The (Very) Earthly Pursuits of Rev. Calvin O. Butts III (The Villiage Voice) and Other Sunday, April 21st, 2013 NYC Police Related News Articles

 

Sunday, April 21st, 2013 — Good Morning, Stay Safe

 

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It All on the Level  /  Harlem Political Sleaze & Domestic Violence

NYPD's New ‘Chief of Department’ Phillip Banks and the Rev. Calvin Butts

 

The (Very) Earthly Pursuits of Rev. Calvin O. Butts III

By Graham Rayman — Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 (April 17 - April 23 Issue)  ‘The Villiage Voice’ / Manhattan

 

Excerpt; desired to read the article in its entirety, go to:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-04-17/news/the-very-earthly-pursuits-of-calvin-o-butts-iii/full/

 

 

Securing Wright's new job at United Way NYC wasn't Butts's last favor for his protégée. On the evening of Jan. 5 the reverend made calls to a top police official on her behalf after she was arrested for assaulting her husband, Gregg Walker.

 

It was actually Walker, a senior vice president with Sony, who had first called Harlem's 30th Precinct that night, to report his wife for the alleged assault. Wright filed a cross-complaint against Walker and, while she was detained, her mother made calls to a range of influential New Yorkers, including Butts, who called then-New York Police Department Chief of Community Affairs Phillip Banks. Banks, who was recently promoted to chief of department, the No. 3 official in the whole NYPD, is the brother of David Banks, the founder of the Eagle Academy Foundation, the creator of Mayor Bloomberg's Young Men's Initiative, and a close friend of Wright's.

 

After those calls, the charge against Wright was dropped the same night. The charge against Walker, however, was allowed to stand. Walker has pleaded not guilty and the case is still pending. Neither Walker nor his attorney would comment for this article, but people close to Walker believe pressure was brought to get the charge against Wright dropped.

 

Alert: ‘Browne Poo’  Fatty McFibber Goes Into Overdrive on Damage Control

 

Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, a police spokesman, denied that Banks intervened in the arrest. "He was, however, contacted by the Reverend Calvin Butts and other clergy asking—not that the woman's arrest be voided—but that her arrest processing be expedited," Browne said. "Chief Banks was subsequently informed that the woman's arrest had been voided."

 

But the next morning, Jan. 6, Wright was arrested again. She had allegedly drilled through the lock on Walker's 68-year-old mother's door and attacked her, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Manhattan District Attorney's office. Walker's mother alleges that Wright slapped her in the face, scratched her arm, and pushed her. Misdemeanor counts of harassment and attempted assault against Wright are still pending. She has pleaded not guilty.

 

A police source questioned why 30th Precinct cops took Wright's word in the dispute with Walker: "Normally, the one who makes the initial report has greater credibility." As for Banks's role, the source says that even if he had merely inquired about the arrest and done nothing else, the precinct would have taken that as a signal. "Everyone reads between the lines," the source says. "It's a form of influence-peddling."

 

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Much to Do About Nothing

 

NYPD ‘red’ light
NYPD warns officers on bias against redheaded colleagues

By BRAD HAMILTON and CANDICE M. GIOVE — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Post’

 

 

NYPD supervisors have been put on red alert: Don’t discriminate against carrot-top cops!

 

An anti-bias message went out this month to Manhattan sergeants and lieutenants, who were told that redhead harassment would not be tolerated.

 

“We’re apparently victims now,” said one cop with ginger locks. “We’re protected from discrimination.”

 

No lawsuit has been filed against the city, but the feds say a claim alleging unfair treatment over red hair would be supported by federal law, which bars workplace bias against applicants and employees based on race, national origin, skin color, religion, sex or disability.

 

Red hair qualifies because people with that color are found in higher numbers in Britain and Ireland than elsewhere, according to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

 

Experts say it’s 13 percent in Scotland and less than 1 percent in most countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

 

“It’s an innocuous-seeming criteria, but if it has a ‘disparate impact’ on a certain racial group, red hair could be considered the basis of discrimination,” said Justine Lisser of the EEOC in Washington, DC.

 

The NYPD has one of the most racially and culturally diverse workforces in the country, but includes a large percentage of officers of Irish descent.

 

Some claim they’ve endured years of ridicule over their hair color.

 

One retired cop told The Post that he was constantly roughed up as a kid and called a “red-headed devil.”

 

“You get abuse every day when your hair is red,” he said. “You get beaten and chased. You better learn how to fight.”

 

The issue is a hot topic in Britain, where model Lily Cole, who sports cinnamon curls, blasted teachers for allowing bullying to go on “because there isn’t a stigma around it.”

 

Still, some shrugged off any need to protect the NYPD’s ginger set.

 

A retired Irish-American cop who was one of two redheads at his Brooklyn precinct enjoyed the good-natured jabs he exchanged with fellow officers, who were mostly of Italian descent.

 

“I never felt I was a minority,” he said.

 

“To put redheads in a protective class — that’s ridiculous!” said a retired officer who was often called “Carrot Top.”

 

“Toughen up.”

 

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Staten Island

 

NYPD's top uniform cop visits Staten Island to discuss stop, question and frisk

By Deborah Young  — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The Staten Island Advance’ / Staten Island

 

 

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A former police officer who is now a teacher and the chairwoman for youth services of Community Board 1, Marilyn Brown would seem unlikely to arouse the suspicion of law enforcement. But even Ms. Brown, of Silver Lake, has a story about a time police stopped her to ask her a few questions.

 

"I too have been stopped. I was mistreated, and I was thinking, what happens if you don't know the protocols, you don't know how to stay calm," said Ms. Brown, during a frank and open conversation Saturday with Chief of Department Philip Banks III, the NYPD's top uniformed cop at Olivet Presbyterian Church, West Brighton. "But overall, I know this isn't the whole force; every organization is going to have a few bad apples."

 

Ms. Brown was among about two dozen in attendance for the informal chat with Chief Banks, during which Staten Islanders weighed in on the New York Police Department's controversial stop, question and frisk policy and shared ideas about how to strengthen the relationship between the police and the community.

 

 

The forum sponsored by the Eye Openers Youth Against Violence brought out neighborhood teens as well as activists and leaders, more than a few of whom described unpleasant brushes with police officers in the streets.

 

"I have conducted a lot of stop, question and frisk in my day, always within the guidelines of the constitution, and carried out with respect," said Banks, describing an incident that happened to him years ago when he was stopped and treated badly by a police officer.  "That's one of the things we have to address. I tell the officers, when you stop somebody, put your mother's your brother's face on that person and treat them with that respect."

 

Banks stalwartly defended the policy currently under scrutiny in a federal lawsuit. Even so, he conceded there are ways to make it more palatable to city dwellers -- particularly black and Latino young people living in high-crime areas, who statistics show have a far higher likelihood of being stopped and questioned by officers.

 

"I see the officers coming to work, and they look like you. They're hats are backwards and their pants are hanging, and they are talking to each other like 'yo,'" said Banks, who reminded those gathered that 53 percent of police officers are black, Latino or another minority. "When they put the uniform on. I see the transformation right away, and maybe it's too much. The problem we're having is cops and kids don't know each other."

 

That is the crux of the issue agreed Helen Settles, a board member of Project Hospitality and Advance Woman of Achievement who waxed about a time in Stapleton when the local beat cop knew everybody's name.

 

"Now you get them, and they're walking in clumps like they're scared of their own shadows," said Settles, who asked the Chief to return cops to the street, while others also pressed for more Spanish-speaking officers to be assigned to the borough

 

With about 7,000 fewer officers available to walk the beat than in the force's heyday, there is a need to do more with less, said Banks.

 

But improving relationship is a two-way street, and community members need to step forward rather than stepping back from officers, he insisted.

 

"In certain communities - and I understand this because I am from that community - we tend to complain behind closed doors because we have lost faith in the system," said Chief Banks, dressed in casual civilian clothes of a green sweater, slacks and dress shoes. "The small amount of officers who don't do the right thing have cast a negative shadow in those neighborhoods."

 

To combat the pervasive feeling of misunderstanding he encouraged those gathered to make it a point to say "hello" when they see cops in their neighborhood, and to keep at it, even if they do not get a response at first.

 

"Try this," he said to those gathered. "We can make Staten Island a first in the city."

 

Banks also urged people to get the word out about doing "ride alongs" with police officers. Taking a spin on a tour of duty gives civilians a sense of what it feels like to be wearing the blue uniform, and also helps officers get a fresh perspective on what they see. Signing up for a tour is as easy as going on the Community Affairs part of the NYPD website or calling 212-343-3678.

 

The Chief also pledged to support a reinvigorated Police Explorers program on Staten Island -- the program offers young people an experience similar to scouting, but with a law enforcement emphasis.

 

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120 Precinct Holding Cell Suicide

 

Arrestee Found Hanged In Staten Island Police Station Lockup

By Unnamed Author(s) (CBS News - New York)  —  Saturday, April 20th, 2013; 3:08 p.m. EDT

 

 

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A man was found hanged in his jail cell this week, after being arrested when police caught him sleeping in a restaurant on Staten Island.

 

Police were dispatched around 10:45 p.m. this past Thursday to the restaurant at 1005 Castleton Ave. in the West New Brighton section of Staten Island. The El Tenampa Deli and Restaurant is located at the address.

 

The man was arrested for criminal trespass and resisting arrest, and taken to the 120th Precinct police station, at 78 Richmond Ter. on Staten Island, for processing.

 

Around 3:16 a.m. Friday, the suspect – a 57-year-old man – was found hanging from a belt in his cell at the police station lockup, police said.

 

The unidentified man was taken to Richmond University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

 

The NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau has launched an investigation into the man’s death.

 

The New York City Medical Examiner’s office was to conduct an autopsy. Information about the autopsy was not immediately available Saturday.

 

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Westchester

 

Cornel West stirs White Plains crowd on police controversies

By Rob Ryser  — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The Journal News’ / White Plains, NY

 

 

WHITE PLAINS — With all the fire of a Sunday sermon and all the charge of a street rally, speakers brought a capacity church crowd to its feet multiple times Saturday in solidarity with families who have lost loved ones to controversial police actions.

 

More than 300 people packed the sanctuary of Mount Hope AME Zion Church overlooking Lake Street to hear charismatic scholar and philosopher Cornel West deliver a keynote speech about standing up for justice.

 

“Hatred is a coward’s revenge, and we don’t want to be cowardly,” an animated West told the crowd. “We need to be courageous. We need to be maladjusted to injustice.”

 

The crowd also gave standing ovations to Yusef Salaam, one of the now-exonerated men who served prison time for the 1989 Central Park rape case, and for Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., the son of a 68-year-old man who was shot to death in his apartment by White Plains police in 2011.

 

“The last image I have is my father looking at me with his eyes wide open, his tongue hanging out of his mouth and a bullet wound,” said Chamberlain, whose family has filed a $21 million federal lawsuit. “We have to understand who has the power. We have the power.”

 

The 90-minute event was moderated by the Rev. Odinga Lawrence Maddox, the pastor of Mount Hope, and the co-chair of the Westchester Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Nonviolence.

 

“This is a young man who is fighting for the honor and good name of his father, who was lynched by the White Plains Police Department,” Maddox told the crowd. “Anytime you take the life of someone without giving them due process, ‘lynch’ is a proper term.”

 

White Plains police went to the apartment of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. when his medical alert accidentally went off.

 

An officer accused of using the N-word as the situation escalated has been suspended without pay and is facing department charges that could result in his dismissal.

 

A Westchester grand jury did not indict any of the officers involved in the fatal shooting, but the U.S. Attorney General’s office has met twice since the verdict with the Chamberlain family.

 

A police union official who was not at the meeting said the characterizations of police were unfair.

 

“I support my members who were involved,” said Robert Riley, president of the White Plains Police Benevolent Association. “It was a terrible tragedy, and I feel sorry for the Chamberlain family for their loss, but it went to a grand jury and my members were cleared.”

 

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New Jersey

 

Promotions, raises mark launch of new Camden police force

By Claudia Vargas and Darran Simon — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The Philadelphia Inquirer’ / Philadelphia, PA

(Edited for brevity and generic law enforcement pertinence) 

 

 

The dignitaries had said their pieces by the time Joseph L. Williams, a new deputy chief in the Camden County Police Department, stepped to the lectern this month during a news conference showcasing hires on the new force.

 

Williams, who was a sergeant with the city police, joined the county department that is to replace the city force by April 30.

 

"This is an exciting, historic day for me, being one of the first employees starting up this new county metro division," the 20-year veteran said.

 

As the county force takes shape and its officers begin to hit the streets of Camden, there are new faces in uniform from suburban towns - and old ones like Williams, and current city Police Chief Scott Thomson, who will remain in charge.

 

Personnel details obtained by The Inquirer from the county indicate that a substantial portion of the new force will be familiar to Camden residents: Nearly 100 of the first 260 hires of the new county force are former veterans of the city Police Department.

 

The records also provide the first glimpse of what a one-year state civil-service waiver has enabled the county to do:

 

Several supervisory personnel have been quickly bumped up in rank, along with their salaries. Williams, hired as a lieutenant, skipped over the rank of captain to become deputy chief - a move questioned by the city superior officers' union but defended by the consultant who has helped organize the new force.

 

Williams is among former city officers who were demoted and whose incomes were cut two years ago by the violence-torn but cash-strapped city as it tried to trim costs.

 

He is among nearly a dozen who will see increases from their most recent salaries - as much as $20,000 for some, and more than $40,000 in Williams' case, to $145,000.

 

Thomson will get a nearly $7,000 raise, to $160,000.

 

"Salaries needed to be competitive and commensurate with other like departments in order to attract talented law enforcement officers to this department," county spokesman Dan Keashen said.

 

The county Police Department became official Jan. 17, when the Camden County Board of Freeholders voted to establish it. Officials have set an April 30 deadline for dismantling the present city force.

 

As yet undetermined is how much the city will have to pay for the services of the county force's so-called metro division, as well as what kind of long-term commitment the state will make so that Camden can afford to pay.

 

Shared services and financial agreements among the city, county, and state are still being negotiated, Keashen said late last week.

 

For this fiscal year, ending in June, the state provided $102 million in aid to Camden, nearly 70 percent of its budget.

 

County and city leaders argued for the new force in part because it would enable them to shed generous police contracts and eliminate extras, such as shift differentials, saving about $20 million. The savings, they have said, will let them raise the larger 400-member county force.

 

Several supervising officers have received promotions as the new force begins operation.

 

For example, Gabriel Camacho, who was demoted from sergeant to detective during the 2011 layoffs, has been promoted to lieutenant. His base salary jumps from $84,201 to $104,070, records show.

 

David Suarez and Deiter Tunstall, who were sergeants, skipped over lieutenant and became captain, the rank below deputy chief. The salary for each is listed as $118,232, at least a $15,000 raise for each.

 

Under the waiver from a variety of civil-service guidelines, the county is exempt from the requirement that officers pass promotional tests.

 

But candidates still must satisfy the minimum job requirements for promotions. Thus, a candidate for lieutenant must have two years of supervisory experience as a sergeant.

 

Joe Cordero, (Ret. NYPD Inspector)  the consultant who designed the new force, said all those who have been promoted have more than satisfied the minimum requirements.

 

"The people whom we put into supervisory roles and leadership positions are the ones that we believe, based upon the evidence before us, are the most suited to lead this organization," he said.

 

Christopher Gray, labor lawyer for the city superior officers' union, said that under civil-service rules, officers may be promoted only in order of rank and must serve at least a year in that rank to be able to take a promotional test.

 

He questioned whether the county could promote Williams to deputy chief, skipping several ranks, even under the waiver.

 

Williams could not be reached, and Keashen declined to comment on specific promotions.

 

A spokesman for the Civil Service Commission declined to clarify the promotions process under the exemption.

 

John Williamson, president of Camden's Fraternal Order of Police, which represents the current rank-and-file officers, said the waiver paves the way for abuse.

 

"On the surface, it appears that a lot of people have been rewarded for their loyalty and support of the plan," he said. "That's why civil service is important, because it mitigates political favors and cronyism."

 

Williamson also questioned how the county can afford raises when officials have said the city Police Department's costs were unsustainable.

 

Cordero said the new salaries don't have any hidden extras.

 

"What you see is what you get," he said.

 

The current salaries, including overtime, and new vehicles and other equipment are temporarily being paid for from more than $7 million the state has provided in start-up funding.

 

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U.S.A.

 

Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Times’ Editorial:

 

The Right to Remain Silent    (Miranda:  Non-Terrorist Related)

 

 

Under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, no one can be compelled to be a witness against himself in a criminal case. The prosecution cannot use a defendant’s decision not to testify in court as evidence of guilt. Nor, as a result of the landmark Miranda case, can it use as evidence of guilt a suspect’s decision to remain silent after being arrested.

 

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Salinas v. Texas about whether the right to silence long applied to trials and police interrogations after arrests should now be extended to suspects before they are arrested and given Miranda warnings. The justices should say yes.

 

Before Genovevo Salinas was charged with murder in Texas, he voluntarily went with police officers for questioning. He answered questions for an hour, but he fell silent rather than answer a key question: whether shotgun shells found at the crime scene would match a shotgun found at his home.

 

At his trial, the prosecutor called Mr. Salinas’s refusal to answer “a very important piece of evidence.” Mr. Salinas was convicted of murder in a county court. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction, saying the prosecutor’s damaging remark was acceptable. The police had not required Mr. Salinas to talk, the court said, so the Fifth Amendment’s protection against forced self-incrimination was “irrelevant.”

 

But what that means is that if a suspect does not answer every question from the police during an interrogation before he is arrested, the prosecution can use that silence against him in court. “That is such a radical position, that silence is an admission of guilt,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during oral argument.

 

That position gives police officers too much leverage to coerce or cajole a suspect into answering their questions — to compel incriminating testimony in direct contradiction of the Fifth Amendment — or, just as bad, into making a false confession when he is innocent.

 

There is disagreement among lower courts about this vital issue, some agreeing with Justice Sotomayor, some not. Mr. Salinas’s lawyer said the disagreement was intractable and must be resolved by the Supreme Court. So it should — in favor of the idea that a prosecutor may not use a suspect’s silence during an interrogation before his arrest as evidence of guilt.

 

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Manhunts Appear to Be the New Car Chases
The search for the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing showcased an increasingly troubling hunger in our society for the thrill of pursuit rather than the process of justice.

By Uzma Kolsy — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The Atlantic’  / Washington, DC

 

 

In 2003, Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton and other city officials made a peculiar public appeal to journalists in Southern California: stop splattering TV screens with an incessant string of live images of car chases. They alleged that oversaturated coverage was dangerous, drew attention seekers to provoke a chase, and put gawkers' safety at risk. But in a city where police pursuits were all the rage and generated huge ratings, the appeal was roundly dismissed by shrewd media executives.

 

Reporters in Los Angeles were keenly attuned to what their consumers wanted, and they weren't going to pull the plug on it anytime soon. Continuous aerial coverage of a swarm of police cars tailing a lone rebel provided the evening news with a glamorous edge that captivated viewers in Hollywood's backyard. Pepper in a little gunfire, a car accident, and maybe even a high profile pursuant and you had Nielsen gold.

 

Our insatiable appetite for a stirring police pursuit, riddled with dramatic obstacles, persists today. What became evident in yesterday's pervasive, engrossing coverage of the Boston bomber's manhunt, is that we have unearthed this decade's car chase.

 

As media has expanded to include newer mediums and more platforms, we have become more ravenous for news with a soaring thrill factor. In 1994, over 20 helicopters followed the LAPD's titillating chase of OJ Simpson in his iconic white Ford Bronco. The cavalcade garnered over 95 million viewers nationwide, even luring spectators to stand at freeway overpasses to wait for the procession to pass under. The celebrity chase ended peacefully, but gave rise to the enthralling appeal of tracking police pursuits as they unfold. In the years that followed, chases that drew media attention were often over an hour long, featured havoc and bloodshed, sometimes involved violent accidents, and on occasion ended in a harrowing suicide.

 

Earlier this year, when the LAPD hounded Christopher Dorner, we witnessed how manhunts have trumped the notorious police car chase. The gripping standoff resulted in record breaking ratings surges for local LA TV stations, and even cable networks raked in millions of views in their coverage of the confrontation. The Dorner manhunt however, was far more grim and gruesome than the sensational, action-packed car chase sequences that characterized the '90s and early 2000s, and the fact that viewers remained glued to their TV and computer screens indicates a devolution in our obsession with real life crime drama. News networks feed viewers pulsing images of violence as if it were grief pornography, providing lifeblood to the human impulse that thrives off that stimulation. The showdown between the LAPD and Dorner brimmed with elements of movie magic intrigue- obscenities made it on-air along with sounds of gunfire, the scene ending with Dorner trapped inside a cabin engulfed in flames.

 

But the Dorner manhunt doesn't hold a candle to the ferocious pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. The immersive live coverage followed the progress from the moment the first surveillance images were released, to the fiery shootout and hurling of explosives that caused the death of a police officer and the first suspect and the lockdown of an entire metropolis, and ultimately to the victory in the nabbing of a bloody second suspect. In a post 9/11 world, with suspects who happen to be Muslim, there couldn't have been a more evocative scene or a more perfect criminal. News stations, who had been tripping all over themselves to stay abreast of the situation, schlepped in huge ratings for their live coverage. Social media was ablaze with live updates serving up information (and at times, misinformation) about the hunt to those frantically searching for it. In the wake of a horrific tragedy where innocent civilians died and dozens were brutally and senselessly injured, the eyes of a nation were transfixed on a riveting, grimy, unnervingly real, manhunt.

 

Our persisting fascination with the pursuit and capture of alleged criminals is increasingly unsettling as it has evolved from chase to hunt. Just as wide-eyed onlookers watched Simpson's SUV race by, crowds erupted in cheer as a limp and wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested. Ten years ago in Los Angeles, some experts speculated that excessive media attention on pursuits could be a good thing -- the spotlight could ensure accountability and police officers would be less inclined to rough up a suspect after a pursuit. Today however, even as cell phone to TV cameras follow law enforcement's every move, "roughing up" a suspect is sometimes lauded in the context of the black and white dichotomy we've projected on these manhunts. President Obama's vow that, "Yes, we'll find you and, yes, you will find justice and we'll hold you accountable," whet our appetite in seeing that these men were delivered retribution, however it was served.

 

Absorbed by the gory mayhem that ensued in Boston, we have glorified violence and death when it is inflicted on a suspected terrorist. The Boston PD are no doubt heroes in gallantly working to protect the city, just as sure as those responsible for the heinous crime should undeniably be held accountable. But as consumers of news, our desperate search for closure and clarity has hindered our ability to discern between fact and fiction. The two men tracked and discovered by authorities are suspects whose guilt has not yet been established in a court of law. So while the death of Suspect 1 brought mollifying relief to many, it's important to remember that shots fired by the police -- even in self-defense -- do not amount to justice. In the case of the Boston manhunt, once the media spotlight wanes and time has afforded us the ability to reflect, we must examine what complexities we may have sacrificed by reducing this story to a 'Boston manhunt.'

 

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Cincinnati, Ohio

 

It'll be just the basics for downsized police force
Planned layoffs could mean a department with least number of officers in almost 60 years

By Jane Prendergast — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The Cincinnati Enquirer’ / Cincinnati, OH

(Edited for brevity and generic law enforcement pertinence) 

 

 

Note on staffing totals: The Cincinnati Police Department doesn’t keep logs of staffing by year. Sgt. Louise Shields, supervisor of the personnel section, found some numbers in monthly staffing reports. The numbers also vary a lot, depending upon retirements, other departures and the timing of recruit classes.

 

If 149 Cincinnati police officers get laid off this summer, as the city currently plans, the department will be smaller than it has been in almost 60 years.

 

For people who live, work and visit Cincinnati, that could mean the city focuses only on the basic service police officers provide – responding to 911 calls. That’s the one thing officers can’t stop doing.

 

The rest, like organizing prostitution stings and special targeted drug busts, experts caution, could disappear. Investigations could take longer if detectives move back to the street.

 

Just three years ago, the force had 1,135 officers; since then attrition – no new recruit classes and positions’ going unfilled – has cut the force to 969. The latest proposed cuts would reduce it another 15 percent, to 820.

 

That’s the equivalent of closing one of the city’s five police districts. District 3, for example, which covers the West Side, has 160 officers and is the city’s busiest.

 

After the cut, Cincinnati would employ 2.8 police officers for every 1,000 residents, about the same as similar-sized Pittsburgh, where the ratio is 2.9 officers to 1,000 residents. Now, with 969 officers, Cincinnati’s number is 3.3.

 

Cincinnati’s ratio would still be higher than in these other cities: Columbus and Dayton, both at 2.3; Akron, 2. Cleveland’s is higher, at 3.9.

 

City budget experts are trying to whittle down the layoff number. But they can’t go so far as to have the saved salaries outweighed by the payout of accrued vacation and other time saved. The accrual payout for the 149 is estimated at $10 million.

 

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Homeland Security

 

Bombing Inquiry Turns to Motive and Russian Trip

By ERIC SCHMITT, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and ELLEN BARRY — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Times’

 

 

WASHINGTON — With one suspect dead and the other captured and lying grievously wounded in a hospital, the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings turned on Saturday to questions about the men’s motives, and to the significance of an overseas trip one of them took last year.

 

Federal investigators are hurrying to review a visit that one of the suspected bombers made to Chechnya and Dagestan, predominantly Muslim republics in the north Caucasus region of Russia. Both have active militant separatist movements. Members of Congress expressed concern about the F.B.I.’s handling of a request from Russia before the trip to examine the man’s possible links to extremist groups in the region.

 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died early Friday after a shootout with the police in Watertown, Mass., spent six months in Dagestan in 2012, and analysts said that sojourn might have marked a crucial step in his alleged path toward the bombings.

 

Kevin R. Brock, a former senior F.B.I. and counterterrorism official, said, “It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”

 

The investigators began scrutinizing the events in the months and years before the fatal attack, as Boston began to feel like itself for the first time in nearly a week.

 

On Monday, the twin bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded more than 170. The tense days that followed culminated in Friday’s lockdown of the entire region as the police searched for Mr. Tsarnaev’s younger brother from suburban backyards to an Amtrak train bound for New York City.

 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody Friday night after he was found, bloody and weakened, hiding on a boat in a driveway in Watertown. He was still too wounded to speak on Saturday, said Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. Special counterterrorism agents trained in interrogating high-value detainees were waiting to question him, according to a law enforcement official. An issue arose about the administration’s decision to question him for a period without giving him a Miranda warning, under an exception for questions about immediate threats to public safety.

 

The brothers’ motives are still unclear. Of Chechen heritage, they had lived in the United States for years, according to friends and relatives, and no direct ties have been publicly established with known Chechen terrorist or separatist groups. While Dzhokhar became a naturalized American citizen last year, Tamerlan was still seeking citizenship. Their father, Anzor, said Tamerlan had made last year’s trip to renew his Russian passport.

 

The significance of the trip was magnified late Friday when the F.B.I. disclosed in a statement that in 2011 “a foreign government” — now acknowledged by officials to be Russia — asked for information about Tamerlan. The request was “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 for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

 

The senior law enforcement official said the Russians feared he could be a risk, and “they had something on him and were concerned about him, and him traveling to their region.” Chechen extremists pose a greater threat to Russia than they do to the United States, counterterrorism specialists say, though some of the groups have had ties to Al Qaeda.

 

But the F.B.I. never followed up on Tamerlan once he returned, a senior law enforcement official acknowledged on Saturday, adding that its investigation did not turn up anything and it did not have the legal authority to keep tabs on him. Investigators are now scrambling to review that trip, and learn about any extremists who might have influenced, trained or directed Tamerlan while he was there.

 

President Obama and Republican lawmakers devoted their weekly broadcast addresses to the Boston attack, with both sides finding a common voice. Mr. Obama also met with his national security team for an update on the investigation.

 

“Americans refuse to be terrorized,” Mr. Obama said. “Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week.”

 

Since 1994, Russia and the United States have routinely exchanged requests for background information on residents traveling between the two countries on visa, criminal or terrorism issues.

 

The F.B.I. responded to the request in 2011 by checking “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,” it said in a statement.

 

In January 2011, two counterterrorism agents from the bureau’s Boston field office interviewed Tamerlan and family members, a senior law enforcement official said on Saturday. According to the F.B.I.’s statement, “The F.B.I. did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign,” and conveyed those findings to “the foreign government” by the summer of 2011.

 

Federal officials said on Saturday that the Department of Homeland Security, however, had decided not to grant a petition from Tamerlan for United States citizenship after officials found a record in his files that he had been interviewed by the F.B.I. His petition was held for further review.

 

As the law enforcement official put it, “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory.”

 

The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti quoted the father of the Tsarnaev brothers recalling the F.B.I.’s close questioning of his elder son, “two or three times.” He said they had told his son that the questioning “is prophylactic, so that no one sets off bombs on the streets of Boston.”

 

In an interview in Russia, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two men, said that the agents had told her that Tamerlan was “an excellent boy,” but “at the same time, they told me he is getting information from really extremist sites, and they are afraid of him.”

 

After Tamerlan’s visit to Dagestan and Chechnya, signs of alienation emerged. One month after he returned to the United States, a YouTube page that appeared to belong to him was created and featured multiple jihadist videos that he had endorsed in the past six months. One video featured the preaching of Abdul al-Hamid al-Juhani, an important ideologue in Chechnya; another focused on Feiz Mohammad, an extremist Salafi Lebanese preacher based in Australia. He also created a playlist of songs by a Russian musical artist, Timur Mucuraev, one of which promoted jihad, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors statements by jihadists.

 

The Boston bombings have led to increased cooperation between Washington and Moscow, a jarring shift coming amid weeks of rancor over American criticism of Russia’s human rights record. Presidents Obama and Vladimir V. Putin spoke by telephone late Friday night, in a conversation initiated by the Russian side, the Kremlin announced. The Kremlin’s statement said both leaders expressed “the building of close coordination between Russian and American intelligence services in the battle with global terrorism.”

 

Nevertheless, there were glaring questions about the case, among them how Tamerlan had escaped scrutiny.

 

A Russian intelligence official told the Interfax news service on Saturday that Russia had not been able to provide the United States with “operatively significant” information about the Tsarnaev brothers, “because the Tsarnaev brothers had not been living in Russia.”

 

Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who specializes in Russia’s security services, said he believed that Tamerlan might have attracted the attention of Russian intelligence because of the video clips he had posted under his own name, some of which were included on a list of banned materials by the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B.

 

On Saturday morning, federal prosecutors were drafting a criminal complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was wounded in the leg and neck.

 

An official said the criminal complaint would most likely include a constellation of charges stemming from both the bombings and the shooting, possibly including the use of weapons of mass destruction, an applicable charge for the detonation of a bomb. That charge, the official said, carries a maximum penalty of death. Though Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, federal law allows it.

 

The F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies continued on Saturday to gather evidence recovered from the suspects’ home and the cars they used. Investigators found five pipe bombs and three grenades after the firefight Friday, and they were seeking to identify the origins of the explosives.

 

Agents fanned out to interview family members and others who knew the brothers to determine any motive, as well as clues about what or who radicalized them. Three Kazakh citizens who were acquainted with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev contacted the Kazakh Embassy in Washington, reporting that they had been questioned by the F.B.I. and asking for consular assistance, said Ilyas T. Omarov, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. None of the three were held, he said.

 

Muslim leaders in many cities rushed to hold news conferences and preach sermons at mosques denouncing the bombing suspects, mourning the victims and praising the response of law enforcement and the community in Boston. They were eager to dissociate their faith from the Muslim suspects, and to head off a backlash against Muslims in the United States.

 

Anzor Tsarnaev and his younger son first came to the United States legally in April 2002 on 90-day tourist visas, federal law enforcement officials said. Once in this country, the father applied for political asylum, claiming he feared deadly persecution based on his ties to Chechnya. Dzhokhar, who was 8, applied for asylum under his father’s petition, the officials said.

 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to the United States later, and applied for American citizenship on Sept. 5 last year, federal law enforcement officials said.

 

Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt reported from Washington, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Reporting was contributed by John Schwartz and Julia Preston from New York; Andrew Roth and David M. Herszenhorn from Makhachkala, Dagestan; Peter Baker from Washington; and C. J. Chivers from the United States.

 

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Legal Questions Riddle Boston Marathon Case

By ETHAN BRONNER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Times’

 

 

The capture of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect raises a host of freighted legal issues for a society still feeling the shadow of Sept. 11, including whether he should be read a Miranda warning, how he should be charged, where he might be tried and whether the bombings on Boylston Street last Monday were a crime or an act of war.

 

The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was taken, bleeding, to a hospital on Friday night, and it remained unclear on Saturday whether he was conscious.

 

The authorities would typically arraign a suspect in a courtroom by Monday, a process that involves his being represented by a lawyer.

 

Most experts expected the case to be handled by the federal authorities, who were preparing a criminal complaint, including the use of weapons of mass destruction, which can carry the death penalty because deaths resulted from the blasts.

 

The decision to seek the death penalty must be made by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Under federal law, prosecutors must go through what is known within the Justice Department as a death-penalty protocol, under which the United States Attorney’s Office and Justice Department lawyers in Washington analyze all aspects of the crime, as well as the defendant’s background, criminal history and other characteristics.

 

“I think we can expect the prosecution to put together a meticulous case based on the forensic evidence, the videos, eyewitness testimony and any statements that the surviving defendant makes to the authorities,” said Kelly T. Currie, who led the Violent Crimes and Terrorism section in the Brooklyn United States Attorney’s Office from 2006 to 2008, where he supervised a number of terrorism prosecutions.

 

“I would think it’s going to be a very strong case, and ultimately all the pieces put together are cumulatively going to show a pretty full mosaic of this defendant’s actions leading up to the attack and in its wake,” Mr. Currie said.

 

Massachusetts has no death penalty, so a defense attorney in this case might seek to have the case tried in state court. State and county officials might also be eager to prosecute the defendant in the deaths of four of their residents.

 

President Obama described the attack that Mr. Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, were accused of committing as “terrorism.” Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed.

 

The administration has said it planned to begin questioning the younger Mr. Tsarnaev for a period without delivering the Miranda warning that he had a right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present.

 

Normally such a warning is necessary if prosecutors want to introduce statements made by a suspect in custody as evidence in court, but the administration said it was invoking an exception for questions about immediate threats to public safety. The Justice Department has pressed the view that in terrorism cases the length of time and type of questioning that fall under that exception is broader than what would be permissible in ordinary criminal cases, a view upheld by a federal judge in the case of the man convicted of trying to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009.

 

Civil libertarians have objected to the more aggressive interpretation of the exception to the Miranda rule, which protects the Constitutional right against involuntary self-incrimination. Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that it would be acceptable to withhold Miranda before asking whether there were any more bombs hidden in Boston, but that once the F.B.I. went into broader questioning, it must not “cut corners.”

 

But some prosecutors suggested that if any confession was unnecessary to convict him, then the F.B.I. might keep him talking without a warning without ultimately invoking the more disputed version of the public-safety exception to introduce it in court.

 

“I see a fairly strong case against this young man based on a great deal of evidence so, as a prosecutor, the top of my list would not be necessarily to Mirandize him and get a usable confession,” said David Raskin, a former federal prosecutor in terrorism cases in New York.

 

At the same time, some Republican senators, including John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, argued that using the criminal-justice system was a mistake and that Mr. Tsarnaev should instead be held indefinitely by the military as an “enemy combatant,” under the laws of war, and questioned without any Miranda warning or legal representation, in order to gain intelligence.

 

Still, there is not yet any public evidence suggesting that Mr. Tsarnaev was part of Al Qaeda or its associated forces — the specific enemy with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. And some legal specialists also doubted that the Constitution would permit holding a suspect like Mr. Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.

 

“This is an American citizen being tried for a crime that occurred domestically, and there is simply no way to treat him like an enemy combatant — not even close,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and seasoned defense lawyer.

 

Whether legal proceedings take place in state or federal court — and both could occur, one after the other — a defense lawyer for Mr. Tsarnaev could contend that a fair trial was impossible in the Boston area and seek to have it moved. The lawyer could argue that so many people in Boston were affected by the bombings that no objective jury could be empanelled. The trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber responsible for killing scores and injuring hundreds in 1995, was moved to Colorado.

 

On the other hand, witnesses and officials are all in the Boston area, and a trial that required them to travel extensively could be seen by a judge as an inappropriate burden on the community.

 

Based on statements by the authorities to date, the case against Mr. Tsarnaev appears relatively strong. The F.B.I. released videos showing him and his brother at the marathon in the area of the explosions, carrying backpacks like those that forensic tests indicated contained the pressure-cooker bombs that killed three and maimed scores. Boston’s top F.B.I. official said when the videos were released that Mr. Tsarnaev, then identified as Suspect 2, placed one bag at the site of the second explosion, outside the Forum restaurant, moments before the second blast.

 

Law-enforcement officials have also said the brothers admitted to the bombings — as well as to the killing on Thursday night of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer — to a man whose car they stole at gunpoint. There is, in addition, the possibility of testimony by one of the bombing victims, a man whose legs were blown off, who told the F.B.I. that he saw Tamerlan Tsarnaev place the other bomb.

 

Officers who exchanged gunfire with the brothers Friday morning would also be witnesses, and their testimony would most likely focus on the gun battle.

 

Thomas Anthony Durkin, a defense lawyer and former assistant United States attorney in Chicago, said he doubted that a fair trial could be had for Mr. Tsarnaev anywhere in the country, given the emotion around the case. In any case, he said, the primary goal of a defense lawyer would be “to save his life.”

 

To that end, he and others said, three factors would most likely be highlighted — Mr. Tsarnaev’s relative youth, at 19; the influence his older brother seems to have had on him; and his own impressive past of sports, friendships and academic performance.

 

Mr. Dershowitz, who said that any lawyer who took the case would become the most despised person in the country, agreed that a number of factors should play a role in preventing the death penalty. On the other hand, he noted, Mr. Tsarnaev is accused of putting down “a bag full of nails and bombs in front of an 8-year-old kid, and that will probably trump everything.”

 

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Debate Over Delaying of Miranda Warning

By CHARLIE SAVAGE — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Times’

 

 

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s announcement that it planned to question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present has revived a constitutionally charged debate over the handling of terrorism cases in the criminal justice system.

 

The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, a naturalized American citizen, remained hospitalized on Saturday for treatment of injuries sustained when he was captured by the police on Friday night, and it was not clear whether he had been questioned yet. But the administration’s effort to stretch a gap in the Miranda rule for questioning about immediate threats to public safety in this and other terrorism cases has alarmed advocates of individual rights.

 

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that for broader questioning, the F.B.I. must not “cut corners.”

 

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”

 

The Miranda warning comes from a 1966 case in which the Supreme Court held that, to protect against involuntary self-incrimination, if prosecutors want to use statements at a trial that a defendant made in custody, the police must first have advised him of his rights. The court later created an exception, allowing prosecutors to use statements made before any warning in response to questions about immediate threats to public safety, like where a gun is hidden.

 

The question applying those rules in terrorism cases arose after a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. After landing in Michigan, he was given painkillers for burns and confessed to a nurse. He also spoke freely to F.B.I. agents for 50 minutes before going into surgery.

 

After he awoke, the F.B.I. read Mr. Abdulmutallab the Miranda warning, and he stopped cooperating for several weeks.

 

Republicans portrayed the Obama administration’s handling of the case in the criminal justice system as endangering national security, setting the template for a recurring debate.

 

In late January 2010, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s family and lawyer persuaded him to start talking again, and he provided a wealth of further information about Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Later, during pretrial hearings, his lawyers asked a federal judge, Nancy G. Edmunds, to suppress the early statements.

 

But Judge Edmunds ruled that the statement to the nurse had been voluntary and lucid despite the painkillers, and that the 50-minute questioning was a “fully justified” use of the public safety exception. She declined to suppress the statements, and Mr. Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

 

By then, the Justice Department had sent the F.B.I. a policy memo urging agents, when questioning “operational terrorists,” to use a broad interpretation of the public safety exception. The memo asserted that giving the “magnitude and complexity” of terrorism cases, a lengthier delay is permissible, unlike ordinary criminal cases.

 

“Depending on the facts, such interrogation might include, for example, questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might post an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks,” it said.

 

Judge Edmunds’s ruling was seen by the administration as confirmation that its new policy was constitutional — and that it was neither necessary nor appropriate to put domestic cases in military hands.

 

Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, said the middle ground sought by the administration has put both the civil libertarian and national security conservative factions in a bind.

 

“This is the paradox of progressive national security law, which is how do you at once advocate for the ability of the civilian courts without accepting that some of that includes compromises that are problematic from a civil liberties perspective?” he said. “The paradox is just as true for the right, because they are ardent supporters of things like the public-safety exception, but its existence actually undermines the case for military commissions.”

 

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Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’ Editorial:

 

The right to remain alive
The FBI makes the smart decision and questions the Boston Marathon bomber without mirandizing him first

 

 

In accord with the wise principle that the U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact, the FBI has chosen to question Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev without first reading him the Miranda warnings about his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present.

 

Predictably, civil libertarians have risen up in protest against what they see as one more infringement on rights in the war on terror, not quite on the order of a drone strike against a citizen abroad, but getting there. Actually, the bureau has solid legal grounds for dispensing with Miranda and, practically speaking, should have no worries about the consequence.

 

At the other end of the political spectrum, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona have called for declaring Tsarnaev an enemy combatant and shipping him to Guantanamo Bay for trial before a military tribunal. While the idea is attractive, it’s also silly.

 

The Miranda warnings are designed to prevent police from squeezing confessions out of suspects in violation of their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. If a cop fails to mirandize a prisoner, the courts will bar prosecutors from using any statements as evidence.

 

But the authorities have leeway under a “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule. So said the Supreme Court in a 1984 case based in Queens. A woman told police that an armed and dangerous man had raped her. Cops found the man at a supermarket; he had a shoulder holster, but it was empty.

 

An officer handcuffed the suspect and — without mirandizing him — asked where the gun was. He gestured toward a stack of soap cartons. Cops found a loaded revolver. Lower courts threw the evidence out because Quarles hadn’t been read his rights. The high court reinstated the evidence.

 

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist declared: “we do not believe that the doctrinal underpinnings of Miranda require that it be applied in all its rigor to a situation in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety . . .”

 

“We conclude that the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination.”

 

Concern for public safety is crystal clear in Tsarnaev’s case. He and older brother Tamerlan built an arsenal of bombs, unleashed two at the marathon and detonated additional explosives while pursued by police.

 

Crucial questions of the moment for the wounded and hospitalized Tsarnaev are: How much more ordinance, if any, had they stockpiled, and were they working with accomplices. The lives that may be hanging in the balance far outweigh giving Tsarnaev what, under these circumstances, would be a meaningless introduction to the Bill of Rights.

 

The FBI already has proof beyond all doubt, not just beyond reasonable doubt, that Tsarnaev is guilty. Thus, clearly, agents will question him in the hope of averting more harm rather than to trick him into a confession.

 

On the other hand, in the extremely unlikely event that a court eventually found the FBI to have overstepped bounds, out would go Tsarnaev’s statements, and his rights would be fully vindicated as he went off to prison anyway.

 

That said, a decision to withhold Miranda is not taken lightly.

 

In 2001, during the administration of President George W. Bush, agents mirandized would-be jetliner shoe bomber Richard Reid four times over two days, starting immediately after his arrest. In 2009, the FBI made the opposite judgment and refrained from mirandizing attempted underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes after taking him into custody.

 

Speaking of the Miranda warnings, FBI Agent Timothy Waters explained as follows the proceedings that produced Abdulmutallab’s conviction and upheld the public safety exception:

 

“It stops the process dead in its tracks. I didn’t feel it was necessary . . . We needed information right now about individuals willing to martyr themselves on other airplanes.”

 

The same sound logic must now apply to Tsarnaev. As for sending him to Gitmo as an enemy combatant, that status is reserved by law for Al Qaeda-linked terrorists abroad.

 

A radicalized U.S. citizen, operating on U.S. soil with no known ties to Al Qaeda, simply does not qualify — except in the rhetoric of politicians playing for partisan gain.

 

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No immediate suggestion of accomplices in Boston bombings

By Tom Watkins  (CNN News)  —  Saturday, April 20th, 2013; 6:36 p.m. EDT

 

 

(CNN) -- Evidence uncovered so far supports the theory that the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings had no help, authorities said Saturday.

 

"From what I know right now, these two acted together and alone," Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau told CNN. "I think we have to be ever vigilant, and we're learning as we go along, but as far as this little cell -- this little group -- I think we got our guys."

 

Deveau said investigators were continuing to look into where Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, may have gotten the resources to amass the cache of weapons used in the bombings and afterward. "We have to figure that out," he said. "There's a lot more work to go."

 

But, asked whether Boston residents can rest easy, Deveau said, "We got our two guys."

 

Boston police shared their Watertown colleague's view. "The hunt is over," the department said in a tweet. "The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won."

 

But the suspects' father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said his sons were not the bombers.

 

"My kids never did anything -- that's it," he told CNN from the Russian republic of Dagestan, where he lives. "Never, ever."

 

President Barack Obama said the question remained open. "Why did these young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence? How did they plan and carry out these attacks? And did they receive any help? The families of those killed so senselessly deserve answers," he said Friday.

 

The question of whether others may have played a role in the blasts could affect the decision by federal authorities not to read Miranda rights to Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who was in serious condition Saturday in a Boston hospital.

 

The government is invoking the public safety exception, a designation that allows investigators to question Tsarnaev without reading him his Miranda rights, a Justice Department official told CNN on condition of anonymity.

 

In ordinary cases, suspects are told by police they have the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer.

 

But this is no ordinary case, according to U.S. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

 

They urged that Tsarnaev be held as an "enemy combatant."

 

"Now that the suspect is in custody, the last thing we should want is for him to remain silent. It is absolutely vital the suspect be questioned for intelligence gathering purposes," the senators said in a statement. "Under the law of war we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel."

 

Alan Dershowitz, a prominent defense attorney and Harvard law professor, scoffed at the statement.

 

"There's no way an American citizen committing a domestic crime in the city of Boston could be tried as an enemy combatant," he told CNN's Piers Morgan. "That shows absolute ignorance of the law."

 

Dershowitz cited statements made by Boston police as appearing to contradict the government's rationale for invoking the public safety exception.

 

"The police have said there's no public safety issue. It's solved; it's over," Dershowitz said. "There are no further threats. But the FBI is saying there's enough further threats to justify an exception."

 

But former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said state officials may not be privy to information regarding possible international threats that federal authorities may know about.

 

"You would have to know the internals of what they have before you can assess whether there is a sensible invocation or not," Giuliani said.

 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev appears to have become increasingly religious in the last three or four years, according to an analysis of his social media accounts and accounts from family members. But there was no immediate evidence of active association with international jihadist groups.

 

The only video Tsarnaev posted with a strongly jihadist theme appears to have been reposted on his YouTube page four months ago, about the "emergence of the black flags from the promised land of Khorasan." Khorasan is a reference by jihadis to parts of Afghanistan.

 

And the devices used in the attacks were rudimentary and could have been built by downloading instructions off the Internet, authorities said.

 

Still, the investigation is continuing. Whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev's return to Russia in the first half of 2012 changed his outlook is likely to be one of many avenues of inquiry. Before he left, the FBI had already -- at the request of an unidentified foreign government -- investigated possible links with militant groups, but discovered nothing suspicious.

 

A senior U.S. official told CNN it was Russia in 2011 that asked the FBI to look at Tamerlan Tsarnaev's activities.

 

The request was based on information that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a follower of radical Islam, the FBI said.

 

"I think unless we see some horrible dropping of the ball, I don't think this is an intelligence failure," said former CIA operative Robert Baer. "In retrospect, it might look like one, but I don't think it is."

 

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This Is the Modern Manhunt: The FBI, the Hive Mind and the Boston Bombers

By Spencer Ackerman — Saturday, April 20th, 2013; 4:00 p.m. ‘Wired.Com’

 

 

In an earlier era, law enforcement might not have identified the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing so rapidly.

 

When the smoke literally cleared on Monday, investigators had a huge problem and nearly no leads. No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the bombings that killed three and wounded more than 180. So they took a big leap: They copped to how little they knew, and embraced the wisdom of The Crowd.

 

Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited. Police, FBI, and the other investigators opted to let spectator surveillance supplement and augment their own. When they called for that imagery, locals flooded it in. They spoke to the public frequently, both in person and especially on Twitter. All that represented a modern twist on the age-old law enforcement maxim that the public’s eyes and ears are crucial investigative assets, as the Internet rapidly compressed the time it took for tips to arrive and get analyzed.

 

But the FBI and police have been reluctant to embrace what the hive mind can provide: it implies the authorities don’t always have the answers. Veteran law enforcement officers remember cases from the ’90s when the bureau clammed up to the public and local cops, at the expense of receiving greater public cooperation. “If law enforcement didn’t share any information — [as with bombers] Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski — if your intel is shared with no one, that is the consummate investigative challenge,” says Mike Rolince, a retired FBI special agent who set up Boston’s first Joint Terrorism Task Force.

 

-

 

As of this writing, police, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and state troopers are still combing the streets of Watertown, trying to find 19-year old University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth student Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. His older brother, Tameran, a former boxer, lies dead after a chaotic pre-dawn chase with police. But they might never have been identified so rapidly, the ex-investigators tell Danger Room, had investigators not decided that their best resource wasn’t in their own pockets. It was in everyone else’s.

 

“The great advantage here is the number of cameras out there,” Rolince says. “Without the cameras, I don’t know where we are.” The cameras were everywhere. It wasn’t just the surveillance cameras looming on the tops of buildings at Copley Square. Bostonians and out-of-towners who came to the Marathon, one of the most celebrated civic events in the city, pulled their phones out throughout the race to feed their Instagram addictions and keep their Flickr pages current. It would become a reminder that the public enthusiasm for documenting their lives can outpace even the vast surveillance apparatus of the government.

 

On Monday, the FBI-led investigation had little more than a crime scene, one that had just been trampled by thousands of people attempting to flee Copley Square after the twin bombs detonated. An intact, pristine crime scene is something investigators desperately want and too rarely find. “Twenty thousand people milling around screws it up,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Yet first responders very rapidly cleared the square of people.

 

The area was filled with clues. One of them would be crucial: the remnants of a dark backpack near the blast scene. The day after the bombing, FBI Special Agent in Charge Rick DesLauriers made a critical decision. He and his team called for “assistance from the public” to submit any and all types of media taken by Marathon spectators. The team set up a website for tip submissions. DesLauriers confessed that it would “take some time” for leads in the case to develop. DesLauriers might have wanted to level with the public, but the statement raised some anxieties that the investigation was far behind the curve.

 

If so, the call for public assistance helped get it over the hump. Within two days, DesLauriers received what he would describe as “thousands” of photos and videos, showing different vantage points of the Copley Square spectators. Once investigators arranged them by the time they were taken, they could piece together a mosaic of the scene, allowing them to check behavior they considered suspicious — and apply imaging tools to focus the accumulation of data.

 

Numerous law-enforcement sources were reluctant to get specific about those tools. (“We wouldn’t discuss this specific detail at this stage,” FBI spokesman Paul Bresson demurred.) But a former FBI technology official who didn’t want to be quoted by name cautioned that there isn’t a tech-intensive secret sauce behind the manhunt. Facial-recognition tools may be growing more advanced, but their limits are still on display: “If you don’t have a high-quality photo, you can’t use that,” the ex-official says. But there’s “all different types of [relevant] data — pixels, the cell tower data, any records that might exist.”

 

What agents can do instead is assemble the public’s pictures digitally and dig through them to find patterns of suspicious behavior — someone with a backpack; someone with a backpack who might be milling about; someone with a backpack who might be milling about in a certain pattern; all of which intersects with the scene of the blast. “Twenty years ago, we had to put a photo spread together using hands-on-pics, pasted together,” the ex-official says.

 

The actual secret sauce remains what it’s been for years: “blood, sweat and tears” of FBI investigators, Rolince says. “The most effective thing is put your eyes on it and review it.” The threat of a big-data problem is evident — the military confronts it every day, from terabytes of aerial surveillance data — but investigators “working backward” from the imagery of the crime scene at the time of the explosion are trained to focus on things they perceive as anomalous once the mosaic of what’s normal at the scene emerges from the crowd-provided images.

 

“Now the digital technology allows us to disseminate that stuff much more rapidly and efficiently,” the ex-FBI technology official says. By Thursday, investigators believed they had clear pictures from a Lord & Taylor surveillance camera showing their two suspects. DesLauriers again called on the public to help identify and locate the two men, publishing the images and relying on the Internet to spread the equivalent of a Wanted poster far and wide.

 

Several law enforcement sources told Danger Room that DesLauriers would not have made that decision without the blessing of FBI Director Robert Mueller and possibly Attorney General Eric Holder. Rolince believes that the furious outpouring of public photography and videography meant that if the two suspects were still in the Boston area, putting their photos on the Internet meant they would be tracked down in a matter of hours — if the suspects didn’t make a hasty error to expose themselves to law enforcement first.

 

“Someone lives next to him, works with him, his kids play soccer with him,” he says. “Once you got that first photo out, it’s only a short amount of time before more photos come in.” Reportedly, the FBI tracked down the names of the Tsarnaev brothers with the aid of State Department immigration records.

 

There was another element to the modern manhunt: the Boston Police’s social media presence.

 

All through the week, the @Boston_Police Twitter account has provided surprisingly rapid factual information about the manhunt. Yael Bar-Tur, a social media and law-enforcement consultant, says Boston bucked a trend among cop shops to shy away from the unfamiliar terrain of Twitter and Facebook. “It’s so unusual for police departments to do this,” she says.

 

“I live in New York City. There are 40,000 cops here, and none of my friends know any of them. There’s huge disconnect between regular people and police,” she continues. So when something suspicious happens, they’re “not going to call the police unless there’s familiarity.” By putting out regular Twitter updates, the Boston police department opened a new avenue of communication, one that Bar-Tur believes got information back to the Boston police rapidly. “The community trust is incredible,” she says, noting that @Boston_Police now has over 200,000 followers.

 

All of this is a modern update to a very old story. Law enforcement has always relied on tips to do its job. It’s always had to balance the needs of transparency and operational security. The Boston manhunt is nowhere near over, as the ongoing clampdown on the city shows.

 

And there are messy precedents emerging from mass photo and video data emerging from an era of ubiquitous cellphone cameras augmenting police surveillance: the ex-FBI technology official says that “legal and ethical questions” cause investigators to hesitate before launching big data-mining projects, even with all the broad leeway they have to violate citizens’ privacy. That hesitation doesn’t have to apply when citizens volunteer the data.

 

“Nothing has really changed,” Bar-Tur says, “just the medium has changed.” That might be enough for a new model manhunt to emerge.

 

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Police rethink security at outdoor events, amid obstacles

By Keith Eddings — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The Eagle-Tribune’ / North Andover, MA

(Edited for brevity and generic law enforcement pertinence) 

 

 

Fleets of airborne drones may peer into crowds from a mile high, relaying live images sharp enough to identify the contents of a curbside trash can.

 

Mailboxes, newspaper vending machines and anything else that could hold explosives may be unbolted from streets and hauled away.

 

And Porta Potties — an icon of comfort and convenience at large outdoor gatherings for generations — may disappear as police and other law enforcement officials rethink the way they protect crowds at public events following the deadly bombings at the Boston Marathon last week.

 

Some security upgrades under consideration would go mostly unnoticed, including the drones overhead and, underfoot, the manholes that would be bolted closed.

 

But some would be painfully obvious, including the hours-long lines at gates and metal detectors in places where they never used to be, and the rows of portable toilets that would go missing after decades of providing reliable relief to the masses.

 

“You have to leave or wear a diaper — and some people do,” said Lt. John Grimpel, a spokesman for the New York City Police Department, referring to the stark choice tens of thousands of New Year’s Eve revelers have faced since Dec. 31, 2001, four months after the 9/11 attacks, when portable toilets were removed for good from the celebration in Times Square.

 

The pledge President Obama delivered at a service for the victims of the marathon bombings that Boston “will run again” was an affirming message for a wounded city. But for the people whose job it is to secure the marathons, parades, sporting events, rallies and similar outdoor events around the country, the president’s pledge was as much of a back-to-the-drawing-board work order as a soothing consolation.

 

Emerging technology is changing the domestic war on terror on both sides: terrorists now detonate bombs remotely by cell phone. The recent profusion of surveillance cameras, and soon possibly drones, aid in their identity and capture.

 

Boston and state police did not return phone calls Friday seeking to learn how they might upgrade security at next year’s marathon and similar outdoor events. Spokesmen said they were focused on the massive manhunt for the last suspect still at-large, which ended under the shrink-wrap of a boat parked in a Watertown backyard late that night.

 

In Lawrence, Police Chief John Romero said fully securing many outdoor places where large numbers of people concentrate is impossible given the logistics, the delays that would occur by screening everyone and the ingrained cultural expectation in the United States that living in a free country means free access.

 

The biggest challenge may be the wide-open subway systems in major municipalities that admit millions of people daily with just the swipe of a card, Romero said. In New York, where Romero was a precinct commander and deputy inspector before coming to Lawrence, subways provide 5.4 million rides every workday.

 

In Boston, when the MBTA was shut for most of the day on Friday in an historic first for the region as the search for a suspect in the marathon bombing intensified, local riders got an idea of what happens when terror disrupts a far-flung urban mass transit system.

 

“There’s no way you can efficiently search everyone coming through,” Romero said about transit systems. “The impact on rush hour would be (unacceptable). You can make periodic stops, but you’re not going to be able to check every person. You’re limited in what you can do.”

 

Boston’s transit system is not nearly so sprawling or heavily traveled as the one Romero helped protect in New York, and its schedule of prominent outdoor public events is much less crammed. But from the marathon in April to the fireworks on the Common in July to the Head of the Charles regatta in November, few weekends pass in Boston without a major event, many with international allure.

 

“There are thousands and thousands of road races and events throughout the country,” said Bill Pennington, who made it to mile 25 at the Boston Marathon on Monday before he and his daughter were forced off the course. “I don’t think there’s a hell of a lot you can do. If you protect the finish line, then at mile two-and-a-half somebody could do something crazy. There were police at the Boston Marathon on every block. Every intersection, there was a policeman or National Guardsman. And still it happened.”

 

The obstacles to enhancing security at public events go beyond the expense, logistics and practicalities, and include more than foiling terrorists.

 

A decade ago, the surveillance cameras that are now commonplace at street corners, bank lobbies and delicatessens — and that provided the breakthrough in the search for suspects in the marathon bombing — were fiercely opposed by civil libertarians, who said they violated privacy.

 

Grimpel, the NYPD lieutenant, said he expects there will be similar opposition if police departments begin launching drones to monitor crowds at outdoor events. But he said the department took a small step in that direction last year when it deployed four 20-foot retractable watchtowers, each equipped with infrared cameras and mounted on vehicles, to monitor high-crime areas and prevent looting in neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy.

 

“Surveillance, whether it’s with a camera or drone, doesn’t stop crime from taking place,” said Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. “These horrible attacks (at the marathon) indicate that. This was a heavily surveilled area and a heavily policed area. And it didn’t prevent these horrible attacks. So it’s important that people don’t think technology is going to solve all the public security issues when other kinds of investments, including community policing and outreach, may go much further to keep us safe.”

 

Grimpel acknowledged that establishing a balance between security and freedom is a special challenge in countries like the United States.

 

“In a democratic, open society,” he said, “it’s next to impossible to be 100 percent secure.”

 

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Speculation  a/k/a  Educated Guess

 

How terrorists are born
Former top NYPD expert explains the poisonous process that may well have propelled the Tsarnaev brothers

By Mitchell Silber (Former Civilian Director of NYPD Intel Analysis) — Sunday, April 21st, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’  

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/terrorists-born-article-1.1322915

 

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                                                          Mike Bosak