Sunday, May 12th, 2013 — Good Afternoon, Stay Safe
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Brooklyn North Homi: Allegations of Flaking and Questionable Investigative Tactics
Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered
By FRANCES ROBLES and N. R. KLEINFIELD — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has ordered a review of some 50 murder cases assigned to an acclaimed homicide detective, an acknowledgment of mounting questions about the officer’s tactics and the legitimacy of the convictions.
The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.
The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.
The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.
“People will look for blame,” said John O’Mara, who leads the Conviction Integrity Unit. “Our goal isn’t to look for blame. Our goal is to correct injustice.”
Mr. Scarcella’s name surfaced in March after a judge freed David Ranta, who had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a rabbi. Prosecutors determined that Mr. Ranta’s conviction resulted in large part from flawed police work by Mr. Scarcella and a partner, including failing to pursue a more logical suspect. An investigation found they removed violent criminals from jail to let them smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta. A witness also said Mr. Scarcella told him who to choose in a lineup.
Mr. Scarcella, 61, who retired from the police force in 1999, said he was surprised to learn of the review.
“Are you kidding me?,” he said Saturday in an interview.“Wow. This is quite a bit of a shock. Let them look at my convictions. I will help them if they need me. I don’t know what else to say. I expect he will find nothing,” he said.
He has maintained that he did nothing wrong.
“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” he said in a previous interview. “I never fudged a lineup in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”
He suggested that, following the Ranta news, those he put away believe that “Scarcella is the get-out-of-jail-free key.”
Pressed about specific cases, he said he could not recall many details and that he was being unfairly singled out.
“I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy,” he said. “I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.”
The questions about Mr. Scarcella stem from the sordid decades when the city saw as many as six homicides a day, and the police and the district attorney struggled to keep up.
Interviews with dozens of lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest a detective who followed his own rules.
The new developments have proved embarrassing for Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to his seventh term this fall. Although many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases date back to Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, his office has for years aggressively fended off appeals and denied public records requests from inmates who believe they were wrongly targeted by Mr. Scarcella.
Ms. Holtzman said Saturday, “I support a review of these cases.”
A Common Eyewitness
Teresa Gomez, a drug addict born in Trinidad who spent her nights on the streets of Crown Heights, seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to, prompting lawyers to call her “Louie’s go-to witness.”
In the late 1980s, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw a drug dealer, Robert Hill, commit two separate murders. Both times, she was the only eyewitness.
In the first trial, she said she was hiding in a closet in a crack den, watching through a keyhole in the door, and saw Mr. Hill put a pillow over a man’s head and shoot him. Mr. Hill’s cousin said the family later hired an investigator and found no keyhole in the closet door.
Mr. Hill was acquitted.
In the second trial, Mr. Hill was accused of shooting a man on a Crown Heights street corner and then, curiously, putting the dying man inside a livery cab and ordering the driver to take him to the hospital.
Ms. Gomez’s testimony was so belligerent that the judge threatened to strike it in its entirety. She contradicted the evidence in several ways, including the direction the shot was fired and the color of the cab. She even admitted she lied during the first trial.
Yet Mr. Hill was convicted.
“I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill, now 52, said in an interview at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Mr. Hill and his family say they are convinced he had been railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and believe the detective coached Ms. Gomez on her testimony.
They said in interviews that they were startled when Ms. Gomez surfaced again, this time at the trial of Mr. Hill’s stepbrothers, Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were accused of killing a man for his money.
Transcripts show Ms. Gomez, who claimed to see the killing from a nearby street corner and decided to follow the killers home because she was “nosy,” gave muddled answers that contradicted the other eyewitness.
Jurors were deadlocked and leaning toward acquittal, according to court records. They complained of moldy sandwiches, and the judge pressed them to try harder. Three hours later, they returned with a conviction. Mr. Austin died in prison of lung disease, while Mr. Jennette, 49, was released in 2007 after serving 21 years. “The whole neighborhood knows we didn’t kill that guy,” he said.
As for Ms. Gomez, he said, “I don’t know anyone who ever witnessed three, four or five homicides, unless you were doing them.”
The Legal Aid Society said recently that Ms. Gomez’s repeated role is so troubling that it plans to review homicide appeals of that era to see how many mention her.
Mr. Scarcella said she testified in at least six cases and had nothing but praise for her.
“God bless her,” he said. Though he said he did not recall many specifics of the cases that involved her, he “stood by her 100 percent.” She died years ago, in what acquaintances said was a hit-and-run accident.
Witnesses back then were elusive. Yet Mr. Scarcella could not explain Ms. Gomez’s verbosity and ubiquity. He said he would give her cigarettes and some food money, but that was it.
George Duke, a former supervisor of Mr. Scarcella’s who speaks highly of him, said he thinks Ms. Gomez was among several prostitutes whom the police paid $100 per murder for information. But when they were obviously lying, Mr. Duke said, he would not use them in that case.
A prosecutor’s view of Ms. Gomez is available in an Internet posting on a cigar-smokers forum. Neil Ross, a former assistant district attorney who is now a Manhattan criminal court judge, prosecuted the two Hill cases. In a 2000 posting, he reminisced about a cigar he received from the “legendary detective” Louis Scarcella as they celebrated in a bar after the Hill conviction.
In the post, Mr. Ross said that the evidence backed up Ms. Gomez but acknowledged, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”
Mr. Ross declined to comment, citing judicial ethics rules. “That is horrible,” Mr. Scarcella said about the post. “I don’t know what else to say.”
His Own Way
Mr. Scarcella grew up in Bensonhurst and his father, Domenick, was a police officer. The young Scarcella served six years in the Navy, and joined the police force in 1973. He became a detective in 1981, and in 1987 transferred to the Brooklyn North homicide squad. During off hours, he moonlighted as a Coney Island carnival barker.
His day job was nonstop. All told, Mr. Scarcella estimates he was the lead investigator on around 175 homicides and had a role in at least another 175. After he left the police force, he served as a schools investigator and a dock builder.
Some lawyers who crossed paths with Mr. Scarcella said they thought he imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules.
“He had a gregarious, funny, wonderful personality,” said Martin Marshak, a defense lawyer who represented clients in several cases in which, he said, Mr. Scarcella threatened witnesses. “N.Y.P.D. and prosecutors thought he was one of the best homicide detectives. The only problem was he never followed the rules.”
He added, “I don’t want to say he manufactured witnesses, but he got people to say what he wanted them to say.”
The Police Department would not comment on Mr. Scarcella or make his personnel record available.
Jay Saltpeter, a former detective who worked with Mr. Scarcella and is now a private investigator, says Mr. Scarcella is being unfairly scapegoated. He said detectives back then often assembled sloppy cases that prosecutors accepted. But he also said people did harbor doubts about Mr. Scarcella. “All the questions and rumors we heard then are coming out now,” he said.
In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were “a classic illustration of what not to do.” Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, “We have the guy who committed the murder.”
“That was wrong if I did that,” Mr. Scarcella said. “But I don’t remember.”
Questionable Tactics
When Shabaka Shakur was interrogated by Mr. Scarcella back in 1989, he said he told the detective nothing of consequence.
But when Mr. Shakur showed up in court for his double murder trial, he was confronted by an incriminating statement that Mr. Scarcella swore he had taken from him. Mr. Scarcella’s underlying interrogation notes were missing, a lapse that shows up in other Scarcella cases.
Mr. Shakur was convicted in what was characterized by prosecutors as a squabble over car payments. The key evidence was an eyewitness and the incriminating statement.
Mr. Shakur, 48, is at Auburn Correctional Facility, in his 26th year of a 40-year-to-life sentence. In a telephone interview, he said Mr. Scarcella fabricated the statement and “they ignored the evidence that shows I wasn’t the guy.”
Ronald Kuby, his current lawyer, said he believes further investigation will show that a vicious drug gang was responsible.
Mr. Scarcella said he did not recall the case.
He does readily acknowledge that he obtained confessions and witnesses that fellow detectives could not. But he ascribes it to his beguiling manner.
“You’re right,” Mr. Scarcella said, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”
At times, he would bang tables and belittle suspects, but he said he favored more delicate approaches.
“Sometimes I would cry with them. Sometimes I would pray with them. Sometimes I would sit with them for hours and hours and hours,” he said, adding, “One young man, after advising him of his rights, said I was the father he never had. He felt so good. Unfortunately, he killed his roommate.”
In 2007, Mr. Scarcella appeared on the Dr. Phil show as an interrogation expert to discuss false confessions. At one point, he said: “Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop, shoot them in the head, ruin the lives of their family. I don’t play by the rules.”
He went on: “I would use a lie. I had a case, and I said: ‘I have your prints. You were there, and that’s it.’ He said: ‘No. No way. I wasn’t there.’ It’s like 4 in the morning. I take him into the bathroom, and he says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”
Few individuals feel as wronged by Mr. Scarcella as Derrick Hamilton. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 murder, before being paroled in 2011. Now a paralegal, he continues to try to prove he was set up by Mr. Scarcella.
Prosecutors defend the conviction, but Mr. Hamilton has affidavits from four witnesses, including a former police officer, who put him in New Haven, Conn., when the murder occurred. None had originally testified. The sole eyewitness who testified said Mr. Scarcella coached her on what to say, and has since recanted.
Mr. Hamilton, 47, had earlier served seven years for manslaughter. When Mr. Scarcella came to arrest him at a beauty parlor, Mr. Hamilton said, the detective gave him a smart-alecky kiss, and then at the precinct “looked me straight in the eye and said he knew for a fact I didn’t do it, but said I didn’t do enough time on a prior case.”
Asked about that, Mr. Scarcella said: “He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar.”
Accusations of Intimidation
Witnesses as well as suspects accused Mr. Scarcella of coercing false testimony from them.
In 1992, Ronald Pondexter was accused of murdering a man during a middle-of-the-night robbery in the vestibule of an apartment building. The victim was with another man, who survived. After first offering a description that did not match Mr. Pondexter, the survivor said Mr. Pondexter was the killer, though his consumption of 12 drinks undercut his reliability as a witness.
Mr. Scarcella, the arresting officer, produced one other witness, a 19-year-old girl.
Her testimony of what she saw outside her window implicated Mr. Pondexter. Her mother, however, swore her daughter was asleep. In court papers, it was suggested that the mother might have been intimidated by associates of Mr. Pondexter.
During the trial, Michael Baum, Mr. Pondexter’s defense lawyer, said the daughter told him that she had lied because Mr. Scarcella had threatened her.
The judge did not allow her to take the stand again or strike her testimony. Mr. Pondexter was convicted. In 1996, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The girl did not appear, and Mr. Pondexter was acquitted.
Mr. Scarcella called it “ridiculous” that he would intimidate a person to testify.
“I have no recollection of that whatsoever,” he said.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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DA to probe other slay cases of ‘wrong man’ detective
By JOSH SAUL and BRAD HAMILTON — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes has ordered a review of homicide cases handled by a decorated police detective whose record has been tainted by an overturned murder conviction, officials said yesterday.
Hynes’ investigators will take a fresh look at 50 murder cases involving retired NYPD Det. Louis Scarcella.
“We’ll be looking for certain red flags — for instance, one-witness cases or cases that are based solely on a confession,” said Hynes’ spokesman Jerry Schmetterer.
Scarcella allegedly coached witnesses to finger David Ranta for the February 1990 slaying of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger in Williamsburg. Ranta, a career petty criminal, was convicted and sentenced to 37 years in prison.
A review by Hynes’ conviction-integrity unit re-examined the Werzberger killing and determined in March that Ranta’s conviction was unjust. Prosecutors convinced a judge to free Ranta.
“The DA says they’re going to investigate 50 cases. I welcome it. I will cooperate with them,” Scarcella told The Post. “But it saddens me I’m being treated this way. I’m angry. I’m standing up for myself because it’s the truthful thing to do.”
Scarcella said every move in the Ranta probe included top-to-bottom cooperation between cops and Brooklyn prosecutors: “We worked as a team.”
Despite Scarcella’s involvement with Ranta’s questionable conviction, the cop still has strong supporters in the department and DA’s office, law-enforcement sources said.
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Shots Fired at M.O.S.: Confines of the 81st Precinct
Gunman fires at plainclothes cops in Bed-Stuy investigating shooting of parked cars
The officers were searching through a backyard for a gun used to shoot at three nearby vehicles when they were fired upon by an unidentified shooter, who remains at large.
By Thomas Tracy — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
A trigger-happy goon opened fire on cops investigating a Brooklyn shooting, officials said Saturday.
No one was hit as the single shot was fired at an NYPD sergeant and cop searching through a Bedford Stuyvesant backyard just before midnight Friday.
The shot whizzed by the plainclothes officers from the 81st Precinct while they were in the rear of a Pulaski St. building, near Lewis Ave., looking for a gun that was used to shoot up three nearby parked cars moments earlier, officials said.
No one was injured, officials said. The gunman was still at large Saturday night.
Anyone with information regarding the incident is asked to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. All calls are confidential.
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Communications Div.
NYPD forcing 911 operators working on Mother's Day to stay four hours of mandatory overtime
With Mother's Day being one of the days with the highest call volume, the mostly female staff was told on May 1 of the extra hours they would have to work. Those planning to call in sick will have to provide proof of an illness. The NYPD’s 911 call center is about 300 under the optimal headcount, two sources told the Daily News.
By Ginger Adams Otis — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Call 911 — someone swiped Mother’s Day.
NYPD brass at the city’s 911 center put the kibosh on Sunday brunches and breakfast-in-bed for its working moms — ordering all staffers scheduled on Mother’s Day to stay for at least four hours of mandatory overtime.
The memo obtained by the Daily News was issued May 1, a preemptive move by the NYPD to make sure it had enough coverage on the festive family holiday — which frequently turns out to be one of the busiest days of the year in terms of call volume, 911 sources said.
According to the memo, which was sent to more than 600 emergency operators already working the three eight-hour shifts Sunday, they have to be prepared to stay for an additional four hours — and could be forced to remain longer if necessary.
“You are to perform the ordered overtime tour indicated or until dismissed by competent authority,” the memo says.
Mother’s Day is a popular holiday among the predominantly female 911 operators — so the NYPD also warned workers that anyone calling in sick needed to bring proof.
“Remind every member that reports sick during this time span that medical documentation is required upon their return to duty,” says a separate order issued May 9.
The sick leave policy will end at 7 a.m. Monday, the note said.
According to an NYPD 911 operator who spoke to the Daily News, officials followed that up with an even more Draconian order — don’t even try to call in sick.
“They basically canceled sick leave,” said the operator.
The move has demoralized the already overworked staffers, she said, who had hoped to have at least some time with kids and family.
“It’s double-jeopardy for us, because handling crime calls all day, with no break to go home to your family, plays with the psyche. You worry about making a mistake and getting written up, but moreover, you worry about making a mistake that will hurt somebody.”
The NYPD 911 call center, which has 1,040 staff members, is about 300 under the optimal headcount, two sources told the Daily News.
They said the center has been increasing mandatory overtime for the past eight months thanks to slow hiring and the need to train operators on a new computer system.
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
With Joe Kemp
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Stop, Question and Frisk Search / Rationalization and/or Justification Is In the Mind of the Beholder
When drone strikes collide with stop-and-frisk
Dispositions and watching for "weird behavior" increasingly guide both policing and national security policy
By Natasha Lennard — Saturday, May 11th, 2013; 12:00 p.m. ‘Salon Magazine’ / New York, NY
(Op-Ed / Commentary)
When NYPD officer Kha Dang took to the stand this week in the landmark federal trial challenging stop-and-frisk practices, he couldn’t have known how revealing his testimony would be. Indeed, based on his comments, it’s striking that that the police department would allow Dang — a so-called stop-and-frisk “all star” for the large numbers of stops he carried out — on the stand at all.
As Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, in the third quarter of 2009 alone “Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person.” Dang’s record here is stunning enough alone. More telling still is the justifications he recounted to the court for making many of his stops, referring to repeated observation of individuals’ general behavioral patterns, including “furtive movements” — a vague policing phrase regularly stretched beyond the limits of all reasonableness. “We have a general idea of their behavior,” Dang testified.
The weak justification given for the regular harassment of young black men in New York is noteworthy. But waiting and watching for “weird behavior” and certain behavioral patterns is not just a flawed NYPD policy — it’s increasingly the sort of preemptive and prefiguring policing that underpins national security policy too, from how the FBI chooses sting targets to the use of drone strikes to target unidentified individuals displaying “signature” behaviors. >From police stops in Brooklyn to drone strikes in Pakistan, the “disposition matrix” applies.
Devereaux’s report on Dang’s testimony reveals the sort of racial and behavioral profiling applied to police stops:
Dang told the court… he would monitor the same individuals going about their lives on a daily basis. If he noticed anything out of the ordinary, what he called “weird behavior,” he might make a stop. When asked what might count as “weird behavior”, Dang said: “Furtive movement would be one of them.” The phrase has come up repeatedly in the course of the trial. Along with high crime area, furtive movement is the justification officers most frequently check off on departmental stop forms known as UF250s. Critics say it a dangerously vague term that allows officers overly broad discretion in conducting stops.
… “Has anyone asked you why you only stopped people of color?” [plaintiff attorney Bruce] Corey asked. Nobody had, Dang replied. Corey asked Dang if his supervisors had raised concerns about the fact that he did not recover any weapons during the period in question, again he said no.
The model of officers making stops here maps neatly onto the mechanisms that go behind CIA drone strikes known as “signature strikes.” Watching and waiting using drone technology, the CIA do not launch signature strikes against identified al-Qaida suspects (just as nearly all NYPD stops are not carried out on identified crime suspects) but rather, as Pro Publica reported, “drone operators fire on people whose identities they do not know based on evidence of suspicious behavior or other ‘signatures.’”
Sarah Knuckey, NYU lawyer and special adviser to the U.N. special reporter on extra-judicial killings, stressed at the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ hearing on lethal drone strikes last Wednesday that the reliance on “vague and expansive” legal concepts and rubric makes some nonsense of claims that strikes are precision driven and “targeted.”
In her testimony to Congress, noted here, Knuckey said:
What is concerning about current US practice and policy is that only very general legal justifications are offered for highly contentious killing practices, and in some cases, the legal concepts employed appear to be stretched beyond long-accepted understandings.
Particularly concerning are broad or ill-defined interpretations of terms which regulate targeting, including an “elongated” concept of imminence, “associated forces” and “directly participating in hostilities.”
What counts as an appropriate “signature” to suggest an unidentified individual is worthy of a lethal strike is as dangerously vague as the NYPD’s reliance on “furtive movements.” As ProPublica’s Cora Curier pointed out, citing various sources, such signature behavior identified in Pakistan ranges from “convoys of vehicles that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run” to, as Former Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter once put it “the definition is a male between the ages of 20 and 40.”
As human rights advocates continue to stress, the opacity around Obama’s lethal drone strike program makes judging its success impossible. We do know, however, based on reports from the Pakistani government corroborated by groups like the U.K.’s Bureau of investigative journalism, that over 400 civilians have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan. We know that in the past week the highest court in Pakistan ruled the U.S. strikes illegal; we know that, as Yemeni human rights activist Baraa Shiban told Congress members, when lethal drone strikes don’t his al-Qaida operatives but ordinary Yemenis, it is “kerosene for insurgency.” Relying on “signatures” and dispositions is a war-game stoking anti-U.S. sentiment, stretching the limits of constitutional legal justifications and abrogating international law.
Meanwhile, the NYPD’s reliance on dispositions and profiling has produced nothing short of a scandal: the department has now carried out over 5 million stop-and-frisks under Mayor Bloomberg, over 86 percent of which on black or Latino individuals. Analysis of police data by the NYCLU revealed that 88 percent of the stops did not result in an arrest or summons (and of course an even smaller proportion ever lead to a conviction). This sort of policing doesn’t catch crime suspects, it prefigures (and treats) as criminals young men of color in certain neighborhoods.
John Knefel pointed out for Rolling Stone following the Boston Marathon bombings that there is a profound problem with this sort of “preemptive policing” when it comes to domestic counterterrorism and efforts to stem the radicalization of Muslims too:
[L]aw enforcement organizations have used the flawed logic of “radicalization” to justify investigating innocent Muslims in almost every part of their daily lives. Under “preventive policing,” critics say cops and FBI agents aren’t focusing on actual crime, but on protected first amendment activities – like the NYPD’s surveillance of student and political groups, or reports “that the FBI has infiltrated mosques simply to learn about what was being said by the imam leading prayers and by those attending” – without a clear reason to suspect criminality.
Knefel is right that the logic is “flawed” when the aim is to stop tragedies like the Boston bombing. The logic of applying disposition matrices is flawed too for crime-stopping on New York streets (again 88 percent of stops don’t lead to an arrest, let alone a conviction). And, when applied in shadow drone wars, this sort of logic leads to civilian deaths and stokes anti-American sentiment around the world. So it’s certainly flawed. But here’s what is shored up: from New York to Pakistan, young brown and black men are treated as “criminal” and “terrorist” — threatening, constructed “others” against which to build a sprawling but rotten security and policing apparatus.
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Armed Robbery Confines of the 46 Pct.: At the time Off-Duty Transit District 12 P.O. Ivan Marcano
Obama praises hero NYPD cop and girlfriend during White House ceremony
NYPD detective Ivan Marcano received a shout-out from Obama during the National Association of Police Organizations 2013 TOP COPS recognition ceremony. The president talked about how, while off duty, Marcano helped out a cabbie who was being robbed. He was out that night with his girlfriend, Hilda Miolan, who Obama said deserved ‘a really nice dinner.’
By Dan Friedman — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
WASHINGTON — An impressed President Obama singled out courageous NYPD cop Ivan Marcano — and his surprised girlfriend — at a White House ceremony Saturday for heroic cops from around the country.
Marcano, one of two of the 43 officers honored Saturday who Obama cited by name, was off duty, driving through the Bronx with his girlfriend, Hilda Miolan, on Oct. 24 when he spotted two armed suspects robbing a 60-year-old cabbie.
When Marcano stopped and identified himself as a police officer, one suspect immediately opened fire, wounding the officer in the arm and chest, inches from his heart.
As Miolan, who Obama joked was probably “not very happy with” Marcano, drove him to the hospital, he saw the suspects and an accomplice. They had just crashed into a livery cab, jumped a curb on Burnside Ave. and ditched the car. Clutching his chest to keep pressure on his wound, Marcano jumped out of his car and approached them. As one, 18-year-old Prince James, reportedly fired again, Marcano, a righty shooting left-handed, fatally shot James in the head.
“He wasn’t on the clock when any of this happened,” Obama said. “This was his date night. It’s unbelievable.”
The President then asked Miolan to stand for applause.
“She deserves a really nice dinner,” he said to laughter.
Miolan, 24, said after the ceremony that she was not expecting “to be called out like that” by the President. She said it was her first visit to Washington.
“I thought it was really cool,” she told the Daily News. “I was a little shy and embarrassed but I got into it.”
She was not laughing at the time of the shooting, she noted. “It brought back a lot of memories from the incident, but other than that, the outcome has been great,” Miolan said.
Marcano, then 27, was promoted to detective while recovering in the hospital during a visit by Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
The White House event honored the National Association of Police Organizations 2013 TOP COPS awardees. The group includes NYPD Detectives Terence Munnelly and Steven Smith, who found the gun that shot Marcano and caught the surviving suspects within 36 hours.
“They’ll tell you they’re not heroes,” Obama said of the full group. “They’ll say they were just doing their job. And today we honor them as top cops because they are half right. It’s true, they were just doing their jobs. From the moment they swore an oath to serve with honor, from the first time they put on a uniform and put on a badge, they knew they might be called upon to do some really tough stuff.
“But I think that makes them more heroic, not less heroic, because they signed up for this,” Obama said. “They volunteered.”
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Obama Honors ‘Top Cops’ in White House Ceremony
By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
Three weeks after praising Massachusetts law enforcement officials for their handling of the manhunt tied to the Boston Marathon bombings, President Obama honored 43 officers from across the country named by their peers as this year’s Top Cops.
Recalling the Watertown, Mass., residents who emerged from their homes to cheer for the officers after the capture of the surviving suspect, Mr. Obama said the attacks had been another reminder of the courage of police officers and other first responders.
“We don’t always get that opportunity to stand and applaud the men and women who keep us safe,” he said, standing in front of the honorees in the East Room of the White House. “But they’re out there, hundreds of thousands of you, patrolling our streets every single day. And we know that when we need you most, you’ll be ready to dash into danger, to protect our lives even if it means putting your lives on the line.”
With some senators trying to resuscitate the failed effort to overhaul the nation’s gun laws, Mr. Obama challenged Washington to learn from the officers, calling for “common-sense steps” to make it harder for criminals to get deadly weapons.
“You set an example, because if Top Cops can risk their lives to do their jobs, the rest of us should just be able to summon some tiny fraction of courage and the same sense of responsibility,” he said.
Since 1994, the National Association of Police Organizations has awarded its Top Cops designation each year to law enforcement officers nominated by their colleagues for their noteworthy service.
This year’s recipients included Lt. Brian Murphy, who was shot multiple times after being the first officer to respond to the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last August, and seven other officers from the Oak Creek, Wis., police department. Other winners came from departments including Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Houston.
In an animated moment, Mr. Obama recounted how Ivan Marcano, a detective with the New York Police Department, intervened in an attack on a cabdriver when he was out with his girlfriend. With his left hand on his chest and his right hand miming a gun, Mr. Obama demonstrated how Mr. Marcano pursued the gunmen even after Mr. Marcano had been shot.
Laughing, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Marcano’s girlfriend — a slightly embarrassed-looking woman in a pink dress, sitting in the back of the audience — to stand for a round of applause.
“She deserves a really nice dinner after putting her through that,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Marcano.
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Hero NYPD Detective Honored By President Obama
Detective Ivan Marcano Pursued Suspect Even After Being Shot, Wounded
By Unnamed Author(s) (CBS News - New York) — Saturday, May 11th, 2013; 1:01 p.m. EDT
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A hero NYPD detective was honored by President Barack Obama at the White House Saturday, six months after he was shot and wounded as he fought a group of robbery suspects while off-duty.
President Obama honored Detective Ivan Marcano as one of the National Association of Police Organizations Top Cops award winners.
He said Marcano thoroughly deserves the honor after his actions last October, when he continued to pursue the robbery suspects – and shoot one of them dead – even after being shot in the chest.
“What does Detective Marcano do, he jumps out of the car – he’s been shot – keeps pressure on his chest with his left hand, holding a service weapon with his right, runs after the suspects,” Obama said. “(He) took one of them down, which led to the capture of the others.”
Marcano was off-duty when his girlfriend noticed a robbery taking place in Morris Heights on the night of Oct. 24. Marcano told his girlfriend to call 911 as he got out of their car with his gun and shield and identified himself to the suspects as a cop, police said.
Marcano, who was not wearing a bulletproof vest, was shot in the chest as he tried to help Mario Arbaca, who was being beaten.
The two suspects then took off in a white Ford Mustang driven by a third suspect, police said. Marcano got back into his car and with his girlfriend at the wheel, followed them.
What happened next was caught on video.
The video shows the white car Marcano was driving in pull up behind another white car that the robbery suspects were in. The suspects’ car can then be seen lurching forward into a livery cab and another parked car. The white Mustang then careened onto the sidewalk before coming to a stop, police said.
After the suspects’ car came to a stop, Marcano is seen in the surveillance video getting out of his car and, with one hand applying pressure to his own wound, using the other hand to shoot and kill one of the suspects, police said.
As he followed one of the suspects onto Burnside Avenue, Marcano stumbled upon an ambulance that was parked on Burnside near Harrison. He is seen in the video apparently talking to a medic in the front of the ambulance before climbing in and getting taken to the hospital.
The suspect fatally shot by Marcano was identified by police as Prince James, 18, of the Bronx.
Two other suspects, Jason Levia and Rodain Ortega, both 20, later turned themselves in as accomplices in the incident. Ortega and James were believed to be the gunman and Levia the getaway driver, according to published reports.
Two days after the incident, Marcano was promoted to detective in a bedside ceremony, presided over by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Also honored by President Obama Saturday was Brian Murphy, the first officer to arrive on the scene at the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin last year that killed six people.
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Decriminalizing Pot
‘High’ tolerance
NYC on road to decriminalizing pot
By BRAD HAMILTON — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
New York City is going green — with ganja.
Pot arrests and seizures are plummeting as low-level offenders duck jail and cops ease off dealers, who are racking up record profits, police sources say.
Gov. Cuomo vowed in January to wipe out the lowest marijuana charge — fifth-degree criminal possession — for those caught lighting up in public or flashing their stash.
The crime, which currently calls for an arrest if the pot is in public view or weighs more than 25 grams, accounted for 149,951 of 155,048 marijuana busts in New York City since 2010 — 99.2 percent of the total.
Had Cuomo’s plan been in place last year, it could have eliminated 39,257 of the 40,661 arrests.
But even without the Cuomo proposal yet etched in law, an unprecedented reduction in enforcement has already begun.
Marijuana arrests in the city plunged 22 percent last year — to 40,661 from 52,220 in 2011 — and are on pace for another 20 percent decline this year, according to data from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
Decriminalization gathered steam in February, when Mayor Bloomberg announced that NYPD cops would now merely ticket those charged with fifth-degree possession, instead of tossing them in jail.
But it’s not just the casual user who’s catching a break.
Kingpins are also skating.
Figures show that in Manhattan and Brooklyn, police have nailed just three dealers this year for first-degree criminal possession of marijuana — a felony for sellers apprehended with 10 pounds or more.
That’s way down from the 28 such peddlers cops locked up in those boroughs last year.
One source said some NYPD detectives have been told to back off dealers because they’re considered a lower priority than those hawking pills, cocaine and heroin.
“When we have intel on pretty big marijuana cases, we’re being pushed away,” said the source, who works on narcotics cases.
“It’s. ‘Let’s just focus on pills and cocaine.’ Narcotics can still do grow houses, but a guy dealing a pound or two here or there, they don’t have much interest.”
The amount of reefer being seized is also rapidly dwindling.
The feds confiscated 2,500 kilos of marijuana in the state in 2010, but that figure dropped to just 210 kilos last year, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
This year, only 60 kilos have been seized.
Reefer gladness
Arrest for Marijuana Possession in New York City
2010 52,089
2011 52,220
2012 40,661
2013 10,078 (through April 23)
32,552 (projected)
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U.S.A.
Pimping Mom Out / Mother's Day Police Pervert (One Way of Making Ends Meet)
Baltimore police officer charged with prostituting wife
By Justin Fenton — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The Washington Post’ / Washington, DC
A Baltimore police officer was charged with pimping for his wife after officers from a human trafficking task force found him outside a hotel where the woman had agreed to have sex with an undercover officer for cash.
The child recovery task force was working on an investigation into human trafficking when they came across a “young-looking female” advertised as an escort on a Web site, police said. Officers arranged to meet the woman at a hotel near Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, court records show.
Inside the hotel room Friday, a woman identified by police as Marissa Braun-Manneh told an undercover officer that she would have sex for $100 and was placed under arrest, charging documents show.
She said that her husband, Lamin Manneh, was waiting outside in a car, and that she gives him her money and he drives her from “date to date,” according to court records. She said that he posts the online ads using his credit card. Manneh, 31, acknowledged his role in an interview with detectives, records show.
Elena Russo, a state police spokeswoman, said both husband and wife were charged because they appeared to be “working as a team.”
Manneh, of the 2400 block of Marbourne Avenue in Baltimore, is an officer assigned to the Baltimore Police Department’s Eastern District. State police said he was suspended without pay and that the city police’s internal affairs unit would investigate.
“This allegation is a disgrace and embarrassment to every member — both current and retired — who serve with the Baltimore Police Department,” Baltimore’s Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said in a statement. “We expect every member of this department to hold themselves to the highest professional standards. Our colleagues and our community deserve nothing less.”
Manneh was charged in Anne Arundel County District Court with one count each of human trafficking and prostitution and was released on his own recognizance by a District Court commissioner, records show. Braun-Manneh was charged with one count of prostitution and also released on her own recognizance.
Attempts to reach the couple were unsuccessful.
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Illinois
State seeks uniform alcohol measure for police
By Hannah Douglas — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The Bloomington Pantagraph’ / Bloomington, IL
SPRINGFIELD — Illinois lawmakers are pushing for a zero-tolerance alcohol policy for on-duty police officers, but recent findings could slow current negotiations.
This effort comes amid a Better Government Association investigation that showed there weren’t consistent alcohol standards for law enforcement agencies across the state. The rules currently range from a zero tolerance for alcohol in the bloodstream to just below 0.08 percent, the legal limit for drunken driving in Illinois.
Secretary of State Jesse White, who is pushing for the legislation, said the findings from the Chicago-based watchdog group were surprising. He added there should be consistency in alcohol tolerance across the state.
“I’m steadfast in my opposition to police officers being able to have alcohol in their system,” White said. “I do think that they really put themselves in a terrible situation when they come to work impaired.”
In Normal, Police Chief Rick Bleichner said it is not acceptable for officers to have any alcohol in their system. A breath test would be used if there were reason to believe an officer had been drinking, and it could result in disciplinary action, he said.
“Officers who are responding to back other officers up, who are operating vehicles, who are charged with determining levels of force necessary in stressful situations. It’s simply not acceptable for us to have any level of alcohol in our system,” Bleichner said.
In Normal policy, the alcohol tolerance level is up to 0.02 while on duty, according to the association report. However, Bleichner said any alcohol level that is less than 0.02 still is unacceptable unless it’s part of a work assignment such as an undercover operation.
“Outside of that, we say no alcohol in the blood while on duty is acceptable,” he said.
In Decatur, officers can show up to work with a blood alcohol content with less than 0.08, with the acceptable level depending on if they are presumed to be impaired. In Charleston, the cutoff is 0.04.
The proposal would allow for exceptions to zero tolerance in cases such as undercover work and for other training purposes.
The measure has received House approval and currently awaits action in the Senate.
Tamara Cummings, general counsel for Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Council, said cases such as when off-duty officers are called in to work should be taken into consideration. The main issue should be whether an officer is impaired or not, she added.
“Cops aren’t coming to work drunk,” Cummings said. “It’s just not happening. If you’re testing people that are not impaired and by happenstance they have some trace alcohol in their system, you’re subjecting them to being terminated when there’s really no basis for it.”
The legislation is House Bill 3035.
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Immigration Enforcement / Illegal Aliens
Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform
By David Kravets — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘Wired.Com’
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.
Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation ( http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/legislation/EAS13500toMDM13313redline.pdf ) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.
This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.
“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”
For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.
“The Social Security number itself, it’s pretty ubiquitous in your life,” Calabrese said.
David Bier, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agrees with the ACLU’s fears.
“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”
For the moment, the debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee is focused on the parameters of legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a border fence and legal immigration in the future.
The committee is scheduled to resume debate on the package Tuesday.
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Homeland Security
FBI head Richard DesLauriers downplays any tension among law enforcement over Marathon bombings
By Akilah Johnson — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The Boston Globe’ / Boston, MA
WORCESTER -- The head of the FBI’s Boston division fended off questions of friction between his office and local law enforcement just before giving the commencement address at his alma mater, Assumption College this morning.
Richard DesLauriers said his agency works “shoulder-to-shoulder” with local law enforcement officers, despite a recent congressional hearing that suggested a possible breakdown in intelligence-sharing regarding the 2011 investigation of Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
“We work very, very collaboratively together,” DesLauriers said in an interview with the Globe. “We’re always working shoulder-to-shoulder in times of crisis or in times of big investigations as well as more customary times.”
DesLauriers said Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis, whom he described as “a great friend,” called him within three minutes of last month’s twin explosions asking for help, and it came in the form of immediately dispatched federal special forces teams.
Davis testified before members of the House Homeland Security Committee Thursday, and his testimony elicited angry responses from several congressmen who railed about a lack of information sharing. Some said they perceived tension among law enforcement officials as a result of the hearing, but DesLauriers said today that such allegations “couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
During the hearing, Davis said he was first told about the FBI’s previous interest in Tamerlan Tsarnaev only after the FBI identified his body, following a confrontation with police in Watertown. Davis said he also was not advised of Tsarnaev’s 2012 trip to the Dagestan region of Russia, despite having three Boston police detectives and one sergeant assigned to the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Reaction to the hearing prompted Davis and DesLauriers to release a joint statement Friday assuring the public that “our agencies have, and continue to have, a close, strong, and effective partnership.”
The statement acknowledges those who question the level of cooperation between the agencies but says asking questions “should not be confused with a reasonable evaluation of the facts and circumstances surrounding this matter.”
Interdepartmental cooperation led to the capture of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, within 101 hours of the attack, the statement said. Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured in the April 15 bombing. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a shootout with police in the early hours of April 19. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested later that day and is in custody.
“We pulled together as one team, and we are fighting one fight to achieve justice for the victims, DesLauriers said this morning.
DesLauriers graduated from Assumption College in 1982 following in the footsteps of his father and two uncles, all of whom were alumnus of the small Roman Catholic liberal arts college. He was asked to give the keynote address to the school’s 605 graduates long before the events of April 15.
Still, the events of the past three and a half weeks were on the minds of those sitting under huge white tent on the campus’s H.L. Rocheleau Field, where DesLauriers also received an honorary doctorate degree. The bombings were mentioned during Hannah-Lee Hilsman’s valedictorian address about the student body’s commitment to social justice and service to mankind.
“In the wake of the recent events, I believe this world needs a few more Greyhounds,” the graduate of psychology and women’s studies said while referencing the school’s mascot. “In the days after the Boston Marathon bombings, we ... demonstrated solidarity with our neighbors in the Boston metropolitan area through ‘Wear Boston’ days and offered emotional and spiritual support for members of the Assumption community who had been touched by those abominable acts.”
Graduates received the Assumptionist cross engraved with the college’s motto “until Christ be formed in you” to, as President Francesco Cesareo said during his greeting, “serve as a reminder in the years ahead of the values that animated your experience here. You will need to draw on those values as you engage in the world that awaits you.”
DesLauriers, 53, told the students that he still follows the “moral compass” imbued in the lessons and life at Assumption. “This characteristic, in my opinion, is absolutely essential to success in the workplace, and broader success in life,” he told the crowd. “Possessing a moral compass is vitally important...especially in a world which today so often appears morally agnostic.”
Before the ceremony, DesLauriers, who is Catholic, said prayers, faith, and nourishing one’s spiritual nature are keys to “being able to take the right action in a crisis situation. Whether others are praying for you or you’re praying for the victims of the crime or you’re praying for your fellow law enforcement officers...faith is definitely critical.”
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Attack drills more realistic and intense as schools ready for a possible ‘active shooter’ incident
In the wake of Newtown, Conn., massacre, mass shootings join fires as schools' top worry. Debate rages on as mock attacks are on the upsurge across the U.S. to prepare for if — or when — a gunman attacks.
By Sasha Goldstein — Sunday, May 12th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Armed with guns, masked men broke into a rural Oregon school, taking aim at 15 teachers clustered in the library.
Shots and screams rang out — but the surprise attack was staged and no one was hurt.
The realistic drill, held in tiny Halfway, Ore., was meant to force teachers to see if they would survive a firearms assault.
But the survival rate was grim. By one teacher’s count, only two of 15 went “unhurt” by the gunmen, played by other faculty members who wielded starter pistols and fired blanks.
“I’ll tell you, the whole situation was horrible,” elementary school teacher Morgan Gover told The Oregonian newspaper. “I got a couple in the front and a couple in the back.”
Similar scenes are playing out across the country, more often now in the wake of December’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that left 20 first-graders and six school staffers dead.
But as the school shooting list keeps growing — Columbine, Virginia Tech, Chardon, Ohio — there is no clear solution for a country with more than 80 million students enrolled in kindergarten through college. Instead, schools across the nation are grappling with how to best defend themselves against an intruder with murderous intent.
A suburban Chicago high school ran a “code red” drill with the gunmen shooting blanks in January. Last month, an Indiana school ran a shooting drill replete with blood and a body count.
Last year, an El Paso, Tex., school set up a shocking surprise lockdown simulation that enraged parents like Stephanie Belcher, whose son sent her a panicked text message.
“He said, ‘I’m not kidding. There’s gunshots and people screaming and we were locked in a storage closet,’ ” Belcher told KFOX-TV. “These kids thought that their classmates were being killed and that they could be next. There’s no excuse for that.”
But the district’s assistant superintendent defended the practice. “It’s an active shooter drill,” Pat O’Neill told KFOX. “We do this every now and then. If you warn too many people, then the simulation is not effective.”
New York City public schools, home to 1.1 million students, have a safety plan that calls for a “hard” or “soft” lockdown during an emergency. Teachers either evacuate the building or “shelter-in” — lock the doors but continue with classes.
The city has been experimenting with surprise drills, too, with rocky results: An unannounced practice lockdown at East Harlem’s Public School 79 — for special needs kids — was so realistic that a teacher called the cops.
“It was probably the worst feeling I ever had in my life,” a teacher told The New York Times in December.
As a result, a new policy revealed by city Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott will require schools to conduct at least two planned lockdown drills each year. There’s also a mandatory two-hour summer training program for school leaders.
“Everybody is concerned about the security of children, particularly in light of (the) incidents,” said Chiara Coletti, spokeswoman for the principals union. “No one is balking at this.”
Mass school shootings have also created a business boom for those who train schools how to protect their students.
Texas-based Response Options — tag line “Prepared, Proactive, Protected” — uses 18 instructors with military and/or law enforcement backgrounds to train schools, municipalities and even other law enforcement agencies on “active shooter and violent intruder events.”
“It’s spreading very, very quickly,” Marianne Alvarez, the organization’s director of training, said. “We are booked up for the next few months straight. We’re glad, because they’re making their schools safer.”
Sessions can run from two hours to two days, with a sliding cost scale, Alvarez said. A one-day training runs $2,500 a pop.
Some trainers use the A.L.i.C.E. method — Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Confront, Evacuate — which has been so well received that San Diego State University made the training mandatory for all incoming freshman, about 4,000 students.
Men armed with fake pistols try to barge into rooms as students and staff scurry and hide, barricading themselves in classrooms. It’s realistic, but planned, said Lamine Secka, university police captain.
Groups repeatedly run the scenarios, adding an A.L.i.C.E. component as they go. It works, Secka said, because every time there are fewer “casualties.”
“The object is to manage that confusion (of a shooting) as best we can,” he said. “It’s really just a matter of giving people options. These are usually over within five to seven minutes, certainly 15, and they end by the time . . . when police show up. The plan is to give people things to do in that window to increase their odds of surviving.”
Other training options include using consultants like counterterrorism expert and former NYPD Detective Nick Casale of Casale Associates, who uses a “no-notice mobilization” drill when he works with New York-area schools.
Staffers know that there are two drills each semester, and that each one starts when a Casale employee comes to the school with a red envelope.
“ ‘I have a gun,’ it says,” Casale said. “What are you gonna do?”
There’s also a blaring, disorienting alarm that prompts teachers to hustle all children into classrooms. He instructs school districts to invest in heavy, solid, lockable doors that can withstand an attack.
“The drill checks your vulnerabilities,” Casale said. “It may sound dramatic, but you’ve got to be able to train the same way, just like they do for a fire alarm.”
Back in Halfway, Ore., home to 200 students, the closest big town is 90 minutes away. That long law enforcement response time means the district has to be creative, District Superintendent Mike Corley said.
“By the time (police) get here, it’s pretty much over,” Corley said. “Several months ago, in response to Sandy Hook, we began to assess how vulnerable we are.”
Yet the recent shooting drill at the district’s Pine Eagle Charter School left parents and employees alike livid.
Tom Huff, a rancher who has a 16-year-old son at Pine Eagle, understands the need for preparedness. And as a gun owner who packs heat “everywhere,” he understands the appeal of personal protection in a rural area where 80% to 90% of the population owns firearms.
But he doesn’t understand the surprise drill, which has left one of the teachers so stressed she’s unable to return to work. There are rumors that others need counseling.
Some in town have said a lawsuit might be in the works.
“The idea behind a drill is to practice an action plan,” Huff told the Daily News. “This school doesn’t have a policy or plan in place. This drill was meaningless. All it served was to scare the hell out of these teachers.
“I carry a gun everywhere I go,” he continued. “If I was driving by and saw two masked people with guns nearing the school, I would have pulled in there and tried to do something about it. And today, we would have talked about how I shot an innocent person, and that scares me to death.”
School board Vice Chairman Dave Schmitt insists the drill was only part of developing an effective shooting response plan.
“We do safety drills all the time, and in our mind, this is one of those safety drills,” he said. “If someone’s going to panic, we’d much rather it happen at a drill than during a real shooting.”
But ultimately, the school will no longer use such dramatic, unannounced drills, Corley said. Instead, it will join the rest of the country in bracing for if — or when — a shooter attacks.
With Corinne Lestch and Ben Chapman
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Mike Bosak
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