WHEN POLICING FAILS: The Angel of Death Wears Granny Glasses. “Anne Kirkpatrick has been a police executive for a long time, proudly fighting to remove machismo from policing, and she’s bounced from high-profile job to high-profile job. Among many other jobs, she was the police chief in Oakland, California for three years, until she was fired. . . . You can’t exaggerate the failure of policing in Oakland, in the wake of an effort to, you’ll never guess, re-imagine policing and shift police funding to social justice. The city is notorious for shuttered businesses, driven out by daily crime. . . . Back when Kirkpatrick was the police chief, Oakland had a reputation for unanswered and slowly answered 911 calls, and new stories described 911 calls that were finally answered by an operator but never actually produced a police response. And of course, as I’ve said many times, Oakland’s best-known community activist makes videos in which he just walks around to show what a disgraceful shithole the city has become. So how does this person get to New Orleans? Let’s look at the hiring announcement from the mayor’s office.”
Plus: “Rises to management on limited experience. Bounces from job to job. Fails then gets hired again elsewhere. It’s a whole cultural story in a single lifetime. . . . Much respect to the NOPD officers on duty in the French Quarter this morning for handling a horrifying act of violence with courage, despite the quality of their leadership.”
True: “In New Orleans this morning, a terrorist attacked a crowd with his truck, then tried to get out of the car and start shooting — and New Orleans cops, working for a department that has an old reputation for troubling behavior, stopped him instantly. We have footage on social media that shows a bunch of NOPD officers sprinting straight into the attack, and choppy, broken footage that maybe sort of shows the edges of the gunfight. The attacker appears to have died right next to his truck, a fact that suggests courage and seriousness in the police response.”
BTW, don’t invite Kirkpatrick to be your designated driver.