Archive for January 25, 2022

Cops are taking a hike

Posted: January 25, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized

By Christopher Harper

In a perfect storm of protests over police reform and the deadly use of force, Philadelphia cops are leaving in droves, and few recruits are available to replace them.

These trends exist in other Pennsylvania locales, where crime has increased significantly over the past two years, creating a growing crisis in law enforcement. 

“We are anticipating that the department is going to be understaffed by several hundred members because hundreds of guys are either retiring or taking other jobs and leaving the department,” said Mike Neilon, spokesperson for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge No. 5, the union that represents city police officers.

The pandemic has also hampered recruiting efforts, as has the relatively new requirement that police applicants live in the city, Neilon told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “All of that coming together is creating some issues with finding the best and brightest to sign up to be Philadelphia police officers.” 

In the past month, 79 Philadelphia officers have been accepted into the city’s Deferred Retirement Option Program, meaning they intend to retire within four years. That’s six times the number from last year.

The Philadelphia Police Department is budgeted to have 6,380 officers but has just 6,112, leaving 268 vacancies.

“Every action has a reaction. When you vilify every police officer for every bad police officer’s decision, [people] don’t want to take this job anymore,” said Pat Colligan, president of the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association, the state’s largest police union

“It’s been a very trying and difficult time to put on the badge every day,” he told the Inquirer. “There’s a recruiting crisis.”

Many departments face the same problems in older cops retiring early and younger people not wanting to join the ranks. 

“There’s no doubt in my mind that what’s transpiring in our nation today is contributing to the lack of retention and the difficulty in hiring new officers. A lot of cops right now, in view of the environment, are saying, ‘Hey, I’ve gone 20, 30 years without being sued, shot, or divorced. I’m going to get out while I have an opportunity,’” Jack Rinchich, president of the 4,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police, said recently.

Officers also are upset, he said, by decisions to eliminate specialized units, such as SWAT and K-9 teams, and from local officials freezing and cutting police budgets and debating whether to strip officers of qualified immunity, which shields them from being sued in most cases.

Haverford Township Police Chief John Viola, president of the Delaware County Police Chiefs Association, told the Inquirer that larger departments that regularly fill recruit classes are trying to pump up falling numbers by making the application process more accessible.

“People don’t want to be police anymore. It’s a good job, and good-paying job, but when you look at national news every day, people just don’t want to be officers,” he added.

His department used to get applicant pools of 200 or 300. Only 72 people have applied so far this year, he said.

Elsewhere in the Pennsylvania suburbs, departments looking to fill vacancies of retiring veterans are struggling. For example, Hatfield Township had 100 applicants during a recent call for new officers. Of that group, only 47 showed up to take the exam. Those who did apply were from a mix of backgrounds: Some were college graduates struggling to find work in their fields, others had a lifelong interest in policing, and another group applied out of curiosity about the field.

In New Jersey, Col. Patrick Callahan, the acting superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said the state’s largest police agency is facing a historically low applicant pool this year. So far, the agency has received 2,670 qualified applicants, which compares with 5,000 in 2020 and 15,000 in 1993. 

The message seems clear. We all should get ready for a bumpy road ahead when cops leave the beat.

Still nowhere near that high score so I suggest you read one of the most important piece you can on how we got here

Posted: January 25, 2022 by datechguy in culture
Tags: , ,

Well yesterday didn’t see Dan’s high score fall so under my “blogging will be light” meme let me suggest you read what might in terms of our cultural history both the saddest and in fact the least surprising story I’ve seen (via Don Surber)

“I didn’t go into this thinking I was going to hear these really shocking things,” said Dean, who originally had no interest in launching an investigative dig through the erotica tycoon’s dirty laundry. “I figured it’d be fun, but kind of lightweight.”

Dean had just wrapped production on Paris Hilton’s gripping “This Is Paris” documentary in early 2020 when she was tapped to probe Hefner’s previously impenetrable kingdom at the dawn of the pandemic. 

“But as I started to have these conversations [with the survivors of Hefner], the project transformed 180 degrees, from lightweight to super-critical,” she said, deeming the documentary the crown jewel of her career. 

I’ve been saying for a long time that men won the sexual revolution hands down. We went from a culture where a man was expected to marry a girl if he wanted to sleep with them (As my dad taught me and as I taught my sons “If she’s good enough to sleep with she’s good enough to marry”) to one where women are taught to put out and now even in schools we are encouraging kids in this direction.

“The women were telling me what they’d been through, and why it was important for us to re-examine who Hef really was,” Dean continued. “Our ideas of emancipated womanhood, sexuality and sexual freedom are all wrapped up with Playboy. But is a man like Hugh Hefner fit to define that?”

We went from the vice squad and porn being something tough to find to something so prevalent that they were unable to do a study on its effect because they couldn’t find a control group that hadn’t been exposed to it. Hefner was the man their pried this door open and many who wanted the benefits of making perversion socially acceptable ran right though it.

Theodore clinched the coveted post as Hef’s main squeeze for five years during the late ’70s through the early ’80s. And his unending supply of cocaine and “leg spreader” Quaaludes helped her dull the pangs of being coaxed into orgies five nights a week, being ordered to have sex with a revolving door of men and women while Hef watched voyeuristically and she caught him engaging in sexual activities with her pet. 

Multiply this by all the different women who went though that mansion over 4 decades and the “revolving door of men and woman” who they serviced and you might get the scope of what this was. This was Jeffrey Epstein on steroids.

I submit and suggest that that the war on Christianity was all about enabling this.

Closing thought:

Speaking of Epstein on steroids, does anyone really believe that there were not camera rolling while all those people were in those rooms?