Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 — Good Afternoon, Stay Safe
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NYPD, NYCHA among worst for requests for information: report
Nearly of third of Freedom of Information Requests to the two agencies were completely ignored, the worst of all the city agencies monitored, according to a new report from Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.
By Jennifer Fermino — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
(Edited for NYPD pertinence)
Good luck getting information out of the NYPD or the NYCHA.
Nearly of third of Freedom of Information Requests to those two agencies were completely ignored, the worst of all the city agencies monitored, according to a new report from Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.
The report found that 33 percent of requests to the police department under the Freedom of Information Act - a federal law that requires state and city agencies to be transparent - went unanswered during a three-month period.
"The City is inviting waste and corruption by blocking information that belongs to the public. That's the last thing New York City can afford right now. We have to start holding government accountable when it refuses to turn over public records to citizens and taxpayers," said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.
He is calling on the city to impose a system that would fine agencies for non-response.
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The NYPD is particularly untransparent among city agencies, de Blasio reports
By Azi Paybarah — Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013; 6:02 p.m. ‘Capital New York’ / New York, NY
One day after the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York complained about a lack of transparency in New York government, New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio released a report giving the New York Police Department and other city agencies failing grades for disclosure of public information.
The "transparency report card" from de Blasio, which renders its grades in some handwriting font that's supposed to be evocative of old-fashioned school grades, examines how well each city agency has responded to Freedom of Information Law requests from January 1 to March 31 of 2011. The NYPD had the second-highest number of FOIL requests, with 1,883, but the single highest number of "outstanding" requests, 577.
"Outstanding" was defined as any request that had not received a "yes" or "no" response after six months.
According to de Blasio's report, this delay "undermines the spirit of the Freedom of Information Law" because it's "difficult for a requestor to challenge an agency's delay as they must wait for determination in order to make an appeal."
One of the best-performing agencies in FOIL terms, the report found, was the Department of Transportation. It received 1,655 FOIL requests, and only had 12 outstanding requests.
The report recommends, among other things, having city agencies regularly account for FOIL requests to the City Council, and fining agencies with excessive delays. De Blasio also recommends the city proactively release the most commonly requested data.
I asked a spokesman for de Blasio what the most commonly requested data were. The spokesperson said that the public advocate's office was unable to determine that based on the information it has received from the agencies.
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NYPD Thinks Freedom Of Information Law Is Real Cute
By Lauren Evans — Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013; 4:32 p.m. ‘The Gothamist’ / New York, NY
Mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio is not pleased with the NYPD's level of transparency, giving the agency a dreaded "F" grade on his Transparency Report Card based on the high number of FOIL requests that have gone unanswered.
According to the report [ http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/pdf/deBlasioFOILReport.pdf ], the Public Advocate sent 10,000 requests to 35 city agencies over a three month period in 2011. The NYPD, as well as the Department of Environmental Protection, were shown to be the two worst offenders, with the NYPD leaving 577 requests unanswered as of November 14, 2011.
In most cases, City agencies were able to provide a spreadsheet detailing FOIL requests that were received and the status or outcome of these requests. The New York Police Department (NYPD) and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) - the two agencies with the highest number of reported FOIL requests - were notable exceptions; both failed to provide the requested information in full. NYPD indicated that the department did not have all the requested information for January-March 2011 and therefore instead provided data on FOIL requests received May 1-July 31, 2011.
Still, the DEP managed to receive a "C" grade, while the only other agency to fail completely was the New York City Housing Authority.
Is that all? No! The NYPD is also facing a lawsuit from Remapping Debate, a non-profit public policy news website that is suing the agency for, you guessed it, failing to respond to FOIL requests. According to a statement, the organization requested information on how the police department addresses applications for "parade" permits, such as those required for protests, as well as sound-device permits, used for sound-amplification equipment, so that it could study how the issuing of such permits has changed over time. Remapping Debate says that exactly none of those records have been produced.
“The documents sought are important to facilitating public understanding of how New York City has treated those seeking to exercise their First Amendment rights," Christopher Dunn, the associate director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, Remapping Debate's experience of having received no documents more than 10 months after the requests were made is all too typical of how the NYPD violates its Freedom of Information Law obligations.”
We'll see if this lawsuit is more successful than the Gray Lady's attempt earlier this year.
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The Mayoral Race and Raymond Kelly
A Quinn-centric debate about public safety and the Bloomberg record
By Azi Paybarah — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘Capital New York’ / New York, NY
The major Democratic mayoral candidates will participate in their first televised debate this evening at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
A few hours before the event begins, the leading Democratic candidate, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, will unveil her public safety strategy at Hunter College.
The Democratic contenders have disagreed publicly on a number of public safety-related questions, starting with whether the current police commissioner, Ray Kelly, ought to be offered an extension after Bloomberg leaves office. Another has to do with a proposal to create an inspector general to watch over the conduct of the department.
Quinn, in a characteristic piece a difference-splitting between the current administration's approach and one favored by some liberal constituencies who will be highly influential in the primary, is in favor of both of these propositions.
The major contenders also disagree, to an extent, on the NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk, a tactic the administration says reduces crime but critics say unfairly targets minorities and makes neighborhoods less safe.
On this issue, Quinn's rhetoric has evolved.
In February 2012, she wrote a letter to the NYPD outlining changes she'd like to see in how police use the tactic, even as she defended its use and credited it with reducing crime.
Last month, while still not calling for an outright ban on stop-and-frisk, Quinn said that contrary to the administration's assertions, the number of stop-and-frisks conducted and the crime level in New York City "don't correlate."
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Demographics of Homicide and Suicide Victims Reveal Differences
By SAM ROBERTS — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
More people killed themselves last year in New York City than were murdered, the authorities have said, a consequence of the city’s plunging murder rate. A peek behind the numbers reveals some interesting differences.
While men died in disproportionate numbers from both causes, the victims of homicide and suicide come from very different universes.
Typically, most murder victims are young and black. Most suicides are older and non-Hispanic white.
“There’s no explanations that I think are fully satisfying and explain what accounts for the contrast,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“What you’re seeing is a reflection of the context in which homicides and violence are endemic,” he said. “The myth of the unexpected homicide occurring to a wealthy person in a wealthy neighborhood is vanishingly rare.”
“The vast majority of suicides are known to have had some psychopathology, and although the literature is muddy, depression is more common in majority groups,” Dr. Galea continued. “The second reason may well be that there are different coping mechanisms among minorities that are more externalism than internalizing. But there’s an interesting paradox: If we know that adverse living circumstances are associated with greater risk of depression why aren’t minorities more prone to suicide?”
According to preliminary figures from the Police Department, 418 murders were recorded in 2012.
Among the victims, 84 percent were men, 60 percent were black, 27 percent were Hispanic, and 9 percent were non-Hispanic white. (Among the known assailants, 93 percent were men; 53 percent were black and 35 percent were Hispanic). More than two-thirds of the victims were 40 or younger.
In 2011, the city’s health department recorded 509 suicides. Though the rate for 2012 is not yet available, city officials believe that, based on recent trends, suicides outnumbered murders last year.
While the homicide rate has been declining, the suicide rate has remained fairly steady in the last decade.
Homicide was the leading cause of death among New Yorkers 15 to 34, suicide was third among 15- to 24-year-olds and fourth among 25- to 34-year-olds.
Among people under 65, suicide was the third leading cause of death among Asians, fifth among non-Hispanic whites and non-Puerto Rican Hispanic people. It was not among the top 10 causes of death among blacks. Non-Hispanic whites recorded the highest death rates from suicide, blacks the lowest.
Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the shifting ratio of murders to suicides reflect two other factors: “A lot of suicides go unreported,” he said, “and because of the increased sophistication of emergency medical technology, people who 10 years ago would be dead from murder are now living.”
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Prostitution in NYC
Condoms shouldn’t be a crime
In New York, rubbers are used as evidence of prostitution -- which only discourages people from using them
By Tracy Clark-Flory — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘Salon.Com’ / New York, NY
NOTE: Also see the somewhat related articles: “U.S. Issues Guidelines for Medical Exams in Sexual Assault Cases” and “Rape evidence in U.S. languishes untested in police storage” below in the U.S.A. section. - Mike
New York City loves condoms. The municipality has its very own brand of rubbers. Every month, the Department of Health hands out more than 3 million of them. But the NYPD considers those same city-issued condoms, along with your run-of-the-mill Trojan, to be evidence of a crime: prostitution. (Some have suggested that this is a blatant attempt by law enforcement to meet quotas.)
The health impact is clear: As Human Rights Watch reported, “Police use of condoms as evidence of prostitution has the same effect everywhere: despite millions of dollars spent on promoting and distributing condoms as an effective method of HIV prevention, groups most at risk of infection … are afraid to carry them and therefore engage in sex without protection as a result of police harassment.” What’s more, “Outreach workers and businesses are unable to distribute condoms freely and without fear of harassment as well.”
Who knew your tax dollars could be used to both encourage and discourage the use of condoms with such magnificent inefficiency! Today, activists are lobbying in Albany to change all that. Their goal is to pass S1379, which prohibits the “possession of contraceptive devices” from being used as evidence of prostitution in a criminal or civil proceeding. This, of course, is key to the health of sex workers and their clients. It’s perhaps especially poignant in cases of trafficking in which workers are presented with the “double whammy” of not only being forced into prostitution but are also prevented from using protection, says Audacia Ray, director of the sex worker rights organization Red Umbrella Project.
But this policy doesn’t just impact sex workers. “One of the crimes you can be arrested for in New York state is loitering for the purposes of prostitution,” says Ray. “That, of course, leads to profiling based on what they’re wearing, what part of the city they’re in, what their gender presentation is.” The LGBT community is particularly at risk for such profiling. A study last year found that 59 percent of transgender respondents, none of whom identified as sex workers, reported having been stopped by police under the assumption that they were selling sex.
While lobbying around a similar bill last year, Ray tells me that she found politicians would frequently say things like, “I think that this practice is ridiculous … but I can’t speak out about it because I don’t want to be perceived as supporting prostitution.” This year’s bill has firm backing from advocates for public health and LGBT rights, as well as sex workers. That broader human rights foundation certainly can’t hurt: For nearly 15 years, activists have attempted to get similar legislation passed, but year after year, it fails to pass committee. Ray recently suggested, as reported by Vice’s Kristen Bahler, that the key to success might be in shifting the focus away from sex worker safety, which she said, “hurts a little.”
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Bloomberg, Kelly Applaud Counter-Terror Surveillance Of Lower Manhattan
By: Dean Meminger — Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013; 6:52 p.m. ‘NY 1 News’
The mayor and city police commissioner say more cameras need to blanket the five boroughs to help improve the odds in the fight against terrorism, and they stopped by a high-tech NYPD surveillance location in Manhattan on Tuesday to see their efforts first-hand. NY1's Criminal Justice reporter Dean Meminger filed the following report.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly checked out the city's counter-terrorism efforts in Manhattan on Tuesday, to tell the officers behind the scenes who keep a close watch on possible suspicious activity that they are doing a job well done.
"As soon as we become blase about street crime or about terrorism, then you are going to get hurt again and we want to make sure that doesn't happen," Bloomberg said.
That is where the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative comes into play. Some 4,000 cameras can be monitored here by officers and private sector employees from the Financial District.
There are also so-called smart cameras that can be programmed to spot suspicious items left on the street. The NYPD has some facial recognition technology with hundreds of thousands of photos in its database.
The mayor and police commissioner said they want even more cameras on the street.
"People are all worried about privacy. Yes, it is a concern, but given the balance you have between keeping people safe and total privacy, the direction the whole world is going is more cameras and better-quality cameras," Bloomberg said.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, the NYPD counter-terrorism unit has been on heightened alert and the police commissioner said the investigation is ongoing to see if the Boston suspects visited New York for any reason.
With all of the technology and cameras, the mayor and commissioner said there were no guarantees in stopping attacks in the city or anywhere else in the country.
"I'm surprised it hasn't happened more often in other cities," Kelly said. "People who are intent on this sort of thing know that we are out there looking and listening. So they are very aware of that and keep the information very close. So it is a challenge for us."
The police commissioner said he is not concerned about would-be terrorists knowing about all of the cameras, saying it is a good reason for them not to try to attack the city.
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NY drone rangers
By CARL CAMPANILE — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
The three GOP mayoral candidates last night endorsed the use of unmanned drones in New York City.
“I’m absolutely for it,” former MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said at the Young Professionals Republicans forum. “Drones to be used from a surveillance point of view — so long as it understands people’s privacy rights — we could use them for collecting intelligence.”
Doe Fund founder George McDonald and Gristedes mogul John Catsimatidis agreed.
“We have to use 21st century technology . . . to help keep New Yorkers safe,” Catsimatidis said.
Mayor Bloomberg last month said that extensive surveillance is coming — whether New Yorkers like it or not.
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NYPD teams with US lab to study airborne weapons
By Unnamed Author(s) (The Associated Press) — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013; 10:28 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK — The New York Police Department is teaming up with a national laboratory to study how chemical weapons could be dispersed through the air into the subway system.
Researchers will track the movement of harmless tracer gases. They'll place air sampling devices in specific areas on the street and within the subway system. The gases mimic how a chemical or biological weapon may react if released.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the study will help safeguard the city against attacks.
The project with the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory was announced Wednesday. It will be funded through a $3.4 million federal grant.
The subway system is the nation's largest with about 5 million riders per day.
The tests will be conducted in July in all five boroughs.
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NYPD Stop, Question & Frisk Federal District Court Trial
Judge concerned by NYPD officers’ testimony in stop and frisk trial
By Ryan Devereaux — Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013 ‘The Guardian’ / London, England
The federal judge presiding over the landmark case against the New York police department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy has complained that witnesses have perjured themselves during the hearings.
Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered two officers to come back to court this week, after expressing concerns about their earlier testimony. In heated exchanges with the officers’ lawyers, she alleged that other witnesses had committed perjury.
The two officers returned to court on Monday, in order to be seen by Leroy Downs, an African American resident of Staten Island who claims they violated his rights in a 2008 stop. The officers had first testified last week. One said he could not recall the stop, while the other said it did not happen. Downs’ detailed description of the alleged encounter, as well as earlier complaints about the incident that were upheld, has called the officers’ testimony into question and underscored ongoing challenges in the landmark trial.
The drama began last week, as officers James Mahoney and Scott Giacona took the witness stand. The pair were questioned about a stop alleged to have taken place on 20 August 2008, while the men were part of a plainclothes Brooklyn gang unit temporarily assigned to work on Staten Island. The officers were accused of stopping, frisking and searching Downs outside his home. Downs filed a complaint about the incident with the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an institution tasked with investigating allegations of police abuse. In January 2009, the officers testified under oath about the stop in an interview with the CCRB.
Both men told the CCRB that they did not recall stopping and frisking Downs. The CCRB ultimately upheld a complaint against both officers for failing to provide their badge numbers during the encounter, after being asked to do so.
In testimony last week, Mahoney repeated his claim that he did not recall the stop. Giacona, meanwhile, was shown a photograph of Downs on the day the stop happened. When asked if he recognized the man or had ever stopped him, Giacona said: “No.”
The two officers and Downs had been scheduled to testify on the same day, which would have placed all three in the same room at the same time, but due to a reordering of the witness list the police officers testified earlier in the week and Downs took the stand on Friday. He described the stop in detail, and said that he later recognized the two officers when he went to file a complaint at the 120th precinct.
Scheindlin was visibly disturbed by the discrepancies between Downs’ account and the that of the officers. “It’s kind of an important point since they swore under oath that this never happened,” she said. “If the court concludes that any witness has perjured him or herself, that’s a serious problem.” She ordered the officers to appear again on Monday. “I’m directing the city: reproduce these two officers. Call their precincts. Get them in here,” Scheindlin said.
Scheindlin then indicated that she believes she has already heard perjured testimony in the trial, which is now entering its sixth week.
“Do I think I’ve heard some perjured testimony in the last four weeks? From somebody? From all the witnesses I’ve heard?” Judge Scheindlin asked. “Yeah, I think somebody, of all those four weeks, I think I’ve heard it already. Proving it is a different issue. You don’t know who I’m referring to. It could be a plaintiff witness. It could be a defense witness. I think I’ve already heard it.”
On Monday morning, Mahoney, Giacona and Downs all returned to court. The officers denied having ever seen Downs before, while Downs insisted they were the officers who had stopped him. “Those were the two,” he said. The episode raises an ongoing tension in the historic stop-and-frisk trial: how to assess the testimony provided.
Andrew Quinn of the Sergeants’ Benevolent Association, representing the officers on Monday, said: “It’s not unusual for officers in a gang unit to have thousands of interactions,” arguing that his clients could not be expected to remember every single street-level encounter.
Darius Charney, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the plaintiffs, said: “While for an officer it may be no big deal because they’ve done hundreds of thousands of stops over the years and one stop isn’t a big deal to them, that stop is a very big deal to the people who are stopped.
“To hear Mr Downs’ detailed description of what happened to him, his efforts to file a complaint and find out who these officers are, to suggest that he’s just making it all up is outrageous, and I think that’s what the judge was reacting to.”
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Sgt. Solangel Ruiz-Diaz Collared
NYPD Sergeant Arrested For Assault, Cops Say
By Aidan Gardiner — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘DNAinfo.Com News’ / Manhattan
NEW YORK CITY — An off-duty NYPD sergeant has been suspended after she was busted for misdemeanor assault on Tuesday, cops said.
Sgt. Solangel Ruiz-Diaz, 49, was arrested and charged Tuesday in the 13th Precinct, which covers Gramercy Park and Kips Bay, according to the NYPD.
Details about the circumstances surrounding the assault were not immediately available, but cops said the incident was not domestic.
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1st Precinct P.O. Artur Kasprzak (Deceased)
Family of cop who died in Hurricane Sandy to receive $50K from relief fund
By JAMIE SCHRAM and REBECCA HARSHBARGER — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
The family of a police officer who sacrificed his life during Hurricane Sandy will receive tens of thousands of dollars from a disaster relief nonprofit today.
The New York Police Disaster Relief Fund will give $50,000 to the family of Officer Artur Kasprzak, who shepherded six family members to safety at his Staten Island home, but got caught in the flood waters in his basement while looking for another person.
The award will be given at his parent’s home Sunnyside home this afternoon in advance of the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged New York City on October 29.
Kasprzak served in the 1st precinct, and had been on the job for six years.
Five police unions, including the Captains’ Endowment Association and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, started the fund to provide relief for uniformed NYPD members, as well as other police officers in New York State.
Many cops lost their homes in the storm, and suffered other property damage.
Almost a thousand awards have been given to cops so far through donations from the public.
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NYPD $$ Lawyer Lotto $$ Giveaway
City tries forcing man who claims he was sodomized by NYPD cops to take $35,000 settlement
Vincent Delgrosso sued the city and claims the attack occurred when he was arrested on drug charges in 2011, but the city says his account is a 'complete fabrication' and says Delgrosso must take a settlement agreed upon by a former lawyer, even though he apparently hadn't signed any settlement papers.
By John Marzulli — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
City lawyers went to court Tuesday to force a Staten Island man they say falsely claimed he was sodomized by NYPD cops to accept a $35,000 settlement of his lawsuit. Vincent Delgrosso’s former lawyers had agreed to the settlement with the city, along with a condition that he would withdraw the sodomy claim.
Delgrosso, 27, insists that the lawyers did not have his approval, but the city is asking a federal judge to enforce the settlement.
In the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, Delgrosso alleges the attack occurred when he was arrested on drug charges in 2011.
But the NYPD gang unit recorded the bust on video and city lawyer Sumit Sud said the tape shows the sodomy claim is a “complete fabrication.”
Delgrosso’s former lawyer, Ingrid Garcia, testified she and co-counsel Richard Cardinale sought to settle the case after viewing the video. “I could not see that there was a sodomy,” she said.
Magistrate Judge Viktor Pohorelsky reserved decision on whether the plaintiff is bound by the agreement between his lawyer and the city even though he did not sign any settlement papers.
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PSA # 2 Sergeant Thomas O’Conner and Police Officers Christopher Welch and Adam Triolo
Cops run into ex-con with loaded gun — but he decides against opening fire
Confrontation at Brooklyn housing project end with arrest, recovery of gun
By Thomas Tracy — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Cops confronted a Brooklyn ex-con with a loaded .45 caliber pistol in his hand Monday — but he ran away rather than opening fire, officials said.
Maurice Henriques, 49, put the gun in his waistband and ran away from the three East New York housing cops — only to have the weapon shake out of his pants leg as he tussled with the officers after a brief pursuit, police sources said.
Sergeant Thomas O’Conner and Police Officers Christopher Welch and Adam Triolo were patrolling the halls of a Cypress Hills Houses apartment building at 5:46 p.m. when they decided to take the elevator to the seventh floor so they could check the roof.
But when the elevator doors opened, Henriques — who lives on the first floor — was standing just paces away with the gun in his hand, officials said.
Henriques ran off, but cops grabbed him and recovered the gun, which was loaded with regular bullets and hollow-point bullets, police sources say.
Henriques was charged with criminal possession of a loaded firearm.
Police sources say the 49-year-old has been arrested five times and spent three years in prison for robbery in 1984. He also spent two years in prison after being convicted of drug possession charges in 1992.
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New York State
NYS Police changing vehicle fleet
By KEITH HUNT — Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013; 7:14 p.m. ‘WKTV (NBC) News’ / Utica, NY
The driving public has seen the Ford Crown Victoria in action for years now, but that familiar blue look is about to change dramatically as Captain Francis Coots of the New York State Police explains, "unfortunately for the law enforcement community the two thousand eleven production year was the last year that Ford made the Crown Victoria police interceptor. "
The state is now in the middle of a selection process for the next fleet, and the three being looked at, the dodge charger, Ford Taurus and the Chevy Caprice and all have one thing in common, Captain Coots continues, "every trooper that is being trained in the use of these vehicles initially have the opportunity to try all three they are required to complete a survey and the results will be taken by our fleet management in Albany.
Officer safety is the first concern, as these rolling data centers get tested. The cars also need to accommodate radar units, gun storage lockers, safety equipment and room to transport prisoners.
The car that 'takes' the Crown will be selected by the end of this summer.
Already in service is the Chevy Tahoe used for CITE, "concealed identity traffic enforcement " Captain Coots says, so enforcement of laws for texting while driving, unsafe operation, and speeding, will be this units primary job. On the outside, the vehicles appears very plain, but when needed .. its ready with an incredible array of lights.
And if you're in the habit of rolling through stop signs or tickling that double yellow line, ...you might want to change "your habits".. and get ready for the next generation of New York State troop cars
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New Jersey
New Jersey High Court Clears Police Search
By Unnamed Author(s) (The Associated Press) — Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013; 11:51 p.m. EDT
TRENTON—Police who raided a Monmouth County man's home in 2007 were justified in using a "flash-bang" device as a diversion before entering, New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
The 6-1 decision overturned an appellate court ruling and reinstated the drug conviction of a Manalapan man who had claimed the search was unconstitutional.
According to court documents, police suspected John Rockford was selling drugs from his house after they'd conducted surveillance for several days. The police obtained a warrant that required them to knock and identify themselves before entering the home.
On the day of the search, police used a flash-bang device, which emits intense light and makes a loud noise, as a diversion outside the house. They then knocked and announced their presence before entering the home. The suspect and another man were standing in the driveway when the device was detonated.
An appeals court ruled the use of the device violated the terms of the warrant and excluded the drugs found during the search. But the state Supreme Court in its ruling Tuesday called the execution of the warrant "objectively reasonable and, thus, constitutional."
"The Court declines to adopt a bright-line rule against the use of a flash-bang device to execute a knock-and-announce search warrant," the majority wrote. "The objective reasonableness of law enforcement's execution of a warrant that includes the use of a flash-bang device should be determined on a case-by-case basis, considering the totality of the circumstances."
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Jaynee LaVecchia likened the search, which involved 12 police officers in three teams, to "a military raid on a compound instead of a drug search in a suburban neighborhood." She argued the use of the flash-bang device was inconsistent with the type of search warrant issued.
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U.S.A.
ATF falls behind on inspecting licensed gun dealers
The agency that enforces the nation's gun laws is falling behind on inspections of gun dealers.
By Gregory Korte — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘U.S.A. Today’
WASHINGTON — About 58% of federally licensed firearms dealers have not been inspected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the past five years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General.
The report finds that the federal agency that enforces gun laws is stretched too thin to keep up with the growing number of firearms dealers. The result: It often takes more than a year — sometimes more than three years — for the agency to revoke a dealer's license after finding serious violations.
The report found violations of record-keeping rules are up 276% since 2004, but the number of firearms licenses revoked is down 43%.
The inspector general's report is the most complete look at the nation's firearms-dealer-regulation system since 2004, and it comes amid a national debate over gun control after the shooting deaths of 26 people — including 20 children — at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last December.
"It's completely outrageous," said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. "The agency has an appalling lack of resources."
He said the gun industry and some lawmakers in Congress have argued that existing laws should be enforced as a first step. "They're saying we can't pass more gun laws until the ATF does more enforcement, and then won't give them money for more enforcement. They're in a Catch-22."
President Obama's proposed 2014 budget asks Congress for $173 million more to enforce gun-safety laws, in part by increasing the frequency of inspections.
The number of gun dealers has increased 16% since 2004, and the report found ATF improving in some areas. Although license revocations are down, the number of other enforcement actions, such as warning letters and suspensions, is almost four times higher.
But the agency says it doesn't have the manpower to meet its goal of inspect every dealer at least once every three to five years. Even if every field investigator in the Kansas City region worked full-time on gun dealer inspections — and didn't have to travel up to six hours to cover far-flung gun stores — the region still wouldn't meet its goal of 1,981 annual inspections every year just to keep up, the report said.
In a formal response, the ATF says shifting resources to routine inspections isn't an option. That's because the law requires the agency to make other issues a priority: inspecting explosives licensees, processing new gun-dealer applications within 60 days and focusing on high-risk gun dealers.
In 2011, 62% of inspections found no violations. Most of the violations the ATF did find were paperwork errors, such as failing to keep updated records, keep a copy of a purchaser's identification or sign and date the required forms. Unless inspectors find multiple violations that would require a reinspection, a 1986 federal law bans the agency from making more than one unannounced inspection every year.
The association representing firearms dealers says it generally supports more inspections. "The industry is very concerned about making sure that firearms can be traced, because it is a vital law enforcement tool. We don't have any problem at all with any reasonable requests," said Andy Molchan, director National Association of Federally Licensed Firearms Dealers.
"As to violations, that tends to be a tricky thing. There's a lot of trivia that can be violations," he said. For example, he said, a dealer in Texas was cited for using an incorrect state abbreviation. "Technically, it was a violation, but what does it mean?"
By reconciling dealer inventories with records, the inspections also reveal that thousands of guns are unaccounted for. Since 2004, ATF inspections have discovered 174,679 guns missing from gun dealer inventories and presumed lost or stolen.
Though there are sometimes innocent explanations for those missing firearms — paperwork on dealer-to-dealer transactions might be missing, for example — they're a problem for law enforcement.
"They are untraceable," said George Semonick, an ATF spokesman and former field inspector. "They'll be traced down to that dealer, but that's where the trace stops."
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U.S. Issues Guidelines for Medical Exams in Sexual Assault Cases
By ERICA GOODE — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
Techniques for collecting and analyzing evidence in rape cases have evolved over the last decade, as has the understanding of the psychological effects of sexual assault. But how health practitioners, law enforcement officers, prosecutors and others respond after a rape still varies widely across the country.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice will issue new national guidelines for forensic medical examinations in cases of sexual assault.
The recommendations, revised from those issued in 2004, are aimed at establishing voluntary standards for care when rape victims seek help at hospitals or other medical facilities. The standards will be mandatory for practitioners working in federal prisons or in the military.
The guidelines emphasize that the rape victim’s physical and emotional needs should take precedence over criminal justice considerations. The 2004 guidelines “took a more prosecutorial tone,” said Bea Hanson, director of the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, which developed the protocol, placing more stress on the need for victims to collaborate with criminal justice authorities.
“Research shows that once victims get support, they’re more likely to cooperate with the criminal justice system,” Ms. Hanson said.
The new protocol will be announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. at an award ceremony for crime victims in Washington on Wednesday morning.
Unlike the 2004 protocol, the new guidelines also recommend that rape victims be offered emergency contraception or — in cases where health professionals have moral objections — information on how to immediately obtain the medication.
The earlier guidelines “were not nearly so direct,” said Barbara Sheaffer, medical advocacy coordinator for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, which receives some financing from the Justice Department.
The guidelines note that many women who are sexually assaulted want to report the rape to the authorities immediately, but that some are reluctant to do so. In such cases, victims should be encouraged to have a forensic medical examination anyway, the protocol recommends, since the evidence can be used later on. “Pressuring these victims to report may discourage their future involvement,” the guidelines state.
The protocol offers detailed recommendations on how evidence should be collected, what equipment should be on hand and the importance of a team approach that involves law enforcement officers, prosecutors and advocates, as well as specially trained nurses or other health professionals. In a section on alcohol and drugs, it cautions that voluntary drug and or alcohol use “should not diminish the perceived seriousness of the assault.”
Sgt. Jim Markey, a former sex crimes investigator for the Phoenix Police Department who now trains law enforcement officers in dealing with sexual assault, said the new guidelines were “long overdue.”
“What this does is this allows workers in the trenches, those victim advocates, those detectives and nurses, to go to the decision makers and leaders in their communities and say, ‘You know what? Here are the standards. We need the resources to provide the minimum standards that are in this protocol.'”
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Rape evidence in U.S. languishes untested in police storage
By Lisa Anderson — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The Thomson Reuters Foundation’ / New York, NY
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The United States leads the world in the use of rape kits to gather DNA and forensic evidence from victims of sexual assault, but hundreds of thousands of those kits remain untested, some for years, according to researchers.
The number of untested kits could be as high as 400,000 - the still widely quoted figure released by the Bush Administration in 2004 when it announced the creation of the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program to assist states with reducing the backlog. Smith was a rape victim who waited six years for her kit to be tested.
The backlog so disturbed Julie Smolyansky, the president and chief executive officer of Chicago-based Lifeway Foods and a certified rape crisis counselor, that in late March she announced the launch of Test400k, a national campaign to raise awareness, advocate and support innovation in rapid DNA analysis. Financing will come from grants, corporate sponsorships and other fundraising, she said.
The problem - and a troubling symptom of the lingering lassitude about rape investigations in the U.S. - is that no one really knows the actual number of untested kits languishing in police storage rooms around the country, according to those working in the field.
“It’s not just that there are no updated numbers, there are no numbers nationally,” said Sarah Tofte, director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation.
There is no national database keeping tabs on untested kits, no organized tracking of rape kits in most jurisdictions, and no federal law mandating timely testing, while only two states, Illinois and Texas, have passed laws mandating that action.
DECADES-OLD EVIDENCE
The number is estimated to have decreased somewhat since 2004, but new caches of untested kits are still being found on a regular basis. Two months ago, for example, 51 kits were found in a suburban Chicago police storage room, the oldest dating back more than three decades.
Tofte formerly was a Human Rights Watch researcher who authored a 2009 report that first documented the existence of untested kits sitting on police storage shelves in Los Angeles. Similar situations have emerged in many jurisdictions around the country.
The Joyful Heart Foundation is a New York-based non-profit founded by actress Mariska Hargitay, star of the popular TV series "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," to combat sexual and domestic violence. A Joyful Heart continues to push states to adopt laws mandating the processing of all rape kits and the creation of a national database.
The reasons for the backlog are myriad. "Law enforcement agencies say the number one reason they don’t process kits is lack of resources. I would say, in my observations, that the number one reason is less about resources than will and the continued deficiencies in the way that law enforcement in a lot of jurisdictions treat sexual assault cases," Tofte said.
The cost to process a rape kit at a laboratory averages about $1,200. Kits are typically provided by the state, which also bears the cost of the kit and its analysis.
Smolyansky, whose foundation has begun to work with law enforcement agencies in Chicago’s Cook County, said she has found a private lab that would lower the processing cost to about $500 per kit if there was enough volume.
HER WORD VS DETECTIVE’S
However, cost is not the only problem, Tofte said. One key obstacle for getting a rape kit to a lab for analysis is the wide discretion afforded to police investigators to determine if a case deserves to proceed - a compelling argument, she said, for the mandatory sending of all kits for testing, even those involving alleged rapes by known acquaintances or intimate partners.
“Why are some cases left behind? Inevitably they come back, over and over again, to (the detectives’) opinion of the victim, her value to speak, her worth, her position in our society and how likely she is to be believed,” Tofte said.
She noted that in reviewing public records on rape cases, she consistently found derogatory comments about the victim made by detectives who noted the victim’s potential role in the assault, including her decision to consume alcohol or to engage in what they deemed other “risky behavior”.
Rape, often underreported, has the lowest arrest rate of all serious violent crimes in the U.S., hovering around an average 20 percent nationally, according to federal statistics. Even lower are prosecution and conviction rates, at around 9 percent and 5 percent respectively, according to the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), one of the nation’s largest anti-sexual assault organizations.
TRUE COST OF UNTESTED KITS
A rape kit is used in conjunction with a thorough physical examination of the victim by a health professional trained to examine sexual assault victims.
In addition to documentation forms and evidence bags for the victim’s clothing, it typically contains swabs, bags and envelopes used to collect and store possible samples of DNA, such as semen, hair or skin samples left under the victim’s fingernails, left by the perpetrator during the rape.
It also contains sterile bed sheets to collect fibers and other possible physical evidence that may have transferred from the perpetrator and falls off the victim during the exam.
The cost to society of failing to test rape kits goes far beyond the case of the individual victim.
For example, in New York City, which has cleared a backlog of 16,000 untested kits since 1999 and now immediately tests every single kit collected, the arrest rate for rape has soared to 70 percent.
DNA from the New York City’s processed kits has resulted in at least 2,000 matches in a national DNA database linking the perpetrator to either other unrelated rapes or various other crimes.
Los Angeles also has cleared its backlog, but, Tofte said, “I’m guessing most jurisdictions have a rape kit backlog if they haven’t tackled it.”
LEFT LIKE GARBAGE
Smolyansky, 37, who volunteered for three years as a certified rape crisis counselor during college, was appalled and angered when she read a 2010 Human Rights Watch report which found that 80 percent of the rape kits collected in Illinois had never been sent to a lab for testing, many sitting in storage rooms for years.
“I couldn’t believe that only 20 percent of the rape kits I had collected were processed,” she said, recalling the dozens of women she had sat with in hospital rooms as a volunteer through the often difficult, invasive and lengthy six-hour-plus rape examinations.
Thinking of the untested kits, Smolyansky said, “I had a visceral reaction. How unfair… to just leave them sitting there like garbage.”
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Immigration Enforcement / Illegal Aliens
How can feds screen 11 million immigrants in country illegally?
By Daniel González — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The Arizona Republic’ / Phoenix, AZ
The 11 million immigrants in the country illegally would have to pass national-security and criminal-background checks before receiving legal status under the reform bill being considered by the Senate, but some critics say the federal government would have a hard time adequately screening such a large number of people.
Federal immigration officials conducting the background checks also would have difficulty screening out potential terrorists because the checks are limited to information contained in government databases and terrorist- watch lists, critics say.
“If you are not in an existing database as a problem or there is not something in your background that raises a red flag, you are going to breeze through,” said James Carafano, a vice president and national-security expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “It’s far from a panacea.”
National security a concern
National security has become a major concern in the debate over immigration reform in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.
On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the sweeping immigration-reform bill introduced last week in the Senate would improve national security by helping authorities know who is in the country.
In addition to other reforms, the bill would allow most of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country to apply for provisional legal status. After 10 years, they could apply for permanent residency, and then, after three more years, citizenship.
The bill requires immigrants applying for legal status to register with the government by filing applications that include personal information and requires them to submit fingerprints and other biometric data. The bill also requires them to pass national-security and criminal-background checks each time they apply to renew their provisional status and when they apply for permanent residency.
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican and a member of the “Gang of Eight” senators who crafted the bill, said the measure would improve national security because it would subject illegal immigrants to background checks that are sufficiently thorough.
“It will be a daunting task to do it, but we need to,” Flake said. “We have to because those who have aggravated felonies on their record will not have the opportunity to adjust (their status).”
He has also said the bill would establish a better system to track when immigrants enter the country and when they leave.
Some Republicans, however, are trying to slow down the movement of the reform bill introduced by the bipartisan group of eight senators, which includes Arizona Republicans John McCain and Flake. The opponents want to know if the Boston Marathon bombing suspects exploited any loopholes in the nation’s immigration system or whether there are any national-security flaws the bill should address.
“To give amnesty to millions — without knowing whether some of them want to do us harm — is to jeopardize American lives,” U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said in a written statement. “We should go slow before making any changes to immigration policy that don’t put the interests of Americans first.”
There is no indication so far, however, that the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, violated U.S. immigration laws.
The two brothers are ethnic Chechens from Russia and came to the U.S. legally about a decade ago when their family sought asylum. Both became legal permanent residents. Dzhokhar later became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but the Department of Homeland Security turned down Tamerlan’s application to naturalize after a routine background check showed that he had been interviewed in 2011 by the FBI, federal officials told the New York Times.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that Tamerlan, who was killed, was an ardent reader of jihadist websites and extremist propaganda.
Such activity alone, however, would most likely not show up in an immigration background check, Carafano said.
“You could spend your entire life on jihadist websites, and unless you are on a terrorist-watch list or in some kind of database or unless there is something very strange in your application that flags them, you could be the leader of the local I Hate America Club and they are not going to pick up on that,” he said.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security agency responsible for conducting background checks for immigrants applying for immigration benefits, including permanent residency and citizenship, is already swamped with applications, Carafano said. That creates a long backlog for background checks.
Legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, although increasing legal immigration by granting permanent residency to millions of immigrants waiting for green cards, another provision of the bill, would make it that much more difficult for the government to conduct timely background checks, he said.
“We’ve been down that road before post-9/11 where we dramatically expanded the number of people we did background checks on,” Carafano said. “It’s going to create an enormous strain.”
Paying for the program
Carafano also doubts the fines and fees immigrants would be required to pay to legalize their status would be enough cover the costs of the background checks.
Flake said the fees and penalties called for in the bill should be sufficient to cover the costs of background checks, but if they fall short, Congress would have to appropriate money because the background checks are “extremely important.”
“This is part of coming out of the shadows,” he said. “That’s part of the benefit. We know who is here.”
Flake said that the purpose of conducting background checks is not just to determine who qualifies for legal status. The background checks would also be used to determine who should be deported.
“That is part of the benefit of having people go through background checks: to have a better idea of who is here,” Flake said. “I can’t image that anyone would object to deporting someone who comes up in these background checks as having aggravated felonies or ties to terrorism or something like that. That’s a good thing if we find that.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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Homeland Security
People On Terrorism Watch List Not Blocked From Buying Guns
By Ailsa Chang — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘NPR News’ / Washington, DC
Even al-Qaida gloats about what's possible under U.S. gun laws. In June 2011, a senior al-Qaida operative, Adam Gadahn, released a video message rallying people to take advantage of opportunities those laws provide.
"America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," Gadahn says, explaining that "you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center" and buy a gun without a background check.
Then a faint smile crosses Gadahn's face. "So what are you waiting for?" he asks.
Under current laws, if a background check reveals that your name is on the national terrorism watch list, you're still free to walk out of a gun dealership with a firearm in your hands — as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record.
Data from the Government Accountability Office show that between 2004 and 2010, people on terrorism watch lists tried to buy guns and explosives more than 1,400 times. They succeeded in more than 90 percent of those cases, or 1,321 times.
"It's absurd that we allow people to buy unlimited AK-47s, AR-15s and Uzis, even if we feel they are too dangerous to be allowed on a plane, even after they've gone through a security check," says Jon Lowy, a lawyer for the Brady Campaign, a gun control group.
But Michael James Barton, a White House counterterrorism official during the Bush administration, points out that there's a lot more leeway to limit someone's right to get on a plane.
"The U.S. Constitution specifically protects the right to purchase firearms. The Constitution has no specific right to use transportation of any mode," Barton says.
Before the government can limit anybody's Second Amendment rights, he says, it needs a pretty good reason. And in his experience, a lot of totally innocent people end up on the terrorism watch list — such as business associates, roommates or landlords of suspected terrorists.
"Some of them are merely individuals who have proximity to terrorism suspects and are not themselves the focus of any investigation or any suspicion whatsoever," he says.
Barton says the terrorism watch "list" actually refers to several lists of names, including the "no fly" list. All of the lists are secret, and no one can control getting on or off them. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says that's why the lists shouldn't determine whether someone should buy a gun.
"I think anyone who's on the terrorist watch list should not lose their Second Amendment right without the ability to challenge that determination," says Graham, noting that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy showed up on the no-fly list in 2004 because a suspected terrorist was using the alias Edward Kennedy.
Gun rights supporters also ask: Why tip off an actual terrorist that we're on to him by telling him he failed a background check?
"We're gonna go, 'Boy, we're so good, we prevented those terrorists from getting the guns.' No, we didn't! We prevented them from getting them from a legitimate source, where we had an opportunity to follow them," says Richard Feldman, who heads the Independent Firearm Owners Association. "Now we don't know if they're ever going to get them, when they get them, where they got them."
But gun control supporters are scratching their heads at that logic. Why not just pass a law giving the government discretion to block a dangerous person on the terrorism watch list from buying a gun? The gun lobby has pushed back hard on that idea.
"This is yet another example of zealots on the far right of the gun movement throwing away the baby with the bath water," says Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which supports tighter gun laws.
Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey has tried since 2007 to push for legislation that would close the terrorism loophole. Under the bill, if a background check reveals a gun buyer is on the terrorism watch list, the U.S. attorney general would have the discretion to block the gun sale.
The Department of Justice under the Bush administration had supported the legislation.
The proposal was filed as an amendment to the gun control bill last week, but things ground to a halt in the Senate after every major gun control proposal failed.
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Senators Say Case Indicates That Problems Persist in Agencies’ Data Sharing
By ERIC SCHMITT and JULIA PRESTON — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
WASHINGTON — As investigators sought answers to what or who may have radicalized the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, leading lawmakers said Tuesday that potentially important clues about at least one of the men might not have been widely shared within investigative circles months before the attack.
Emerging from a closed two-hour hearing with three senior law enforcement and intelligence officials, several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee raised new questions about how the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security apparently handled information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the suspect who was killed in a shootout with the police on Friday.
“I’m very concerned that there still seem to be serious problems with sharing information, including critical investigative information,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, told reporters. “That is troubling to me that this many years after the attacks on our country in 2001, that we still seem to have stovepipes that prevent information from being shared effectively, not only among agencies but also within the same agency, in one case.”
Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the committee’s ranking Republican, also voiced worries that efforts to break down barriers of communication between federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks may have started to erode. “There have been some stone walls and stovepipes reconstructed that were probably unintentional,” he said. “We’re going to continue to look at whether or not all the information was adequately shared and given to all the law enforcement agencies. If it wasn’t, we’ve got to fix that.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the panel, said every investigation revealed flaws, but when asked at a briefing after the hearing if the F.B.I. had “dropped the ball,” she said, “No.”
None of the senators would identify what information was not shared adequately or which agencies were involved, but the issue seemed to center on Mr. Tsarnaev’s six-month trip in 2012 to Dagestan and Chechnya, predominantly Muslim republics in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Both have been hotbeds of militant separatists.
Testifying earlier in the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano sought to clarify what the authorities knew about Mr. Tsarnaev’s trip. He left the country on Jan. 12 and returned on July 17.
His flight reservation set off a security alert to customs authorities when he departed, Ms. Napolitano said, in spite of a “mismatch” in the spelling of his name on his airline ticket, his travel document and the passenger manifest of his flight.
As a result of “redundancies” in the system, the error was detected, the secretary said, and “there was a ping on the outbound to customs.”
But when Mr. Tsarnaev returned, more than a year had gone by since the F.B.I. closed a background review of his possible links to extremist groups that had been requested by the Russian government in January 2011. It was determined that he posed no threat. The security alert “at that point was more than a year old and had expired,” Ms. Napolitano said.
It is not clear, however, that the customs security alert, flagging Mr. Tsarnaev’s travel to Russia, was ever passed on to the F.B.I. And even if it had been, it is not certain what the F.B.I. would have done with that information.
Once investigators closed the background check, it would have been a violation of federal guidelines to keep investigating Mr. Tsarnaev without additional information, a senior law enforcement official said.
Two months after he returned from Russia, Mr. Tsarnaev applied for naturalization. The application prompted Homeland Security Department officials to review a 2009 domestic abuse arrest, and they found he had not been convicted in that case. They also contacted the F.B.I. and learned that “no derogatory information” on him had emerged from an interview that the agency conducted in January 2011.
According to federal law enforcement officials, Homeland Security Department officials left the naturalization “pending,” without approving it, as a precaution to see if new information would emerge, but they did not open a new investigation.
Ms. Napolitano said that a bipartisan bill in the Senate to overhaul immigration would further tighten security, because it would require all passports to be electronically readable, to avoid errors in flight records.
More questions surfaced Tuesday evening when House members attended a classified hearing with Ms. Napolitano and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I. Some lawmakers emerged saying they still felt uninformed about many aspects of the case.
Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, said he and other members of Congress were frustrated by the lack of answers on why Mr. Tsarnaev’s trip to Russia slipped through the cracks.
Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.
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Lawmakers ask who knew what about bomb suspect
By KIMBERLY DOZIER, DAVID CRARY and DENISE LAVOIE (The Associated Press) — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013; 9:00 a.m. EDT
BOSTON (AP) -- Lawmakers are asking tough questions about how the government tracked suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he traveled to Russia last year, renewing criticism from after the Sept. 11 attacks that failure to share intelligence may have contributed to last week's deadly assault.
Following a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill with the FBI and other law enforcement officials on Tuesday, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it doesn't appear yet that anyone "dropped the ball." But he said he was asking all the federal agencies for more information about who knew what about the suspect.
"There still seem to be serious problems with sharing information, including critical investigative information ... not only among agencies but also within the same agency in one case," said committee member Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
Lawmakers intensified their scrutiny as funerals were held Tuesday for an 8-year-old boy killed in the bombings and a campus police officer who authorities said was shot by Tsarnaev and his younger brother days later. A memorial service for the officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, is scheduled for Wednesday. Vice President Joe Biden is expected to speak.
Also Wednesday, Boylston Street, where the blasts occurred, reopened to the public after being closed since the bombings.
While family said that the older Tsarnaev had been influenced by a Muslim convert to follow a strict type of Islam, brother 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev remained hospitalized after days of questioning over his role in the attacks. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police last week.
Conflicting stories appeared to emerge about which agencies knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's six-month trip to Russia last year how they handled it. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Judiciary Committee on immigration legislation that her agency knew about Tsarnaev's journey to his homeland.
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the FBI "told me they had no knowledge of him leaving or coming back."
Information-sharing failures between agencies prompted an overhaul of the U.S. intelligence system after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Meanwhile, evidence mounted that Tsarnaev had embraced a radical, anti-American strain of Islam. Family members blamed the influence of a Muslim convert, known only to the family as Misha, for steering him toward a strict type of Islam.
"Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father about Misha's influence.
Authorities don't believe Tsarnaev or his brother had links to terror groups. However, two U.S. officials said that Tsarnaev frequently looked at extremist websites, including Inspire magazine, an English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate. The magazine has endorsed lone-wolf terror attacks.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
Eight-year-old Martin Richard, a Boston schoolboy and the youngest of those killed by the blasts, was laid to rest Tuesday after a family-only funeral Mass.
"The outpouring of love and support over the last week has been tremendous," the family said in a statement. "This has been the most difficult week of our lives."
The Richards family said they would hold a public memorial service for Martin in the coming weeks.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's condition was upgraded from serious to fair Tuesday as investigators continued building their case against him.
He could face the death penalty after being charged Monday with joining forces with his brother in setting off shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs. Three people were killed and over 260 injured. About 50 were still hospitalized.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured hiding in a tarp-covered boat in a suburban Boston backyard on Friday.
In Washington, Senate Intelligence Committee member Richard Burr, R-N.C., said after his panel was briefed by federal law enforcement officials that there is "no question" that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "the dominant force" behind the attacks and that the brothers had apparently been radicalized by material on the Internet rather than by contact with militant groups overseas.
The brothers' parents are from Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim province in Russia's Caucasus, where Islamic militants have waged an insurgency against Russia. A U.S. Embassy official said Wednesday that a team of U.S. investigators has traveled to Dagestan to speak to the parents. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Family members reached in the U.S. and abroad by The Associated Press said Tamerlan was influenced by Misha.
After befriending Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing, stopped studying music and began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to family members, who said he turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind 9/11.
"You could always hear his younger brother and sisters say, `Tamerlan said this,' and `Tamerlan said that.' Dzhokhar loved him. He would do whatever Tamerlan would say," recalled Elmirza Khozhugov, the ex-husband of Tamerlan's sister. He spoke by telephone from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The brothers, who came to the U.S. from Russia a decade ago, were raised in a home that followed Sunni Islam, the religion's largest sect, but were not regulars at the mosque and rarely discussed religion, Khozhugov said.
Then, in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met Misha, a heavyset bald man with a reddish beard. Khozhugov didn't know where they met but believed they attended a Boston-area mosque together.
The disclosures about the possible role of Misha in influencing Tsarnaev was described as "new information" by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "It's important we have the appropriate authorities check that out," he said Wednesday on CNN. "Obviously if there are people fomenting that type of activity in the United States we want to know who they are and hold them accountable."
Napolitano said Tuesday that her agency knew of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's trip to Russia. She said that even though the suspect's name was misspelled on a travel document, redundancies in the system allowed his departure to be captured by U.S. authorities in January 2012.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Embassy official said U.S. investigators traveled to southern Russia to speak to the brothers' parents, hoping to learn more about their motives.
In other developments:
- A lawyer for Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife, Katherine Tsarnaeva, said his client "is doing everything she can to assist with the investigation," although he would not say whether she had spoken with federal authorities. Another lawyer for Tsarnaeva said the 24-year-old deeply mourned the loss of innocent victims in the bombings.
- The Massachusetts state House turned aside a bid by several lawmakers to reinstate the death penalty in certain cases, including the murder of police officers. In a 119-38 vote, the House sent the proposal to a study committee rather than advance it to an up-or-down vote.
- In New Jersey, the sisters of the suspects, Ailina and Bella Tsarnaeva, issued a statement saying they were saddened to "see so many innocent people hurt after such a callous act." Later, in brief remarks to several news outlets, Ailina described her elder brother as a "kind and loving man." She said of both brothers: "I have no idea what got into them" and also that "at the end of the day no one knows the truth."
- Phantom Fireworks of Seabrook, N.H., said Tamerlan Tsarnaev bought 48 mortar shells at the store in February. Company Vice President William Weimer, however, said the amount of gunpowder that could be extracted from the fireworks would not have been enough for the Boston bombs.
- A fund created to benefit the victims of the Boston Marathon attacks has generated $20 million. Mayor Thomas Menino said more than 50,000 donors from across the world have made donations to One Fund Boston.
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Dozier reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy and Bob Salsberg in Boston, Lynn Berry in Moscow, and Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, Matt Apuzzo, and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.
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Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’ Editorial:
Did the FBI miss clues about Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
Congressional probe must explore if Russian warning fell through the cracks
The critical challenge facing America’s counterterrorism agencies is to connect the dots that draw an outline of a plot in the making and then intervene to prevent death and destruction.
Identifying the dots — those bits of information that are innocuous standing alone but together are terrifying — is perhaps the hardest aspect of the work. More, they don’t just come your way. You have to hunt them down.
Self-evidently true, the basics bear repeating because there are serious questions as to how national security authorities failed to recognize that Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a brewing jihadist threat.
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday began an inquiry that must deliver a full accounting of who knew what when. The panel must also determine why agents failed to learn more, as well as how they let Tsarnaev slip from view as he became radicalized.
According to the bureau, Russian security asked for data on Tsarnaev “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States” on a trip to Russia.
The Boston field office then “checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history.”
After turning up nothing, the FBI asked the Russians for further information. They failed to respond; agents interviewed Tsarnaev and closed a cursory once-over. Never did the feds place Tsarnaev under surveillance or press to get evidentiary support for an eavesdropping warrant.
One question congressional probers must ask in this regard is whether the FBI regulations covering the conduct of preliminary anti-terror probes prevented agents from more aggressively checking out Tsarnaev. Of startling note, a “senior law enforcement official” told The New York Times that federal guidelines prohibited additional probing without new information.
Tsarnaev traveled to Dagestan last year and returned after six months. His reentry passed unnoticed because the government had purged Tsarnaev’s name from a watch list after the FBI’s probe had been closed for a year without action.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said deleting files is standard procedure. If so, the U.S. is erasing potentially crucial dots, apparently out of excessive concern about retaining the names of individuals whose links to terrorism have not been conclusively proven.
Over the next months, watched by no one, Tsarnaev created a YouTube page that featured jihadist videos, made a large fireworks purchase in New Hampshire — apparently to amass gunpowder — and got into two confrontations over his radical theological ideology with Muslims at a Cambridge mosque.
Since few citizens report extremist declarations like Tsarnaev’s, the episodes are the kind that the NYPD looks for in public settings using undercover officers or cooperating witnesses. Speaking as anonymous sources, some FBI agents have denigrated the NYPD program as spying. If only those agents had been listening when Tsarnaev spoke.
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Boston Marathon bombing: Is American jihadism on the rise?
The Boston Marathon bombing suspects appear to be the latest American jihadis, responsible for a surge in homegrown terror plots and attacks. But their ranks are diminishing, say some experts.
By Mark Clayton — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘The Christian Science Monitor’ / Boston, MA
The emerging portrait of the brothers Tsarnaev, deceased 26-year-old Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, 19, both implicated in a terrorist bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, is one that increasingly describes a pair of homegrown American jihadis.
However what caused Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, who shared an apartment in Cambridge, Mass., to “radicalize” – going from young party-throwing American immigrants to suspected bomb-toting terrorists willing to wreak destruction on their adopted country – isn’t known yet.
Relatives and friends describe a shift in Tamerlan, beginning around 2009, in which he suddenly delved into Islam and tossed aside his boxing career. But even before he left the sport he was quoted, now famously, as saying that he had no American friends and didn’t understand them.
For his part, Dzhokhar was reported Tuesday to have told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother read “Inspire,” an online magazine published by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. If so, the pair would not be the first Americans to take inspiration and operational advice on how to conduct mayhem from that jihadi magazine, which first appeared in mid-2010.
But for clearer answers on why the brothers turned to violence, government intelligence agencies are still analyzing the suspects’ backgrounds, their FaceBook pages, immigration information, travel connections, and biographical data. Whom, for instance, did Tamerlan meet with during his trip last year to Dagestan, a republic in Russia's south that borders Chechnya?
What does seem to be getting clearer, though, is that the Boston Marathon bomb attack that killed three people and wounded more than 280 appears to fit a national portrait in domestic jihadism – mostly attempted plots with a handful of attacks – that have bubbled up from within America over the past decade.
There have been 63 homegrown violent jihadist plots or attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported in January. Two-thirds of those – 40 plots and two attacks –were uncovered or occurred between April 2009 and December 2012.
“Most of the 2009-2012 homegrown plots likely reflect a trend in jihadist terrorist activity away from schemes directed by core members of significant terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda,” the CRS reported. “It may be too early to tell how sustained this uptick is.... Regardless, the apparent spike in such activity after April 2009 suggests that ideologies supporting violent jihad continue to influence some Americans – even if a tiny minority.”
But there is serious disagreement about this “spike” in home-grown jihadi activity. Are the Tsarnaev brothers part of a dangerous upswing in homegrown American jihadism since 2009 – or the rare exception in a vastly diminished, quickly receding threat?
“The circumstances of this [Boston Marathon] case are a little different, but it does seem to reinforce the overall pattern, the spike that we’ve seen since 2009,” says Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism,” and former director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. “There’s been increasing silence by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership, but an evolution toward outsourcing Al Qaeda operations to the grass roots.”
But if the number of indictments, uncovered plots, and actual attacks have surged since 2009, other researchers say another statistic, the number of participants in the homegrown terror plots, tells a different story.
“I certainly agree there was a big spike in 2009 and 2010, but our data show that Muslim-American terrorism is declining,” says David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center of Terrorism and Homeland Security in Durham, N.C. “We’re seeing domestic jihadi terrorism declining further. The facts are we’ve seen a drop off in the last three years.”
By looking at the number of those arrested on terrorism charges, not just the number of plots they are involved with, it becomes clear that the number of participants involved in homegrown jihadism is shrinking, he and others say.
Fourteen Muslim-Americans were indicted for violent terrorist plots in 2012, a drop from 21 the year before, according to a Triangle Center study released in February. The number of plots also dropped from 18 in 2011 to 9 in 2012.
“The director of the FBI in 2003 testified before Congress that Americans should expect hundreds of terrorist attacks in shopping malls, stores, and schools,” says Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the recent Triangle Center study.
“Fortunately we have not seen anywhere near that level of terrorist violence. Part of that is due to good policing that has disrupted plots,” he say. “But the decline also has to be because Muslim Americans have resisted calls to violent activity and share more values with their American neighbors than revolutionary movements overseas.”
Since 9/11, and not including the marathon bombing, Muslim-American terrorism has left 33 dead in the United States, Dr. Kurzman’s study found. During the same period, more than 180,000 murders were committed in the US – with more than 200 Americans killed in political violence by white supremacists and other groups on the far right, according to a recent study published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy.
For perspective, the volume of US domestic terrorist activity was far greater in the 1970s than it is today, with 60 to 70 terrorist incidents, mostly bombings, on US soil each year, according to a 2010 RAND study. In the nine-year period from 1970 to 1978, 72 people were killed in terrorist incidents, more than five times as many as were killed by jihadist terrorists in the United States in the nine years following 9/11, writes Brian Jenkins, the study’s author.
Still other experts contend that the 2009-2010 “spike” in cases of domestic jihadism and the overall increase since then are reflective more of the policies of federal investigators. The threat of big-scale terrorist violence “has pushed law enforcement toward prevention rather than criminal apprehension after an event – or, as one senior police official put it, ‘staying to the left of the boom,’ which means stopping the explosions or attacks before they occur,” Mr. Jenkins writes.
Such policies result in inflated numbers that may give Americans an exaggerated fear of the threat from homegrown jihadism – and distract resources from catching the likes of the Tsarnaev brothers, some experts say.
“These arrest numbers are soft,” says Marc Sageman, an independent counter-terrorism researcher and former Central Intelligence Agency case officer. “They don’t look at whether the attacks would have occurred without FBI involvement in many of them as sting operations.”
A change in federal strategy, beginning around 2009, led to an increased focus on drawing out those involved in online discussions about attacking the US, he says.
“Before it was just these guys fantasizing about attacking,” Dr. Sageman says. “Now they get someone – an FBI informant – saying, ‘I’ll get you weapons.’ This did not occur very often prior to 2009. So, basically, what you are seeing is a very aggressive counter-terrorism strategy where a lot of people on the Internet are threatening government authority – but absent the FBI – it’s doubtful anything would have happened.”
Other experts are less sure. Online forums, websites, chat rooms, and other online means of disseminating Al Qaeda’s message – especially its online magazine “Inspire” that once included an article entitled “How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom” – is proving to be a potent means for cultivating jihadis, they say.
Dr. Brachman worried the Boston Marathon bombing is just one sign that Al Qaeda, which has struggled to get young Western male Muslims embrace the idea of attacking the societies they live in – now may have “cracked the formula on how to radicalize a young Muslim male in the West – one who feels culturally dislocated and may be dealing with personal grief.”
Al Qaeda’s “Inspire” purports to supply a rationale – and a solution – for the predicament faced by a small subset of American Muslims who may find themselves not fitting in and alienated from society, he says. The magazine creates for its readers a funnel that systematically works the reader through a process, explaining that all the disappointment, anger and failure are a result of one thing – the western “war on Islam” – and that the only solution is to fight back.
“I think we have to be concerned now about what we’ve seen demonstrated with the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston,” says Brachman. “Dzhokhar’s admission to the authorities that he and his brother read 'Inspire' isn’t just about how to build bombs. The fact they were reading and drawing on 'Inspire' is significant and reflective of a pattern we’re seeing in homegrown jihadism. He may be seeing these heroes of the Al Qaeda movement and saying to himself – “maybe I can be like them.”
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'Public Safety Exception' Used in Boston Bomb Case Traces Back to Queens
By Murray Weiss — Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 ‘DNAinfo.Com News’ / Manhattan
NEW YORK CITY — The "public safety exception" that allowed federal authorities to delay reading Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights originated from a routine gun arrest in Queens more than 30 years ago.
Benjamin Quarles, 21, was arrested on Sept. 11, 1980, after a woman ran up to cops on Francis Lewis Boulevard claiming a gun-toting attacker had raped her. Cops drove her around the neighborhood in a squad car until the woman pointed out her alleged attacker standing in a supermarket checkout line.
When cops entered the supermarket, Quarles bolted, heading for the rear of the store. When officers grabbed and frisked him, they found he had an empty gun holster. An officer handcuffed Quarles and asked him, "Where is the gun?"
Quarles said he had stashed the weapon in a soapbox, where cops found a revolver. Only then was he read his rights and formally arrested.
Miranda is a warning given by police to suspects in custody before they are questioned. It's designed to inform them that anything they say can be used against them in a trial.
That Quarles was asked about the gun before he was read his Miranda rights turned a seemingly insignificant gun collar into a case that was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court after two lower courts in New York ruled against the NYPD.
"You had very honest cops saying, 'I handcuffed him,' asked where the gun was before reading him his Miranda rights," Steven Hyman, the Manhattan lawyer who represented Quarles, explained to DNAinfo.com New York.
Hyman had convinced two lower courts in New York, and had 30 minutes to persuade the Supreme Court in 1984.
But the high court delivered a 5-4 opinion arguing the cops did not have to read Quarles his rights because of the “public safety” need to know where the weapon was.
“They said it was spontaneous and not intended to get evidence but to alleviate the need to find the weapon,” Hyman recalled.
In today’s post-9/11 world, law enforcement now uses the “public safety” exception to interrogate suspects in order to get information to track down other suspects and find possible explosives.
Hyman questioned whether the “public safety” ruling has been stretched beyond its intended limit — in Boston it took three days before Tsarnaev was formally charged by the feds at his hospital bed.
“I think they are abusing it,” Hyman said. “The whole thrust of Quarles' [case] was spontaneous need for public safety. It was not intended for open-ended interrogation.”
By failing to issue a Miranda warning, evidence investigators obtain from Tsarnaev could be jeopardized if lawyers decided to challenge the public-safety exception. Miranda only applies to self-incrimination.
It does not cover statements he may make about other potential suspects, if they exist, sources said.
As for Quarles, the Queens District Attorney's Office never charged him with the rape, but he pleaded guilty to the weapons charge and was put on probation without any jail time.
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One in five data breaches are the result of cyberespionage, Verizon says
Verizon's data breach investigations report covering 2012 includes information on cyberespionage-related breaches for the first time
By Lucian Constantin — Monday, April 22nd, 2013; 8:07 p.m. ‘Computer World Magazine’
IDG News Service - While the majority of data breaches are the result of financially motivated cybercriminal attacks, cyberespionage activities are also responsible for a significant number of data theft incidents, according to a report that will be released Tuesday by Verizon.
Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) covers data breaches investigated during 2012 by the company's RISK Team and 18 other organizations from around the globe, including national computer emergency response teams (CERTs) and law enforcement agencies. The report compiles information from more than 47,000 security incidents and 621 confirmed data breaches that resulted in at least 44 million compromised records.
In addition to including the largest number of sources to date, the report is also Verizon's first to contain information on breaches resulting from state-affiliated cyberespionage attacks. This kind of attack targets intellectual property and accounted for 20% of the data breaches covered by the report.
In more than 95% of cases the cyberespionage attacks originated from China, said Jay Jacobs, a senior analyst with the Verizon RISK team. The team tried to be very thorough regarding attribution and used different known indicators that linked the techniques and malware used in those breaches back to known Chinese hacker groups, he said.
However, it would be naive to assume that cyberespionage attacks only come from China, Jacobs said. "It just so happens that the data we were able to collect for 2012 reflected more Chinese actors than from anywhere else."
The more interesting aspects of these attacks were the types of tactics used, as well as the size and industry of the targeted organizations, the analyst said.
"Typically what we see in our data set are financially motivated breaches, so the targets usually include retail organizations, restaurants, food-service-type firms, banks and financial institutions," Jacobs said. "When we looked at the espionage cases, those industries suddenly dropped down to the bottom of the list and we saw mostly targets with a large amount of intellectual property like organizations from the manufacturing and professional services industries, computer and engineering consultancies, and so on."
A surprising finding was the almost fifty-fifty split between the number of large organizations and small organizations that experienced breaches related to cyberespionage, the analyst said.
"When we thought of espionage, we thought of big companies and the large amount of intellectual property they have, but there were many small organizations targeted with the exact same tactics," Jacobs said.
There is a lot of intelligence-gathering involved in the selection of targets by these espionage groups, Jacobs said. "We think that they pick the small organizations because of their affiliation or work with larger organizations."
In comparison to cyberespionage, financially motivated cybercrime was responsible for 75% of data breach incidents covered in the report and hacktivists were behind the remaining 5%.
One noteworthy finding of this report is that all threat actors are targeting valid credentials, Jacobs said. In four out of five breaches, the attackers stole valid credentials to maintain a presence on the victim's network, he said.
This will hopefully start to raise some questions about the widespread reliance on single-factor password-based authentication, Jacobs said. "I think if we switch to two-factor authentication and stop being so reliant on passwords, we might see a decrease in the number of these attacks or at least force the attackers to change" some of their techniques.
Fifty-two percent of data breach incidents involved hacking techniques, 40% involved the use of malware, 35% the use of physical attacks -- for example ATM skimming -- and 29% the use of social tactics like phishing.
The number of breaches that involved phishing was four times higher in 2012 compared to the previous year, which is probably the result of this technique being commonly used in targeted espionage campaigns.
Despite all the attention given to mobile threats during the past year, only a very small number of breaches covered by the Verizon report involved the use of mobile devices.
"For the most part, we are not seeing breaches leverage mobile devices as of yet," Jacobs said. "That's a pretty interesting finding that's kind of counter-intuitive in light of all the headlines saying how insecure mobile devices are. That's not to say they're not vulnerable, but the attackers currently have other easier methods to get the data."
The same holds true for cloud technologies, Jacobs said. While there have been some breaches involving systems that are hosted in the cloud, they were not the result of attacks exploiting cloud technologies, he said. "If your site is vulnerable to SQL injection, it doesn't matter where it's hosted -- in the cloud or locally. The kind of breaches we're seeing would occur regardless of whether the system would be in the cloud or not."
The Verizon report includes a list of 20 critical security controls that should be implemented by companies and which are mapped to the most prevalent threat actions identified in the analyzed dataset. However, the level to which every company should implement each control depends on the industry they're part of and the type of attacks they're likely to be more exposed to.
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Mike Bosak
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