Monday, April 29th, 2013 — Good Afternoon, Stay Safe
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NYPD Stop, Question and Frisk Trial
NYPD whistle-blowers harassed for testifying at stop-frisk trial
By TOM HAYS and COLLEEN LONG (The Associated Press) — Sunday, April 28th, 2013; 3:40 p.m. EDT
NEW YORK — After Officer Pedro Serrano decided to testify in federal court about what he sees as wrongdoing within the New York Police Department, a rat sticker appeared on his locker.
That was the least of his problems.
Serrano claims he's been harassed, micromanaged and eventually transferred to a different precinct and put on the overnight shift.
"It hasn't been a picnic," he said in an interview this week. "They have their methods of dealing with someone like me."
Serrano and other whistle-blowers took the stand in a civil rights case challenging some of the 5 million streets stops made by police in the past decade using a tactic known as stop and frisk. They believe illegal quotas are behind some wrongful stops of black and Hispanic men.
"A lot of people told me not to come forward because of what would happen - they said the department would come after me," Serrano said. "But I've been thinking about it since 2007. I felt I couldn't keep quiet."
Several other officers and police brass testified to the opposite: They say there are no quotas. Most officers follow the letter of the law, and low-performing cops like Serrano are lazy malcontents who make the city less safe.
Under NYPD policy, officers are required to report corruption without fear of retribution to the internal affairs bureau, which investigates the claims.
But starting with legendary whistle-blower Frank Serpico in the 1970s, corruption scandals large and small have exposed a clannish culture that critics say encourages police officers to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing and never question authority - or else face harassment by peers and punishment by superiors.
As a plainclothes officer, Serpico was labeled a traitor for refusing payoffs and reporting corruption. On Feb. 3, 1971, he was shot in the face during a drug raid; he says other officers purposely failed to back him up. He recovered and testified before the Knapp Commission - a story etched in popular culture by a hit movie starring Al Pacino.
In the early 1990s, an internal affairs investigator who pursued drug-dealing officers was blackballed by his commanders before an independent investigation by the Mollen Commission proved him right. And the 1997 police assault of Abner Louima resulted in charges against officers who kept quiet because of a so-called blue wall of silence - an unspoken code among the rank-and-file to never "rat" on each other.
"Nothing's changed," the 76-year-old Serpico said in a recent phone interview when asked about the current crop of whistle-blowers. "It's the same old crap - kill the messenger."
In the ongoing federal trial over stop and frisk, lawyers for men who have sued police are seeking to show a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic men are being wrongly stopped in part because officers are under too much pressure to keep enforcement numbers up.
Serrano, along with Officers Adhyl Polanco and Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded hours of patrol briefings, meetings with bosses and encounters on the streets that they say show they were being targeted by overzealous officials bent on making their precincts look good. The recordings were played at trial.
Both Serrano and Polanco said they made stops they didn't think were right as a result.
"I was extremely bothered with what I was seeing out there," Polanco testified. "The racial profiling, the arresting people for no reason, being called to scenes that I did not observe a violation and being forced to write a summons that I didn't observe."
Polanco said he agonized over the decision to come forward.
"I was afraid," he said. "It's not that easy to report corruption. ... Look at what happened to Schoolcraft."
Schoolcraft, who didn't appear in court because he has filed his own federal suit, was taken to a psychiatric ward in 2009 by his superiors, he says against his will. He remains suspended.
Polanco was suspended with pay for years after internal affairs officers brought charges of filing false arrest paperwork; he says the charges came because he detailed a list of complaints to internal affairs.
Serrano testified that he received poor evaluations, was denied vacation days and was forced to work overtime as punishment because he tallied too few arrests and stop-and-frisk reports.
"There's a whole bunch of things they do, but they're minor," Serrano said. "But when you put it all together, it becomes a hostile work environment."
For example, he says, he never saw his commanding officer until word got out about his quota allegations - then the official was personally checking Serrano's shift paperwork. He says he was forced to drive around with a sergeant and issue summonses and stop people until he brought up his numbers. Even after his numbers improved, his evaluations didn't. And he claimed he was forced to come in during a massive snowstorm even though he was nearly in a car accident.
When asked whether Serrano's complaints were considered punishment, several other officers who testified said no - it's just part of the job.
Most officers "leave their house every day to go to work to protect the city. They have the best intentions all the time, and they do it," Joseph Esposito, the former chief of the department, testified. "There is a small percentage ... we're talking about in any profession, there is a group that will try to do the least amount and get paid the most."
After Serrano appeared in court last month, he was transferred from the Bronx to a Manhattan precinct where he now works the midnight shift.
Serpico, who adopted a pet rat after he was accused of being one, says he holds the bosses responsible.
"Their message is 'Do you want to write a summons or do you want to be delivering pizza? As a police officer, you're duty-bound to refuse an illegal order. ... But where do you go? The police department doesn't want to hear it."
Serpico, who now lives in upstate New York, still feels like an outsider to the police. He says he's there to listen when fellow whistle-blowers reach out.
"I've become their grandfather," he said. "They don't want nothing. They just want somebody who knows what they're going through. I give them moral support."
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Charts: Are the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisks Violating the Constitution?
As New York City defends its controversial policing policy in court, here's what you need to know.
By Adam Serwer and Jaeah Lee — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'Mother Jones Magazine' / San Francisco, CA
Excerpt; desired to read the article and see the charts in their entirety, go to:
This week, New York City is defending itself against a lawsuit that claims its controversial "stop and frisk" policy is used to illegally detain and search people on the basis of race. The subject of an ongoing trial, the suit also argues that the weak justifications given by NYPD officers for most stop-and-frisks fail to meet the constitutional burden for search and seizure. We put together this explainer and some charts to help you make sense of what's going on.
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NYPD Releases New Video That Teaches You How to Stop and Frisk
By John Surico — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The Huffington Post' / New York, NY
Watch it here: http://www.ny1.com/content/criminal_justice/181167/ny1-online--nypd-video-on-stop-and-frisk-training
"Illegal weapons are flooding our city's streets," the eerie voice says amongst pictures of AK-47s. "Out of state gun hoarders have made it all too easy to acquire an illegal gun if the price is right. It is our job as professional police officers to legally detect and remove guns by arresting the offenders. This important task ensures the public's safety."
So begins the video presented to a Manhattan court this week by NYPD attorneys. The footage was used as a defense in Floyd v. City of New York, the case that seeks to upend stop and frisk as an unconstitutional and biased infringement on civilian rights. It's shown to officers in training and basically runs as a 'How To' for the controversial procedure.
And, boy, does it make you uncomfortable.
The narrator advises officers to constantly be cautious of "furtive movements," in which suspects look and act out of the ordinary. Given the present officer's perspective and opinions, that could virtually mean anything. Later on, officers are told to not "be shy about going into the crotch area." So that's great to hear.
The video justifies stop and frisk as a deterrent to the illegal gun flow going in and out of the city. This is also the argument being taken up by the NYPD in the court. But that argument doesn't necessarily make sense because here's what we know:
Illegal guns were found in 0.1% of stops in 2012 and, as Bloomberg's law enforcement force elevated stop and frisk in use by 700 percent between 2003 and 2012, only 176 additional guns were actually found. The bossman himself has even said stop and frisk doesn't do much to stop shootings whatsoever.
Conclusion: there goes the entire underlying theme of the video and, as a result, the entire underlying argument of the NYPD's defense. If we look at the situation in this angle, the future of stop and frisk is bleak as a justifiable practice for law and order.
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NYPD Makes Its Stop-And-Frisk Training Video Public
By: Dean Meminger — Sunday, April 28th, 2013; 5:25 p.m. 'NY 1 News'
View it here: http://ny1.com/?ArID=181167&secId=6
Monday marks the start of the seventh week in the federal trial against the New York City Police Department and its stop-and-frisk tactics. NY1's Criminal Justice reporter Dean Meminger takes a detailed look at a video shown in court to train officers on the controversial practice.
The New York City Police Department uses a nine-minute video to teach and re-train officers on how to spot a person who might be carrying a gun. It was played by city attorneys during the federal stop-and-frisk trial last week.
The video instructs, "When frisking a suspect, do your job thoroughly. Don't be shy about going into the crotch area."
It also mentions potential signs that a person may be carrying a concealed weapon. They include:
• A suspicious bulge at the waist line under a shirt or jacket.
• The outline of a gun in a pocket.
• A shirt worn on the outside under a jacket.
• Inappropriate clothing such as a warm rain jacket worn on a clear day
• A tilted shopping bag.
• A zipper pouch, cradled in hand that appears unusually heavy.
• The carrying of an elongated package that could contain a rifle or shotgun
• A suspect walking with a stiff leg could indicate a long gun concealed in a pants leg.
• A suspect running with his hands in his pocket.
The video does say these are only tips and may not be reason enough to stop, question and frisk a person.
City attorneys played it during testimony by NYPD Deputy Chief James Shea, who works for the police department's anti-gang initiative.
NY1 recorded a training exercise last year at the police academy as Shea showed the media how officers are instructed on how to stop, question and frisk suspects.
Shea told the court the NYPD video can help get guns off the street, but officers should be using good discretion when stopping people, because it isn't "pleasant" for those who are stopped.
The video also re-enacts real arrests made by police who spotted bad guys.
One person on the video says, "We observed an individual who was walking rather nervously, he was looking around, not sure where he was. he had started to adjust an object in his right waistband.
He continues, "The subject began to flee. After brief distance we observed this guy take a firearm from his right waistband side and throw it to the ground. After a short distance we were able to apprehend him."
Shea is due back on the stand for the city Monday. Plaintiffs in the federal trial are suing to have a court monitor oversee stop-and-frisks.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says it is unnecessary, that officers are trained not to use racial profiling when conducting stops.
"A lot of training, ongoing training program up at our Rodman's Neck range. We use attorneys, we use that video," Kelly says. "So we are very much concerned about the issue but I believe we are on top of it. And I believe that training video if you saw it, is very well done."
But it is up to a federal judge to have the final say on how the NYPD handles stop-and-frisks.
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Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The New York Daily News' Editorial:
Stop-and-frisk fiasco
Upon closer examination, the class action case against the NYPD falls apart
Where does the NYPD's stop, question and frisk program go to get its reputation back?
By granting class-action status to a civil rights suit challenging the strategy, Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin bestowed credence on accusations of widespread police misconduct. The charges have been a major theme in the mayoral campaign.
Now, the activists who sued have taken their best shot with all the evidence they could muster at trial. It fell far short of convincingly depicting the cops as running roughshod over black and Hispanic New Yorkers with discriminatory intent.
Central to the case is the testimony of 11 citizens who recounted being stopped, questioned and frisked without, they alleged, proper cause. All told, they described 19 encounters with cops that were supposed to represent the abuse of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers every year.
The claimants made much of the fact that the NYPD stopped people for brief questioning 4.4 million times from 2004 to 2012. Trying to judge how many were legally justified based on testimony about a mere 19 is preposterous on its face.
Additionally, the testimony revealed the police were justified beyond all doubt in stopping and frisking some of the complaining witnesses and had the weight of the evidence on their side in explaining other stops.
Police have the authority to stop an individual when an officer has reasonable suspicion of criminality, and cops may frisk when they have grounds for suspecting the presence of a weapon.
David Floyd, Nicholas Peart, Clive Lino and Dominique Sidnayiganza were among the witnesses who charged that police lacked reasonable suspicion to stop them. But undisputed testimony showed that:
l Officers approached Floyd because they spotted him and another man trying a series of keys in the lock of a door to a house in the Bronx. There had been a pattern of burglaries in the area.
l Cops ordered Peart and two men onto the ground for a search after a 911 caller reported hearing three men, one with a gun, talking about a robbery. The caller gave a description that matched Peart and the two men, down to Peart's blue shorts and tank top.
l Police stopped Lino in a subway station while searching for a robbery suspect who was Lino's size and wore a red Pelle Pelle jacket, like the one Lino had on. The cops showed Lino a poster that matched him before letting him go.
l Officers questioned Sidnayiganza as he walked into a Petco store because a woman had pointed him out as having harassed her.
In each case, police had textbook cause for briefly intruding on liberty. Remove them from consideration, as Scheindlin must, and she is left with stories told by seven of the people who were part of the 4.4 million stops.
Uniformly, those witnesses asserted that police had stopped them for no reason. But, in the cases where cops testified, the picture often indicated they were in the right — or at least that they had made acceptable judgment calls.
For example, Devin Almonor testified that when he was 13 years old in 2010, cops came up behind him as he was crossing a Bronx street. He was thrown against their police car, cuffed, searched and put in the back seat.
Officer Brian Dennis testified that residents had called 911 reporting a large group of young men brawling, throwing garbage cans and setting off car alarms. One was said to have been armed with a cane. The group seemed to have dispersed and reformed. Dennis said he found trash cans in the street, drove slowly and saw Almonor.
He testified that Almonor looked over his shoulder "at least five times" and adjusted his waistband in a way that suggested he might have a gun.
"It's a very common practice at times to support your holster, your weapon, or to readjust it, depending upon what you're doing at the time," Dennis said, adding that Almonor "kept turning" to the side, away from him, "for absolutely no reason."
"It's called blading," Dennis testified. "It's whenever you interact with somebody, you're always conscious to keep your firearm further away from whoever you're talking to."
Then there was Deon Dennis, who testified that he was smoking a cigarette on an empty Harlem street when cops pulled up in a van, pointed to a cup on the ground, asked if he had been drinking and searched him. The police account was that officers saw Dennis drinking and searched him after discovering he was wanted on a warrant.
Few of the disputed cases presented Scheindlin with testimony that showed police wrongdoing by a preponderance of evidence. All the cases documented why she must give little weight to the cases in which the claimants did not provide enough information to identify the officers who allegedly violated their rights. The accusation is easy to believe — until you hear from the other side.
Collectively, the testimony presented cases that were dismissible or, at worst, debatable. Scheindlin must have the courage to shut the matter down after disastrously permitting it to proceed this far.
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Bloomberg Asserts: Increase in S/Q/F Lowered Gun Deaths in City
City gun deaths plummet
By SALLY GOLDENBERG — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The New York Post'
Deaths by gunfire in the city are down dramatically, far lower than the national rate, according to a new study — and Mayor Bloomberg credited his policing strategies for the downturn.
The number of firearm deaths — which are made up primarily of homicides, but also include suicides and accidental shootings — dropped from 524 in 2000 to 366 in 2011, a city Health Department study has found.
That represents a 31 percent decline during a time when the NYPD drastically increased its use of stop-and-frisk.
Bloomberg aides said they expect the death rate from guns would continue to drop, pointing out that murders by shooting accounted for 57 percent of total homicides in 2012 in the city, which had 419 murders last year.
By comparison, 87 percent of Chicago's murders last year were caused by firearms, a Bloomberg aide noted.
Murders caused by firearms dropped from 434 in 2000 to 240 in 2012 — a 45 percent drop — according to the mayor's office.
In his weekly radio address yesterday, Bloomberg credited the city's tough gun-possession laws and "smart, proactive policing that makes it much more likely that if you break our city's gun laws, you'll be caught."
While firearm deaths are down citywide, Bloomberg was quick to point out that guns remain the leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-old men in several neighborhoods, including East New York and Crown Heights.
"Black young men aged 15 to 24 years bear the greatest burden of violence-related death and injury," the report concluded.
The firearm death rate in that age group in Crown Heights is 42 per 100,000 — the highest in the city, the study shows.
The study showed New York City's firearm death rate is less than half of the nation's rate: 4.3 per 100,000 residents across the five boroughs, compared with 10 per 100,000 people countrywide.
Bloomberg has long attributed the city's precipitous crime drop in part to stop-and-frisk — a controversial policy that all of the would-be Democratic mayoral candidates want to rein in or abolish.
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'One Police Plaza'
Ray Kelly's Terror Fairy Tale
By: Leonard Levitt – Monday, April 29th, 2013 'NYPD Confidential.Com'
(Op-Ed / Commentary)
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said what a big boy am I.
What better way for Ray Kelly to capture attention than to announce that the Boston Marathon bombers had planned to drive to New York and detonate their remaining bombs in Times Square.
And then, in tandem with the ranting of the Daily News, to criticize the FBI for not alerting him to this sooner.
Ginning up fears about the Boston Marathon bombings with hyperbolic claims is what fighting terrorism has become in New York City these past couple of weeks.
Kelly had been shut out of the spotlight after the Marathon. Instead, the national media had turned to his rival and nemesis, former Boston police commissioner Bill Bratton, to pontificate.
Nor had Kelly gained much traction when, the day before his Times Square claim, he announced that, after setting off their bombs in Boston, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhor Tsarnaev had planned to drive New York "to party."
Little wonder that Kelly had been ignored. That wisp of information had come from the brothers' car-jacking victim. "The two individuals were speaking in either Chechen or Russian language that the driver didn't understand," Kelly said, "but he thought he heard the word 'Manhattan.'
"It may have been a word to the effect of 'coming to party in New York,'" Kelly said.
His Times Square bombing claim didn't seem any more credible.
The information, passed along to him from the FBI, came from Dzhokhor in his hospital bed.
Many thinking law enforcement folk — to say nothing of Congressional Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers [R. Mich.] — considered such a plan a momentary blip as the two drove around Boston after placing their bombs at the marathon.
Nonetheless, the mere mention of Times Square — site of an unexploded bomb placed by Faisal Shahzad in 2010 — allowed Kelly to flex his terrorism bona fides. He ordered a flock of NYPD patrol cars to Times Square, then lined them up in a show of force.
He also took a swipe at the FBI, saying they should have notified him sooner.
"We did express our concerns over the lag," Kelly said.
Asked what difference it would have made had he learned of it sooner, Kelly answered: "I don't want to speculate. The fact of the matter was there was a 48-hour lag."
[At the same time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg used the Times Square scenario as a plea for more federal money. Someday, his successor might provide an accounting of what specifically those millions of federal dollars have been used for.]
Meanwhile, the 48-hour time lag brought out the beast in the Daily News.
"The FBI's dereliction in failing to instantly notify Police Commissioner Ray Kelly that the Boston Marathon bombers planned to attack New York was irresponsible, unforgivable, terrifying and grounds for overhauling its anti-terror protocols," read last Friday's editorial.
"The bureau allowed well more than 48 hours to pass before sending word that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had told agents that, in the massacre's aftermath, he and his brother, Tamerlan, had determined to head to Times Square for more mayhem.
"The delay blocked the NYPD from immediately investigating whether the Tsarnaevs had allies in the city, a lag that would have been costly had the brothers been in league with conspirators here."
Echoing such nonsense was the indefatigable Judith Miller, the ex-New York Times reporter perhaps best known for beating the drum for the Iraq war and, more recently, the amanuensis of Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence David Cohen, who has masterminded the NYPD's foreign and domestic spying operation.
Miller wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Boston attack "may well have been prevented entirely had the perpetrators lived in New York City."
"In the dozen years since 9/11, the city has developed a counter-terrorism program that is a model of how to identify and stop killers like the Tsarnaev brother before they strike," she said.
Of more legitimate concern to the NYPD was the sense — repeatedly sounded at the highest levels of its intelligence gathering apparatus — that the feds cannot be counted on to do their jobs.
Just as the CIA and FBI had failed to connect the dots of disparate plane-hijacking intelligence before 9/11, neither agency followed through on Tamerlan after Russian intelligence notified both in 2011 of his possible ties to radical Islam.
The FBI says it didn't know that Tamerlan visited Dagestan, a Muslim region in southern Russia, in 2012 with an Islamic insurgency. Somehow, his name and date of birth were incorrectly entered into a data bank that checks flight manifests against a list of possible terrorists. And the Department of Homeland Security knew but didn't tell.
Most important, no federal agency monitored Tamerlan when he returned from Dagestan to Boston.
The Washington bureaucracy has fallen over itself to justify its inaction, declaring each agency followed protocol. Whether from misguided civil rights concerns or the desire to get home for the weekend to beat the Friday afternoon rush hour traffic, not one federal operative took that extra investigative step.
Would the NYPD have acted so? Say what you will about Kelly and Cohen and their pervasive spying on Muslims, taking the extra step is something they well might have done.
For once in his brief career as a professional NYPD yahoo, former civilian intelligence analyst Mitchell Silber may have been correct when he told Miller last week: "We would have been very reluctant to shut down an investigation if we knew all that it seems the Bureau knew or could have known, especially once he had traveled to a region of concern."
[Note Silber's use of "we," although he left the department nearly a year ago.]
On the other hand, as reporting by NYPD Confidential and the Associated Press have documented, there is no mention in the NYPD's key spying document, its 2006 "Strategic Posture" of Chechnya, the brothers' homeland, or of Chechens.
Miller adds, improbably, in her Journal article that, if Tamerlan had lived in New York, his "sudden behavioral changes might well have been reported by concerned worshipers, the imam himself, or other fellow Muslims."
She adds: "The NYPD maintains close ties to Muslim preachers and community leaders, as well a network of tipsters and undercover operatives."
That's another Ray Kelly terror fairy tale, which he presented a week ago to an obviously ill-prepared CNN interviewer, Fareed Zakaria, who failed to challenge Kelly when he said that the NYPD's relations with the city's Muslim community "are better now, in my judgment, than they have ever been."
Kelly said to Zakaria in toto: "And I think we have a very strong working relationship with, certainly, the Muslim community. I have a group that I meet with on a regular basis of opinion-formers in the Muslim community. We have back-and-forth, give-and-take. I go to many community meetings. We have very strong working relationships in the communities throughout the city. This is a complex environment, a complex city. And I would say our commanders, our community officers are — and I've been in the police department a long time — our relationships are better now, in my judgment, than they have ever been."
On the contrary, through its pervasive spying, the NYPD has alienated crucial segments of the formerly law enforcement-friendly Muslim community.
A report last March by the CUNY School of Law, Muslim student associations and grass-roots Muslim organizations on the NYPD's secret spying on Muslims for the past decade describes its chilling effect on Muslim New Yorkers, who have come to distrust their friends, classmates, religious leaders — and the NYPD.
"Conversations relating to foreign policy, civil rights and activism areas all deemed off-limits as interviewees fear such conversations would draw greater NYPD scrutiny," the report said.
"Parents discourage their children from being active in Muslim student groups, protests or other activism, believing that these activities would threaten to expose them to greater government scrutiny."
The report also cites a "deep distrust of the NYPD."
"Individuals did not view it as a protective force or a resource for those in need of assistance — rather, the police are increasingly regarded as threatening and untrustworthy."
If Kelly believes otherwise, he is living in a fantasy world — for which we, the public, may someday pay a heavy price.
Edited by Donald Forst
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Former NYPD DCPI John Miller's Excellent Logic
CBS' Miller rises above the fray in Boston case
By DAVID BAUDER (The Associated Press) — Monday, April 29th, 2013; 7:35 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK (AP) -- If John Miller had scheduled an earlier flight, the CBS News coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath would have been much weaker.
Miller was driving home on the afternoon of April 15 to pick up his wife for their flight to a vacation in Florence, Italy. A phone call alerted him to the bombings and he turned around and headed back to the office, where he's spent much of his time since.
His dual role as a low-key explainer and reporter helped keep CBS ahead on key details of the investigation as the suspects' identities began to emerge, and away from missteps made by other news organizations.
Miller, who appears primarily on "CBS This Morning," reported two days after the bombing that authorities had their eye specifically on someone seen by a store security camera. When Internet sleuths began speculating about potential suspects based on pictures taken at the scene, Miller steered CBS away from them. Miller similarly assured the network it wasn't true when rivals reported erroneously that a suspect had been arrested, said CBS News President David Rhodes.
His bosses knew as much from Miller's demeanor as his words that day. Miller sat calmly in the newsroom eating a sandwich while other news divisions were frantically reporting and unreporting an arrest, Rhodes said.
"One of the main reasons I'm watching CBS' coverage of the Boston story is because of John Miller," said Marcy McGinnis, a former CBS executive who is associate dean of Stony Brook University's journalism school. "I think he's got extraordinary sources. They give him information immediately. The night this (capture of the second suspect) was unfolding, I was in awe."
He's also very measured and clear in his delivery, she said.
Along with reporters, most broadcast news divisions employ analysts, usually former office-holders or experts with an insider's view of how things work. Hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger, who comments on aviation stories for CBS, is an example.
Miller, 54, handles both roles. He's a veteran reporter who worked at ABC News and its New York affiliate. His boss, CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, calls Miller "one of the best reporters to have ever worked in television." Miller also worked for former New York and Los Angeles police commissioner Bill Bratton when Bratton ran those departments, and at the CIA, FBI and National Security Administration.
By 2011, Miller said he was looking to get back into journalism.
"I had been doing government work for 10 years after 9/11 and it was time to come home," he said.
His long list of contacts was an obvious selling point, and he pitched to Fager an ability to see stories where others wouldn't. His insider's knowledge of law enforcement would also help him identify experts in areas like improvised explosive devices and persuade them to be interviewed by CBS if the moment called for it.
Fager balked at that last point. He wanted Miller to be the person viewers were accustomed to hearing from. If it was a subject beyond what he knew, he could gather the information off-screen so he could talk about it on the air.
No one could have anticipated the rush of stories where Miller's expertise would be vital: the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting; the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus; the shooting rampage and manhunt for a former Los Angeles police office; the Newtown, Conn., school shootings; and Boston.
Miller's knowledge of police operations enables him to act almost as an interpreter during breaking stories. On the night suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found hiding in a boat, Miller was able to explain how officials were going about trying to capture him. He knew police would try to stretch it out to make time move more slowly, and he prepared the television audience for this, too.
"It fills the airtime with something other than `there were shots and we don't know what's going on,'" he said.
Following the Aurora shooting, Miller knew right away the police who would be responding since one of them once worked for him in Brooklyn, Rhodes said.
Miller is hesitant to even call his sources "sources."
"Sources are people you meet on other stories and you develop them into sources of information," he said. "I'm calling friends, and I'm asking them, `What's happening here?'"
For all their benefits, there's a danger of those relationships getting in the way of his job if authorities are criticized for wrongdoing or failures in their response to situations. Would Miller be able to publicly criticize or question his former colleagues? Host Charlie Rose asked Miller on Thursday about whether the FBI failed to more aggressively follow up on concerns about older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev's turn to radical Islam.
"20/20 hindsight is going to be brilliant in this case because they're going to go backwards from a bombing reassessing it," Miller replied. He added: "The question is not `did we do it by the book?' - sure we did - it's `could we have done it any better if we had dug deeper or looked at something different?'"
Citing his experience at both the FBI and with New York police, Miller on Friday dismissed criticism that the investigators should have told New York that the Tsarnaevs planned to head there with bombs. Times Square security had already been beefed up following the marathon, he said. "This seems like a lot of gnashing of teeth over nonsense," he said.
For all her admiration of his work, McGinnis said she didn't know whether Miller would be able to set aside relationships from his past life in cases where things have not been handled well.
Fager said that such concerns don't hold up if you look at Miller's reporting. "He's tough," Fager said. "He's inquisitive. He'll go anywhere."
For his part, Miller said, "I am reluctant to criticize authorities."
"My interpretation of when they need to be (criticized) and somebody else's might be different," he said. "If you've been there and you know how that works and what it's like, and how easy it is to take potshots from the outside, your criticism is more measured, your analysis of what is worthy of criticism and what isn't is slightly different."
When the bombing story quiets down, Miller will no doubt have another pressing concern: his wife. That vacation.
"I am currently in the correspondent's protection program," he said, "broadcasting under another identity and up at the Holiday Inn here between 9th and 10th (Avenues) until they can negotiate a time when I can go home again."
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Auto Crime and TARU / Sloppy Police Work
NYPD loses even more evidence in high-profile stolen motorcycles case
The NYPD's Auto Crimes Division and Technical Assistance Response Unit deleted video surveillance and failed to record undercover conversations with suspects. It remains to be seen if this will affect trials of the defendants, but a ruling on the evidence issue is expected
By Shayna Jacobs — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The New York Daily News'
Sloppy cop work has undermined a high-profile stolen motorcycle case for the second time in less than a year, the Daily News has learned.
The NYPD's Auto Crimes Division and Technical Assistance Response Unit wiped two surveillance videos — the only copies available — and apparently failed even to record two other meetings between undercover cops and suspects, according to criminal court proceedings last week.
The missing evidence is the second embarrassing gaffe to result from the 17-month investigation into gun trafficking and the theft and resale of 63 bikes valued at about $500,000.
About a month after Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. announced last July's takedown, seven high-performance bikes that had been seized in the sting were swiped from a poorly secured police lot in the Bronx.
Now it has emerged in a Manhattan Supreme Court pretrial hearing that two recordings made in August 2011 were later erased when a detective's hard drive was reformatted by the NYPD technical experts. The backup copy, on an undercover cop's laptop, has also been expunged. Two meetings held months later were supposed to be recorded but never were, detectives testified at hearings.
Defense attorneys for four of the defendants due to go on trial in May in the sophisticated theft ring are seeking dismissals or exclusions of testimony and evidence.
Lawyer Andrew Miller, who represents Damian Jones, argued that "you can't get more blatantly careless" with evidence than the NYPD was in this case.
"The evidence destroyed here is highly relevant," attorney Joseph Heinzmann, who represents accused ringleader Steve (Jersey Dred) Dow, argued in a letter to the court.
Prosecutors downplayed the significance of the snafu.
"This is just an unfortunate mistake that does happen, unfortunately, in large operations such as this," Assistant District Attorney Diana Florence said.
It remains to be seen how the botched video collection will affect the upcoming trial of Jones, Dow, Omar Thomas and fourth defendant Truman Francis, who all face up to 25 years in prison. A ruling on the evidence issue by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marcy Kahn is expected Monday.
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120 Precinct Prisoner Suicide: Proper Search of Cell Not Performed
Man found hanged in Staten Island precinct cell likely used belt left by earlier prisoner, sources say
By John M. Annese — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The Staten Island Advance' / Staten Island
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Castleton Corners man found hanging inside a 120th Precinct holding cell on April 19 used a belt that had apparently been left behind by another prisoner, the Advance has learned.
At least two police officers will be disciplined as the NYPD continues to investigate the hanging, according to sources familiar with the case.
The man, Charles Kohm, 57, was found unconscious and hanging from a belt at 3:16 a.m. He later died at Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton, according to authorities.
Kohm, who had a size-36 waist, wasn't wearing a belt when he was processed, and police had taken his shoelaces and searched him several times, sources said. His cellmate woke up and saw him hanging from the cell door and yelled for an officer, sources said.
The belt found around Kohm's neck was a size-52, sources said, and investigators believe it may have been left in a trash receptacle connected to the cell's toilet, out of sight unless officers had done a thorough inspection.
A spokeswoman for the city medical examiner said Kohm's death has been ruled a hanging suicide.
He's the second prisoner to die after being taken into custody at the 120th Precinct over the past six weeks.
On March 7, 52-year-old Irving Mizell, who was arrested on charges he violated an order of protection, told officers he was having difficulty breathing and was taken by ambulance to Richmond Medical, where he was pronounced dead upon arrival.
The cause of Mizell's death has not yet been determined, the medical examiner's spokeswoman said.
Sources said police also stopped a prisoner from committing suicide with an article of clothing in a holding cell at the precinct a few days prior to Kohm's death.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly last week acknowledged that a probe was under way, but wouldn't go into specifics.
"I can tell you that a major investigation is ongoing conducted by [the] Internal Affairs Bureau anytime something like this happens. We process about 400,000 prisoners a year, but a prisoner, someone in custody, taking their life, I can assure you is a very serious matter to the department," Kelly said.
"We make sure to take people's shoelaces, their belts, that sort of thing. We have cameras that are trained on cell areas, not all of them, but we're doing a major examination of this incident."
Kelly referred to the 120th as one of the city's "busier precincts," and said the investigation would include reviewing holding cell procedures there.
The 120th Precinct cells are notorious for their grimy conditions. In early July 2011, the NYPD temporarily shut down the precinct's holding cells for fumigation and rerouted its prisoners to the 61st Precinct on Coney Island.
The infestation led one prisoner, Eric Marrero, to file a federal lawsuit alleging that officers put him into a bedbug-ridden cell to punish him for mouthing off during an arrest. The city agreed last month to pay him a $30,000 settlement.
Also, in November 2011, the city paid a $4,000 settlement to a masseuse who claimed she'd been held in a "filthy, unhygienic cell" there and forced to clean an overflowing toilet.
Kohm had been arrested on third-degree criminal trespass and resisting arrest charges Thursday night after police found him sleeping in the basement of El Torito, a restaurant and bar at 1007 Castleton Ave., authorities have said. Public records show he owns a home two doors down, at 1003 Castleton Ave.
Accounts vary as to what Kohm was doing there. His family maintains that he wasn't trespassing or sleeping in the basement, but rather had gone there to retrieve tools, shovels and other items he kept there.
He had been embroiled in a year-long dispute with the restaurant's owners, said a cousin, Lynn Cormier, who said that Kohm had been hit with thousands of dollars in Sanitation fines because the bar left its garbage outside his property.
The restaurant's owner, Nery Mendez, insisted that he didn't know of any Sanitation issue, and said Kohm didn't keep any tools in the basement. Kohm was a heavy drinker, and would often go into the basement to steal beer, Mendez said.
"All the time he comes over here, and all the time I say, 'Listen, Mr. Charlie, don't steal my stuff. If you need something let me know," Mendez said.
Others people would also sneak in from time to time, he said, and when he saw Kohm go into the basement on Thursday night, he called police.
"I think I did what I had to do," Mendez said. "If we knew this thing was going to happen, I'd never call the police."
The family has also retained lawyer Jonathan D'Agostino, who said he intends to file a notice of claim against the city and the NYPD.
Kohm wasn't facing the kind of charges that typically result in incarceration, and D'Agostino said he didn't know of any mental-health issues like depression.
"It makes no sense. He should have just been given a desk appearance ticket," D'Agostino said.
D'Agostino said Kohm never wore a belt, because of a hernia condition. He also said he'd want to take a close look at the medical examiner's report, to verify if, in fact, Kohm's death was a suicide.
"There are a lot of inconsistencies. The family really is most concerned about getting to the truth," D'Agostino said. "This is really something that never should have happened."
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Aviation Unit
NYPD fighting terrorism from the sky
By Nicole Johnson — Sunday, April 28th, 2013 'WPIX 11 TV News' / New York, NY
It is technology once thought of as made for Hollywood movies, but times have changed here in the city.
This technology is real and being used every day to fight crime, terrorism and save lives.
And you better believe it has been helpful.
Thermal imaging found the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev crammed on the floor of a boat as the Boston Police Department zeroed in.
And we all know what happened after that.
What you may not know is how the NYPD's Aviation Unit uses thermal imaging or infrared to spot anything out of the ordinary, suspects, radiation, movement — you name it — in Time Square, lower Manhattan or on any street.
We took a flight over the city to see just how it works.
The view from the chopper showed nothing is secret—– with clear skies and a press of a button, our co-pilot Officer Chris Maher can see a full picture of what's happening on the ground and video is being recorded just in case they have to take a second look.
Nothing will get past these eyes from the sky.
With the city always being a possible target for terror, this technology is always being updated.
The crew consists of experienced officers with dozens of years on the job.
"The technology is always changing, being updated. We are and will always prepare for any and everything," Officer Maher said.
Pilot Det. Dennis Derienzo said, "Boston did a great job handling the situation. It also makes us think what if that happens here so we prepare and train all the time."
"I am proud to be a part of this department apart of this unit," Det. Pierre Zimmerli told us.
From the ground, to the sky, the NYPD is working tirelessly to ensure the safety of New Yorkers.
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47 Precinct Robberies
Robbed at Gunpoint, Some Bronx Victims Resist
By J. DAVID GOODMAN — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The New York Times'
(Edited for brevity and generic law enforcement pertinence)
COMMENT / INACCURACIES: As all who have worked the street know, many a 'non-resisting vic' has been shot, cut, stabbed or beaten simply because he or she had nothing to give the perp. That, sometimes, is just the way of the street. Also, who has ever said that robbers are rational? If they were, they'd be pursuing another much safer line of work. - Mike
Criminologists have for decades studied the responses of victims to violent crime. Robberies in particular became a topic of scholarly research in the 1980s and 1990s, as random street crime spread through urban areas, with those studies mostly confirming the obvious: if you resist a robber, you are more likely to get hurt or, possibly, killed.
"From any perspective of rationality, the thing to do with a robber is to cooperate politely," said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law School. But, he added, both robbers and recalcitrant victims have never been the most rational actors.
"You don't have much money on you; it's nuts for the victim to refuse," he said. "Here's the second layer of nuts: You've got a rational robber. If the victim refuses, why doesn't he just find somebody else?"
National victim surveys in more recent years suggest little change in the number of people standing up to their muggers, or even a slight decrease.
But with decade-long declines in crime, some scholars have noted a change in the nature of robberies. A 2009 study of national victim surveys taken since 1993 found that not only were robberies becoming less frequent over time, they were also becoming more violent, in part because of what the authors describe as "victim hardening."
"Softer victims take precautions," said Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist and one of the study's authors. In addition, he said, many people who may have become robbers in the past may instead have gotten jobs as urban economies improved, leaving the more-hardened criminals to encounter more-hardened victims on the streets of certain neighborhoods.
"You get more resistance in high-crime areas than low-crime areas," he said. "People who would not resist have left the areas. Those who stay can't afford to leave or to give up the little property that they have in their possession."
The general perception of bad guys may have changed as well. Decades ago, many harbored an understandable fear that a gun-wielding assailant, fueled by drugs or desperation, would shoot at the smallest provocation. But a spreading sense of safety in many areas of the city, fostered by the falling murder rate, may lead some to doubt that a gunman these days will pull the trigger.
"It does sound plausible that when you have less of a climate of fear, you have more resistance," said Mr. Sethi, though he cautioned that research has not been conducted in this area.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said that the police have seen fewer crimes in the north Bronx than in some areas of the city. "It's not the 7-5," he said, referring to the precinct in East New York, Brooklyn. But, he added, it is among the higher-crime areas of the Bronx. The 47th Precinct has recorded at least 118 felony assaults and 107 robberies this year. Over the weekend, the precinct had its first murder of the year, the shooting death of a 34-year-old man; the police said it did not appear to have occurred in the course of a robbery.
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NYPD $$ Lawyer Lotto $$ Bonanza / 122 Precinct
Couple whose dog was shot and killed by NYPD officer to sue the city
Patricia Ratz and Pat Guglielmo's pit bull, Baby Girl, died days after being shot in a park in Staten Island. Their lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and will be filed in Brooklyn Federal Court on Monday.
By Thomas Tracy — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The New York Daily News'
A cop killed their Baby Girl — and now they want her to pay.
The grieving owner of a 2-year-old pit bull mortally wounded by a cop's bullet on Staten Island this month is suing the city as well as the cop who opened fire on the beloved pet.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, will be filed in Brooklyn Federal Court on Monday, said the attorney for Baby Girl's owner, Patricia Ratz.
"Nobody's doing well," the attorney, Ronald Kuby, said of Ratz and her fiancé, Pat Guglielmo. "It was a horrible thing to endure."
Ratz had taken the doomed dog and two other pit bulls for a walk through Schmul Park on April 6 when the other two dogs — Bo and Missy — started snapping at each other.
One of the dogs bit Ratz when she tried to calm them down, she said.
A police officer in the Travis park fired upward of 10 shots at the dogs, shooting Baby Girl in the back as the canine ran off, the lawsuit states.
Baby Girl died five days later.
Police say the cop, who is still on active duty, fired seven times when the dog charged her.
Kuby hopes that the suit will spark a change in how the police interact with dogs."We are seeking to fundamentally change the way the NYPD deals with pets," he said.
"When a dog is fleeing the scene, it's because the doggie is afraid, not because the dog is concerned about getting arrested. That's the reason people flee, not doggies."
Police stand by their account of the shooting, which is under investigation.
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New Jersey
Jersey City police brass identify a pro-militia clique in the department and say they've been stopped
By Michaelangelo Conte — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The Jersey Journal' / Jersey City, NJ
A clique of officers who calls themselves "Three-Percenters" in the Jersey City Police Department's Emergency Services Unit sprouted about two years ago, officials have told The Jersey Journal.
"They were separating themselves from the others in the unit and we put a stop to it immediately," Jersey City Police Deputy Chief Peter Nalbach said.
The deputy chief said there were officers who were disciplined over the matter.
Three-percenters are an "anti-government extremist" movement that has grown since President Barack Obama took office, according to the Anti Defamation League, a nonprofit that combats what it believes to be anti-Semitism and bigotry.
The three-percent movement promotes the idea that the federal government is plotting to take away the rights of American citizens and must be resisted, the ADL says on its website.
The three-percenters apparently get their name from the notion that 3 percent of American colonists took up arms against the British crown during the Revolutionary War, according to the Three Percenter's Club on Facebook, which has more than 17,500 followers.
"The (three-percenter) honors and is sworn to uphold and enforce the Constitution of the United States of America... (Three-percenters) are soldiers who have sworn to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic," the groups says on its "About" page.
Followers sometimes call themselves "Oath Keepers" and associate with self-described pro-militia "patriot" groups that support gun rights and "engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing," including the idea that the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks were perpetrated by the federal government, according to the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
It was not clear if the disciplined officers belonged to any particular three-percent group.
An anonymous letter sent to The Jersey Journal says that some ESU officers wore a patch saying "ONE OF THE 3 %" and the letter includes a picture of a patch. The letter also says some official ESU patches were altered by adding "3%" to them. The letter also includes a picture of such a patch.
Finally, the letter includes a patch with the image of a skull and says ESU officers wore the skull patch and Three-Percenters patches while on patrol.
Nalbach confirmed that officers were wearing a patch and said "It was removed because we don't allow unofficial patches."
The letter also includes an image of a Three-Percenters flag and said it was hung in the ESU gym. Nalbach said he was not aware of a flag.
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Nomination for New Jersey Retired Police Officer Retard of the Year
Retired N.J. cop who claimed disability stars in reality show 'Bear Swamp Recovery,' report says
By Eunice Lee — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The Newark Star-Ledger' / Newark, NJ
(Edited for brevity)
HAMILTON — The story of Joseph Derrico blurs the lines between fake and reality, a joint investigation by New Jersey Watchdog and NBC 4 New York reports.
Derrico retired as a Hamilton police officer in 2010 to collect a police disability pension of nearly $70,000 a year, but today's report shows that he's spent part of his retirement starring on truTV's "Bear Swamp Recovery," a reality show on vehicle repos by the "baddest towing team in Jersey."
During the show's "Monster Truck Showdown" episode, Derrico is seen chasing a monster truck on foot, grabbing the driver and throwing him to the ground, the report said.
According to the report, the episode first aired Oct. 19, 2011 — a year after Derrico received his first $5,808 pension check.
After viewing one of Derrico's television appearances, state officials are re-evalulate the retired cop "to see if he really is disabled."
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Connecticut
Few schools hire armed guards after Newtown
By STEPHEN KALIN (The Associated Press) — Monday, April 29th, 2013; 12:01 a.m. EDT
Hartford - As the nation reeled from the Newtown massacre, proposals to place armed guards in schools quickly gained steam and, initially, public support. But more than four months after the shooting, just two Connecticut school districts are pushing forward with the idea while others are calling it unaffordable or imprudent.
Scott Schoonmaker, superintendent of North Branford schools, hired private guards less than three weeks after the December rampage, which killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
"I felt, and others felt, that the ability to have a person there specifically to monitor buildings and grounds and be a point person in charge of school safety was the avenue to pursue," he said.
Enfield's town council followed suit in March when it voted to place armed guards in its schools.
But the proposals elsewhere in Connecticut and in many other states have succumbed to political opposition or economic reality. Only Arizona and South Dakota have adopted legislation to ease restrictions on guards carrying guns in schools, while Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, North Dakota and New Hampshire have rejected such bills.
And in Newtown, residents last week rejected town and school budgets that would have funded additional school security personnel. The district had a "very good" school security plan when the shooting occurred, according to Patrice McCarthy, deputy director of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education.
Police officers were assigned to the upper schools in Newtown but not the elementary schools.
The guards in North Branford are private citizens without arrest powers but are in contact with town police and train with them. Schoonmaker expects them to receive permission to carry firearms soon.
Schoonmaker allocated $140,000 in the budget to pay the guards $20 an hour, which he calls "cost efficient."
Placing armed guards in schools is hardly a new idea. School resource officers - sworn police officers with full arrest powers who wear a uniform and carry a gun - have existed in Connecticut for more than a decade. They are charged with counseling and teaching as well as law enforcement.
About 100 SROs work in the state, says Caleb Lopez, president of the Connecticut SRO Association. Lopez worries that private guards will lack training and disregard the responsibility to bond with students.
Enfield has three SROs, but Superintendent Jeffrey Schumann said expanding that program would cost too much time and money. He plans to reduce costs and speed implementation by hiring retiring police officers who are already trained and can accept part-time wages. They would operate under the public safety department but lack policing authority.
The initiative is expected to cost $630,000 next year and $500,000 each subsequent year and is in the budget proposal before the Enfield town council.
"I think the town council has a real challenge," said Schumann, "because we're in tough economic times, and this is a relatively expensive program. It's an impossible argument to have about how valuable the lives of children are and putting a price on that."
Other Connecticut municipalities are making expenditures on physical infrastructure improvements that balance safety and cost.
The Glastonbury town council contracted a school security audit and allocated $485,000 for building hardening initiatives including reinforced doors, locks and buzzer systems.
Danbury has taken similar steps and included unarmed school safety advocates in its proposed budget. Mayor Mark Boughton said adding SROs to elementary schools and other educational buildings is financially unfeasible.
"It would be incredibly difficult to pull off," he said, "and some people have policy concerns about having police officers in the building."
While municipalities consider how to finance and implement long-term initiatives, a council for school safety infrastructure that was created by the new state gun control law is expected to meet next week.
The council will set school safety standards by Jan. 1. Every school must submit a security plan that meets those standards by July 1, 2014.
The council will also administer a $15 million grant program for school safety infrastructure. But as districts move ahead with security assessments, personnel hires, building hardening and capital improvements, many are not relying on Hartford for financial support.
"It's disappointing and incredibly misguided to only appropriate $15 million for the entire state," Boughton said. "That is not nearly enough money and won't even remotely help the hundreds of schools in the state harden themselves and become safer and protect themselves from a potential attack like what happened in Newtown."
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U.S.A. / 2nd Amendment Firearms Issues
A new front for gun background checks: the ballot
By MIKE BAKER (The Associated Press) — Sunday, April 28th, 2013; 6:41 p.m. EDT
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) -- After struggling to sway both state and federal lawmakers, proponents of expanding background checks for gun sales are now exploring whether they will have more success by taking the issue directly to voters.
While advocates generally prefer that new gun laws be passed through the legislative process, especially at the national level, they are also concerned about how much sway the National Rifle Association has with lawmakers.
Washington Rep. Jamie Pedersen, a Democrat who had sponsored unsuccessful legislation on background checks at the state level, said a winning ballot initiative would make a statement with broad implications.
"It's more powerful if the voters do it - as opposed to our doing it," Pedersen said. "And it would make it easier for the Legislature to do even more."
On Monday, proponents of universal background checks in Washington will announce their plan to launch a statewide initiative campaign that would require the collection of some 300,000 signatures, according to a person involved in the initiative planning who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt the official announcement.
The Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility has scheduled a fundraiser in Seattle at the end of next month and hopes to have a campaign budget in the millions of dollars.
Ballot measures may be an option elsewhere, too. Hildy Saizow, president of Arizonans for Gun Safety, said an initiative is one of the things the group will be considering as it reconsiders strategies. An organizer in Oregon was focused on the Legislature for now but wouldn't rule out a ballot measure in the future if lawmakers fail to pass a proposed bill there.
While advocates have had recent success on background checks in places like Connecticut and Colorado, they've been thwarted in some other states and in Congress. The U.S. Senate rejected a plan to expand background checks earlier this month, although lawmakers in the chamber are still working to gather additional votes.
Brian Malte, director of mobilization at the national nonprofit lobbying group Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said passage through Congress is the ideal in order to have a national solution and so that states with strong gun laws aren't undermined by nearby states with weaker standards. He noted that initiative campaigns are costly endeavors that can drain important, limited resources.
Still, Malte said, the ballot measures are an option to consider.
"At some point, certainly decisions need to be made about what the right time is to say we take it to the people," Malte said.
Brian Judy, a lobbyist who represents the NRA in Washington state, did not return calls seeking comment about the new initiative. He has previously said the NRA would likely oppose such an effort, arguing that the recently proposed laws on background checks would largely impact law-abiding citizens instead of the intended targets such as criminals and the mentally ill.
Gun measures have had mixed results at the ballot. More than 70 percent of Washington state voters rejected a 1997 initiative campaign that would have required handgun owners to pass a safety course. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, voters in Colorado and Oregon approved ballot measures the next year to require background checks for buying weapons at gun shows.
Following another massacre in Colorado earlier this year, state lawmakers approved a bill to expand background checks to private transactions and online purchases. A similar expansion plan in Oregon is stalled in the state Senate.
Some states don't see initiatives as a viable option right now. In Missouri, state Rep. Stacey Newman has been pushing for background checks with little success. While she spoke positively about the idea of a ballot initiative, she said there's no serious consideration of it because of the cost and coordination required just to get it on the ballot. Instead, the supporters of background checks in the state are simply working to prevent NRA-supported legislation from passing the state's General Assembly.
"We're continually on defense," she said.
Gun buyers currently must undergo a background check when they purchase a weapon from a federally licensed firearms dealer but can avoid checks in most states by using private purchases, such as at gun shows.
Washington state advocates believe polls show the public is sufficiently on the side of expanding background checks further. An independent Elway Poll conducted two months ago found that 79 percent of registered voters in Washington state supported background checks on all gun sales, including private transactions.
That wasn't enough to shepherd the bill through the Legislature. Even in the state House, which is controlled by Democrats, supporters fell short after an NRA campaign put pressure on some lawmakers. Pedersen had offered concessions through the process, including the option of sending the measure out for a public vote and exemptions for people who already have concealed pistol licenses or law enforcement credentials.
Pedersen said he was working with the initiative organizers on language for the proposal, and he said the Legislature would first have another chance to adopt the measure early next year. If it fails among lawmakers again, the proposal would then automatically go to the ballot, where Pedersen said he welcomed a campaign competing against groups like the NRA.
"I'm not afraid of it at all," Pedersen said. "The public is really with us. It's the right policy. I think it can be useful for further progress."
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Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The New York Times' Editorial:
Congressional Restraints on Gun Safety
One of the cynical arguments that Senate members recently invoked in ducking their responsibility to enact stronger gun controls was that the government first needed to enforce laws already on the books. The hollow, Catch-22 reality of this position has been underlined by a new inspector general's report pointing out that a severely understaffed and underfinanced federal firearms agency failed to inspect nearly 60 percent of the nation's 125,000 licensed gun dealers in the last five years.
The report did not point out that Congressional opponents, obeisant to the gun lobby's demands, have imposed various hobbles on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to impede its performance. A 1986 law, for example, generally bans the bureau from making more than one unannounced inspection a year at a gun shop. Congress has made it more difficult to revoke the licenses of offending dealers, a process that can now take up to three years. Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked White House efforts to name a new director of the bureau, and Congress has denied the agency the right to a central database to better track crime-scene weapons.
One result is that suspect gun dealers who fail to comply with such basic law as buyer background checks go undetected "for many years," a time in which they continue to sell guns, the report noted. A particularly alarming problem is the inability to track 174,679 firearms reported missing or stolen from gun dealers' inventories from 2004 through 2011, a lucrative channel into the black market that should be a red flag about unscrupulous dealers.
President Obama requested more federal funds to bolster the staff and efficiency of the firearms bureau. Public safety, however, has not counted for much in the face of gun lobby mendacity and Congressional timidity.
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Los Angeles, California
After Dorner claim, other fired LAPD cops want cases reviewed
The 40 requests have come in the two months since Christopher Dorner sought revenge for his 2009 dismissal by targeting police officers and their families.
By Joel — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The Los Angeles Times' / Los Angeles, CA
In the wake of Christopher Dorner's claim that his firing from the Los Angeles Police Department was a result of corruption and bias, more than three dozen other fired LAPD cops want department officials to review their cases.
The 40 requests, which were tallied by the union that represents rank-and-file officers, have come in the two months since Dorner sought revenge for his 2009 firing by targeting police officers and their families in a killing rampage that left four dead and others injured.
Dorner's allegations of a department plagued by racism and special interests left Chief Charlie Beck scrambling to stem a growing chorus of others who condemned Dorner's violence but said his complaints about the department were accurate. To assuage concerns, Beck vowed to re-examine the cases of other former officers who believed they had been wrongly expelled from the force.
Now, details of how the department plans to make good on Beck's offer are becoming clear. And, for at least some of the disgruntled ex-officers, they will be disappointing.
In letters to those wishing to have their case reviewed, department officials explain that the city's charter, which spells out the authority granted to various public officials, prevents the police chief from opening new disciplinary proceedings for an officer fired more than three years ago.
"Therefore the Department does not have the power to reinstate officers whose terminations occurred more than three years ago," wrote Gerald Chaleff, the LAPD's special assistant for constitutional policing. "You are being informed of this to forestall any misconceptions about the power of the department."
The reviews remain one of the unsettled postscripts to the Dorner saga. In February, three years after he was fired for allegedly fabricating a story about his partner inappropriately kicking a handcuffed suspect, Dorner resurfaced in violent fashion, bent on seeking revenge for his ouster.
After killing the daughter of the attorney who defended him at his disciplinary hearing and her fiance, Dorner killed two police officers and wounded three other people as he evaded capture during a massive manhunt. After more than a week on the run, Dorner was chased into a cabin in the mountains near Big Bear, where he died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Dorner had posted online an angry manifesto of sorts in which he claimed that he had been a victim of a racist, corrupt police organization that protects its favored officers at the expense of those trying to report abuses. Those accusations tapped into deep wells of discontent and distrust that officers and minority communities have felt toward the department. Beck sought to reassure doubters that years of reforms had changed the department and buried the "ghosts" of the past. He then offered to review past discipline cases.
Fired officers who wish to have their terminations re-examined must first submit an affidavit or similar declaration within two months of receiving the letter from Chaleff, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The letter was sent in recent weeks to the former officers who have already come forward.
Using "clear and convincing language," the letter instructs ex-officers to explain "the new evidence or change in circumstances that would justify a re-examination of your termination."
LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Chaleff will conduct a review for anyone who follows the rules laid out in the letter. "We will do whatever it takes on the cases, including redoing interviews, if necessary," he wrote in an email.
The department and the Protective League declined to release the names of former officers who have requested reviews.
Gary Ingemunson, a longtime attorney for the League, used the case reviews as an opportunity to revive the League's perennial criticism that disciplinary hearings, called Boards of Rights, are stacked against officers.
"The Board of Rights system could be fair, but for the last few years the Department has consistently outdone itself in the attempt to completely skew the system against the officer. The Department wants to win. End of story," Ingemunson wrote in a column in the current issue of the union's monthly magazine.
One of the problems, Ingemunson and other union lawyers have said, is the makeup of the three-person panels that decide an officer's fate. Two of judges are senior-level LAPD officers, while the third is a civilian.
According to the critics, that arrangement is unfair because officers are sent to boards whenever the chief wants them fired and the officers on the panel will feel pressure to do as the chief wants.
Smith rejected that idea, saying board members are completely free to decide as they see fit. He pointed to department figures showing that over the last three years, officers sent by the chief to Boards of Rights were fired in only about 60% of the cases.
Smith defended the department's disciplinary system in general, saying it has been in place for decades and stood up under repeated scrutiny by oversight bodies.
Another allowance Beck made after Dorner's rampage, Smith noted, was to launch a broad review of disciplinary procedures to identify areas that officers believe are unfair and possibly make changes to address those concerns.
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Immigration Enforcement / Illegal Aliens
Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The McClatchy-Tribune News Service' Editorial:
Enforcement before amnesty
WASHINGTON - In 1986, Congress passed a large immigration bill based on a simple deal: amnesty for settled illegal immigrants in exchange for stricter enforcement of the law to minimize new illegal immigration.
The deal was not honored. The promised future enforcement never materialized. That's because once the amnesty was out of the way, there was no longer any political incentive to push for enforcement, and pressure from special-interest groups pushing for non-enforcement.
This history stands in the way of today's drive for "comprehensive immigration reform."
Although no bill has yet been introduced, the outlines are the same as 25 years ago: legalization - read amnesty - for illegal immigrants in exchange for more promises to enforce the law.
Recent polls show most Americans understand what the president and many congressmen do not: If law-enforcement tools to limit illegal immigration are not in place, we'll end up with millions of new illegal immigrants within a few years.
That's why before even debating whether to give legal status to illegal immigrants, Congress and the administration must take steps to ensure that any future amnesty won't just be a prelude to more amnesties in the future.
First, the borders. For all President Obama's boasts, the border is not secure. Border arrests dropped significantly over the past few years, but that was largely due to the bad economy here and the good economy in Mexico.
The flow has started rising again; in south Texas, arrests are double what they were two years ago. That trend will continue unless we make the needed improvements - now, before any consideration of amnesty.
For example, the Border Patrol is smaller than the New York Police Department, and has to keep an eye on 8,000 miles of borders.
Much of the 650 miles of border fencing is designed only to block cars and presents no obstacle to people on foot. What's more, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged recently it has no real way of even measuring the security of the border.
But the border with Mexico is only one part of a functioning immigration-security system.
Close to half the illegal population entered on legitimate temporary visas and never left. Congress has mandated the development of a proper check-in/checkout system for foreign visitors.
That sounds good until you realize that Congress did that in 1996, and has repeated the demand five more times since, and the system still isn't complete.
Finally, the most important change needed before talking about amnesty is to turn off the magnet of jobs.
A big step in that direction would be the universal use of an online tool for companies to check whether new hires are legal. Called E-Verify, this free, simple system is still only voluntary.
Those illegal immigrants who might truly warrant an amnesty are going to have to wait until politicians earn back the public's trust on the matter of immigration security.
Enforcement before amnesty
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Homeland Security
Boston attack not likely to produce 9/11-like surge in federal spending
By Marjorie Censer — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The Washington Post' / Washington, DC
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent military invasions overseas sparked a boom in new work for defense and information technology contractors, many of them based around Washington.
The government established the Department of Homeland Security and ramped up military and intelligence spending. Government services companies and weapons manufacturers saw their businesses surge, particularly after the U.S. military moved into Iraq.
But analysts say the Boston bombing is unlikely to be the same kind of catalyst.
The incident did refocus the public and government officials on the country's ability to defend itself from terrorism, but analysts say any resulting new spending will probably be in limited pockets.
"It took a couple of days for people in the defense business to understand what 9/11 meant, but almost immediately people saw that the days of low defense budgets were over," said Loren Thompson, a defense industry consultant. "This is not another 9/11."
The government has alleged that two brothers set off explosives that killed three people and wounded scores more near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15. Officials, who identified the suspects by reviewing surveillance-camera footage, apprehended the surviving suspect just days after the attack.
Given the suspects' quick detection, "the message the political system gets from what actually happened is that we're well prepared," Thompson said.
"This could've been a turning point if there was a major conspiracy and the perpetrators were not caught quickly."
Still, at a time when the Pentagon is focusing increased attention on Asia, some analysts acknowledged that the Boston attack could serve as a reminder of the security needs at home.
"I could see it . . . impacting the debate on things like the National Guard, certainly the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Coast Guard," said Byron Callan, a director at Washington-based investment research firm Capital Alpha Partners.
What the attacks might mean is an increased interest in surveillance technologies, said Michael S. Lewis, managing director of the Silverline Group, a consulting firm.
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) last week praised the role of surveillance cameras in identifying the suspects.
"We've made major investments in camera technology . . . and the attacks in Boston, I think, demonstrate just how valuable those cameras can be," he said during a news conference. The attack "shows just how crucial it is for the [New York Police Department] to continue to expand its counterterrorism capabilities and intelligence gathering activities."
Lewis said understanding the intelligence that was useful to investigators as well as the weaknesses in existing technology could spur new spending on next-generation technologies. The attack could also renew a focus on technologies that allow government agencies to share information, given reports that one of the suspects had previously been identified as a potential threat.
Still, Callan said, that could ultimately prove to be a downside for traditional defense contractors if money is merely diverted from one program to fund another.
"There may . . . be some money for contractors in [surveillance], but that's not money that's going to go to the big iconic programs," he said. In fact, surveillance-camera spending could be money that "ultimately comes at the expense of defense spending."
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Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Including failed terror plots in US terrorism databases would make the US terror-threat picture more complete and provide important information for law enforcement, researchers suggest.
By Mark Clayton — Sunday, April 28th, 2013 'The Christian Science Monitor' / Boston, MA
The terrorism threat facing the United States may be vastly understated, as well as inaccurately characterized, because so many "failed" terror plots are excluded from the nation's terror attack databases, new terrorism research suggests.
Despite a sharp decline in terrorist attacks since the 1970s, there still were 207 terrorist attacks recorded inside the United States in the decade after 9/11 – about 20 per year on average, according to the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) maintained at the University of Maryland, widely regarded as the nation's most complete tally.
But what if those totals were, say, 50 percent higher? A researcher at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif., recently tallied 109 failed terrorist plots between 2001 and 2012, only a few of which were included in the GTD's national terror "attack" totals.
Yet those failed plots are perhaps just as important in their own way as plots that became actual attacks, some terrorism researchers say. Placing failed plots alongside successful attacks would make the US terror-threat picture more complete, highlight trends in terrorist targeting and methods, and possibly reveal a different – or even bigger – threat, they say.
"One finding from my research is that the terror threat within the US is higher than most Americans realize," says Erik Dahl, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, whose research has identified 227 failed domestic and international terror plots of all kinds (Islamic jihadist, right-wing extremist and others) against the US dating back to 1987 – the vast majority excluded from national "attack" tallies.
In his post-9/11 analysis, Dr. Dahl found that of the 109 failed attacks, 76 were inspired by radical Islamist beliefs. But the fact that the rest of the terror flops – 30 percent – were not inspired by radical Islam "might surprise some people and shows the importance of the domestic extremist threat, including right-wing militias, anti-government groups," Dahl says.
Understanding exactly why terror plots fizzled before they could be carried out – and how far they proceeded before being stopped – is vital if lawmakers and investigators are to accurately calibrate the scope of the threat, the law enforcement techniques that work best, and terrorist groups' adaptation and targeting patterns, he says.
Yet at present, only successful "attacks" or attack attempts that at least make it "out the door" are included in the GTD, according to criteria on its website. Cases where terrorists dropped their plot, or where law enforcement made arrests long before any action could be taken, are usually not included.
Some do overlap, however. The May 2010 attempted car bombing in Times Square is one such example. The GTD includes it because the attacker made it "out the door," even though it didn't go off and was therefore a failure.
But the GTD skips the 2002 case of Jose Padilla for which he was convicted of terrorism-related charges, the 2006 plot by five men to bomb the Sears Tower, or the "Lackawanna Six" case of six Yemeni-American men arrested in 2002, who ultimately each pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.
Failures on Dahl's list also include a 2010 plan to bomb the New York City subway, the plot to bomb Wrigley Field in Chicago, and a plan to attack the Long Island Rail road.
"If we know more about what caused these plots to fail, we might be able to be far more effective in stopping future terror plots," Dahl says.
A few other researchers are pursuing a similar path. Preliminary data show that from 1993 to 2012 there were 16 failed terror plots by jihadists in the United States – instances where the plotters dropped their plot on their own, or failed on their own – and 69 others in which the plots were foiled by law enforcement, says Martha Crenshaw, senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. She agrees with Dahl that there is a "tip of the iceberg" aspect to the uncounted failed plots.
Among the plots that were foiled from the outside, 32 percent had government agents in on the plot from the beginning; 16 percent had government agents involved after a tip; and another 25 percent involved surveillance early on, but not active intervention, she says. Of those that failed from the inside, 10 reached the implementation stage and failed to complete, six were called off by the terrorists themselves.
"We're trying to figure out what the big picture is, because without that we don't get a good understanding of their target, or motive," Dr. Crenshaw says. "For instance, it might appear as though some group doesn't attack crowds, but data from our research might find that they, in fact, do attack crowds, but just failed because they lacked funding or the bomb fizzled. Then in the database, it just looks like they never had an intention of doing that. So then we're not expecting that kind of attack."
Crenshaw's fledgling work, along with Dahl's, are both receiving support from the GTD operators, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland.
"Data on these failed plots would fill significant gaps in our understanding of the terror threat," says Gary LaFree, director of START. "The reason we don't get all these failures in our database is that back to 1970s we adopted the US military's definition of an attack – which includes a kinetic element. What we miss, then, is the failed plots where there's no kinetic reaction. But we see how important these are – and we want to get them into the database."
Still other researchers are finding surprising patterns in data that includes failed plots. Until the Boston Marathon bombing, there had been a definite downward trend in Muslim-American terrorism, according to a February study by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. But that was only visible by looking at failed plots.
Fourteen Muslim-Americans were indicted for violent terrorist plots in 2012, down from 21 the year before, the study found. That brought the total since 9/11 to 209, or just below 20 per year. The number of terror plots involving Muslim-Americans also fell from 18 in 2011 to 9 in 2012.
"The number of failed plots is always going to be higher than the number of attacks," says Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the recent Triangle Center study. "In a huge portion of these plots, law enforcement is involved almost from the start. If we take these failed plots as a suggestion of the level of foment and desire to engage in terrorism – we still see that the number of people being arrested and numbers of plots are foiled have decreased in the last several years."
The overall number of Muslim-Americans involved in those failures is tiny, leading Dr. Kurzman to believe that Islamic terror organizations overseas trying to recruit and radicalize American Muslims are broadly failing – despite what happened in Boston.
Crenshaw, too, thinks there's a gold mine of valuable data in the pile of failed plots.
"You can't even answer the question of the extent of the threat without looking at the number of failures," she says. "Some have made the argument that all the failures are trivial or overhyped. But you have to sit down and sort them and say – okay, these are trivial, but here are some with much more serious dimension. You can't just dismiss all failures as unimportant."
What they reveal, she says, are the terrorists' targets, their depth of motivation, and their level of persistence in going after a target even if they fail once or twice. She rattles off three failed attacks by Al Qaeda-inspired operatives on airliners since 9/11.
"It's all under the water right now – and unless we do this analysis, we won't have an accurate picture of the threat," she says. "You won't have an answer to the question: How likely are these outside groups to recruit people in the US?"
For his part, Dahl agrees the line between failed plot – and Boston Marathon bombing – can be an exceedingly fine one. If the FBI had, perhaps because of tracking past failed plot patterns – decided to investigated the elder Tsarnaev brother further, that too might have ended as another failed plot instead of a bombing that killed three and wounded hundreds.
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Boston Bombing Aftermath Showed First Responder Communications Problems
By Ted Gest — Monday, April 29th, 2013 'The John Jay College of Criminal Justice Crime & Justice News' / Washington, DC
As law enforcement sought the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the city's reliance on commercial cellular wireless carriers became an escalating problem, with major crashes in the bombing's aftermath, reports Stateline.
"I called Comcast and asked them to open up the Xfinity Wi-Fi in Watertown," said Boston Chief Information Officer Donald Denning. The investigation demonstrated how first responders need to be able to share high volumes of data securely with partners in other law enforcement agencies.
Denning said the city's reliance on the capacity of commercial carriers reinforced the need for a dedicated national public safety broadband network now in its planning stage. Suzanne Spaulding, deputy undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged there were other communications failures during the response to the bombings. "Significant problems really arose [ ] with that essential delivery of big data packages, particularly the videos that proved to be so significant and important in the resolution of this event."
She said the challenges experienced in Boston are the issues FirstNet, the independent authority that will design, build, and operate the new network, is supposed to address.
State and local governments must continue paying for existing "land mobile radio" systems until broadband-based voice functions have been fully developed and proved reliable. The U.S. Government Accountability Office says that may take a decade or more.
To read the full Pew Stateline report, go to:
http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/after-boston-bombings-a-failure-of-communications-85899471750
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Mike Bosak
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