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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

There is a lull for a week or two in the hand-wringing over the Virginia Tech incident . This provides a time for the friends and families to grieve and bury their dead, and for those looking to make the best of a bad situation to find lawyers and draw up papers to serve on anyone with pockets deep enough to make the effort worthwhile. Some of the lawsuits will focus on Monday-morning quarterbacking the actions of the VT Police and other agencies that responded, but others will try and find someone to blame for what Cho Seung-Hui became in the days and years before April 16. Their stated mission will be to ensure that no one is ever again driven to do such a thing–oh, and make someone pay them money.

This purported sense of outrage is at the foundation of what some people called the Nanny Society, where we invoke the power of the state to protect people from themselves, and to forbid behaviors that are harmful to society. Extending the premise a bit, we can also see mandating behavior that encourages a nurturing environment. I’ve had several conversations over the past week where Seung-Hui’s behavior was cited and the question “why didn’t anyone do anything?” came up. Something probably could have been done, but most of us wouldn’t want to live in a society that required it.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I’m writing this on my way back from Wheeling, Illinois, after spending the last week at the annual conference of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA) conference. The original plan was to blog more or less daily from the conference, but that plan went sideways due to an incident you may have heard about at Virginia Tech. Despite the downer starting the week, it was still a great conference.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I should probably say more here about the Virginia Tech shootings, but I’d prefer to leave that to people with more expertise than I have, like John Wills, Kevin Davis and Richard Nance. It’s more interesting for me to comment on the news coverage and public reaction to the incident. Never have so many saying so much to so many people been so misinformed.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I’m sitting in a hotel room outside of Chicago, watching a large school of reporters trying to extract information from Chief Wendell Flinchum, the chief of police at Virginia Tech. The day has been full of surprises for me, although my day has been an ice cream social as compared to his.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

American soldiers and Marines are being killed in Iraq, Africans are dying in exponentially larger numbers in Darfur, the ice caps are melting, and high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Still, the top news headlines this week focused on Don Imus’ use of ethnic slurs in describing a women’s basketball team, and Calvin Broadus’ walk on serious felony charges in California. That ordering of priorities is bad enough. But I am supposed to stick to topics that have something to do with criminal justice, and I’ll extend that news cycle by a few seconds to illustrate how the Imus and Broadus situations are examples of much larger problems in our legal system and the culture that shapes it.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Please note that these are sometimes overlapping categories. For the purpose of this editorial, though, we’ll treat them separately.

There were two news items from last week I thought were noteworthy, mainly because they were footnotes to larger stories. One involved the producer of risqué videos. The other concerns the passing of a California inmate whose most infamous crime took place over 44 years ago.

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