There is something very unsettling about a member of the LAPD accusing a reporter of doing drugs for disagreeing with them. That would go for any police force, but the LAPD - in a post-Rampart world - throwing around the 'you're a dope head' dismissal for challenging his murky crime stats, is really...scary. And incredibly stupid.

But yesterday on Patt Morrison's show on KPCC, when Morrison asked about the oft cited (by Bratton) 'statistic' "LA is the safest its been since 1956", Police Chief Bill Bratton refuted the LA Weekly's findings. He said that the LA Weekly must have been 'smoking a little weed when they wrote the article'. And then he called it 'voodoo reporting'. The show is archived here (as if you don't already subscribe to Patt's show on iTunes). The comment is about 27 minutes into the second hour.

The article, written by Patrick Range McDonald gets into how mind-boggling absurd the claim Bratton makes is.

"It's a silly comparison," Malcolm Klein, professor emeritus of sociology at USC and a gang-crime expert, says bluntly. An author of numerous books on gang crime, Klein says that when Bratton starts publicly comparing crime levels of the 1950s to today, "You're not listening to a chief of police, you're listening to a politician."

McDonald told FBLA:

If we were smoking weed, then former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates must have been smoking weed, too. He wrote to us and said we were right on target.

That article can be found here.

This post was written without the assistance of weed...not that we're happy about it.