abaduck

Be aware this area has 'history'; in 1985, the residents murdered, and attempted to decapitate, an (unarmed, of course) cop during an episode of rioting. Unsurprisingly there has been ongoing tension, but the present situation (there's been rioting and looting in other areas of London tonight) is pure gang criminality; all the scrotes of London seem to have taken this as an excuse to have a night off from mugging, and loot stores in mobs instead. Mike

I remember when they finally started opening the streets near Ground Zero... first thing that happened, all along Vesey & Fulton, outside St. Pauls... street vendors selling photos, books, all kinds of '9/11 souvenirs'. That's when I knew how Jesus felt when he threw the money changers out of the temple. Mike

They serve no purpose whatever and can complicate our job; isn't there some mileage in trying to get such fake structures outlawed by code? Has that actually been done anywhere to anyones knowledge? Mike

Jim Jannard. The guy is a billionaire, he owns islands in Canada and Fiji, he doesn't *need* to punt vapourware. The camera you're talking about is the EPIC: Totally not vapourware. Pre-production versions have been circulating for a year or so, been used to shoot many big Hollywood movies - The Social Network, Pirates of the Caribbean, Contagion, the new Spiderman, The Hobbit... and you or I can buy one today: http://www.red.com/s.../product/epic-m Price will be dropping when it's in full production later this year. If it's still too rich, there will be a lower-spec version (same resolution but lower frame rates) for around $13,000 (guesstimate) for a body - the EPIC-S. If that's still too rich, there's a 3K version of the camera coming (called Scarlet), again later this year or early next, with a built-in 25-225mm (equivalent) zoom, for $7,500. All shoot raw files. I own a RED ONE, will be upgrading to EPIC later this year :-) The concept by the way is 'DSMC' - Digital Stills & Motion Picture camera. RED ONE is a big old beast, EPIC is small enough to handhold and at 15 megapixels or so, is competitive with high-end DSLRs. The difference is EPIC can shoot 15MP... at 120 frames per second!!! Mike

Great point. I lived in the city for several years... I was in the process of applying to join this unit, abandoned that due to wife's pregnancy, we knew when baby arrived we would be moving out of the city so no point in joining for just a few months. I was always rather dubious about the idea of someone putting on any kind of LE uniform, without having the gun to back it up, so to speak. I wonder if the murderer in the above case even knew they were unarmed cops. What do the LEOs here feel about this? Mike

Thanks for the informative (if depressing) post, JJB531... I guess you've dealt with enough of these kids to have a handle on them. I take your point about how tough it is to change anything about them on the streets. Which is why I still think, once you get them off the streets and into the justice system, that's a place someone might have a chance to turn them around. Mike

I agree. This does a better job of explaining it: It's interesting technically, but useless chrome when it comes to practical photography. If you want to see a revolutionary (in the literal sense of the word) camera company in action, visit http://www.red.com Mike

Crime Cop, I certainly didn't use the word 'harassment' because it isn't; that means something quite different. It certainly shouldn't be used in respect of this situation. Harassment is calculated and malicious. This is well-intentioned, but on the evidence I've heard, excessive. We had a previous poster, RayRider, a career LT so probably a decent guy not prone to whining, cite multiple instances of what they consider excessive stops by LE - which, while individually friendly and well intentioned and not harassment, cumulatively have the effect of spoiling a day out sufficiently the good LT doesn't do it any more. With respect I think it's not good enough for you to shrug and say it is what it is, if you don't like it go someplace else. I think part of the problem is simply numbers. If you tried to stop and inspect, say, 1 in 10 road users on the I-95, you would have a traffic screwup God himself couldn't untangle. The much lower density of traffic on the river makes much more frequent stops - perhaps excessively frequent from the point of view of the individual river user - possible. I'm not trying to be negative or anti-cop or anti-enforcement here, I've agreed enforcement is necessary. But if it's happening to guys who have done nothing wrong, with no probable cause, more than once a day... we need more joined-up thinking somewhere. Be constructive :-) Mike

Disclaimer: I'm not a boater, never have been. But i'm reading this with interest, and will open my big mouth with some thoughts. I can see both sides here. People kill themselves and others doing dumb things and drunk things in cars. People kill themselves and others doing dumb things and drunk things in boats. So we enforce certain laws to try to prevent that. I drive every day in Westchester. Thousands and thousands of miles a year. In eight years I've been stopped for checks or inspections maybe three or four times - usually just a five second stop while a cop checks the registration and inspection stickers on the windscreen. If law-abiding people on the river - people who aren't drunk or doing anything to suggest they're breaking any laws - are being stopped regularly, or even occasionally, three or four or five times a DAY, something is very wrong. No harm in aggressive enforcement and 'showing the flag' as LEOs - just like the deterrent effect of parking a cruiser somewhere visible. But if that extends to excessive actual stops - which it sounds like has been happening - then I'd have to wonder if the enforcement is being adequately targeted. JJB531 is right, enforcement is clearly needed, otherwise the people who don't give a s*** will have a free-for-all. ny10570 is right too; it sounds as if the enforcement is sometimes happening in a way and at a level that would NEVER be tolerated on the roads - civil disobedience would be the result, people would simply stop consenting to be so policed, and start refusing to stop. Maybe the answer IS legislation and consolidation; a single PD for a single river sounds very much like the natural way to go. Maybe until that happens the river users need to engage with all the LE agencies collectively, and come up together with some way to minimise the number of times law-abiding boaters are stopped - the USCG sticker, or some similar scheme, sounds like a good start, for example. That's good for the river users, who have less hassle, and good for the cops, who spend less of their time dealing with the law-abiding. Mike Mike

I can see where both Seth & Crime Cop are coming from here. Crime Cop and I would agree absolutely that actions need to have consequences, and criminal actions need to have significant consequences. If the parent(s) haven't managed or bothered to teach that, it falls to the state to try to do so. But the kid that started this discussion isn't 15 or 16, he's *12*. Yes I'm sure there are some 12 year olds that are what in Scotland would be called 'hard cases' and need bars; the safety of the community comes first and if they're so dangerous that that is a factor, end of story. But the average 12 year old on the wrong track needs something different, I believe. At 12, how many interventions could there have been that tried and failed? Far too young to write them off. Seth's story about the football player pointed in the right direction. Some real honest hard work community service would seem a better option to me than warehousing them in a dubious facility - a madhouse, as Seth put it. Of course that kind of service takes money and effort and supervision. See what the results are, in terms of the safety of the community from offending behaviour, and the future savings from turning a kid away from being a jailbird for some or all of his adult life - it's our tax dollars that pay for this, as Crime Cop pointed out. I have to say, from the comments I've heard, that a kid in one of those facilities is likely to learn bugger all apart from being an even worse criminal. What's the recidivism rate like? That's the bottom line for whether kids should be there or something, anything, else tried. I'm no bleeding heart liberal; maybe part of the problem is these days, if a kid gets in serious trouble and gets paddled, the *parent* goes to jail. But I can't support locking kids up unless it's been shown to be the most successful option in getting them on the straight and narrow. Punish of course - but it has to be something that *works*. In the UK they had a very successful program dealing with kids who wouldn't stop stealing and racing cars; they played to their strengths and set up a training program with them teaching them mechanic work, stripping and rebuilding old cars. Worked; kids who had been in and out of juvenile facilities gave up on the car theft and got into real mechanics. Mike

Indonesia today... Maybe not the best place to build a town... Mike

I said in my earlier post on this thread: "You should assign drivers after looking at their record, their experience, their temperament, their personality, and their driving skills" I'm a Scotsman. I call a spade a spade. I have to say, based just on what you're saying and how you're saying it, I personally wouldn't let you near the driving seat of any apparatus. You're talking too much and not listening enough. Mike

I'll contribute this. My dad never had an accident in his life. He never had a driving lesson and never passed a test. He started driving heavy vehicles (dump trucks etc.) near the end of WW2 when he was 14; he was just told to get in and drive it. There are idiots and bad drivers and people who shouldn't be trusted with a lawn mower of every age. IMHO older people, some of them anyway, just tend to be better at hiding this. You should assign drivers after looking at their record, their experience, their temperament, their personality, and their driving skills - all over a good length of time - and you should be assigning them prudently and erring on the side of caution. You shouldn't be looking at the calendar. If there's a problem, or perceived problem, with younger drivers, the problem is in their selection, training, and supervision, not in the drivers themselves; the military manage to teach younger drivers to drive all kinds of vehicles in combat. Mike

He can oppose until he's blue in the face. Fortunately its not his decision; he has no say in the matter. Mike

Chevrons and similar patterns have been standard on British, and other european, rigs for many many years; I don't buy 'marketing', I think they're playing catch-up and perhaps to a degree dealing with issues of 'tradition'. Me, I don't give a damn what a rig looks like so long as the rig works. Paint it pink with purple chevrons on it if some credible studies show they're marginally the most helpful colours. In the UK battenbergs are also widely used. Here's a paper giving some background to this stuff: http://theheap.net/files/14-04-high-conspicuity-livery.pdf Mike

Folks will remember the case a couple of years ago where a trooper pulled over & assaulted a paramedic who was transporting a patient, apparently in retaliation for a perceived earlier failure to yield (to give ONE interpretation of events). The original thread: has been locked, but I felt folks might like an update: the court case is continuing, and the latest is that the trooper has lost an appeal court ruling; they were told they couldn't use LEO qualified immunity as a shield for their actions: http://newsok.com/feed/appellate-court-rules-trooper-excessive-force-lawsuit-should-move-forward/article/3575596?custom_click=pod_headline_news Mike

abaduck - Mike Ross, he doesn't hide is name, is, for the record, a registered Republican, more libertarian than anything else. Certainly not a liberal. He didn't respond earlier because he's spent the day at the FTC doing rescue tech, and joined in the good-natured banter involving one of the other students, an LEO. He's so anti-police that he was in the in the middle of joining the police, as a volunteer cop in the UK, before that was cut short by our moving to the USA. He's given serious thought to joining the volunteer PSEF here in Westchester, but has back-burnered that due to too many other commitments. Yes, sometimes I debate - I have questions and opinions about police actions on occasions. About the only time I think I could be said to have been out of line was the recent thread on the Philly open carry guy, and enough LEOs here told me how and why I was wrong I manned up, said OK I was wrong, and apologised. All I wanted to do was update people on what was happening; a lot of people discussed this case, and a story on the latest developments caught my eye. I often end up reading something and someplace down the line it's 'I wonder what happened about X? How did that play out?' That's all there was to it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and JJB531, I respectfully think you're out of line here. Mike

That's by and large correct. The general rule is that if you can see it from a public place, and you aren't obstructing the PD in their work, you can record it. A guide, well-known and regarded by most in the photographic community as accurate, is here: http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf Mike

Thanks Helicopper, that's interesting and something I didn't know... I know I sometimes harp on about it, but I find the differences between the US and UK systems fascinating, given that they have the same roots; in the UK there's no such thing as a statue of limitations, period. Any crime can always be tried, in principle. In practice the defence may seek to have the action struck out as an abuse of process, if it concerns events in the extremely remote past, but we still hear of, for instance, crimes involving the abuse of children being successfully prosecuted after 20, 30, even 40 years. Mike

A fair point. I've asked myself a few times: if waterboarding is effective and legal, why isn't it used more generally in the justice system? I'm sure there are cases where it could be helpful. Mike

Interesting on many levels; I'm a photographer as well as a fireman. I can't understand how it can be lawful to photograph or video anyone in public, but only so long as you don't record their voice. That's such an unwarranted 1st amendment prior restraint that I can't imagine for an instant it's constitutional; I'm astonished they passed it and even more astonished they're trying to enforce it. Or maybe not; I've been warned about Chicago. Ask any aviator about Meigs Field. Heinlein knew what he was talking about when he featured the despotic 'Chicago Imperium' in one of his books! My personal 'What the $%($' moment was: "earlier this year, for example, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for lying under oath about his role in the routine torture of hundreds of suspects in police interrogation rooms for more than a decade. Nearly everyone else involved in the tortures, including the police commanders and prosecutors who helped cover them up, couldn't be prosecuted due to statutes of limitations." There's a statute of limitations for *torture*?!! Mike

I dunno how it works in the USA, but back home in Scotland there's a lot of latitude in the law; the prosecution can hang a 'sexual' tag on pretty much any minor offence IF they can prove it was done for an unlawful sexual thrill, even things like minor assault, disorderly conduct, or breach of the peace, and if the judge agrees they can order the offender to sign the sex offenders register as part of the sentence. I guess in a case like this it would hinge on being able to show whether it was done for sexual thrills (to put it crudely) or just to humiliate; to be mean and evil and bullying. Doesn't make it any less wrong of course. Either way it's conduct that has NO place in the firehouse or anywhere else (to state the bloody obvious!) Mike

I drive whichever of our cars I happen to find the keys for first. In winter my gear lives in the house and I don it warm before I drive; I've never seen the point in dancing the tarantella in the snow. The rest of the year it gets thrown in the trunk. I have a blue light. I use it, if I happen to have it in the car, on maybe one in fifty or one in a hundred calls. Next! Mike

Ok, enough guys I respect seem to think the Philly guy was out of line, so I'll be man enough to go with that, wind my neck in and apologise. Mike

Aye. Titanium can burn in CO2 (!) and putting water on a titanium fire will likely result in an explosion. It can even act as a catalyst and decompose water into hydrogen & oxygen, which generally ends in a loud bang... dry chem indeed. Mike