have decided to let their standers slip on who they’ll hire as an officer. It use to be that you could only find officers that were tall (5’10” or taller was standard). They use to have to be in shape. Now that the standards have slipped for equality at any cost mentality I keep spotting officers that just aren’t intimidating. And the women seem to be the worst. They’re either to small, week twigs or huge hippos who couldn’t run after a suspect to save their lives. Its no wonder that their quickest to draw, there bodies aren’t built for ruff n tumble so when confronting a suspect their options are limited.
Now if we could go back to some legitimate standards in quality I could see a decent argument being made to let women in as officers, but only so long as they could keep up and fulfill those standards. Of course I’ve also got the same problem with our military, especially with front line solders in the army. Women get away with doing less exercises, less weight and running slower.