In a world where Bill Ayers is virtually indistinguishable from the Unabomber or even Timothy McVeigh (and don’t laugh, I’ve had conversations with conservatives who say exactly that), it’s rather odd to hear Glenn Beck attempt to justify shooting sprees like the one down in Alabama as good old Americans simply “pushed to the wall” by political […]

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The day after a guy in Alabama goes nuts, killing 12 - including members of his own family - we have a Columbine in Germany, teen gunman killing 15, according to the BBC.
Resentment in the air.

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We’ve talked about the theory a lot in Lancaster. Some research up in Massachusetts that seems to indicate the approach actually does work:
The year was 2005 and Lowell was being turned into a real life crime-fighting laboratory.
Researchers, working with police, identified 34 crime hot spots. In half of them, authorities set to work - clearing trash from […]

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Colleague points out that the area where that unfortunate woman was slain this morning is one of several that is slated to get new security cameras under a plan by the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition.
In other words - had this killing taken after May 31, 2009, it might all have been captured on film. Too late in […]

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Jeebus. Is there anyone who made money the old-fashioned honest way in recent years?
Seriously, this is just the latest in a loooong parade of embezzlement cases here. Has the pressure to keep up with the Joneses been so great in Lancaster County that we should have so many people accused or convicted of doing this?
Whatever […]

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Here’s one in light of the drunken driving series we’ve been running, in which a druken driver runs over… himself.

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More details from the Republican crime victim who wasn’t:
Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department’s investigations division, said Todd is being charged with making a false police report.
Police doubted her story from the start, Bryant said.
“She just opened up and said she wanted to tell the truth,” Bryant said, according to the Pittsburgh […]

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Janet Kelley’s piece in today’s Era about Meghan Lippiatt walking free is amazing, in perhaps the saddest way possible.

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Or, how it appears that the DEA might now be getting a little help from Blackwater.

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That guy who shot up the Unitarian church in Tennessee yesterday during a kids’ performance, killing two? Sounds like a talk radio fan:
The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, […]

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Apropos to the discussion of former state Rep. Tom Armstrong’s halfway house for sex offenders, and the hullaballoo which followed it from Conestoga to Marietta.
Florida, like Pennsylvania, has laws about where sex offenders can live. Local communities passed their own laws:
Florida, like many states, barred offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, playgrounds, […]

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Been following the discussion on security cameras in Lancaster, something on which I’m ambivalent; Citydweller puts forth a decent case here, and I’ve actually had this argument with some others. But the way I see it, what does a security camera mounted on a telephone pole see that a uniformed officer walking the beat or […]

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Remember that Missouri mom who created the fake MySpace page in order to spy on, and then belittle, a 13-year-old neighbor girl who then killed herself?
The mom’s been indicted:
Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict […]

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I’m not quite sure how I missed this the first time ’round, but it just came up here in the office that, in its attempt to better inform students and other members of the “campus community” and beyond about emergency situations, Millersville University will be installing sirens.
Sirens?
“The sirens are just more ways to communicate to […]

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Here’s what I don’t understand about the Stephen Spiese case, the grotesque contradiction at the heart of it all:
Lots of people come forward to defend Spiese at his sentencing, noting too that he has worked extensively with children, whose lives he has enriched. And I don’t doubt that he has done just that.
But one particular […]

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And so we see another young male going out in a blaze of glory, taking eight others with him.
It’s always young men. It’s always those nursing a grievance against society - Fate/God has been cruel to me, now I will have my revenge upon faith/upon God. I shall inflict injustice upon the world, as it […]

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What is this - Ocean’s 32?

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I caught Ray Schoenke in the car on his way home from Lancaster, where he’d presented Mayor Rick Gray with a check for $1,000 from his fledgling organization to help fight gun crime in Lancaster.
Which, while nice, might not seem too significant. Until you consider that Schoenke heads a gun group called the American Hunters […]

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Suburban Philly kids trash house, get a “sweet deal” from the judge, aren’t even on the hook for the $18,000 in damages they caused - and the victim feels like she’s the one being published:
Imagine having your house ravaged by hard-drinking teenagers who doused your clothes with urine, pooped on your piano, and played catch with […]

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Just wrapped up a three-minute phone interview for Fox News (!) on the Haines murder. National attention continues to focus on this - the CrimeBlog thread, if anything, has heated up since the arrest was announced; indeed, I’d link, but CrimeBlog seems to be down, “has exceeded its CPU quota” - which also happened Saturday night, […]

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