William K. Rashbaum reports in the New York Times:

The men came in one by one, sat down in the chair in front of the shop’s newest barber, and got their hair cut. They looked like customers at pretty much any other barber shop around the city. They paid, and went on their way.

But they were not like other customers. They were all undercover police officers.

And so was the man cutting their hair.

They were all in the shop, Who’s First Barber Shop II, on East 149th Street in the Hub section of the Bronx, trying to collect evidence during the early stages of what would become a sweeping ticket-fixing investigation, according to court documents, police records and people briefed on the case. The owner, a police officer named Jose Ramos, was believed to be aiding drug dealers.

But few of the undercover officers, it turns out, came back after their haircuts, according to one person with knowledge of the matter, and ended up contributing little to the eventual success of the investigation.

The reason they did not return had nothing to do with crime or criminals. It was simply because they did not like the way their colleague, the undercover barber, cut their hair, according to the person briefed on the case. And that is despite the fact that the Police Department was picking up the tab.

The NYPD paid for an officer to recertify himself as a barber and rent a chair in a barber owned by a fellow officer who was suspected of aiding drug dealers. Fellow officers from the Department of Internal Affairs were supposed to come in for haircuts and buy drugs. No drugs were purchased.

Part of the problem, according to anonymous sources, was that few of the undercover officers were willing to come back for a second haircut.  “The consensus was just that he gave bad haircuts,” one of the people briefed on the matter told the Times, “They just didn’t like his haircuts.”

Somewhere, Frank Serpico is shaking his head in disgust. You’d think undercover officers would be resigned to bad hair in the line of duty, mullets, even.

Or, maybe this is NYPD face-saving and nobody was dealing drugs out of the barber shop. According to the story, the undercover barber didn’t witness any significant criminal activity in the few days he worked in the shop during the summer of 2009.

[Photo credit: Diamondduste, Creative Commons.]

I’m very pleased to announce that Irin Carmon of Salon has won the November Sidney Award for her coverage of a proposed amendment to the Mississippi constitution that would redefine a fertilized egg as a person. Carmon reported that the measure, billed as an anti-abortion initiative, would also ban some forms of birth control, and chart a course to challenge Roe v. Wade.

Mississippians vote today, Tuesday the 8th, on Initiative 26. Other states have voted on so-called “personhood” initiatives, but this is the first time such a measure stands a chance of passing. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor have endorsed the measure. Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said last month that he’d support a hypothetical personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Carmon’s in-depth reporting from Mississippi shaped the national conversation on the Mississippi “personhood” vote. She was one of the first journalists to state plainly that the measure would ban not only abortion but also any form of birth control that destroys a fertilized egg.

Carmon exposed ambivalence and basic factual confusion among leading proponents of Initiative 26. Would the personhood amendment ban the Pill? Nobody would give Carmon a straight answer. The pro-personhood contingent has good reason to equivocate. The birth control pill is, after all, very popular. Then again, for many prospective supporters of ovum “personhood,” banning birth control is a feature, not a bug.

Medical science says that birth control pills work by suppressing ovulation, as evidenced by the fact that women who skip doses, and therefore ovulate on the Pill, can still get pregnant. High-dose birth control for emergency contraception (“the morning after pill”) works exclusively by suppressing ovulation. But there’s no guarantee that legislators interpreting a sweeping “personhood” amendment would be guided by the best science.

Read my interview with Carmon on the making of her prizewinning feature at The Backstory.

[Photo credit: brains the head, Creative Commons.]

Sy Montgomery explores the minds of octopuses in a fascinating and beautifully written piece of science journalism for Orion Magazine:

I had always longed to meet an octopus. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena’s tank. If she consented, I could touch her. The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds. One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity. The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it. We think of our world as the “real” one, but Athena’s is realer still: after all, most of the world is ocean, and most animals live there. Regardless of whether they live on land or water, more than 95 percent of all animals are invertebrates, like Athena.

Montgomery interviews octopus scientists, a scuba diving philosophy professor, and an aquarium volunteer who found his post-retirement calling as an octopus whisperer.

[Photo credit: hankplank, Creative Commons.]

The third and final installment of Ken Bensinger’s investigation of so-called “Buy Here Pay Here” used car dealerships ran today in the Los Angeles Times. Therein, Bensinger examines what alternatives there are for the clientele of BHPH dealerships, low-income buyers with bad credit who need a car to keep a job. Clear it With Sidney blogged about Parts 1 and 2 of this remarkable series yesterday.

[Photo credit: Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons.]