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Re: FBI raids Arabic deli on Grove St.
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Now there's a reality show concept for you. "Jersey City Grocery Store -- Our Clerks Have A Back Story."
Posted on: 2007/11/2 15:40
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Re: Bomb Scare on 5th street.
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a) I'm writing generally here. In human terms, I feel sorry about all that the original poster went through and am glad s/he got out of the poky relatively quickly. I agree that it's mean to criticize someone for collecting what is actually a harmless object. b) I agree with your specific argument here but think there's got to be another way to balance the right of people to collect fake bombs with the right of the authorities to figure out whether people have real bombs or are clearly likely to use fake bombs to commit crimes. Example: the police might not have the right to keep my off an airplane by deciding whether I have a bomber personality, but, if I try to carry a fake bomb onto a plane, they probably have a right to at least detain and question me, no matter what my intentions are, and even if the bomb looks nothing like a bomb. I don't like our airport security and border control systems, but I do approve of the general concept of keeping people with anything that looks a lot like a bomb off the plane until it's clear that the bomb-like object is not a bomb. I contribute to the ACLU, and I would want any measures of this kind to be approved by and possibly written by people at the ACLU. But my suspicion is that smart ACLU lawyers could come up with a strategy for dealing with this sort of thing while minimizing the effect on people who own harmless objects that turn out to look like bombs. Being able to collect harmless but scary-looking objects is a right, and having some kind of ability to deal with people who, at first glance, seem likely to bomb us is also a right. We have to figure out a way to balance both rights, not use one of the rights as a club to beat up the people who are more interested in the other right.
Posted on: 2007/10/26 23:14
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Re: Bomb Scare on 5th street.
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The PD officers were under no obligation to believe what Slacky said about the disabled grenades. They shouldn't have harassed him (if they did) but they should have had a right to get a bomb expert to look at the disabled grenades, and it seems to me that it would be reasonable for them to have someone evaluate the original poster to make sure he wasn't the kind of person who uses a fake grenade to hold up banks. I guess the question would be what people should do to have the right to use disabled grenades as paperweights without worrying about bomb squads. I think, in practice, the only solution is that people who own that sort of thing should make sure to keep them out of eyesight of emergency personnel. Because, really, there's no practica, foolproof way to make it clear to a non-expert whether a grenade or other bomb is real or fake. Even if, say, a citizen got a valid fake grenade collector license, how would the police know that the collector hadn't started collecting real grenades? Maybe you could argue that the Second Amendment ought to give people the right to own real bombs, to keep the power of the federal government in check. I can empathize with that argument on a theoretical grounds, but I don't really want a lot of my fellow citizens sitting at home with bomb collections.
Posted on: 2007/10/26 21:48
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Re: Bomb Scare on 5th street.
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Within reason (e.g., done once, politely, not 75,000 times per week), the police and other authorities ought to have a right to check out any object that they see that they reasonably think might be a bomb. It seems to me that any fake bomb or disabled bomb certainly ought to count as something that the police should be able to check out, and probably would have wanted to check out long before Sept. 11, 2001. The question is whether the police are being as polite and helpful as they can be to suspects under the circumstances. Maybe, to take the sting out of this sort of thing, the police could give out restaurant coupons or something like that to innocent people who've been inconvenienced by job searchers. But, as long as police aren't using their authority to check out bombs as a tool for harassing someone they don't like (e.g., going into the home of a Healy critic and having a bomb squad checking every object in the office), then they ought to have the right to check out objects that seem to look like bombs, as long as they see the bombs while going about their normal business. People have a right to own funky fake grenade paperweights, but neighbors have a right not to be blown up by grenades that turn out to be real grenades.
Posted on: 2007/10/26 21:40
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Re: Bomb Scare on 5th street.
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I think the conclusion here is that the police were right to check out the inactivated grenades and probably to arrest and evaluate the original poster, but, to the extent that the police and other people involved were rude to the guy, that's wrong.
The message to officers ought to be, "When in doubt, do what Captain Furillo would do," or, to put it another way, "Speak gently and carry a video recorder with great batteries." That doesn't mean that the police have to be pushovers. But, if someone is cooperating reasonably well and not doing anything worse than whining, the police ought to be as polite and even as friendly as they can be, under the circumstances. Even, if, say, a "suspect" clearly has murdered 25 people with axes, being rude to him will not bring back the dead, and being polite to the guy and getting him soda or whatever else he needs to be comfortable might help gently elicit the information needed to convict the guy of a felony.
Posted on: 2007/10/26 18:53
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Re: Jersey Journal & Star Ledger: BIG FEATURES ON CRIME & LOCATIONS -- SEE LINKS
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I'm not sure whether it's really worse or whether I'm just noticing everything more because of JCList. But, anyhow, if well-dressed suits were popping up out of nowhere and mugging people, I would be alarmed, but I don't think I'd be so angry at the JCPD. In this case, we can see the drug dealers hanging out dealing drugs and we can see the potential muggers and car thieves milling around and organizing youth gangs, and we seem to be in a community that's generally under control enough that the police ought to have time to stop by and harass guys who are up to no good at least once or twice an evening. Instead, we see the police eating pizza, harassing homeless guys and beating up the civilians who call in for assistance.
Posted on: 2007/10/23 8:59
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Re: HUDSON COUNTY CRIME DECLINE: Led by steep drops in Jersey City, particularly murder & violent cr
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I forget what thread it was on, but someone posted what I think was a serious post the other day about how the JCPD has done a good job of cleaning up Greenville. If that's the case, maybe what's happening is that crime downtown and in the Heights is up a bit, but Greenville has improved enough to make the city as a whole look a lot better. Also: I'm not really sure whether downtown is much more dangerous than it was 10 years ago. The major questions are why we see the open air drug supermarkets persist, why we see groups of unsupervised kids riding around looking for trouble at night, and why the police let motorists turn streets like Erie into speedways. For now, these issues probably do more to increase petty crime totals than major crime totals. But the problem is that, if we let those cute, happy-go-lucky kiddie gang members continue to jack cars for the joy of it and commit occasional wolf pack attacks on random passers by, eventually those kids could grow up into hardened criminals who do increase the major crime totals.
Posted on: 2007/10/18 15:31
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In theory, too, maybe the guy had right of way. But, if he was going 50 plus mph in a residential zone, maybe there was no practical way for the mom to know whether she could safely back up. When I cross the streets downtown without help from a traffic light, I'm so paranoid I try to wait till I see no cars at all, but sometimes a car still roars up from out of nowhere before I can even get across the street. Anyhow, I wish I had a lie detector and could find out if all of the people who are seriously slamming the mom on NJ.com (where the tone is much harsher and more judgmental than here) obey the speed limit and stop for pedestrians in crosswalks.
Posted on: 2007/10/17 16:58
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Re: Another Child Dies - Not Buckled Up!
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Definitely. It's the reaction of the test pilots in Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" who always try to attribute crashes to something the pilot did wrong. On the one hand, it's an understandable reaction. On the other hand, I think this is the wrong time to post this sort of thing about a mom who's lost a child and is in the hospital herself. We should try to be more careful in our own lives but let the courts and God handle the judging in a case like this.
Posted on: 2007/10/17 16:54
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Re: Jersey Journal & Star Ledger: BIG FEATURES ON CRIME & LOCATIONS -- SEE LINKS
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The map is great, but one weakness is that it isn't adjusted for population adjusted.
Example: Montgomery Gardens has a lot of reported crimes, but it stands to reason that it would, because it's a big apartment complex, and it's crawling with security guards who know they have a legal obligation to report any serious crimes that they discover. In this map, it looks terrible, but it seems to have a much lower crime rate than the housing project on Duncan. I know from personal experience that walking past the projects by the MLK light rail stop, while walking past Montgomery Gardens during the day, at least, is about the same as walking along Jersey Avenue. So, anyhow, if anyone from the Jersey Journal is here: I think it would be good if you could work with the JCPD to come up with a different chart that would compare the projects with the Newport complex, Portside, the Hague building, etc. If Montgomery Gardens were compared with other large apartment/condo complexes, it might still appear to have a high crime rate, but it might not look like the hellhole it seems to be from the crime map that ran the other day.
Posted on: 2007/10/16 15:35
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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Most big news organizations try to make their straight news coverage apolitical because they want to sell subscriptions to readers at all points on the political spectrum, and to sell ads to advertisers on all points on the political spectrum (except to the left of the Marxist Leninist revolutionaries and to the right of the KKK). But there's no law that says journalists have to be apolitical. There is, actually an amendment to the Constitution that gives reporters the right to grind whatever ax they want to grind. Granted: reporters who are intentionally slanting their coverage might be more vulnerable to libel charges. But, in this case, no one is saying that the video is fake or otherwise inaccurate. People here are just disagreeing about whether the video is current news or old news. If it's old news, then maybe it's not worthwhile for the Jersey Journal, the Hudson Reporter, etc. to follow up on this, but that just means it's a mediocre, hard-to-cover story, not that it's libelous, or (video ownership and copyright issues aside) that there's something inherently wrong with a would-be citizen-reporter posting the video to see if people are interested in it. Quote: You say your goal is to expose the identities of the police officers depicted in the video. If current State law requires that this information be kept confidential, how do you plan to go about achieving this goal? If the officers were undercover, I guess that would be a serious problem. In this case, the officers were working in uniform even while off duty, and it sounds as if the law simply gave the JCPD the privilege of keeping the officers' identities private to make the disciplinary process work more smoothly. It looks to me as if people outside the department have no legal obligation to protect the officers' identities.
Posted on: 2007/10/16 15:13
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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That's a terrible, scandalous thing, but that's a completely different story from the drunken officer video story. If people have videotapes of the off-duty police officers helping to brutalize the artists, that would be a lot more compelling than the drinking video.
Posted on: 2007/10/16 14:51
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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The similarity is that, to some extent, this is the sort of thing you might expect from an organization like that. One difference is that, as far as we can tell, the drinking incident happened awhile ago and the ticket investigation is new. Another difference is that the court investigation involves judges -- well-educated lawyers -- being so corrupt on paper that an auditor could just walk in and detect ticket fixing. I think a third difference is that drinking in public is a stupid thing but doesn't directly involve doing an intentionally bad job of being a police officer. Maybe the drunken officers were great, sober officers when on actual police duty. The judges who fixed the tickets, in contrast, were intentionally doing their official jobs in a bad, corrupt way. In my opinion if, say, you could get police officers demanding a bribe from a mother to find her lost 6-year-old, or maybe officers asking for a percentage of the Wayne Street drug supermarket revenue to go away and leave it in peace, that would be the equivalent of the ticket-fixing scandal. On the other hand, at some level, the people criticizing the officers and the JCPD are completely morally right, and the people criticizing the people with the videotape of "smearing" the JCPD are wrong. The drunken officers might not have been drunk, and they didn't (as far as we know) shoot and kill any of the 111 artists. But, if they were drunk, they could have easily ended up shooting an artist, or a passerby, or someone's little kid. I'm not that troubled by the idea that there has to be a statute of limitations on this sort of thing, but this is a kind of a big deal. And I used the word "minor" myself, but only because this is a case of a story that doesn't fall into the "if it bleeds, it leads" category. If Fate had been less kind, this easily could have been a very bloody story.
Posted on: 2007/10/15 22:52
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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a) Please don't take anything in this comment as personal criticism. I think some people in this thread have been really hard on you in a really defensive way. Whatever else you have or don't have, you have a really interesting video. It would be great to put it on Comcast Channel 51. b) I'm not really sure I'd be penalized in any way if there were a picture of me drinking in public. I think my bosses would just look at me with surprise and ask, "You? Drink an alcoholic beverage????" But, anyhow, I think the problem with this test case is that you're too emotionally attached to it, and it's too old and minor to get the attention of the people who could help you. People might enjoy watching this as an example of a You Tube video about corrupt police officers, but I don't think they'll feel any urgent need to go punish the police officers. If you wanted a good, new test case, the thing to do would be to have a bunch of people with hidden video cameras stake out Newark Avenue to get some good video of the police manhandling the homeless people, or maybe to stake out some of the open air drug supermarkets to get video of officers collecting whatever money it is they collect to ignore the supermarkets. Of course, that video might be impossible to get (and to interpret, even if you get it), but that's the sort of thing that would be new enough and outrageous enough that people would pay attention. Another idea: find a kind of frazzly looking woman and have her go up to the off-duty police officers standing guard in front of various shopping centers (example: the one by the MLK light rail stop) asking for help with finding her lost 6-year-old. When the officers blow her off and threaten to report her to DYFS without so much as pressing the "talk buttons" on their radios to ask for help with finding the 6-year-old, maybe that would be attention-getting video. That's what happened to my friend a year or two ago, but I didn't get any video. :( The great thing about me posting this idea here is that now the off-duty police officer security guards will all have to be nice to all women seeking lost children, because they'll afraid one of the women will turn out to be a JC List plant. Anyhow: if there are any police officers reading this to themselves whining, "Why do all those spoiled yuppies hate me?", it takes an awful, awful lot of good officers to make up for one uniformed officer who refuses to lift a finger to find a lost 6-year-old.
Posted on: 2007/10/15 20:15
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Re: Another Child Dies - Not Buckled Up!
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What bugs me about reading the NJ.com comments on this story is that, in general, the commenters are a million times harder on the mom, who apparently was just going to be driving a block to drop her children off at school, than they are on the guy who was driving 50 miles an hour on a residential street and then left two injured children dying on the road.
We don't have a car, so I don't have to worry about this issue very often. But my immediate reaction is that the people trashing the mom must be the drivers who go around almost running me over in the crosswalk in their SUVs. They don't want to take emotional responsibility for all of the times they've nearly crashed into moms in crosswalks or people who were backing up from their driveways, so they come down hard on the mom and all but completely exonerate the reckless driver.
Posted on: 2007/10/15 19:51
Edited by alb on 2007/10/15 20:30:52
Edited by alb on 2007/10/15 20:37:34 |
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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Is that contractor the Deutsche Bank contractor? If so, wow. Quote:
To me, though, the important question isn't, "Were these officers punished enough?" As someone else you quote says, it's hard to know what the officers really were drinking, let alone prove that in court. The questions, for me are: Did the police make information about this case (possibly with the names removed, if necessary for privacy reasons) available to the public at the time it occurred? If so: case closed. If the JCPD broke the rules by failing to file public reports on the case: Why not? How often does this happen? If the JCPB kept the case confidential in accordance with whatever disclosure laws and regulations apply: are those laws and regulations adequate? It seems to me that those questions might still be valid, even now, and you don't have to cause more grief for the officers in the video to look into those questions.
Posted on: 2007/10/15 5:59
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Re: Another Child Dies - Not Buckled Up!
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I would call the police. If nothing else, what was happening was probably some kind of child neglect. I once called the police about a guy having little kids sell candy in the PATH station, and I think the police eventually took care of that. If it looked as if the "supervisors" (pimps) were really raising money for the good of the children, that would be one thing, but the guys farming out those kids never look as if they're all that great to the kids, so I doubt it.
Posted on: 2007/10/15 5:43
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Re: Steve Fulop op-ed on referendums in NY Times Jersey section
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But is that really what held up Ox and Skinner's Loft so long? I was under the impression that they'd run into a bunch of people with hands out. Also, of course, even if the liquor laws were the problem, it could be that a lot of hands got held out during the liquor license application process.
Posted on: 2007/10/12 22:00
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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********************* What this means is that the stuff in the video is news, in the sense that the Jersey Journal and other papers probably had no practical way to know about the existence of the video. Questions: 1. How does the civil service disciplinary system really treat drinking while on duty? Was it really kosher for the IAU to keep this stuff confidential? 2. Is drinking around a loaded weapon really just a violation of department rules, or is it actually a crime? Did the IAU violate any duty that it had to press charges against the officers in the video? (And think, in terms of this, about the stories we've seen lately about police officers and schools insisting on filing charges against high school kids who slug school security guards and about the guy who got accused of "strong arm robbery" because he pushed a store employee after stealing a doughnut from a supermarket.) 3. Even if the IAU can't release information about this specific incident, how many drinking on duty cases does it handle each year, and what is the disposition of those cases? 4. How many confidential cases does the IAU handle each year? Would it be possible for the IAU to describe the nature (and number) of the more serious IAU cases? Example: are there are a lot of reports about police officers beating people up that we don't know about because they're considered confidential, or are just about all of the confidential cases things like an officer cussing at a civilian who probably had it coming?
Posted on: 2007/10/12 21:52
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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Do you mean that you specifically approached him about this issue or another issue? If this issue, and you really had Fulop's full attention and he understood what you were talking about, and he wasn't interested in this case and didn't have a good idea about who else you should talk to, that might mean that he either thinks this is a minor issue or that, even if it is a big issue, it's just too hard for someone to follow up on (unless, say, one of the police officers in the video decides to talk about all of this). Aside, maybe, from the artists at 111, Fulop has more incentive to care about this (if it's a big deal) than anyone else on Earth. If he thinks it's a non-issue, or an interesting issue that's too hard to investigate, then I think you have to take his opinion seriously. On the other hand, it could be that a lot of people are disgusted by this sort of thing. If you call around to a bunch of people, maybe something interesting will turn up.
Posted on: 2007/10/12 21:40
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Re: Steve Fulop op-ed on referendums in NY Times Jersey section
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One example of what Fulop is talking about is why our restaurant scene is so much weaker than Brooklyn's.
If we had intelligent inspectors who at least ran the bribery/protection racket business in a clear-cut way, new Newark Avenue restaurants would probably open for business much more quickly.
Posted on: 2007/10/12 19:48
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Re: OWN TICKETS FIXED? 2 suspended, allegations are probed
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I just read these stories carefully enough to figure out that the Irwin Rosen in these stories is the Temple Beth-El Irwin Rosen.
Wow. Anyhow: I love that guy as a Temple Beth-El member and think he's probably a kind, generous human being, but I think this story is an example of how Jersey City is such an ethically challenged place that some of the slime can rub off on just about anybody. Maybe this is an example of why Steve Fulop is right to assume as a given that most other Jersey City political people are either naive or corrupt and I'm wrong to suggest that he ought to try to work with these people.
Posted on: 2007/10/12 15:17
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Re: Parking Tickets ... WTF?!
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Or maybe she could get out of all of the tickets by getting a job as a municipal judge . . .
Posted on: 2007/10/11 21:53
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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Quote:
Disclaimer: I'm commenting about the questions involved here, not really taking sides. To me, what R_Pinkowitz has posted seems plausible, but I think it's reasonable for other people to want to try to verify what she's written. Quote: 2)get all involved on the record with statement about what they understood and did at the time I think one important point is that, if this is news, it wouldn't be news because of the drinking. It would be news because of the efforts to cover up the disciplinary proceedings. If the city went through legal motions to put the proceedings on the public record, then bullied or tricked the Jersey Journal into not running the story, then this wouldn't be very interesting, except maybe to Extreme Public Relations Quarterly. If the city actually hid the information, then the really, really interesting questions would be, "How did they hide this stuff, and have they used similar methods to hide other, juicier incidents?" Because, seriously, this is such small potatoes. If the JCPD went to the trouble to hide a story like this, then you would think it must be hiding similar stories and stories about more serious problems all the time. In the real world, I don't think there's any way a reporter at a small paper is going to uncover something like this without having a miraculously great source. Either a prosecutor has to seize people's computers and e-mail accounts and go through their e-mail, or someone like Steve Fulop has to wave a magic wand and make a source appear. Quote:
Is it possible it could have been covered with a brief that didn't list names? Or, is it possible that the incident was handled at a level such that it wasn't a matter of public record and was covered by some kind of privacy law? Quote: 4)perhaps a couple of lawyer perspectives I think the lawyers would be interesting only if they knew how the city was/is illegally covering up embarrassing news on a regular basis. Quote: why is everyone so focused on fulop? do we know that he was in office at the time? I don't know whether Fulop was in office at the time, but he seems to be a brilliant, hard-working, honest guy who has an incentive to dig up dirt on the Healy administration and could probably report circles around the Jersey Journal reporters if he chose to be a reporter. If there's any one who would figure out how to get ordinary, non-covered-up disciplinary records concerning the drinking police officers, it would be Fulop. And, if there was a cover-up, I think the only person other than a prosecuting attorney (or FBI investigators) who could come up with inside information about the cover-up would be Fulop. Partly because it's possible that people in the JCPD and at City Hall who are tired of corruption would figure out a way to tell Fulop what they know. On the other hand: maybe I just think this way because I've met Fulop and he made a good impression. Maybe someone like Viola Richardson could get you the same kind of answers.
Posted on: 2007/10/11 20:47
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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In all fairness: one problem with calling a reporter about this first is that it's possible that we'd be sending the reporter on a wild goose chase. Maybe the Jersey Journal missed this because of human error (e.g., a reporter was on vacation), or maybe it covered this with a fine 3-paragraph brief. Maybe the only difference between then and now is Web access to the video. Or maybe Robin is right about the disciplinary actions that took place, but the city somehow managed to cover up what went on. (Or, again, the Jersey Journal somehow messed up.) Anyhow: to me, it seems as if the best way to track this down would be to call Steve Fulop. Possibilities: - Fulop does know that this is old news. In which case, case closed. - Fulop believes the drinking incident was covered up and now is current news. If so, it seems as if this sort of news would be very helpful to Fulop's campaign and that he'd have good incentives to do our legwork for us. (My experience is that Fulop is a really smart, dogged guy. If anything I think errs in assuming that most other Jersey City political people are completely corrupt, not in doing anything to protect or work with the Machine. And I certainly don't think he's going to squander any credibility covering up for drunk JC cops.) - Or: Fulop's "algorithmic trading" job at Citigroup somehow involves mortgage-backed securities and he's too busy keeping the economy from imploding to think about anything else right now, in which case maybe Lou Manzo or some other politician who wrestles with the Machine would be a good Fulop substitute.
Posted on: 2007/10/11 18:44
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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a) Just making the supervisor call request could get you pinned to the ground. (I think the guy I know who got pinned said something along those lines right before he got pinned.) I think the best thing is to have a concealed cell phone with a good built-in audio recorder and to turn it on as soon as you encounter the police. (Do as I say, not as I do: I would never remember to do this myself till it was too late.) b) I think our police force has such a severe problem with this sort of thing -- to the extent that mild-mannered, middle-income people who rarely even jaywalk all have police dickhead anecdotes they can share -- because the city works so hard to hire local candidates. On the one hand, that's a very decent thing to do, and it helps give the city some personality. But the problem with this approach is that Jersey City is a city of ferociously tough pecking orders. If Jersey City wants to have normal police, instead of police who go around pinning fine, upstanding, gainfully employed voters to the sidewalk left and right, then the city has to go way, way out of its way to show new officers that you can exude natural authority without ALWAYS acting like a macho thug. Ideas: Send all police academy students to some kind of special two-week seminar on the campus of Vassar or Sarah Lawrence; make the police academy students and new officers play on a team in a women's softball, basketball or volleyball league; or make the academy students and new officers go play with toddlers at a daycare center at least once a week. In other words: do anything to help the academy students meet mellow, not-so-rigidly hierarchical people, and maybe to put them in situations (where they're giving piggyback rides to 2-year-olds, for example) in which they have to ease off on defending their place in the pecking order.
Posted on: 2007/10/9 15:32
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Re: Are Cops drinking on duty in JC? you have to see this video!!!
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This summer, a utility company had two guys doing work in a manhole on Jersey Avenue. It was a hot day. The off-duty officer who was supposed to be protecting the guys in the manhole was sitting in his car, jabbering on a cell phone. Instead of parking the car behind the manhole, where he could protect the workers, he parked it across the street, under some trees, so it would stay cool. Apparently, there weren't even any orange cones warning motorists that the workers were in the manhole. When someone I know told the officer (quite possibly in a rude way) that he ought to be protecting the workers in the manhole, the officer pinned him to the ground as if he were a serial killer. And, of course, we all know about the police officer's son (!) who got beaten up by the police after he called the police. Now it sounds as if the guy in the Heights who called the police about the stoop sale had the good sense to tape what happened and, if nothing else, can supply us with a recent recording of disturbing JC police activity. I know there are good officers in town. I saw what I think were two really good, smart, polite, vigilant officers protecting a synagogue on Yom Kippur. But I think Jersey City has too many officers who have a chip on their shoulder and think we civilians are being so mean and unfair to them, when in fact we're hostile toward them because a significant number of them act like jerks. So, if there are problems with the posting of the video or the context provided by the people who posted it, well, that's a shame, but I think plenty of us here could be posting more recent videos of other disturbing incidents if we simply had been running a video camera every time we encountered the police.
Posted on: 2007/10/9 14:48
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Re: Yet another city judge ducks out as probe goes on
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Seriously: I think that El Magnifico could have talked about the demographics of Newport Pavonia in more genteel terms, but I really wish we could get him back and have him tell us more about what he saw when he was visiting the local courts this past summer. It sounded as if he had some serious, detailed, valid concerns about how things were being run, and it seems to me that really systematic judicial corruption could have something to do with the persistence of a lot of our obvious open-air drug supermarkets. If you needed to have $50,000 to buy a local judge and all you could buy was leniency for one stupid kid, then, OK, that might be life. But it sounds as if the municipal court was so corrupt that the judges completely ignored the law to get out of teeny parking tickets. If the municipal judges are so blatantly corrupt about parking tickets, it's easy to believe that the defense lawyers could buy them pretty cheaply. If all it takes to buy a municipal judge around here is a dinner at Edward's Steakhouse, it seems as if it might not be all that terribly expensive to buy a state court judge.
Posted on: 2007/10/5 4:07
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Re: JC Real Estate Market Recent Activity
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a) I hope the economy does really well. If the economy does well, houses might cost more, but I'll probably earn more, too, so things will equal out. b) The trillion-dollar question is, obviously, what the mortgage market problems and other problems are going to do to the financial services community as a whole. Example: the Asian markets slump in the late 1990s and the post-9/11 slump didn't do much to hurt the real estate market here, but, of course, the 1987-1992 real estate tax form bill/savings and loan crisis hurt the market here quite badly. One good thing is that most financial people remember the 1987-1992 and understand how we got out of it, and I think that increases the odds that we'll muddle through this time around. On the other hand, what we had going for us in the late 1990s and in 2002 is that Clinton and Congress were doing a good job of controlling budget deficits, which gave us extra wiggle room. Now, we're running up a lot of debt, and I think it's hard to know how all of that extra debt is affecting the mortgage markets and the rest of the economy.
Posted on: 2007/10/4 16:29
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Re: JC Real Estate Market Recent Activity
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What I could buy/when: Of course, it's hard to know what I could buy (or where I could safely locate my cardboard box) during a deep recession. Right now, I think I could afford to buy something fine in the Heights. Why I talked about the recession: I'm not bitter at all. I live a miraculously comfortable life, and I rent mainly because of sloth. But I was just trying to convey the idea that, even if someone DOES believe the housing market will crash, buying a house to live in is probably a better choice than renting for anyone who ought to be buying a house in the first place. If someone is making $20,000 a year, plans to move to Alaska in 2 years, and would be taking out a weird wacky mortgage loan to buy the house, clearly, that person shouldn't be buying a house today -- and shouldn't have been buying a house 5 years ago. But if someone is making $100,000, wants to stay in Jersey City for 10 years, and would be getting a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage or some other sensible mortgage, and that person can come up with a 10% down payment and meet the other requirements imposed by a responsible mortgage lender, then that person probably ought to buy a house. The exception would be if the person making $100,000 is an ultra-responsible person who really would use an automatic withdrawal system to "save the difference" between the rent and the mortgage, then would invest the money saved in some kind of great, diversified, low-expense stock fund. Ultra-responsible people who really would invest the difference probably ought to go with their gut feelings, or consult a Ouija board or flip a coin or something like that. My guess is that even the typical ultra-responsible person who would save the difference would really be better off buying a house. One fact we're not including in this discussion is that, of course, it's more fun to own a house. You can paint the walls however you want and decorate the garden and all that, and you might feel a lot more as if you're part of your community, not just a long-term visitor. So, once you factor the psychic benefits in, I think the home buyer who uses a fixed-rate mortgage will usually come out ahead. The one exception is if you, say, buy a home downtown, and the economy is so bad that people flee and your neighborhood turns into a terrible ghost town populated mainly by street gangs. But, if we go back to the kind of desolation that occurred in the 1970s, then I think a lot of other things will also be wrong with the economy, and it will be very hard to know whether stocks, bonds and commodities will do any better than housing.
Posted on: 2007/10/4 16:13
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