A Detroit neighborhood fights for its life, and an ex-cop leads the way

Jackson knows that, in Michigan, the law says that if your life’s in danger, you have a right to use deadly force to defend yourself. That’s why he keeps a baseball bat stashed on his porch. That’s why he sat there late one night, waiting with that shotgun.

He had seen the old Chevy before, and knew the drug-dealing gunman was inside it. The car belonged to a guy in the dealer’s posse. But it didn’t stay long. Between the armed ex-cop and the video camera mounted above the porch, the dealer had few options. The Chevy backed out of the driveway and left the same way it came.

Jackson is the de facto leader of the neighborhood, like an unofficial sheriff. He’s 63, burly and slower-moving in his retirement. Everyone here knows him, and everyone here calls him Jack Rabbit, a nickname he has had for years. He’s president of the Jefferson-Chalmers Homeowners Association, president of the Jefferson-Chalmers Citizens District Council, and he’s on the Jefferson East Business Association’s board of directors. He plows snow from the wintertime streets and sidewalks with his truck. He’s the neighborhood lookout, and, through his homeowners association, he offers a monthly reward for local crime tips. He’s the one who urges everyone in his neighborhood to stay vigilant, the one who confronts criminals on the street and videotapes them. 

{ MetroTimes | Continue reading }

related { Demolishing Density in Detroit: Can Farming Save the Motor City? }

photo { Thanks Shampoo! }

{ What O.J. Simpson wore when he was acquitted in 1995 of murdering his ex-wife and her friend was the suit seen around the world during one of the most watched televised moments in history. But the Smithsonian Institution, America’s repository of historical artifacts, rejected it Tuesday as inappropriate for their collection. | Washington Post | Continue reading | Flashback: The O. J. Simpson murder case | Wikipedia | Related: Robert L. Stone, a former top executive at the Hertz corporation who had hired O.J. Simpson in the 1970s as a famous pitchman for the car rental giant, has died. | Related: The Los Angeles Police Department has apologized to the family of the late Robert F. Kennedy and removed items from a homicide exhibit in Las Vegas that included the dress shirt worn by the senator when he was assassinated in 1968. | LA Times | Continue reading }

Nearly the entire hit was recorded on closed-circuit TV cameras, from the time the team arrived at Dubai’s airport to the time the assassins entered Hamas military leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s room. The cameras even caught team members before and after they donned their disguises. The only thing the Dubai authorities have been unable to discover is the true names of the team. But having identified the assassins, or at least the borrowed identities they traveled on, Dubai felt confident enough to point a finger at Israel. (Oddly enough several of the identities were stolen from people living in Israel.)

After Dubai released the tapes, the narrative quickly became that the assassination was an embarrassing blunder for Tel Aviv. Mossad failed spectacularly to assassinate a Hamas official in Amman in 1997— the poison that was used acted too slowly and the man survived—and it looks like the agency is not much better today. Why were so many people involved? (The latest report is that there were 26 members of the team.) Why were identities stolen from people living in Israel? Why didn’t they just kill Mr. Mabhouh in a dark alley, one assassin with a pistol with a silencer? Or why at least didn’t they all cover their faces with baseball caps so that the closed-circuit TV cameras did not have a clean view?

The truth is that Mr. Mabhouh’s assassination was conducted according to the book—a military operation in which the environment is completely controlled by the assassins. At least 25 people are needed to carry off something like this. You need “eyes on” the target 24 hours a day to ensure that when the time comes he is alone. You need coverage of the police—assassinations go very wrong when the police stumble into the middle of one. You need coverage of the hotel security staff, the maids, the outside of the hotel. You even need people in back-up accommodations in the event the team needs a place to hide.

I can only speculate about where exactly the hit went wrong. But I would guess the assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology. Not only were there closed-circuit TV cameras in the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated and at the airport, but Dubai has at its fingertips the best security consultants in the world. (…)

Not completely understanding advances in technology may be one explanation for the assassins nonchalantly exposing their faces to the closed-circuit TV cameras, one female assassin even smiling at one.

{ The Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

{ sorry, unsourced photos/email }

Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person, usually a stranger, is in love with him or her.

The illness often occurs during psychosis, especially in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar mania.

Erotomania is also called de Clérambault’s syndrome, after the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934).

The term erotomania is often confused with obsessive love, obsession with unrequited love, or hypersexuality (hypersexuality replaces the older concepts of nymphomania (furor uterinus) and satyriasis.).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The Reagan assassination attempt occurred in Washington, D.C. on Monday, March 30, 1981.

President Reagan and three others were shot and wounded by John Hinckley, Jr. with a .22-caliber pistol.

Reagan was the first serving United States president to survive being shot in an assassination attempt.

{ Reagan assassination attempt | Wikipedia | Continue reading | Google Images | Related: In a 1982 speech, President Ronald Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to America’s national security, putting a too-literal gloss on the phrase “war on drugs.” }

The motivation behind Hinckley’s attack stemmed from an obsession with actress Jodie Foster due to erotomania. While living in Hollywood in the late 1970s, he saw the film Taxi Driver at least 15 times, apparently identifying strongly with Travis Bickle, the lead character.

Hinckley arrived in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, March 29, getting off a Greyhound Lines bus and checking into the Park Central Hotel. He had breakfast at McDonald’s the next morning, noticed U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s schedule on page A4 of the Washington Star, and decided it was time to make his move.

Knowing that he might not live to tell about shooting Reagan, Hinckley wrote (but did not mail) a letter to Foster about two hours prior to the assassination attempt, saying that he hoped to impress her with the magnitude of his action.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | The Trial of John Hinckley, 1982 | Hinckley bought two identical .22-caliber revolvers in Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas on Oct. 3, 1980 | Photos: John Hinckley, Jr. | Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. }

How far can bullets travel when fired into water?

The first candidate for this test was the Civil War rifle. At a range of 15 feet, the ballistics gel was completely unharmed; likewise at five feet. Only when the range was reduced to three feet did the bullet finally penetrate the gel, suggesting that diving under water was probably a pretty effective way of dodging slugs during the Civil War.

The experimenters moved on to the hunting rifle, which was loaded with a full-metal jacket .223 round that emerged at roughly 2,500 feet per second. At ten feet, the bullet disintegrated and the gel was untouched. At three feet, the bullet again broke up, with its tip coming to rest on the gel — not nearly enough power to damage flesh.

A bullet from the M1 Garand, with a muzzle speed of 2,800 ft/sec, also disintegrated at the ten-foot range. At two feet, the slug penetrated about four inches into the gel, suggesting a non-fatal wound. The armor-piercing .50 caliber round didn’t do any better — it, too, came apart at distances greater than five feet and lost most of its punch by three feet.

The engineers at the Central Scientific Research Institute for Precision Machinery Construction in Moscow correctly perceived the problem with shooting into water and in response developed the SPP-1 (Spetsialnyj Podvodnyj Pistolet, or “Special Underwater Pistol”) for use by Russian Navy frogmen. The SPP-1 is a manually operated four-barrel handgun that breaks open along the top and loads in a fashion similar to a double-barrel or over-and-under shotgun. The ammunition is designed to work underwater, using long bottlenecked rimmed casings plus bullets made from mild rather than hardened steel and designed to be stable underwater. The barrel isn’t rifled. According to the specs for the pistol, when fired at a depth of five meters — over sixteen feet — it’s lethal up to seventeen meters, or over fifty-five feet.

The SPP-1 isn’t the only exemplar of the breed. Other firearms are designed to work underwater as well, but they tend more towards the spear-gun model using dart-like projectiles. There’s no bright-line boundary where a bullet becomes a dart, but the projectiles fired by the Heckler & Koch P11 Underwater Pistol, for example, clearly cross the line. The H&K is an all-polymer weapon made especially for underwater use by the German Bundeswehr Kampfschwimmer — “army combat divers.” Each of the five dart-shaped projectiles is powered by a small, solid-fuel rocket. The weapon has been featured in some high-profile films, including Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie, and is said to be able to inflict a fatal wound at fifty feet underwater.

{ The Straight Dope | NB: The article isn’t on the site anymore | Related: Can a bullet fired into the air kill someone when it comes down? }

photos/enlarge { 1. Howard Schatz | 2. Unsourced }

Police pursuing a suspect shot and killed a man who they say fired on them in the Times Square area.

The shooting happened in a very busy area, filled with shoppers and tourists, near West 46th Street and Broadway just before 11:30 a.m today.

According to officials, an undercover officer was dealing with illegal peddlers in Times Square.

When the officer approached two peddlers, one of them took off running and a chase ensued. The sergeant pursued, and the man turned and fired with a Mac-10 machine pistol that held 30 rounds; he got off two shots before it jammed, Browne said, shattering the glass window at a Broadway baby store.

The officer returned fire, police said, hitting the suspect several times.

The suspect had been wanted for assault in the Bronx, but the officer approached him because he was recognized as an aggressive panhandler, authorities said.

The second man was arrested, but not hurt.

{ ABC 7 | Continue reading | NY Daily News }

illustration { Jonas Bergstrand }

{ You fire a bullet, and it explodes where you tell it to. That’s the essence of the XM25, a gun that fires explosive rounds able to neutralize enemies camped out behind cover. Soldiers in urban environments can fire over or past walls sheltering their enemies, and the bullets will explode on the other side. | Time | more | Related: The evolution of the human capacity for killing at a distance | audio }

For nearly a decade, writer and artist Ken Habarta has been scanning newspapers, FBI alerts, and the internet for information on bank robberies. He’s especially drawn to robberies that involve a note. “The single most popular way of robbing banks,” he says, “is the quieter, gentler act of passing a note.” Gone are the days of pistols in the waist line.

Habarta posts the notes, security camera stills, and other details of bank robberies to his blog.

{ UTUNE | Continue reading | Bank Notes | Ken Habarta’s blog }

But we know that murder is not in fact such a random matter. It is first and foremost an interaction between two people who more often than not know each other: approximately 75% of all homicides in the United States from 1995 to 2002 occurred between people who knew each other prior to the murder (Federal Bureau of Investigation, selected years).

We also know that the victim and offender tend to resemble each other socially and demographically (e.g., Wolfgang 1958; Luckenbill 1977). Young people kill other young people, poor people kill other poor people, gang members kill other gang members, and so on.

{ Murder by structure: dominance relations and the social structure of gang homicide. | via Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

{ A Colt Is My Passport, 1967 | Screenshots | Wikipedia | Trailer }