sad, sad, sad; --or, well, stupid and uniformed....

Over in the UK, there's this Cameron chap who is going to meet a tough

American Cop--a so-called super-cop..

Why?

There's a lot of super crap, or super bullshit floating around about how police techniques

can influence crime....

I quote (cut and paste) the first paragraph of a section of a paper by the sociologist Loic Wacquant, below:

2. IT IS THE POLICE WHO MAKE CRIME MELT AWAY

A recent report by the Manhattan Institute – a major promoter of the ‘class

cleansing’ of the streets and nerve centre of the worldwide campaign to

penalize poverty18 – asserts this with emphasis: the sustained drop in the

statistics of crime in the US over the past decade is due to the energetic

and innovative action of the law-enforcement forces, after they were finally

freed from the ideological taboos and legal yokes that previously constrained

them. The paradigmatic case for this is offered by the spectacular turn-

around achieved in New York by the Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani

under the leadership of his master police chiefs William Bratton and William

Safir.19 But there is a catch: here again facts are more stubborn than ideol-

ogy, and all scientific studies converge in concluding that the police did not

play the key determining role that the advocates of the penal management of

social insecurity assign to it as a matter of petitio principii – far from it.

http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/wacquant_pdf/SCHOLARLYMYTHLAW&ORDER.pdf