Free Republic

There is something of a crime epidemic in London. I state this in conditional terms because many of the offences are what can be called “low level” crimes which do not generally involve personal injury, grave damage to property or danger to life. But that is not to say that they are not serious in their effect: on the contrary, they are perceived as signs of a breakdown of civil authority which risks undermining the public’s confidence in justice and stable government. When little crimes are permitted to proliferate unchecked, it is actually much more generally demoralising than the occasional...

An Australian Federal Police (AFP) Officer has been charged with trafficking methamphetamines, high level corruption, theft and money laundering. The magistrate who has released him on bail did so in part because he has “no criminal history.” The officer deserves the presumption of innocence but the range of criminal charges in a country where wrong doing police officers are rarely held to account seems to make a compelling case for protecting the public from what he might do when set free. Who agrees?

The Minneapolis City Council approved a $1 million settlement Friday after a botched drug raid in 2010 in which an officer threw a "flash-bang" grenade into a Minneapolis apartment burning the flesh off a woman's leg. The payout to Rickia Russell, who suffered permanent injuries, was the third largest payout for alleged Minneapolis police misconduct on record. --SNIP-- On the night of Feb. 16, 2010, 18 officers were executing a search warrant on the apartment at 5753 Sander Drive based on a tip that narcotics were being sold at the address by someone named David Conley. In what Bennett called...

Washington, D.C.: America's Scandal CapitalBy Nicholas Stix ashington, D.C., is notorious for its crooks and human depravity - but its problems are not limited to the federal government. For the city of 572,000 inhabitants is plagued by the sort of systemic corruption and misery that is more typical of an African kleptocracy like dictator Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, than an American city. Washington's newest scandal has hit its teachers' union. The city with some of America's worst public schools has a teachers' union that has for years been run like an organized crime syndicate. Initially, the FBI charged that officers of...