Monday, March 18th, 2013 — Good Afternoon, Stay Safe
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Trial to Start in Class Suit on Stop-and-Frisk Tactic
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
In one of the most significant courtroom tests of a key Bloomberg administration policy, a federal judge will begin hearing testimony on Monday in a trial to determine whether the New York Police Department has been unconstitutionally stopping black and Hispanic males in the street over the last decade.
The outcome of the trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan will help define the terms under which the department patrols large swaths of the city long after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office, with the potential to affect the tenor of relations between the police and minority neighborhoods for years to come.
The political and symbolic stakes are high, too. The trial comes after years of a vigorous public debate over the Police Department’s growing reliance on stop-and-frisk tactics, which Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly have steadfastly defended as effective tools in reducing gun violence. They claim that the procedures have saved thousands of lives among young black and Hispanic males.
Expected to last well into May, the trial will feature testimony from current and former police officials, as well as secret station house audio recordings, which the lawyers bringing the suit say were recorded by police whistle-blowers to demonstrate the pressure that officers are under to make stops.
Although the courtroom will hear from 11 black or biracial men and a Hispanic woman about their experiences of being stopped repeatedly by the police, the class-action lawsuit — Floyd v. City of New York — claims to represent “hundreds of thousands if not millions of people” who experienced “suspicionless and race-based stops” by the city’s police officers.
The lead plaintiff, David Floyd, a medical student in the Bronx, was stopped twice, according to the suit. The first time was in April 2007, as he walked on the sidewalk; the following year, he said, he was stopped while standing outside his home, helping a neighbor try to get back inside an apartment after becoming locked out. (Mr. Floyd had retrieved a number of keys from his godmother, who owned the house, and was trying them one by one.) The police approached Mr. Floyd and the neighbor and detained them on suspicion of burglary, ordering Mr. Floyd against a wall and searching his pockets.
The trial’s outcome will be decided by a federal judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, who is currently hearing two related stop-and-frisk lawsuits. One of the suits already resulted in a lengthy hearing held late last year, which included testimony by both police officials and Bronx residents who had been stopped.
But that suit deals with only a small number of stops at private residential buildings in the Bronx, whose landlords had authorized the police to patrol there. In that case, Judge Scheindlin has issued a preliminary ruling that many of the stops at issue were unconstitutional, a ruling that would seem troublesome for the city in the Floyd case.
The third lawsuit, still a long way from trial, concerns stops in public housing projects.
But the Floyd suit, which was filed in 2008, challenges the largest number of stops — several million in recent years — and embodies the stop-and-frisk debate most closely. The trial centers on whether street stops in the city have soared because, as the plaintiffs claim, the Police Department has increasingly ignored constitutional limits on its authority to detain people when they investigate behavior that they deem suspicious.
For decades, the Supreme Court has recognized police authority to detain someone while determining whether the person has committed a crime or is about to do so. But the legal precedent for such stops requires the police to have reasonable suspicion, a standard less stringent than the probable cause required for arrest. Nonetheless, the police cannot stop someone on the basis of a vague hunch.
Every day, judges across the country apply that standard in criminal cases, as they weigh the facts that led the police to approach a person they later arrested. The Floyd case asks Judge Scheindlin to consider not just one stop, but rather the Police Department’s overall practice.
Of the five million stops in New York that the police have recorded since 2004, some 88 percent of those encounters ended with the person’s walking away without a summons or an arrest. One of the core questions in the trial is whether that low rate of finding evidence of criminality suggests, as the plaintiffs claim, that many of the stops were baseless.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs hope to convince Judge Scheindlin that officers are under pressure to make stops as part of a quota system, and that police supervisors use subtle hints and coded language to encourage officers to stop young minority men. In response to the accusations, the Police Department has denied using a quota system and points to its written policy forbidding racial profiling.
“Minorities are overwhelmingly the victims of violent crime in New York City, and the neighborhoods in which they live demand and deserve the Police Department’s attention,” the city’s executive assistant corporation counsel, Celeste Koeleveld, said in a statement about the coming trial. “Precinct by precinct, the rates at which minorities are stopped are consistent with the rates at which minorities are identified as crime suspects.”
The suit alleges that the stops violate the 4th Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The lawsuit, brought by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and elsewhere, asks Judge Scheindlin to create “a process for obtaining community input” to change the stop-and-frisk practices and to appoint a monitor to ensure that the department’s policies comply with the Constitution.
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Trial Begins Over NYPD's Frisk Policy
By SEAN GARDINER — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The Wall Street Journal’ / New York, NY
The New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy, widely credited as an important factor in the citywide drop in crime during the Bloomberg administration, will face its biggest constitutional test in a federal trial beginning Monday.
The goal of the class-action lawsuit being heard is to "end racially discriminatory policing," said Vincent Warren, executive director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York group that filed the lawsuit that triggered the trial, at a news conference last week.
Even if the center prevails, the police won't cease stopping, questioning and searching people. Rather, the center is seeking the appointment of a federal monitor, whose job would be to ensure the NYPD complies with any court-ordered changes made to one of the centerpiece initiatives of Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
"We are not seeking damages, we're not seeking individual compensation for the class members, we're seeking a broad citywide injunction" against police stops that lack "reasonable, articulable suspicion," said Darius Charney, the center's lead attorney.
He alluded to language in a landmark 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision that clarified the test police officers must meet to stop and search someone.
U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin will decide the case in a bench trial that is expected to last four to six weeks. The case is one of three pending class actions challenging stop-and-frisk.
All are being heard by Judge Scheindlin.
Last Thursday, the NYPD made its five-millionth stop-and-frisk since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which said it used police data to arrive at that figure. The policy has absorbed criticism because since 2002 more than 85% of those stopped were either black or Latino, and nearly 90% of all those stopped were released without being charged.
The Center for Constitutional Rights claims stop-and-frisk violates the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which prohibits illegal searches and seizures as well as the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is often invoked to fight laws seen as racially discriminatory.
Via email, Celeste Koeleveld, a senior attorney for the city's law department, said the police department "focuses its efforts in areas where crime is highest" and "precinct by precinct, the rates at which minorities are stopped are consistent with the rates at which minorities are identified as crime suspects."
"That statistic, not the census, is the appropriate benchmark for analyzing police enforcement activity," Ms. Koeleveld stated.
The NYPD has said that stop-and-frisk is an integral element in the historic reduction in city crime. Last year, murders dipped to 419, the fewest in more than 50 years.
Some testimony in the trial will focus on critics' claims that police have a quota system for stops, which would be illegal. Mr. Charney said Paul Browne, the NYPD's chief spokesman, would testify about comments he has made regarding stop-and-frisk and the department's "performance goals."
Mr. Browne didn't respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Charney said his team also planned to call to the stand Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, the NYPD's highest-ranking uniformed official, and make use of recordings made by Adrian Schoolcraft—an officer at a Brooklyn precinct—which purportedly documented officers being threatened if they didn't meet quotas for arrests and stops.
NYPD officials deny a quota system exists.
Mr. Kelly won't testify.
COMMENT: Why? Could it be because it won’t make Raymond Kelly look good, and it’s really all about making Raymond W. Kelly look good and nothing else? – Mike Bosak
The plaintiffs also plan to call as witnesses 12 men and women they say were stopped and questioned without proper reasonable suspicion.
Mr. Charney said the Center for Constitutional Rights's call for a federal monitor over stop-and-frisk stemmed from its dissatisfaction with the settlement in a suit it filed against the NYPD following the 1999 police shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant.
The 2003 settlement, approved by Judge Scheindlin, called for the NYPD to enact an anti-racial profiling policy and revise the form officers are required to complete after they make a stop, among other steps. But there was no move to bring in a federal monitor. After that agreement, the numbers of stop-and-frisks rose each year.
"We learned a valuable lesson in how settle a case with the city," Mr. Charney said. In 2008, claiming the NYPD had failed to sufficiently change their policies, the center filed the suit now going to trial.
Ms. Koeleveld wrote: "Police officers must be able to stop and question people who act suspiciously in order to do their jobs. The NYPD remains fully committed to doing so lawfully, and its robust training policies are a testament to that. We will vigorously defend the City at trial."
Preliminary rulings in this and other pending stop and frisk lawsuits by Judge Scheindlin suggest the city's attorneys face an uphill battle.
In May, Judge Scheindlin, in granting class-action status to the Center for Constitutional Rights' lawsuits, wrote that there was "overwhelming evidence that there in fact exists a centralized stop and frisk program that has led to thousands of unlawful stops."
In January, the judge granted an injunction ordering the NYPD to end what she described as "unlawful trespass stops." Those stop-and-frisk encounters were made outside private buildings in the Bronx participating in a police patrol program known as "Operation Clean Halls."
That case, brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which challenges the legality of similar trespass stops made outside buildings all around the city, is pending.
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Lawsuit Over NYPD's 'Stop And Frisk' Program Heads To Court
By Joel Rose — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘NPR News’ / Washington, DC
A major lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department's use of warrantless stops in high-crime neighborhoods goes to federal court Monday.
Critics say the NYPD's practice — known as stop and frisk — is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. But defenders say it is legal and has helped make New York City safer than it's been in 50 years.
The case, Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., is a class-action suit, so the stories of the plaintiffs are all different. But they do have some basic things in common.
"I remember squad cars pulling up. They just pulled up aggressively, and the cops came out with their guns drawn," says Nicholas Peart, one of the plaintiffs. "I think it left me embarrassed, humiliated and upset — all three things rolled up into one."
"[They] threw me up against the wall, took everything out of my pockets, threw it on the floor, dumped my bag on the floor, my books and everything," says David Ourlicht, another plaintiff. "I had the guns to the back of my head. Like, I didn't want to look up or move because there were so many guns drawn. It's scary."
Peart and Ourlicht say they've been stopped and frisked multiple times by the NYPD — without doing anything wrong. The NYPD makes hundreds of thousands of warrantless stops every year. The department says the tactic is one reason the city is safer than it has been since the 1960s.
"Last year, we had the lowest number of murders that we've had in 50 years, lowest number of shootings. Something is going right here," Police Commissioner Ray Kelly testified last week before the city council.
In a statement, the city law department says police must be able to stop people who act suspiciously in order to prevent crime. But critics say that suspicion is often based on skin color and little else.
Darius Charney is a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the class-action suit against the NYPD. He points out that the overwhelming majority of those who get stopped are young black and Latino men from some of the city's roughest neighborhoods.
"The racial composition of these neighborhoods is the most significant predictor of the stop activity. And to us, that's a pretty damning piece of evidence and really, we think, shows that this whole practice is about race and it's about occupying these communities of color," Charney says.
Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, admits that the city's stop-and-frisk policy may not be perfect. But she points out that crime — especially violent crime — happens disproportionately in minority neighborhoods.
"The police don't make deployments based on population or race. They make deployments based on crime," Mac Donald says. "Getting stopped can be humiliating, infuriating, scary, but it is a lesser evil than the crime rates that the city was saddled with in the early 1990s that were disproportionately taking black and Hispanic lives."
No one disagrees that New York is much safer than it used to be. But critics of stop and frisk say crime is down in other big cities, too — and none of their police departments rely on the practice as heavily as the NYPD. Those critics argue that stop and frisk is counterproductive because it creates distrust with the very people the NYPD says it's trying to protect.
"Every time I go outside, I have the thought in the back of my mind like, is this time the time that when they stop me they're going to shoot me? We're talking about the police force," Ourlicht says.
The hearing that begins Monday is expected to take a month or more. When it's over, a federal judge will decide if the NYPD can continue to stop and frisk as usual, or if the department will be forced to make changes its critics have sought for years.
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Stop And Frisk By The Numbers
The New York Civil Liberties Union recently reported that the NYPD was set to make its 5-millionth stop and frisk. About 4.4 million of the encounters did not result in an arrest, according to the group's data analysis, and more than 86 percent of people stopped were black or Latino.
Yearly stop-and-frisk data are available from the NYPD here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/analysis_and_planning/stop_question_and_frisk_report.shtml
And also here: http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data from the NYCLU, which breaks down the data by race.
NYPD historical statistics http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf show dramatic dips in crime since 2001 as stop-and-frisk encounters increased.
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NY stop and frisk challenge heads to federal court
By COLLEEN LONG (The Associated Press) — Monday, March 18th, 2013; 2:54 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK (AP) -- More than a hundred New Yorkers, police officers, scholars and lawmakers are expected to testify about the police department's controversial tactic of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people on the street.
Police have made about five million stops in the past decade of New Yorkers, mostly black and Hispanic men. The trial, set to begin Monday, will include testimony from a dozen people who say they were targeted because of their race.
"We're putting the NYPD on trial, and the stakes are the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers," said Vincent Warren, director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the suit in 2008 on behalf of four men who said they were wrongly stopped.
The case has since become a class-action suit that seeks a court-appointed monitor to oversee changes to how the police make stops. The trial is expected to last more than a month. Lawyers also plan to play hours of audio tapes made by Adrian Schoolcraft, an officer who was hauled off to a psych ward against his will after he said he refused to fill illegal quotas. His former bosses, including some reassigned after their statements were made public, are also expected.
U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin, who has already said in earlier rulings that she is deeply concerned about stop and frisk, is not being asked to ban the tactic, since it has been found to be legal. But she does have the power to order reforms, which could bring major changes to how the nation's largest police force and other departments use the tactic.
Street stops have become a New York flashpoint, with mass demonstrations, city council hearings, mayoral candidates calling for reform, and, most recently, days of protests following the fatal police shooting of a teen who authorities say pulled out a gun during a stop.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly say it is a necessary, life-saving, crime-fighting tool that helps keep illegal guns off the street, and has helped New York reach all-time crime lows.
"All of the NYPD's policing practices - including making arrests, conducting investigations, and detaining and questioning people who act suspiciously - are directed at preventing crime and promoting public safety citywide," said city Law Department attorney Celeste Koeleveld.
Street stops increased substantially in the mid-1990s, when, faced with overwhelming crime, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani made stop-and-frisk an integral part of the city's law enforcement, relying on the "broken windows" theory that targeting low-level offenses helps prevent bigger ones.
Stops rose, and overall crime dropped dramatically in a city that once had the highest murder rate in the U.S.
There were only 419 murders in 2012, the lowest since similar record keeping began in the 1960s, down from more than 2,000 in the 1990s. And there were 531,159 people stopped, more than five times the number when Bloomberg took office a decade ago. Fifty-one percent of those stopped were black, 32 percent Hispanic and 11 percent white. According to U.S. Census figures, there are 8.2 million people in the city: 26 percent are black, 28 percent are Hispanic and 44 percent are white.
About half of the people are just questioned. Others have their bag or backpack searched. And sometimes police conduct a full pat-down. Only 10 percent of all stops result in arrest, and a weapon is recovered a fraction of the time.
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Opinions / Two Views on NYPD Stop, Question & Frisk
The NYPD–and its statistics–on trial
By Vincent Warren — Friday, March 15th, 2013; 5:19 p.m. ‘MSNBC News’
(Op-Ed / Commentary)
“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain was fond of saying: “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” Selectively presented statistics can be used as much to distort or obscure as they can to illuminate and reveal truths. Much like a carefully cropped photo, a select set of numbers presented in isolation can be used to persuade people of their presenter’s viewpoint, even if in context those stats actually tell a very different story.
So it is with the New York City Police Department’s most recent press release on the 2012 data concerning the department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program. “Blacks were 55% of the stop subjects and were 66% of the violent crime suspects in 2012,” the release said. Gee, it sure sounds like all those critics of the NYPD who say stop-and-frisk is racially discriminatory are wrong, doesn’t it? The police are stopping a smaller percentage of African-Americans than are committing crimes, so they must be stopping them based on colorblind, legitimate suspicion, right?
Wrong. Here’s what the NYPD conveniently left out of that picture: On the forms that police officers fill out reporting why they stopped people, “fits description” was checked off in only 12% of cases (that number comes from January 2010 through June 2012 data, so it is not strictly an apples-to-apples comparison; however, it is also consistent with yearly data from prior years and 2012 data is not yet available on this). Thus “66% of violent crime suspects” is a red herring here since the vast majority of people are not being stopped because they resemble suspects in violent crimes. Moreover, suspect race is actually unknown in almost 40% of all crime complaints filed with the NYPD each year.
Expert analysis of the stop-and-frisk statistics, taken all together, tells a different story. Looking at all the data from January 2010 through June 2012, after controlling for crime, local social conditions and the concentration of police officers in an area, race is a primary explanatory factor for stops at both the individual and neighborhood level. This was also true for expert analysis of the data from 2004 through 2009.
Blacks and Latinos accounted for 87% of 2012 stops (and the same percentage in 2011), but they are only 53% of the population–those numbers make it look like they are singled out because in fact they are singled out.
The NYPD also proudly touts the number of guns confiscated through its stop-and-frisk program, which the press release says was 780 in 2012. But 780 gun confiscations out of 533,042 stops actually only amounts to a recovery rate of 0.15%. That’s one gun for every 683 people stopped.
This is lower than the rate of gun seizures at random checkpoints. It suggests both that unlawfully stopping hundreds of thousands of people is an ineffective way to try to get guns off the street, and that seizing weapons is not really the reason people are being stopped.
Every first-year graduate student learns that correlation does not prove causality, but the NYPD routinely claims that the city’s falling crime rates are caused in part by their stop-and-frisk practices. There is not a single published study providing evidence for this claim. The truth is that no one knows what has caused the city’s drop in crime, but given the fact that only 6% of stops result in arrest and the vast majority of these are for so-called quality of life violations, it seems improbable, to say the least , that crime rates are going down because of stop and frisk.
But this unsubstantiated claim–that stop-and-frisk reduces crime–is essential for the NYPD. Without it, stop-and-frisk just looks like one big waste of public resources spent harassing black and brown citizens. The claim is meant to imply that we should be okay with the constitutional violation of thousands of people’s rights every day because it’s a price we have to pay for our safety.
That and other “lies, damned lies and statistics” the NYPD would like us to believe are meant to distract us from the outrageous reality that every year the police treat hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers as suspects rather than citizens.
But on March 18, when the Center for Constitutional Rights case, Floyd v. City of New York, goes to trial, it will be the NYPD that has to account for its behavior. A judge will hear all the evidence and see all the statistics, not just a cherry-picked few, and decide whether the stop-and-frisk program violates the rights of New Yorkers.
Vincent Warren is Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is lead counsel in Floyd v. City of New York.
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Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’ Editorial:
Scheindlin’s show trial
The verdict seems pre-cooked in the bogus stop, question and frisk class action lawsuit
The class-action lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s program of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking suspicious individuals is set for trial in Manhattan Federal Court with Judge Shira Scheindlin going through the motions of impartial justice.
There is every indication Scheindlin is set to do even more damage to the social fabric than she already has with a finding that, based on race, the police have violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.
She has made her opinions clear in extensive preliminary proceedings. After deriding cops for “presumably sincere efforts” to protect the public, after highlighting “the disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos, as compared to whites, who become entangled in the criminal justice system,” Scheindlin will be the sole arbiter of what’s what.
She, the judge. She, the jury.
Most destructively, she certified the case as a class action in a ruling widely and falsely cited as documenting police abuses. In fact, she let plaintiffs build the class on the wispiest of evidence.
A handful of New Yorkers will describe alleged police abuses, and then an expert will say they happen tens of thousands of times a year.
How does he know? He divined the conclusion by inspecting thousands of forms on which cops checked boxes to record why they stopped someone. He then rendered judgment on which boxes showed a constitutional stop and which did not.
Bogus is the word. This statistician is no more qualified to determine constitutionality than is the man at a hot dog stand. The checks hardly explain the circumstances that provoked suspicions. And he found purported violations in fewer than 7% of cases — hardly proof of widespread abuses.
No matter. Scheindlin bought it all. If the pattern holds, she’ll give short shrift to facts explaining why police stop minorities more than whites. For example: Blacks compose 23% of the population but represent 62% of murder victims and 59% of suspects — proportions roughly in line with the number of blacks stopped for questioning.
Facing a losing cause, the city should play to other courts: the court of public opinion and the appeals court that eventually will have to overturn Scheindlin’s biased legal activism.
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More Bloomberg ‘Big Brother’ / Speeding Cameras
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly Pushes State To Approve Speed Cameras
Kelly argues speed enforcement cameras will have a major deterrent effect, but Assembly-approved plan faces uncertain fate in Albany
BY Glenn Blain — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
NOTE: Also see the Sunday NY Daily News article, titled: “Speeding tickets in Brooklyn varies widely based on precinct” below - Mike
ALBANY — NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly has joined the fight to bring speed enforcement cameras to the city, the Daily News has learned.
Kelly, in a series of letters sent to Gov. Cuomo and legislative leaders last week, argued that using cameras to catch speeders would improve public safety and reduce traffic injuries.
As the debate over speed enforcement cameras heated up last week, The News reported exclusively that the city Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association opposes use of the technology.
“Motorists know that there will never be a sufficient number of police officers to catch everyone who violates the traffic laws, Kelly wrote in a letter to Cuomo, “but the presence of speed cameras can create a strong deterrent effect, serving to reduce speeding and the collision and physical injury that it causes.”
Nearly identical letters were sent to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), Senate GOP leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau County) and Bronx Sen. Jeff Klein, leader of the Senate’s Independent Democratic Conference.
Speed enforcement cameras have emerged as one of the more contentious issues in the ongoing state budget negotiations.
A proposal for a pilot program to install up to 20 cameras in school speed zones was included in a budget bill the Assembly adopted last week. Mayor Bloomberg supports the call for a pilot program in the city, which has had success using cameras to catch motorists who run red lights.
The Senate, however, did not include the measure in its budget bill, and key senators have expressed doubt it would be included in the state’s final budget.
On Friday, PBA President Patrick Lynch told the Daily News that cameras “are no substitute for live policing” and urged the legislature to reject the measure in the final budget.
Lynch argued speed enforcement cameras would let “slip by” drunken drivers, unlicensed motorists, and those carrying weapons or fleeing crime scenes.
Kelly, by contrast, wrote in his letters that speeding is “one of the most inherently dangerous” violations of vehicle & traffic law, with police writing 71,000 summonses for speeding in 2012.
Use of speed enforcement cameras, he argued, was consistent with the NYPD’s continued use of “new technologies” for crime fighting and counterterrorism .
Political momentum has been growing behind the proposal for speed enforcement cameras, as City Council
Speaker and mayoral race front-runner Christine Quinn and several other council members have signaled their support.
Speed enforcement cameras are used in more than 120 cities across the country, but in some instances they’ve prompted lawsuits and efforts by state legislatures to ban them.
The City of Baltimore recently moved to replace its entire network of speed enforcement cameras after an investigation found numerous errors in their speed readings.
A 2011 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety credited speed enforcement cameras with reducing fatal crashes by 24% in 14 large cities where they were used.
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PBA chief says no to cameras for catching speeding drivers
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said Friday it’s urging lawmakers to reject the legislation pushed by the Bloomberg administration for the new devices.
By Glenn Blain — Saturday, March 16th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
ALBANY — The PBA wants to slam the brakes on using cameras to catch speeders.
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said Friday it’s urging lawmakers to reject the legislation pushed by the Bloomberg administration for the new devices.
“Speed cameras are no substitute for live policing,” PBA President Patrick Lynch told the Daily News.
He said the cameras would allow drivers who are drunk, carrying weapons and fleeing crimes to “slip by.”
The cameras record the speed of passing vehicles. The Bloomberg administration wants to test using 20 of them in school zones. Tickets would be issued automatically.
Political momentum had been growing behind the proposal, which was included in an Assembly budget bill adopted this week.
But the PBA’s arguments have found a sympathetic ear in the more conservative state Senate. Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn) predicted the upper chamber would not go along.
“What we need are the actual police officers on the street,” he said. “Cops on the street are what slows people down.”
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Dozens of NYPD Misconduct Accusations Hit Statute of Limitations
By Stephen Nessen — Friday, March 15th, 2013; 3:03 p.m. ‘WNYC News’
Seventy-four cases of alleged NYPD misconduct will not be fully prosecuted because those cases have exceeded the 18-month statue of limitations in February.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board, which reviews all cases filed by civilians against the police, said in a board meeting this week that Sandy was partly to blame for delaying its investigations. It also blamed a hiring freeze, which has recently been lifted.
Last year 12 cases in February hit the statute of limitations. The number of cases that hit the statue of limitations last year, which would have resulted in disciplinary charges was 17.
Chris Dunn, the Associate Legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, says these are cases that need to be investigated.
“In just 12 months there's been a six-fold increase [in cases] and we're now facing a situation where, many officers who may have been disciplined before for having mistreated and abused civilians, will be able to walk away,” Dunn said. “We're now facing a situation where many officers who may have been disciplined before for having mistreated and abused civilians, will be able to walk away.”
The CCRB received more than 5,000 complaints last year.
Even when a case hits the statute of limitations, however, the CCRB continues to investigate it, and the findings will still end up in the officer’s police file.
In 2011, full CCRB investigations took an average of 279 days to complete and 350 days to completed investigations that resulted in disciplinary charges.
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NYPD $$ Lawyer Lotto $$ Bonanza
Law Dept. Launches Unit to Defend State Torts Against NYPD
By Andrew Keshner — Friday, March 15th, 2013 ‘The New York Law Journal’
New York City's Law Department is establishing a new unit to defend tort actions against police in state court, mirroring an initiative it put into place to fight, instead of settle, similar cases filed in federal court.
With an increase in the number of state court actions alleging misconduct by police officers against civilians, particularly in the Bronx, Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo yesterday said the Law Department would be staffing a new unit to fight the excessive force, false arrest and malicious prosecution actions it views as weak on the merits.
Cardozo announced the unit's creation during a City Council budget hearing, where he unveiled a proposed $142 million Law Department budget for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2013. The proposed budget is $5.6 million less than the department's 2013 fiscal budget of $148.1 million.
The cost of funding the new unit will be $1.73 million in fiscal year 2013 and $3.46 million in 2014, according to the Law Department.
The agency employs 670 attorneys and 590 support staff. The state tort unit will be comprised of 45 staff, 29 of whom will be lawyers. One-third of the staff has already been hired, Cardozo said at the hearing.
The unit replicates a Law Department initiative in place since July 2011 that has taken a more assertive approach to federal civil rights actions arising from civilian-police encounters that the city once would have opted to settle for low dollar amounts to avoid the high cost of litigation.
That stance created a "cottage industry" developed where attorneys brought "marginal" cases in search of a quick settlement, Cardozo said.
In the program's first year, the federal unit, with 28 attorneys and six staff, tripled the number of cases it tried to verdict and won "a majority," according to Cardozo's written testimony.
"So far, it looks like this program is working," Cardozo said at the hearing.
Along those lines, he said the new unit would offer a "stronger presence" in similar state court actions.
City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, D-Upper West Side, asked Cardozo if the success of the federal initiative had redirected more actions to state court.
Though the Law Department was still studying the issue, Cardozo said that "certainly some" of the suits were ending up in state court in search of a settlement.
Yet between fiscal year 2010 and fiscal year 2012, there was a 35 percent rise in state claims alleging misconduct by police officers, "largely in the Bronx," the written submission noted.
According a New York City Comptroller's report, "police action claims"—which include claims of false arrest or imprisonment, excessive use of force or assault, failure to provide police protection and shooting of a suspect—were the most frequent type of personal injury claim filed against the city in fiscal year 2011.
Resolving police action claims cost the city $59.6 million in fiscal year 2011, according to the report. That year, the overall city payouts for property and personal injury claims, including police claims, was $550.4 million.
The report noted a steady climb in both police action claims filed and settlements paid between fiscal year 2007 and fiscal year 2011.
Members of the plaintiff's bar welcomed news of the state court unit, if only because it meant quicker resolution of a case.
William Peterman of Corpina Piergrossi Klar & Peterman in the Bronx handles police misconduct cases. But he said he is "selective" in what he takes "because we know it's going to take years to prosecute a case to its conclusion."
"I think anything the law department does in an effort to expedite litigation of these cases is a good thing," he said, noting the city "generally" opts to settle.
Jeffrey Belovin of Belovin & Franzblau in the Bronx also said that in his experience, while the city "threatens trial, when push comes to shove, they settle."
But the time from filing to disposition can take between 3½ to four years, he said.
Belovin said his firm takes on only "legitimate" police misconduct cases.
If the city thinks the case is marginal, he said, it "should test us," adding he would be "delighted" to get an earlier trial.
When asked why police misconduct cases were filed more often in the Bronx, Cardozo said in an interview after the hearing that the question was better posed to plaintiffs.
Peterman said the number of claims "could be related to stop-and-frisk" tactics or "more aggressive policing."
But Belovin said the law requires such torts to be filed in the county where the incident arose, suggesting police in the Bronx are "not behaving appropriately."
Belovin said many Bronx residential buildings were enrolled in "Operation Clean Halls," which allows officers access to private buildings. But he said the program is "abused" as are stop-and-frisk tactics.
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Brooklyn South Anti-Crime Sgt. Mourad Mourad and P.O. Jovaniel Cordova
‘Wanted’ poster for two cops who shot Kimani Gray posted to Instagram
By LARRY CELONA and SELIM ALGAR — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
A mock-up of a “Wanted’’ poster placed on Instagram sickeningly calls for the murders of the two NYPD cops who shot and killed Brooklyn teen Kimani Gray.
The posting on the online photo-sharing Web site features pictures of Sgt. Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel Cordova above the caption, “50z want these pigs heads.”
A source said that the “50z” is a gang subset.
Using the handle “safjcrossfit,” the poster encourages the cops’ would-be killers to “empty the clip on umm.”
Worried about the officers’ safety, the NYPD has provided both men with police radios for them to take home, in case they encounter any trouble, sources said.
The department also has beefed up patrols in the two cops’ neighborhoods, sources said.
Police sources said investigators are working to identify the person who designed and put up the image and are tracking its circulation.
Cordova and Mourad have been assigned to desk duty while the shooting is investigated.
Gray was shot seven times — including three times in the back — on the night of March 9 after the plainclothes officers said he pointed a gun at them when they instructed him to freeze during a street stop.
The deadly confrontation sparked days of violent unrest in the East Flatbush neighborhood where it occurred.
Protesters clashed with cops, pelting them with rocks and bottles, and trashed neighborhood stores as they decried Gray’s killing.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has called the killing a justified shooting and said Gray’s .38-caliber pistol was recovered at the scene.
Portrayals of the teen have ranged from promising schoolboy to trouble-making gangbanger.
Gray has been praised as a dedicated student by an administrator at his Manhattan high school.
“We believed in his potential from the day he entered our school,” Principal Matt Willoughby wrote in a letter to parents at the school.
But cops say Gray, known as “Kiki,’’ was a Bloods gang member and had a criminal record that included raps for grand larceny and inciting a riot.
The Brooklyn teen and his friends were out that night to commit a robbery, law-enforcement sources have said.
Online videos and pictures have surfaced in which the teen pronounces his allegiance to the crew by making gang signs with his hands.
Relatives maintain that Gray lived a dual life where he walked the gangster strut with friends but inwardly longed to escape his violence-plagued neighborhood and hoped to become an accountant.
Mourad has seen three civil-rights complaints filed against him during his time on the force, while Cordova has been hit with two complaints.
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Both cops involved in shooting death of Kimani Gray, 16, in East Flatbush named in federal lawsuits
Sgt. Mourad Mourad racked up three suits while he was a plainclothes cop on Staten Island, and Officer Jovaniel Cordova racked up two at Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct — all alleging various civil rights violations including illegal stop and search and false arrest.
By John Marzulli — Saturday, March 16th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
A woman who told the Daily News she witnessed the shooting from her apartment window said Gray did not have a gun in his hand. But she previously told Internal Affairs investigators she couldn’t see what the kids were doing “from the angle I was at.”
The settlements in the prior cases ranged from $20,000 to $92,500, with no admission of wrongdoing by the city.
“Our clients’ interactions with Sgt. Mourad and Officer Cordova expose a disturbing pattern of unconstitutional and aggressive stop-and-frisk practices,” said lawyer Brett Klein, who filed four of the five suits.
“In each case, Mourad and Cordova attempted to cover up their misconduct by falsifying and fabricating evidence.”
The NYPD sergeant and cop involved in the fatal shooting of Brooklyn 16-year-old Kimani Gray have been named in five federal lawsuits — which cost the city a total of $215,000 in settlements, court records show.
Sgt. Mourad Mourad racked up three suits while he was a plainclothes cop on Staten Island, and Officer Jovaniel Cordova racked up two at Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct — all alleging various civil rights violations including illegal stop and search and false arrest.
Prosecutors later dismissed all but one of the arrests against the six plaintiffs, and the criminal cases were sealed.
Mourad and Cordova had been placed on desk duty while the NYPD and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the March 9 shooting in East Flatbush that has since sparked riots. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said Gray was shot after he pointed a .38-caliber revolver at the sergeant and cop, who had approached a group of youths on the street.
The suits are:
• Derek Franks received a $92,500 settlement for a suit against Mourad and other unidentified cops, alleging he was illegally stopped and frisked on May 7, 2007. He spent four months in Rikers Island until charges were dropped.
• Andre Maraj and Dary Harville each received $22,500 settlements, which alleged they were falsely arrested by Mourad and others. Harville claimed he was “slammed” into a car.
• Jontel Sebbern received $20,000 stemming from his arrest after a car stop. He was ordered out of the car by Mourad and others, who frisked him and pulled his pants and underwear.
“You can take me to the precinct but you’re not going in my underwear here,” Sebbern told the cops, says the complaint.
• Peter Owusu pocketed $22,500 for the “emotional distress” he suffered as a result of a car stop and arrest by Cordova. Owusu claims he was placed face down in a puddle and handcuffed. He later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.
• Steve Morency got $35,000 after accusing Cordova of an illegal stop inside an E. 17th St. building. Morency claimed he was punched in the face and needed three stitches to close a cut above his eye.
Klein said Mourad racked up the suits when he was assigned to an aggressive anti-crime unit.
Both Mourad and Cordova had each been involved in a previous shooting, which were deemed to be within department guidelines.
“None of these civil claims were tried, and the officers were not found to have engaged in any wrongdoing. The decision to settle should not be held against them. The settlements were not large by legal standards, as they included attorney's fees," said city lawyer Muriel Goode-Trufant.
With Rich Schapiro
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Chief of Detectives Phil T Pulaski’s Efforts to Have Detectives Collar Up More
NYPD cops ordered to run criminal checks on domestic-abuse victims
By JAMIE SCHRAM and DAN MANGAN — Friday, March 15th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
Women who report domestic violence are exposing themselves to arrest under a new NYPD directive that orders cops to run criminal checks on the accused and the accuser, The Post has learned.
The memo by Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski requires detectives to look at open warrants, complaint histories and even the driving records of both parties.
“You have no choice but to lock them up” if the victims turn out to have warrants, including for minor offenses like unpaid tickets, a police source said.
“This is going to deter victims of domestic violence . . . They’re going to be scared to come forward.”
The directive tells detectives that when they are investigating cases of domestic violence, they should run a search that cross-references all NYPD databases.
Beside warrants, a person’s criminal record and history of making criminal complaints should be checked, the directive says.
A source said that even if detectives wanted to take pity on someone who was battered by a spouse, they would feel pressure to make an arrest to avoid getting in trouble with superiors.
“We have every right to arrest that person at that moment,” the source said.
Reacting to the March 5 memo, another source fumed, “There’s a lack of common sense in this department right now.”
Marilyn Chinitz, a matrimonial lawyer who often represents abused women, said the policy harms those police should be protecting.
“You’re arresting the victim?” Chinitz said. “That is crazy.
“That is very, very frightening. It would absolutely dissuade people. They would not report a crime because they would fear getting locked up.
“It would empower the perpetrator, and there’s going to be more domestic violence as a consequence, and you’re endangering children,” Chinitz said, noting that kids often live in households where one parent is being abused.
Joseph Tacopina, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, said the new policy will have a “massive chilling effect” on domestic-violence victims, particularly women reluctant to call cops on their partners.
“The majority of domestic-violence cases go unreported,” Tacopina noted. “This is just going to increase this percentage.”
Pulaski’s memo is the latest in nearly 90 instructional memos the former civil engineer and lawyer has issued to NYPD detectives since he was appointed their boss by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in the fall of 2009.
Those memos range from the most mundane tasks to how to grill a suspect.
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NYPD using criminal background checks to push victims in domestic-violence cases
By JAMIE SCHRAM and DAN MANGAN — Saturday, March 16th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
The NYPD is running criminal checks on domestic-violence victims so cops can have leverage if the accuser gets cold feet about pressing charges, a police source told The Post yesterday.
“You’re trying to close the case, but your complainant becomes uncooperative,” the source said. “Your supervisor says, ‘Get her in here, and remind her that she has an open warrant,’ ” the source said. “They want us to use that as leverage to force them to remain cooperative.”
The Post yesterday revealed that Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski’s March 5 memo ordered cops to run criminal background checks — including an open warrant check — on complainants as well as the accused in domestic-violence cases.
Investigators warned that the new edict will deter women from reporting abuse because of fear they will face arrest for something as minor as unpaid parking tickets.
“We all think it is insane,” said a police source.
City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) — chair of the Public Safety Committee — wrote a letter to Pulaski yesterday saying, “I believe that a policy that could potentially lead to the arrest of a victim of domestic violence is misguided.
“I ask you to reconsider immediately and issue a more targeted policy which makes it clear that the purpose of gathering this information is to better assess the situation and not to make arrests.”
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne insisted the directive does not require arrests of domestic-violence victims with warrants. He said researching victims’ backgrounds is “standard practice and policy . . . to help lead them to the victims’ assailants.”
New York Civil Liberties Union chief Donna Lieberman sarcastically asked, “First a woman is abused by her partner, and then she’s abused by the NYPD when she turns to them for help? If we gave out knucklehead awards, this would definitely be at the front of the line.”
Connie Neal, head of the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said the directive likely “will increase fear and reduce safety if victims of domestic violence feel that they cannot call for help when they most need it.”
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‘One Police Plaza’
Ahmed Ferhani: Terrorist or Loser?
By: Leonard Levitt – Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘NYPD Confidential.Com’
(Op-Ed / Commentary)
So who is Ahmed Ferhani, sentenced last week to ten years in jail after pleading guilty to planning to attack New York City synagogues?
Is he the “lone-wolf” terrorist, whose arrest two years ago made world-wide headlines when, at a City Hall news conference in May 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance at his side, accused Ferhani of plotting to blow up the largest synagogue in Manhattan and kill as many Jews as possible?
Or is Ferhani, as his lawyer claimed, an impoverished Algerian immigrant with psychiatric issues, molested as a child, in and out of jail for minor crimes and manipulated by an NYPD undercover officer whom the FBI regarded as untrustworthy?
Ferhani is, in fact, the first terrorist prosecuted in state court under a law passed after 9/11.
He is also the NYPD’s second terrorist convicted without the help of the FBI, which absented itself from the Hall news conference and played no role in Ferhani’s arrest and prosecution.
And he is yet another example of a “lone-wolf” terrorist prosecution whose initial hype does not appear to reflect the actual level of the terrorist threat.
Take the NYPD’s first “lone-wolf” terrorist, Matin Siraj, a Pakistani immigrant, arrested on the eve the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square, accused of plotting to blow up the nearby Herald Square subway station. Siraj’s well-publicized arrest also received international attention.
Evidence at his trial, however, revealed he had an I.Q considered borderline-retarded; that the NYPD had paid an informant $100,000 to egg him on; and that his co-conspirator, James Elshafay, had been recently released from a mental institution. When arrested, Elshafay agreed to testify against Siraj in return for a five-year prison sentence. Siraj was convicted and sentenced to 30 years.
The NYPDs third “lone-wolf” case involves Jose Pimentel, a Dominican immigrant who also has mental issues and who, the NYPD says, was preparing to make bombs to attack police cars, government offices and soldiers returning from overseas. Supposedly inspired by Al Qaeda, his arrest also drew international attention.
Again, the FBI refused to help prosecute him. Law enforcement sources have said its agents were distrustful of the NYPD informant who developed the evidence against Pimentel because he smoked marijuana with him and even helped him construct the bombs.
In Ferhani’s case, a grand jury rejected the top terrorism count, which carried a sentence of life. Instead, it indicted him on lesser gun and hate crime counts.
Seated in Manhattan State Supreme Court last Friday, his head shaved, wearing glasses and an orange prison jump suit with the words DOC [Department of Correction] on the back, Ferhani spoke briefly before sentencing.
In unaccented English, he apologized to his parents, saying they had had “taught me to put others before myself.” He concluded with: “I will use this time to strengthen my mind and character.”
Judge Michael Obus, a Columbia Law School graduate and former Legal Aide attorney for 12 years, responded, “I hope you were sincere.”
Appearing sympathetic to Ferhani’s past difficulties, Obus added: “I know no one was hurt but your conduct was potentially damaging. … This was not a way to involve yourself in a civilized society.”
Ferhani’s Palestinian-American lawyer Lamis Jamal Deek, who represented him pro-bono as his family lacks money, portrayed his reduced, ten-year sentence — as she has the grand jury’s decision not to indict him on the top terrorism count — as a kind of Pyrrhic victory. After he completes his sentence, Ferhani is to be deported back to Algeria.
Meanwhile, District Attorney Vance, who stands ready to prosecute Pimentel, wrote an Op-ed piece in the NY Post the day after Ferhani’s sentencing, asserting his determination to work with the NYPD in prosecuting “lone-wolf” terrorists — along with banking miscreants who finance clients in Iran, Libya and the Sudan.
It could be the opening salvo of a re-election campaign.
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IN THE RIGHT. Could anything be more clear cut? A 16-year-old Brooklyn gangbanger points a loaded .38 at two cops who fire seven (11 shots with seven hits - Mike) shots and kill him.
When City Councilman Jumaane Williams appears to defend a rioting group of teenagers who then trashed a local pharmacy and beat up two people, saying, “There’s a lot of anger out there,” and suggesting that their actions are a response to the NYPD’s ubiquitous Stop and Frisk policy, he is righty pilloried in the media.
Police Commissioner Kelly rightly defends the two officers — a stark contrast to his early days as commissioner when in 2004 he, fearing a riot following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer, blamed the officer for what a Brooklyn grand jury subsequently decided was an accident.
For once, this reporter even found himself agreeing with the troglodytic Daily News, which headlined its editorial condemning the rioting, “Rage without cause.”
Ditto with McManus of the Post, Kelly’s Harvard Club luncheon buddy, whose headline on his most recent column read: “Blame Kimani Gray. The Cops were doing their job.”
And then came Saturday’s Daily News story by its veteran police and court reporter John Marzulli. He reported that the two cops who shot Gray — Sgt. Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel Cordova — had been named in five prior federal lawsuits for which the city paid out a total of $215,000 in settlements.
All the suits alleged civil rights violations, including illegal stop and search and false arrest — i.e., Stop and Frisk.
Lawyer Brett Klein, who filed four of the suits, was quoted as saying: “In each case, Mourad and Cordova attempted to cover up their misconduct by falsifying and fabricating evidence.”
Granted, those five cases civil rights cases seem relatively minor, compared to the fatal shooting of Kimani Gray. Still, they raise the uncomfortable thought: what if?
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NYPD cop busted for using surveillance camera to spy on neighbor in the Bronx
Police Officer Miguel Gomez set up a spy cam inside his building so he could monitor the comings and goings of a 21-year-old woman. It's unknown if he was recording the footage.
By Joe Kemp , Thomas Tracy AND Rich Schapiro — Sunday, March 17th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
He's a Peeping Tom — with a badge.
An off-duty NYPD officer was arrested Friday and charged with using a surveillance camera to spy on a young woman in his Bronx building, police said.
Police Officer Miguel Gomez, 41, who has been on the force for eight years, set up his spy cam inside the building so he could monitor the 21-year-old’s comings and goings, police sources said.
He was arrested shortly after 8 a.m. Friday and booked for unlawful surveillance. Cops recovered the camera, police said.
A woman who identified herself as Gomez’s mother vigorously defended her son.
“My son is a very good boy and wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Juliana Gomez, 67, told the Daily News Saturday night, and refused to answer follow-up questions.
Police officials would not disclose Gomez’s relationship to the victim or where in the building the camera was positioned.
It was also unclear if he was recording footage of the young woman.
A police source said Gomez didn’t use NYPD equipment in his spy game.
“If he did, he would definitely face additional charges,” a police source said.
Gomez joined the force in 2005 and has spent most of his career in the Bronx, officials said.
The arrest marks the latest black eye for the NYPD.
The lurid trial of “Cannibal Cop” Gilberto Valle — who was convicted of conspiring to kidnap, cook and eat women — has drawn embarrassing headlines for weeks.
A Manhattan jury found Valle, a 28-year-old married father, guilty of the gruesome plot last Tuesday.
Like Gomez, Valle’s use of technology led to his undoing.
Valle’s family computer was loaded with crime-scene pictures of dead and mutilated women; twisted photos of ladies being tortured and sexually assaulted; and Google searches for phrases like, “human meat recipes.”
Valle, who is facing the possibility of life behind bars, was also found guilty of illegally accessing a federal law enforcement database to look up information on one of his targets.
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Four off-duty NYPD busted amid St. Patrick's Day weekend hijinks
Two police officers in Queens were booked on drunk driving charges, an administrative aide in the Bronx was charged with possession of a controlled substance and a traffic agent in the Bronx was arrested for weapon possession and possession of stolen property this weekend.
By Barry Paddock — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Four off-duty NYPD employees have been arrested since Friday, including an officer accused of driving drunk and leaving the scene of an accident, officials said.
Officer Joseph King, 28, was arrested on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Queens for driving drunk, leaving the scene of an accident and refusing to take a breath test about 4:40 a.m. on Sunday, cops said.
Officer Dennis Munge, 32, was busted in Queens on charges of driving while intoxicated about 6 a.m. Sunday.
Curline Brown, 55, an NYPD administrative aide, was arrested in the Bronx for possession of a controlled substance about 8:15 p.m. Saturday, police said.
Traffic agent Denise Johnson, 37, was busted in the Bronx for obstruction of government administration, weapon possession and possession of stolen property around noon on Friday.
The string of unrelated busts came after off-duty Officer Miguel Gomez, 41, made headlines when he was busted Friday morning for using a surveillance camera to spy on a young woman in his Bronx building.
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Speeding tickets in Brooklyn varies widely based on precinct, year-end stats show
Bushwick cops gave out most tickets; Greenpoint the fewest
By Rebeca Ibarra And Reuven Blau — Sunday, March 17th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Lead-footed drivers had the best chance to duck police radar guns in Bushwick in 2011, but were likely to be hit with speeding tickets in Greenpoint.
Police in the 83rd Precinct, which covers parts of Broadway and Flushing and Knickerbocker Avenues in Bushwick, issued a mere eight speeding tickets last year, NYPD records show.
But cops in the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint , which encompasses a wide open stretch of road under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, doled out a borough high 555 tickets, NYPD figures show.
Pols and transportation advocates cite the inconsistent enforcement as proof the city needs to add officers, and install speed cameras to punish zooming drivers and prevent further deaths like the one that claimed the lives of a Hasidic couple and their newborn son.
“It's hard to imagine you can't find a large number of speeders in every precinct," said Eugene O'Donnell, a John Jay College professor and former cop.
Precinct cops in Brooklyn doled out 2,873 speeding tickets throughout the borough last year, thousands fewer than other offenses like tinted windows, according to the department's year-end figures.
Highway cops in Brooklyn and parts of Queens handed out an additional 13,535 speeding tickets.
But those figures combined were far fewer than the 43,920 summonses precinct police issued to drivers for yakking on cell phones while driving - the leading cause for a ticket in Brooklyn and citywide.
Precinct cops also issued 37,010 tickets to Brooklyn drivers flouting the city's seat-belt law and the 28,815 tickets to drivers with illegally tinted windows, an offense that has not been cited as a factor in crashes.
“This data shows that Brooklyn needs more resources and clearer enforcement goals to deal effectively with dangerous drivers,” said state Sen. Eric Adams (D-Crown Heights), a former police captain and frontrunner to become Brooklyn’s next borough president. “Until these speedsters know that they'll be caught and harshly prosecuted for their reckless behavior, they will continue to put lives at risk on our streets day-in and day-out.”
The NYPD maintains it is taking a balanced approach to enforcement, stressing each precinct is different, with some near highways, and others surrounded by congested roads with stop signs and lights.
“Speeding is being enforced throughout the borough of Brooklyn. Some commands are more congested than others regarding traffic or the ability to speed,” a department source said.
The NYPD keeps careful track of the number of accidents in each precinct and bosses are forced to explain what they are doing to prevent future crashes during intense Traffic Stat meetings, a police source said.
But a lack of officers and radar guns has been a problem, the department insider added.
The Bloomberg administration has drastically reduced the NYPD's headcount over the past 13 years.
"There's only a limited amount of resources that can be devoted to speeding," said Joseph Pollini, a professor at John Jay College.
That was little solace to Fausto Rodriguez, 49, who works near the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick.
"People speed," he said. "But you're not going to notice enforcement here because the precinct doesn't have the resources or the manpower."
Top five speeding ticket precincts
94th Precinct (Greenpoint) - 555
61st Precinct (Sheepshead Bay) - 198
62nd Precinct (Bensonhurst) - 182
79th Precinct (Bed-Stuy) - 180
60th Precinct (Coney Island) - 173
Bottom five speeding ticket precincts
83rd Precinct (Bushwick) - 8
67th Precinct (East Flatbush) - 45
88th Precinct (Clinton Hill/Fort Greene) -- 46
84th Precinct (Brooklyn Heights) -- 48
68th Precinct (Bay Ridge) - 63
Top Brooklyn tickets
Cell phone - 43,920
Safety belt - 37,010
Disobey sign - 29,889
Tinted windows -28,815
Uninsured - 18,954
Brake lights - 9,981
Speeding - 2,873*
(Excluding the 13,535 tickets issued by Highway officers covering the borough and parts of Queens)
Source: NYPD
With Ginger Adams Otis
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Retired NYPD Deputy Chief Joseph D’Amico Pension Issues
Gov secretly breaks his ‘double-dip’ vow
By FREDRIC U. DICKER — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
The top symbol of Gov. Cuomo’s public pledge to curtail “double dipping” by state officials who collect both state salaries and public pensions has begun double dipping himself, The Post has found.
State Police Superintendent Joseph D’Amico, with Cuomo’s secret approval but without any public notice, quietly obtained permission from the state Civil Service Commission in December to collect his full State Police salary and his pension as a former deputy chief of the NYPD.
Top aides to Cuomo told The Post and other news organizations in December 2010, just days before the new governor took office, that D’Amico would not collect his $85,000-a-year pension on top of his $136,000-a-year state salary because of double-dipping abuses involving politically connected individuals at the State Police and at other state agencies.
“Joe is making a sacrifice for public service. That’s what the new administration will be about,’’ a key Cuomo administration figure told The Post at the time.
The ban on D’Amico’s double dipping prompted several stories by The Post and other news organizations that noted Cuomo’s pledge that public service would require personal sacrifice.
The Post was tipped off to D’Amico’s decision to break the pledge by two prominent law-enforcement officials, who accused the Cuomo administration of “hypocrisy” and of misleading the public.
A Cuomo spokesman claimed D’Amico, 52 — the one-time chief investigator in then-Attorney General Cuomo’s office — had concluded he couldn’t make do on his public salary and threatened to resign if he wasn’t granted a “211 waiver’’ — legal authority to double dip.
“When the superintendent started in his position, he did not take his pension. However, it became financially impossible for him to remain in his position . . . and we granted a 211 waiver,’’ said the Cuomo spokesman, who asked not to be identified.
Double dipping by top State Police officials became a major issue in 2003 after The Post revealed that then-Gov. George Pataki’s good friend Daniel Wiese, a State Police lieutenant colonel, was making $220,000 a year after obtaining a 211 waiver that allowed him to collect his State Police pension after Pataki gave him a high-paying job at the state Power Authority.
Meanwhile, several sources close to the State Police, which has been racked by scandal and political interference, said there was widespread unhappiness with D’Amico.
“The professionals had been hoping that the governor would appoint a cop’s cop, but instead we wound up with just another politician,’’ one said.
The revelation of Cuomo and D’Amico’s flip-flop comes as the governor appears ready to flip-flop on another promise: to allow the controversial “millionaires tax’’ on higher-income earners, approved in December 2011, to expire at the end of 2014.
Concerned its renewal could become a campaign issue when he runs for re-election next year, Cuomo has been secretly negotiating an early extension of the tax with legislative leaders, sources said.
Cuomo, who once compared his commitment to allowing the tax to expire to his father Mario’s famous moral opposition to the death penalty, reversed course at the end of his first year in office in the face of the leftist Occupy Wall Street movement.
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Westchester
Mount Vernon officer costs city $937,000
Brutality suits name Mount Vernon officer
By Jonathan Bandler — Sunday, March 17th, 2013 ‘The Journal News’ / White Plains, NY
Mount Vernon has shelled out more than $930,000 in verdicts, settlements and legal fees for police brutality cases involving a sergeant who has remained on desk duty for four years after allegedly striking a 12-year-old in the head with a baton, a review of city and court records shows.
Three federal lawsuits since 2008 have named Sgt. Michael Marcucilli, including two in which juries found he used excessive force. And the plaintiff in a fourth case that does not name the sergeant insists it was Marcucilli who beat him up outside a city nightclub in 2008 — but that police crafted reports to hide Marcucilli’s involvement because he had been accused in similar cases.
The city’s legal department said Friday that police officials and the city’s outside labor counsel “will proceed with an internal investigation into his conduct and the need for disciplinary action. Sgt. Marcucilli remains on a modified assignment.”
Marcucilli’s continued employment has become symbolic of what critics call a lack of accountability in the department, particularly in the wake of Mayor Ernest Davis’ firing of Police Commissioner Carl Bell last month.
“It’s terrible. It sends a message ... to police officers that they can get away with anything,” said Damon Jones, a county correction officer who is president of the Westchester chapter of Blacks in Law Enforcement. “He shouldn’t have a job anymore and he’s going to end up getting a pension. We’re going to be paying for his retirement, and he’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.”
Marcucilli declined to speak with The Journal News. Sgt. Gregory Addison, president of the Mount Vernon Police Association, would not discuss specific details of Marcucilli’s employment but said that, to his knowledge, Marcucilli had never faced a departmental trial or been charged with any departmental violations. And he suggested that verdicts in lawsuits should not determine whether officers are disciplined by their departments.
“My primary concern is we’re trying the case in the media,” Addison said. “(Police) are not guilty until they’re found guilty (in departmental trials).”
Marcucilli, 42, joined the department in August 1995 and was promoted to sergeant in March 2006. His first decade on the job was free of controversy, but that changed within 10 months of his promotion.
On Jan. 12, 2007, at a Mount Vernon High School basketball game, Marcucilli allegedly threw Paul Weather — a city resident and retired Westchester County detective — against a wall. Weather sued Marcucilli and the city in federal court. A jury in 2011 awarded him $315,000. The city also had to pay $81,000 for his lawyer’s fees and, following Mount Vernon’s unsuccessful appeal, a judge last month ordered the city to pay $34,000 more in legal fees.
On Nov. 27, 2008, Marcucilli responded to a report of a disturbance on Gramatan Avenue, where Jorge Antonio Mendes Da Costa was arrested for disorderly conduct. Da Costa sued the city, Marcucilli and three other officers, claiming that he was hit and kicked more than a dozen times by two of the officers. Marcucilli never touched him, but Da Costa suggested the sergeant ordered the attack or at least should have intervened.
Neither of those cases drew widespread attention. But the third case resulted in Marcucilli having to surrender his gun and badge while investigations were conducted by Internal Affairs and the District Attorney’s Office. Westchester prosecutors chose not to pursue a criminal case against the sergeant.
Twelve-year-old Vanney Allen claimed Marcucilli hit him in the head with his baton on Feb. 28, 2009, when Allen and two friends were found inside A.B. Davis Middle School after school hours. Allen alleged that police told him to claim he had fallen down stairs.
A jury last summer awarded Allen $500,000. When the city appealed, his mother settled the case for $250,000 from the city and $25,000 from Marcucilli. The city also paid $150,000 for Allen’s legal fees and an additional $26,000 for Marcucilli’s lawyer, Douglas Martino.
“I thought he was a professional in all respects. He handled his (police) duties properly,” Martino said. “I don’t agree with the verdict. ... To this day, I don’t think it happened the way the plaintiff alleged.”
Marcucilli, whose annual salary is $100,021, may have taken a financial hit as a result of the modified assignment. Beginning in 2006 his overtime pay jumped significantly, to nearly $30,000 that year and more than $34,000 in each of the next two years. But that figure was down to $7,300 in 2009, and he got just $5,200 in overtime from 2010 through last year.
When the Da Costa case went to trial in November, jurors were not supposed to hear about the other cases of excessive force. But they did learn of the verdicts — though no details — because the sergeant and Mount Vernon corporation counsel Nichelle Johnson “opened the door.”
Marcucilli testified that neither of the officers hit or kicked Da Costa, and he opined that both acted properly in using the “minimal force necessary” to take him into custody.
“I think the jury is entitled to know that (Marcucilli’s) judgment on (use of force) may not be worth the paper it’s printed on,” U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel told the lawyers in allowing the jury to hear of the earlier cases.
Following his testimony and Johnson’s closing argument, the two sides reached a settlement and Da Costa was paid $27,500, even though he had no other eyewitnesses and had pleaded guilty in the criminal case.
The city also paid $31,000 for lawyers who represented other cops in the Allen case and $22,500 to settle claims of Robert Lightfoot Jr., one of the other kids with Allen at the school who was bit by a Yonkers police dog. That makes the total the city has paid out in cases involving Marcucilli $937,000.
Frank Young, Weather’s lawyer, also represents Michael Anderson, who claims he was beaten during an Aug. 30, 2008, arrest.
The lawsuit initially did not name any officers, but after a review of police reports, Officer Sean Blute was added as a defendant.
Last year, Young tried unsuccessfully to reopen depositions and possibly name Marcucilli as a defendant after Anderson’s sister, a retired Mount Vernon cop, said she heard Marcucilli was her brother’s assailant and that police had altered the incident reports to make it look like Blute was the only one who had contact with her brother. When Young asked his client about that, Anderson told him it was Marcucilli who hit him.
“I think it’s very dangerous,” Young said of the sergeant’s continued presence on the job. “The only explanation, other than that the Mount Vernon Police Department is even worse than I thought, is that there are union issues. He doesn’t want to go and they can’t fire him.”
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U.S.A.
Do Arrest Quotas Encourage Police Officers to Break the Law?
By Justin Peters — Friday, March 15th, 2013 ‘Slate Magazine’ / Washington, DC
On Monday, Baltimore police officer Kendell Richburg pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges that could earn him a maximum sentence of life in prison. Looking at the actions that Justin Fenton detailed in his Baltimore Sun article about the case—distributing drugs to be sold on the street, facilitating robberies, planning to frame innocent people—it seems clear that Richburg was a bad cop.
And yet, oddly, it seems like this was actually a case of a bad cop who was trying to be a good cop—at least at the outset. Richburg did these things not for personal gain, but to benefit a confidential informant who fed him information that helped him make arrests. In order to keep his confidential informant on the street, Richburg gave him drugs that he could sell. Richburg tipped off the informant to police activity, helping him avoid arrest. But eventually, their arrangement took a more sinister turn. “As Richburg conspired with the informant, the two discussed plans to set up innocent people,” writes Fenton. “In another instance, Richburg helped the informant plot a robbery.”
Richburg was part of a plainclothes police unit known as the Violent Crimes Impact Section. The VCIS was charged with getting guns and drug dealers off the streets of Baltimore. (The unit was renamed and effectively disbanded last December by new police commissioner Anthony Batts, in the wake of citizen and City Council criticism that its tactics were too aggressive.) Lots of urban police departments have employed specialty units like these, tasked with moving into high-crime areas and rapidly lowering crime rates. These units persist because they work. They make a lot of arrests, seize a lot of guns and drugs, and generally produce the kind of statistics that police officials can proudly tout to politicians and the press. They are blunt objects, and sometimes you need a blunt object if you want to make a dent.
But look closely at incidents of police brutality or corruption and you’ll often see them connected to these “jump-out boys,” so named because the officers tend to jump out of cars and aggressively pursue their targets. In 2011, the city of Chicago disbanded its extremely effective Mobile Strike Force unit, in part because citizens complained that its members played too rough. (In a 2012 Chicago magazine story about the city’s new police chief, Noah Isackson mentioned the 2006 revelations that “some officers robbed and kidnapped residents, and the accusations a year later that one officer plotted to murder another.”) In 2002, New York City disbanded its Street Crimes Unit, three years after four plainclothes officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo, killing him on the steps of his apartment. (The proximate cause of the unit’s downfall was the lawsuit Daniels , et al. v. the City of New York, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in the wake of the Diallo shooting, alleging racial profiling in the Street Crimes Unit and the NYPD at large.)
One of the main problems with these units is that they are often disconnected from the communities they serve. Since they’re not walking beats or attending community meetings like ordinary cops, they don’t always have to directly reckon with the wrath of the law-abiding people they offend. Officers in plainclothes units have been accused of acting indiscriminately and assuming criminal behavior from everyone they encounter. They make arrests, and then move on to the next hot spot.
These units are instruments of the “at any cost” school of policing, where success is measured by the number of arrests made or amount of contraband seized—by meeting often-unrealistic statistical targets imposed from on high. According to Richburg’s attorney, Warren Brown, tactics like those his client employed were common in the VCIS among officers worried about making their arrest quotas. “ ‘[I]f the curtain was pulled back, you would see that his M.O. was standard operating procedure,’ ” Brown told the Sun—which isn’t really a defense for conspiring to commit robbery, but is maybe an explanation for why a certain type of police officer might think that helping an informant commit a robbery is defensible if it encourages that informant to keep feeding him actionable information.
Baltimore’s police department obviously isn’t the only one that allegedly instructs its officers to meet various quotas. In a 1999 New York Times article, for instance, an anonymous member of the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit told David Kocieniewski that the officers were oppressed by stat-driven police tactics, and that they worked under a quota system that said they had to seize at least one illegal firearm per month:
"There are guys who are willing to toss anyone who's walking with his hands in his pockets," said an officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We frisk 20, maybe 30 people a day. Are they all by the book? Of course not; it's safer and easier to just toss people. And if it's the 25th of the month and you haven't got your gun yet? Things can get a little desperate."
If cops are under pressure to make numbers, then it follows that they’ll try hard to make those numbers, even if it means bending some rules in the process. So if a confidential informant is giving an officer good, actionable information, it’s to that officer’s benefit to keep that informant on the streets, even if it means giving that informant drugs to sell. And it makes sense that commanding officers, under pressure from superiors to reduce crime, might look the other way and give their subordinates room to operate however they see fit.
There’s no point in being too idealistic about the mechanics of urban police work. It’s a game of compromises, of weighing relative evils. But so many of these compromises seem to sacrifice long-term progress in favor of short-term rewards. Units like the Street Crimes Unit and the VCIS are an answer, yes, but they’re an answer to an incomplete question: "How do we fix the crime problem right now?" The second half of that question—“What do we do after that?”—is hard to answer with rule-bending shortcuts. I don’t want to imply that it’s not important to make arrests and get criminals off the streets. But it matters how you do it, and doing so in a way that destroys community trust, engenders resentment, inhibits cooperation, and incentivizes bad cop behavior will only make the good cops’ jobs harder—and the streets more dangerous—in the long run.
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Domestic Violence, Firearms and the 4th Amendment
In Some States, Gun Rights Trump Orders of Protection
Ruled a Threat to Family, but Allowed to Keep Guns
By MICHAEL LUO — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
Excerpt; desired to read the article in its entirety, go to:
Advocates for domestic violence victims have long called for stricter laws governing firearms and protective orders. Their argument is rooted in a grim statistic: when women die at the hand of an intimate partner, that hand is more often than not holding a gun.
In these most volatile of human dramas, they contend, the right to bear arms must give ground to the need to protect a woman’s life.
In statehouses across the country, though, the N.R.A. and other gun-rights groups have beaten back legislation mandating the surrender of firearms in domestic violence situations. They argue that gun ownership, as a fundamental constitutional right, should not be stripped away for anything less serious than a felony conviction — and certainly not, as an N.R.A. lobbyist in Washington State put it to legislators, for the “mere issuance of court orders.”
That resistance is being tested anew in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., as proposals on the mandatory surrender of firearms are included in gun control legislation being debated in several states.
Among them is Washington, where current law gives judges issuing civil protection orders the discretion to require the surrender of firearms if, for example, they find a “serious and imminent threat” to public health. But records and interviews show that they rarely do so, making the state a useful laboratory for examining the consequences, as well as the politics, of this standoff over the limits of Second Amendment rights.
By analyzing a number of Washington databases, The New York Times identified scores of gun-related crimes committed by people subject to recently issued civil protection orders, including murder, attempted murder and kidnapping. In at least five instances over the last decade, women were shot to death less than a month after obtaining protection orders. In at least a half-dozen other killings, the victim was not the person being protected but someone else. There were dozens of gun-related assaults like the one Ms. Holten endured.
The analysis — which crosschecked protective orders against arrest and conviction data, along with fatality lists compiled by the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence — represents at best a partial accounting of such situations because of limitations in the data. The databases were missing some orders that have expired or been terminated. They also did not flag the use of firearms in specific crimes, so identifying cases required combing through court records.
Washington’s criminal statutes, however, contain a number of gun-specific charges, like unlawful possession of a firearm and aiming or discharging one, offering another window into the problem. Last year, The Times found, more than 50 people facing protection orders issued since 2011 were arrested on one of these gun charges.
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NRA opposes U.N. arms treaty
By Peter Finn — Sunday, March 17th, 2013 ‘The Washington Post’ / Washington, DC
(Edited for brevity and law enforcement pertinence)
The National Rifle Association, which is battling a raft of gun control measures on Capitol Hill, also has an international fight on its hand as it gears up to oppose a U.N. treaty designed to restrict the flow of arms to conflict zones.
Negotiations open Monday in New York on the Arms Trade Treaty, which would require countries to determine whether weapons they sell would be used to commit serious human rights violations, terrorism or transnational organized crime.
The gun lobby fears that the treaty would be used to regulate civilian weapons. Human rights activists counter that it would reduce the trafficking of weapons, including small arms such as the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle, to outlaw regimes and rebel groups engaged in atrocities against civilian populations.
“This treaty is a common-sense alignment of the interests of governments, law-abiding citizens and individuals all over the world, who deserve the right to live free from harm,” said Michelle A. Ringuette, chief of campaigns and programs at Amnesty International USA. “Any step toward restraining the illicit sale and transfer of weapons used to commit horrific crimes is a good move forward, and the world could use a lot more steps in the direction of ending human rights abuses.”
The Obama administration, which has wavered on the treaty, signaled Friday that it was willing to support the accord. “The United States is steadfast in its commitment to achieve a strong and effective Arms Trade Treaty that helps address the adverse effects of the international arms trade on global peace and stability,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said in a statement. “We will not support any treaty that would be inconsistent with U.S. law and the rights of American citizens under our Constitution, including the Second Amendment.”
The NRA is among the treaty’s most vocal opponents and a founder of the World Forum on Shooting Activities, an international coalition of gun rights activists and gun manufacturers who plan to speak against the treaty.
“What we really object to is the inclusion of civilian firearms within the scope of the ATT,” said Tom Mason, the group’s executive secretary and a lawyer who has represented the NRA at U.N. meetings for nearly two decades. “This is a treaty that really needs to address the transfer of large numbers of military weapons that leads to human rights abuses. We have submitted language that you can define what a civilian firearm is.”
The NRA also argues that the treaty could infringe on gun rights as understood in the United States and could force Americans onto an international registry.
The American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights said in a white paper last month that “it is unlikely the proposed treaty would compromise Second Amendment rights,” and if it did, “the treaty itself would be void.”
The Obama administration said it had a number of technical issues, but activists said there was also a failure of political nerve several months before the presidential election. During the negotiations, the NRA organized a letter signed by a group of 51 Democratic and Republican senators opposing the treaty. The senators warned President Obama that they would “oppose ratification of an Arms Trade Treaty presented to the Senate that in any way restricts the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens to manufacture, assemble, possess, transfer or purchase firearms, ammunition and related items.”
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Cybercrime
Hacker Case Leads to Calls for Better Law
By AMY CHOZICK and CHARLIE SAVAGE — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
Matthew Keys, the 26-year-old deputy social media editor at Reuters charged with assisting computer hackers, has emerged as the latest lightning rod in the continuing battle between proponents of Internet freedom and the Justice Department.
A federal indictment of Mr. Keys filed in California on Thursday met an online cacophony of protests against the 1984 computer crime law under which he was charged, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The indictment says that Mr. Keys, who previously worked as a Web producer at KTXL Fox 40, a Sacramento-based television station that, like The Los Angeles Times, is owned by the Tribune Company, provided a user name and password to hackers associated with the group Anonymous. Those hackers then changed a headline on a Times online article from “Pressure Builds in House to Pass Tax-Cut Package” to “Pressure Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337,” a reference to another hacking group.
Each of the three charges against Mr. Keys could result in fines of as much as $250,000, with possible prison terms of as many as five years in one count and as many as 10 in the other two. The Tribune Company spent more than $5,000 to update its systems in response to the attack, the indictment says.
The aggressive tactics by prosecutors come amid an uptick in prominent cyberattacks in recent months. Last week, President Obama met with chief executives to discuss online security, which has become a hot issue on Capitol Hill.
In Mr. Keys’s case, the scale of the potential punishment relative to the actual harm caused — the vandalism to the Web site was quickly fixed — raised comparisons to the potential sentence in the indictment of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet freedom advocate. Accused of breaking into a university system to download an archive of scholarly papers, Mr. Swartz committed suicide in January.
“Anyone horrified by the amount of jail time” Mr. Keys faced should join in calling for Congressional reform of the computer fraud act, Trevor Timm, an advocate and blogger at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that supports an open Internet, wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday.
Still, it is not clear that an overhaul of the fraud act would change the damage charges Mr. Keys is facing. Orin S. Kerr, a former computer crimes prosecutor who now is a legal scholar at George Washington University, said that the part of the fraud act covering damage to a computer, which Mr. Keys was accused of violating, was more straightforward than the part involving authorized access, which Mr. Swartz was charged with violating; some scholars, including Mr. Kerr, have called those provisions overbroad.
Moreover, several legal specialists said that even if Mr. Keys were convicted on all three charges, they most likely would be collapsed into a single offense for purposes of calculating a sentence since they involved the same basic conduct. The sentencing guidelines would then be consulted in light of Mr. Keys’s previous criminal history, if any, and the economic harm caused by the vandalism — including any overtime or outside consultants paid to audit the system after the intrusion was discovered.
Mark Eckenwiler, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s computer crime section, said that statutory maximums cited in department news releases are “purely theoretical” in most cases, and that it would be inappropriate for the department to speculate at the start of the case about what an eventual sentence would be.
“The truth is that a lot of first-time offenders may well come in the very bottom band” of the sentencing guidelines, he said.
Nevertheless, Mr. Keys’s defense team stoked the furor. “I think hackers are the new Communists for the D.O.J.,” Tor Ekeland, a Brooklyn-based lawyer representing Mr. Keys, said in an interview. He maintained his client’s innocence and said that he intended to “vigorously litigate” the charges.
Jay Leiderman, a criminal defense lawyer in Ventura, Calif., known for representing computer hackers affiliated with Anonymous, is also representing Mr. Keys.
The case against Mr. Keys struck a particular nerve because of his outsize, and outspoken, online presence. A popular and at times volatile figure in the world of social media, Mr. Keys is in many ways emblematic of the new-media landscape. The writer of what was described by Time magazine as one of the 140 best Twitter feeds, Mr. Keys quickly used his feed to discuss the indictment and assure his nearly 25,000 Twitter followers that he was “fine.”
Mr. Keys is among a coterie of young journalists adept at social media who see their stars rise quickly and often are snapped up by major media organizations, said Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at Columbia.
“At a young age you can have more influence than at any time in journalistic history,” Mr. Sreenivasan said, adding, “and the mistakes you make at a younger age are more visible than ever before.”
A Thomson Reuters spokesman said on Friday that Mr. Keys had been suspended with pay. “Any legal violations, or failures to comply with the company’s own strict set of principles and standards, can result in disciplinary action,” the company said in a statement, adding that Mr. Keys joined Reuters in 2012; the apparent crimes occurred in December 2010.
Supporters of Mr. Keys echoed criticism that reached a high pitch in January, when online activists accused prosecutors of trying to bully Mr. Swartz into pleading guilty. An article in Slate was posted on Friday under the headline “Has the Justice Department Learned Anything from the Aaron Swartz Case?”
Last week Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned at a Congressional oversight hearing on whether there had been prosecutorial misconduct in the Swartz case. Mr. Holder called the case tragic but defended prosecutors’ conduct, noting that they had offered Mr. Swartz several versions of a plea deal that would involve only a few months of prison time.
“I don’t look at what necessarily was charged as much as what was offered in terms of how the case might have been resolved,” Mr. Holder said.
Mr. Kerr, the former prosecutor, said the Justice Department had noted the maximum statutory punishments in news releases in part for their deterrent effect — to dissuade others from committing similar crimes — and not because they were realistic. “It’s mostly for show,” Mr. Kerr said.
Anonymous, the global collective of loosely organized “hacktivists” who have used computer attacks to protest political causes, has recently faced particular scrutiny. In August, Higinio O. Ochoa III, a member of an offshoot of Anonymous, was sentenced to two years in prison after he pleaded guilty to defacing Web sites and stealing confidential data when he tapped into several law enforcement computers. In 2011, hackers associated with the group targeted the Sony Corporation’s PlayStation online network, costing the company around $171 million.
“They’re an organization that should be taken seriously, and anyone who is thinking about their network and their security should consider them a force to be reckoned with,” said Edward Schwartz, chief security officer for RSA, the security arm of the EMC Corporation.
“There are three categories of hackers: Russian criminals trying to rob us blind; the Chinese who are trying to steal our secrets; and then there’s Anonymous, and a lot of them are like merry pranksters,” said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at the electronic security firm Sophos. He added: “We’re treating them all the same.”
According to the F.B.I., Mr. Keys went by the name “AESCracked” and in Internet chat rooms offered hackers access to the Fox 40 computer systems and e-mail addresses. “That was such a buzz having my edit on the LA Times,” a user named “sharpie” suspected of being associated with Anonymous wrote, according to the indictment. Mr. Keys is said to have responded, “Nice.”
When compared with recent attacks by Chinese hackers on media organizations including The New York Times, Mr. Keys’s apparent crime is “nothing,” said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software. “It’s like someone handed you the keys to a building and you used them to get in.”
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Sequestration / Criminal Justice System
Federal budget cuts target courts, law enforcement
Forced budget cuts could mean furloughs for court staff, trial delays
By Peter Hall — Monday, March 18th, 2013 ‘The Allentown Morning Call’ / Allentown, PA
(Edited for brevity and law enforcement pertinence)
Forced budget cuts could have an impact on the federal court system ranging from an inability to properly supervise paroled felons to a shortage of money to pay jurors to hear trials.
If the spending cuts known as sequestration last through the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, court employees could be furloughed, trials in civil lawsuits may be put on hold as criminal cases take precedent and court-appointed defense attorneys may have trouble getting paid.
Like other branches of the federal government, leaders in the judiciary have planned for the worst but are keeping fingers crossed that Congress and the Obama administration can compromise before the worst effects of sequestration take effect at the end of the month.
"I think the impact is still up in the air at this juncture and it's going to take a while for any court to come to a decision what they're going to do," said Chief Judge J. Curtis Joyner, who leads the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Congress mandated $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts over nine years, including $85 billion over the next seven months, as part of a 2011 deal to increase the U.S. debt limit. For the federal judiciary this year, sequestration will require cutting $332 million, about 5 percent of its current $6.97 billion budget.
That equates to a 10.4 percent reduction from the court's 2012 fiscal year funding. Sequestration will reduce court salary allotments by 14 percent and other operating budget areas would be slashed up to 20 percent.
In a letter to Congress this month, Thomas F. Hogan, a New York federal judge who serves as director of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, said the cuts cannot be sustained beyond fiscal 2013 "without seriously compromising the constitutional mission of the federal courts."
"Public safety will be impacted because there will be fewer probation officers to supervise criminal offenders released in our communities," Hogan said.
Funding for drug testing would be cut 20 percent and furloughs in the U.S. Marshals Service would mean that courtrooms might not have adequate security, Hogan warned.
The bright spot for the courts is that, unlike other federal departments, their budgeting and management is decentralized and planning is done on the local level. That means the court has been able to plan cuts where appropriate in different districts based on caseloads.
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Immigration Enforcement / Illegal Aliens
Watching the Line
Arizona Border Quiets After Gains in Security
By JULIA PRESTON — Saturday, March 16th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
Excerpt; desired to read the article in its entirety, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/us/arizona-border-security.html?ref=us&pagewanted=all
As Congress debates a broad overhaul of the immigration laws, including a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, skeptical lawmakers are asking if the Southwest border is secure enough to withstand any new wave of illegal crossings that might be spurred by a legalization program, or by new growth in the American economy.
Officers who guard the line say the border is more secure in most places than they have ever known it. They say they are in a strong position to hold off an illegal surge, and to show why they point to Arizona, once the busiest and most contentious border battlefront. To the east, in Texas, agents are still struggling to stop persistent migrants in hundreds of miles of varying and penetrable terrain. But in Arizona, every available measure shows steep declines in the number of people making it across, figures that border agents say demonstrate what they can accomplish.
In Congress, many Republicans recall that an amnesty in 1986, which was supposed to solve illegal migration, was followed by an even larger unauthorized influx. A bipartisan group in the Senate is working on a proposal that would require measurable gains in border security before immigrants would be allowed to proceed onto a path to full citizenship.
But to border officials here, Congress seems to be behind the times, failing to notice that they have already made many of the enforcement advances that lawmakers are seeking. Since 2005, the number of patrol agents in the Southwest has nearly doubled, to more than 18,000. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, has built its air wing to more than 260 aircraft. It acquired an array of technology, including ground sensors and aerial detection devices developed by the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan, and created a military-style command structure with expanded intelligence operations to coordinate agents on the ground.
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Homeland Security
Cyber-Attacks Eclipse Terrorism in Impact, US Leaders Say
By Robert Lemos — Friday, March 15th, 2013 ‘eWeek.Com News’ / Foster City, CA
The heads of national intelligence and U.S. cyber command both warn that cyber operations have become a primary concern for the nation's defenders.
In comments at separate congressional hearings, the leaders of the U.S. intelligence efforts and of the nation's quickly growing Cyber Command warned that cyber operations by nation-states and rogue actors have become a major concern for the country, eclipsing the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
In his delivery of the worldwide threat assessment to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence March 12, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led his list of global threats with the current cyber operations against the nation's interests, indicating that cyber-attacks and espionage are having more impact today than terrorism or the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Recent attacks on U.S. banks, the destructive virus that deleted data from 30,000 workstations at Saudi Aramco, and the wholesale theft of sensitive data by various nations—chief among them China—had weakened the United States' technological advantage, Clapper said in his prepared remarks.
"We assess that highly networked business practices and information technology are providing opportunities for foreign intelligence and security services, trusted insiders, hackers, and others to target and collect sensitive US national security and economic data," Clapper said. "This is almost certainly allowing our adversaries to close the technological gap between our respective militaries, slowly neutralizing one of our key advantages in the international arena."
The assessment comes a few weeks after incident response firm Mandiant issued a report that outlined the overwhelming evidence supporting assertions that China is the nation behind at least one massive espionage campaign in cyberspace.
However, while cyber-espionage has become common, cyber-sabotage will continue to be rare, Clapper said. A successful attack on critical infrastructure is unlikely, for example, because rogue actors tend not to have the technical skills and more sophisticated nation-state adversaries would be unlikely to attack outside of wartime, he said.
"The level of technical expertise and operational sophistication required for such an attack—including the ability to create physical damage or overcome mitigation factors like manual overrides—will be out of reach for most actors during this time frame," Clapper said. "Advanced cyber actors—such as Russia and China—are unlikely to launch such a devastating attack against the United States outside of a military conflict or crisis that they believe threatens their vital interests."
In a separate hearing, Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, supported Clapper's statements, saying that nation-states are unlikely to conduct major attacks through the Internet unless at war.
"We have some confidence in our ability to deter major state-on-state attacks in cyberspace but we are not deterring the seemingly low-level harassment of private and public sites, property, and data," Alexander said in prepared remarks at a March 12 hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Armed Services. "States and extremist groups are behaving recklessly and aggressively in the cyber environment."
The U.S. Cyber Command is quickly ramping up its operations, and plans to hire up to 5,000 cyber-savvy soldiers to staff its operations.
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