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The Police Blotter Quote of the Year Award
The award for The Police Blotter Quote of the Year goes to Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed.
Being convicted of criminal offenses create a lot of hardships for offenders.
I never knew that. I always thought that those who committed criminal offenses created hardships for their victims. Professor Medwed made the comment defending the newly elected DA of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Rachel Rollins. Here is the list of crimes that Ms. Rollins will decline to prosecute when she takes office.
Rollins, 47, has been widely hailed – and widely criticized – for her well-publicized “Charges to be Declined” list, which she has featured on her campaign webpage.
With rare exception, offenses of shoplifting, trespass, threats, and larceny under $250 will no longer be prosecuted, as well as disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and “minor driving offenses,” according to the list.
Breaking and entering will not be prosecuted, as long as the perpetrator makes sure the property is vacant. Alternatively, those who commit break-ins of occupied homes because they are cold or tired, but don’t damage anything, will also be in the clear.
Offenders won’t have to worry about going to court over receiving stolen property or underage drinking, and won’t be held accountable for wanton or malicious destruction of property, either.
Cases where an offender is charged with resisting arrest and nothing else will also be turned away, as well as any instances where the person resists arrest while being charged with another offense on Rollins’ “Charges to be Declined” list.
“In the exceptional circumstances where prosecution of one of these charges is warranted, the line DA must first seek permission from his or her supervisor,” Rollins’ website noted.
Making threats will also be permitted, with the exception of those related to domestic violence.
The good citizens of Suffolk County might want to make sure their business, homeowners, and renters insurance premiums are paid-up, at least while they’re still affordable.
Published in Policing
This is an onion parody, right?
No, this falls into my sense of wonder category. I knew wonder when I saw it, trying to explain it is a different matter.
Criminals aren’t clueless. If she refuses to prosecute any shoplifters, the county will become a magnet for thieves who will strip stores bare. I suspect that part at least won’t last.
Really? That is telling the person who worked to create or to buy such property that his or her time and work are without value.
Actually, the cumulative listing suggests that the new DA (and the voters who elected her) discount property crimes in general, which exhibits a failure to consider that all property is the product of someone’s effort, time, creativity, and work. Failure to value property is failure to value the person(s) who created that property.
Under the Texas penal Code, breaking into an occupied home gives the homeowner almost unrestricted authority to use deadly force.
This is where progressives have been headed the entire time.
My wife and I had the same reaction as @miffedwhitemale. I visited Miss Rollins’s website, and if it’s a parody, it’s top quality.
I am inclined to click “contribute”, at least for $5.00. I think Miss Rollins is doing something very valuable.
She is taking the Social Justice War past the talking and protesting stage, starting to put Social Justice Warriors in charge of the State, and implementing their policies.
This is the only way to silence those who claim that SJW theories can’t work. Put those theories into practice, and if they are successful, it will silence the critics.
It’s a win-win, too. If Miss Rollins is unsuccessful, it will only strengthen the movement. A fundamental part of the theory is that its failures are always due to not giving Marxists enough power.
That could create some perverse incentives.
In the area in which I recently lived, there were several “big box” retail stores along a major highway (Target, WalMart, regional supermarket). The police in the several towns along the highway spent a lot of time breaking up gangs from the nearby city who would travel along this highway stealing things (mostly small high value items like razor cartridges and baby formula) to resell in the city. They’d steal only a few hundred dollars’ worth from each store, but cumulatively they’d collect thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise. A policy such as that announced by the DA would create an incentive for such gangs to keep going, and for the police to have to tell the merchants to just live with the regular loss of thousands of dollars of merchandise.
Tonight’s forecast low in Boston is 23F.
To escape that cold, every vagrant in the city should descend upon Rollins’s house with their breaking and entering equipment.
They should feel free to each take up to $250 in goods.
Anyone under 21 should also feel free to raid the liquor cabinet.
Well, his statement is in and of itself true but not complete – being convicted does create hardships for the convicted offender, in addition to the hardships for the victim. The difference is that the offender has some control over whether he is subjected to those hardships. If he doesn’t commit the offense, he likely won’t suffer the hardships.
As a DA, Miss Rollins probably has a security detail. That would cut down on the number of times her television set gets pinched.
I think that this is going to get very old very fast.
Can you press civil charges for shop lifting? And if the amount in question isn’t very large is it worth the prosecutors effort to make it a criminal case if a civil option exists or there isn’t some clear pattern of repeat behavior?
Personally I’m fine with throwing the book at any petty criminal, so this isn’t an approach I much favor, on the other hand I do think it is possible to be overly focused on small things as a means of deflecting work on harder more serious work. If her office uses the freed up resources from having to prosecute these minor offenses in favor of prosecuting larger and more chronic criminals I’m fine with it as an idea.
Either way the people of Boston voted for her. So really it’s their problem now. They can always vote for someone else if she makes a hash of it.
As it so often does in these times, the famous H.L. Mencken quote applies:
FIFY
So they are basically implementing the opposite of the “Broken Windows” theory of crime control.
Broken Windows said “Take care of the little crimes, and you’ll reduce the big crimes”.
I wonder what the results of ignoring the “little crimes”* will be…
*For the record, I don’t consider breaking and entering, destruction of property, or shoplifting to be “little crimes”.
The Slippery Slope here applies. At some point, once the criminals and populace are accustomed to rolling over for damages under $250, you’ll start to see more sobby sniveling pleadings for mercy for those who only damaged $275, which is surely at worst a minor nudging of boundaries. Do we really want to prosecute for a measly extra $25 in damages? And so on.
Eventually you’ll have to burn someone’s house down with them in it to get an involuntary manslaughter charge.
Yet another kick to the ribs of brick and mortar businesses.
We already have groups of people here in Milwaukee coming into stores, grabbing a bunch of stuff and running out. Most of the major retailers have instructed their staffs to not intervene. Liability and all that…
When I worked at K-Mart back in 1979/1980, we once had every male employee in the store chase a shoplifter more than a mile down the street before he lost us in some woods.
If they are not going to prosecute, then it probably doesn’t make any sense for police to investigate these crimes, does it?
So, if police see a guy climbing in a window the guy can just say, “No, no, no! The people are at work so it’s cool, no prosecutable crime here.”
If someone breaks into my home while I’m there, then yes, prosecution should be the least of their concerns.
It looks like refusing to bake a cake is not on the list.
This is one that a criminal should pass on. There are different types of resistance. Sometimes it a quick wrestling match, sometimes it’s a knockdown drag-out fight. I’ve experienced all of them, including a bystander who fired a couple of shots in the direction of my partner and I from about fifteen away from us on a traffic stop. He told us he was shooting at our car after we arrested him.
Resisting arrest can lead to serious physical injury, including death depending upon the level of resistance.
Great! Now I know where to go to steal womens’ underwear . . .
But seriously, this means a thief can take an item and walk out of a store with impunity, daring the clerks to wrestle him to the ground. Naw, this has to be a parody . . .
Actually I know of several national retailers that will fire an employee if they call the police while a shoplift is in progress, or if they report the shoplift after the thief has left the store. They shall remain nameless.
I don’t recommend employees trying to physically prevent a theft. There are shoplifters that can become violent, and some carry some sort of weapon such as a knife, firearm, or pepper spray.
As Nancy Pelosi said after being released by the Police : “I had to break in to make sure the property was vacant”
Resisting arrest seems like a particularly futile activity, as even if you are momentarily successful, your probability of getting caught eventually is pretty high. At least here in the United States we have pretty decent systems for undoing an unjustified arrest, and (unlike some countries) you are not going to disappear after arrest.
My favorite resisting arrest story (again, in the town where I used to live) started with a domestic violence claim (so he would not be free on DA Rollins’ no charge list). After he was handcuffed, and 3 or 4 police officers were on hand to put him into the police car, he started kicking at the officers, at the car door, at the back window of the car, etc. What could be going through his mind? Why put up the fight? There are several police officers on hand. He is handcuffed. There is clearly no way he is not going to the police station. A couple of years later, after a few more interactions with the town police, he stopped by the station of his own volition – to set fire to some of the police cars parked in back. Fortunately, he was incompetent at that, too, and damaged only the plastic bumper covers.
You can institute civil charges for shoplifting. In Oregon merchants can get a civil penalty as well ($250 iirc). But that doesn’t work with professional shoplifters who are judgment proof. They’d just laugh at it.
I think it will me like the Netherlands after it legalized drugs. The heretofore criminals came in and settled down. Boston will be Amsterdam on the Charles.
I see a lot of broken windows in the future of Suffolk County.
Next: Purge night.
Oh, and I suppose everyone at her Christmas party can take up to $250 in gifts and prizes as a holiday bonus.
We called these types of individuals people with anti-social tendencies. Slow learners was also applicable.
effed up