ArcaMax

Bill Bratton has been the police commissioner of three major cities: Boston, Los Angeles and New York. When asked last year about the value of cops, Bratton, 73, said: "They are the glue that literally holds society together. They are an essential element of a successful democracy." I agree.

But we have come to a place now where we need to ...Read more

Domestic abuse is a terrible cycle. Victim advocates say it takes an average of seven events before the injured person tries to leave an abusive situation for good.

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence estimates nearly 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner in the U.S. every minute. Over the course of one year...Read more

In March 2020, this column focused on the need for citizens who are unhappy with the state of our political and justice systems to speak up about their concerns.

Your opinion can't be counted if you stay silent, I wrote. Or as one of my readers put it, "We now have the government that we have earned but not the government our children deserve...Read more

Americans are now deeper in debt than at any other time in our nation's history. Especially acute are mounting debts on past-due mortgage payments, student loans and medical bills. In fact, medical debt is one of the most often-mentioned causes of personal bankruptcies in the U.S., and the situation has only gotten worse during the pandemic.

So...Read more

Are you among the countless Americans who felt so passionately about the 2020 presidential election that you wrote a check to your favorite candidate? But if your candidate had dropped out of the race, would you have been able to get your money back?

At one time, there were a whopping 29 Democrats running for president in 2020. Collectively, ...Read more

"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime." -- Aristotle

Aristotle had a point, but there are many factors that contribute to crime. Experts have told us about them for a long time. Poverty; unemployment; lack of education or adequate housing; the breakdown of the two-parent family; mental illness; drug abuse; and sexual exploitation of ...Read more

Here's a word from the field of crime I'm betting you've never heard before: hybristophilia. It's pronounced HIGH-briss-toe-feel-ee-uh, and it's such an obscure word some dictionaries don't even include it -- yet.

Expert criminologists and mental health professionals define hybristophilia in a scientific way: a syndrome in which sexual arousal ...Read more

If schools aren't already back in session where you are, they soon will be. As a sign of our times, many parents will worry about the safety of their child and the possibility of another deadly school shooting.

The fact is while mass shootings in the U.S. seem all too frequent, occurring between 10 and 20 times a year, shootings at schools are ...Read more

Sarah Letendre is spending her time trying to piece together a brand-new life for herself and her two small children. Technically, she is homeless, living alone in a hotel, and trying to find a job (with her master's degree in social work) and a permanent place to live. Her days as a nurturing stay-at-home mom are over.

On the evening of July ...Read more

All Democrats want to take your guns. All Republicans are racist. So is law enforcement, and police brutality is commonplace.

Of course, none of those statements are true, but they highlight the groupthink that has infected the national conversation. When a police-involved death occurs, it seems there are no shades of gray anymore, no need for ...Read more

The marvelous Betty Winstanley died in 2019, just shy of her 98th birthday in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She died in the captivity of a court-sanctioned guardianship that haunted her final years. Her life never should have ended that way.

Winstanley was an elegant, eloquent, remarkable woman. In an era when women were undereducated, she ...Read more

Sex registries are in the news again thanks to a couple of high-profile child sex abuse cases. Keeping track of ex-cons who have sexually preyed on others sounds like a good idea. But do these registries really help keep us safe?

Under a 2006 federal law, each state, the District of Columbia, Native American tribes and U.S. territories are ...Read more