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Friday, December 31. Beset by crime and violence, Baltimore adopted “Broken Windows” theory, using quality of life/zero-tolerance policing to bring order and civility to the streets. In 2005, at the height of the program, petty arrests soared. But so did citizen complaints about being hassled by the cops. Two years later the ACLU sued. BPD then switched to targeting gun violence, working with the Feds and going after those it considered the “worst of the worst.” Now it claims success...
Thursday, December 30. What does three concurrent life terms amount to in Massachusetts? In the case of Dominic Cinelli, about thirty years. Paroled in 2008, he shot and killed a police officer four days ago. Click here for the debate...
Wednesday, December 29. Police and Federal agents often place GPS devices on vehicle exteriors without a warrant. They’re relying on a 1983 Supreme Court decision (U.S. v. Knotts) that approved doing so for beepers. But in August the D.C. Circuit (U.S. v. Maynard) prohibited the extended, warrantless use of a GPS device. That created a conflict with several other circuits that will need to be resolved by the Supreme Court. A Maryland state court has now chimed in, ruling that whatever the Federal law, protracted GPS tracking violates the State constitution...
Tuesday, December 28. NLEOMF reports an alarming rise in on-duty law enforcement deaths. Fifty-nine police officers were shot and killed this year, ten more than in 2009. But the largest toll continues to be taken by traffic accidents, with 73 officers dead, 22 more than last year. Click here for a related post...
Monday, December 27. Although the final numbers aren’t in, it looks like Los Angeles will end 2010 with fewer than 300 murders, the lowest tally since 1967. Why is that? Three good guesses: the end of the crack cocaine wars, less gang violence and stiffened punishment...
Weekend update. With murder and violence out of control, New Orleans PD is redirecting its resources to fight violent crime. Petty offenders who were formerly arrested are being cited or ignored. No, it’s not what “broken windows” would prescribe, but maybe it’s time to put that appealing but highly questionable theory to rest...
More WikiLeaks stuff out, this time about efforts by foreign strongmen to infiltrate and neutralize DEA law enforcement operations and use its electronic interception capabilities for corrupt purposes...
Friday, December 24. A man who is likely innocent does 15 years for murder based on the testimony of witnesses who were secretly threatened and given deals. When a Federal judge finally brings this to light, prosecutors refuse to apologize and move for a retrial. Click here for a related post...
Thursday, December 23. Is “junk science” out of control in Texas? Check out this page from the Texas innocence project website...
Read through the evaluation of the Federal GRP (Gang Reduction Program) and you’ll get the impression that spending a measly $2.5 million per site produced positive results in three cities. But tucked in near the end is a caution that “the nature of the pre-post comparison group design...precludes concluding there were cause and effect relationships between GRP and the positive outcomes observed.” In other words, it’s impossible to know if the program worked...
Wednesday, December 22. A newspaper series and an accrediting agency report suggest that deficiencies at the San Francisco PD crime lab extend well past the now-closed drug unit. Its DNA work has come under fire, with revelations of mix-ups and the withholding of possibly exculpatory information from the Grand Jury and defense lawyers...
Tuesday, December 21. Maybe Wall Street is up, but the devastating impact of the economic meltdown on local and state governments has just begun. For Exhibit “A” look no further than one of the most crime-ridden communities in the U.S., Camden, New Jersey. With the city about to lay off half its cops, the county’s planning to slash the D.A.’s office by a quarter...
Monday, December 20. After wringing its hands in fear of what the (gulp!) NRA might do, the Feds posted a proposed rule that would require gun dealers to report selling to the same person, within a five-day period, more than one semi-auto rifle that is larger than .22 caliber and has a detachable magazine. The purpose, of course, is to slow down gunrunning to Mexico. Note that AR-15’s and AR-15 clones are .22’s (actually .223) so they’re apparently exempt. As a further sop the plan would only be in effect for six months...
Weekend update. Barbara Picower, widow of multi-multi-billionaire investor Jeffry Picower, agreed to forfeit $7.2 billion that her husband earned by investing $620 million with Bernard Madoff. Disputing the Federal trustee’s account, she denies that her late husband had any idea that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. After all, Picower only made, um, 1,161 percent on his investment. Hey, we believe it...
Friday, December 17. “Shaken baby syndrome” sent a Los Angeles grandmother to prison for ten years. She was released in 2006 by a Federal appeals court, which ruled that the expert testimony was not credible. (Prosecutors are appealing.) However, other rulings and reports (click here and here) have cast doubt over the syndrome and suggested that it’s ripe for abuse...
 Thursday, December 16. Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry, 40, was shot and killed in the Arizona desert confronting suspects who allegedly rob illegal border crossers...
Wednesday, December 15. A new report by the American Prospect, “Mass Incarceration,” asks if it makes sense to lock up so many people and for such long terms when crime has been falling for decades. Well, maybe not, except that lower crime rates might be due in part to stiffer sentencing. If so, easing up could make crime increase. For more, check out “The Great Debate,” Part I and Part II...
Tuesday, December 14. Inglewood suffers its 21st. murder in 2010. This time it’s a 61-year old woman watching her grandkids at a city park...
Did those bullies at ATF revoke your gun dealer license for repeatedly “losing” stacks of guns from inventory? No problem! Just turn things over to a family member or friend, then get them to hire you as an employee or “consultant.” Just be sure to pretend you’re no longer in charge! For more helpful hints on circumventing America’s weak-kneed gun laws read this informative series in the Washington Post...
Monday, December 13. Isn’t technology grand? That’s what Georgia prison inmates think as they use smuggled cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent, system-wide strike for better prison conditions. Among the demands are better pay for prison work, more educational opportunities and better food...
Weekend update. Mark Madoff, 46, the older of imprisoned Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff’s two sons, hung himself in his New York City apartment. It happened exactly two years after he and his brother told the FBI about their father’s confession...
Monkey-see, monkey-do. WikiLeaks staff dissatisfied with Julian Assange’s supposedly autocratic rule have left to form a competitor, OpenLeaks. It doesn’t intend to publish information itself but to serve as a conduit between whistleblowers and organizations such as newspapers who want to make the information public...
Friday, December 10. Ahoy, criminal justice researchers! A great new online tool automates the process of creating tables for Part I crimes, saving the many hours spent manually poring through yearly UCR’s. Big hugs to The Crime Report for bringing this to light...
Thursday, December 9. Six persons shot and three killed. That’s the toll in the ten-day period following the November 30th. layoff of 167 Newark cops. Desperate to stem the violence, which also includes a spate of carjackings, the local prosecutor is calling in the State Police and national guard...
Hyper-realistic masks made by a Southern California firm are being used by criminals and others to disguise themselves. They are so effective that Ohio police arrested an innocent black man after six of seven bank tellers mistakenly identified him as a robber. The responsible party was actually a white guy (he pled guilty after his girlfriend turned him in.) Cops now think that San Diego’s infamous “geezer bandit” bank robber may also be wearing a mask...
Wednesday, December 8. Just when you thought they’d finally learn, yet another would-be Jihadist accepts a “bomb” from an undercover FBI agent. This time is was 21-year old Baltimore man Antonio Martinez. He had asked friends to join him in taking revenge for all the Muslims killed by Americans. They said no and tried to talk him out of it, but an FBI informant who saw Martinez’s nutty postings on Facebook had a different idea...
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who disclosed reams of classified diplomatic cables is in DOJ’s bulls-eye as an extradition target. But even if Great Britain or Sweden are willing to give him up, all the huffing and puffing by U.S. authorities doesn’t address the question of why government computer networks allowed an Army private in the Middle East to freely roam the State Department database...
Tuesday, December 7. An ongoing judicial hearing into the Constitutionality of the Texas death penalty law is being torpedoed by the Houston D.A., who has ordered her lawyers to “stand mute.” It’s supposedly the first time the law has been challenged on grounds that the risks of executing an innocent person are too great. The two examples given are the allegedly wrongful executions of Cameron Willingham and Claude Jones...
So far this year, FIVE Chicago police officers have been killed in the line of duty. One additional officer was shot and killed while off-duty. Cops are also complaining of more frequent assaults, with reported batteries on police rising as reports of violent crime decline. So here’s the question: are citizens really being “less respectful” of officers, or is overall violence being undercounted? Police go for the first, but we’re not so sure...
Weekend update. What to do when you’re the second-most crime-ridden city in America? That’s easy - you slash your police force in half. Don’t believe it? Facing a budgetary crisis, Camden, New Jersey plans to cut 180 officers from its 373-officer department on January 18. Lacking a tax base, the dirt-poor city is almost entirely dependent on the state, which has its own problems and a new governor who has vowed to wean communities from the public trough...
Friday, December 3. Possession of a cellphone by a California prison inmate is a crime: true or false? False, of course. Despite their misuse for everything from running drug rings to intimidating witnesses, a legislative moratorium on creating new felonies means their possession is nothing more than an administrative violation. Charles Manson had one that he used for calling and sending text messages to persons in several states...
Thursday, December 2. Is WikiLeaks’ Swedish founder Julian Assange committing a U.S. crime by disseminating American diplomatic correspondence? Experts can’t seem to agree. In 2005 two Israeli lobbyists who passed on sensitive information from a Pentagon employee were indicted for espionage. A judge dismissed the case, ruling that the government had to demonstrate that the lobbyists intended to harm the U.S. It seems that the Attorney General may be considering theft charges inasmuch as the material is government property. Even if charges are filed, one would have to snatch or extradite Assange, wherever he may be...
Wednesday, December 1. What was threatened happened. Newark PD laid off 167 officers after the mayor and police union head failed to agree on trimming the contract.
John Ewell, a 53-year old South Los Angeles hairdresser, spoke against three-strikes on the Montel Williams show. Why? Because his two robbery convictions in the 1980’s meant that one more felony could send him to prison for life. But he still kept capering, depositing a stolen $28,000 check in 1994 and, more recently, repeatedly stealing from Home Depots. Each time the D.A. decided not to pursue a third strike. But Ewell finally hit the big time. Now he’s charged with killing four people in a recent series of Los Angeles home invasions.
Tuesday, November 30. The Southern Poverty Law Center released an officer-safety video warning about the “sovereign citizen” movement. It was made with the assistance of police in West Memphis, Arkansas, where a father-son team of extremists shot and killed two officers and wounded two others.
Combine a drive to reduce prisoner headcounts with a rotten economy and what do you get? Large numbers of ex-inmates on the streets trying to figure out what to do. With poor skills, little education and a criminal record they have a tough enough time finding jobs when things are good. Cutbacks in social services and job-finding assistance make things worse...
Monday, November 29. Some who knew the would-be Oregon bomber from school and a local mosque described the behavior of the “assimilated” and once seemingly normal youth as turning increasingly erratic and confused during the past months, a period that coincided with his contacts with FBI undercover agents. The Islamic center that the bomber attended was hit with a firebomb Sunday.
Weekend roundup. When will they ever learn? Friday night the FBI arrested Osman Mohamud, 19, a U.S. citizen born in Somalia, after he attempted to detonate an inert bomb given to him by an FBI undercover agent. Mohamud’s target was a Portland Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. According to press reports the undercover agent worked Mohamud for a year and supposedly tried to talk him out of following through on the plot...
Friday, November 26. Wall Street fraud is back in the headlines with the arrest of Don Chu, a (former) employee of one of the so-called “advisory” firms that hook up hedge funds with experts who can inform them about the performance of various industries. Only problem is, some of these “experts” turn out to be corporate employees who are secretly paid by the advisory firms to provide their clients with insider information (e.g., advance notice of quarterly earnings reports), thus giving them a leg up on other investors. Chu, who expressed worries on an FBI wiretap, is thought to represent only the first salvo in a wide-ranging investigation. Agents have served search warrants at other advisory firms and more arrests are anticipated...
Wednesday, November 24. There’s another obstacle on the road towards legalizing pot. In a stunning move, Los Angeles and Orange Counties have enacted ordinances that outlaw medical marijuana shops in unincorporated areas. The supervisors’ action follows a cacophony of complaints by angry residents who claim that pot clinics are leading their neighborhoods to deteriorate. Meanwhile the DEA has temporarily placed chemicals used to make the synthetic marijuana sold in head shops on Schedule I, thus making them illegal...
Kamala Harris, a fervent opponent of the death penalty, eked out a razor-thin win to become California’s new Attorney General. Now we’ll get to see how she handles an obvious ethical dilemma...
Tuesday, November 23. After all was apparently said and done about airport searches, the Feds flinched. Faced with a lot more griping than they anticipated they’re now promising to be more considerate and “blend privacy and security.” It seems that TSA head John Pistole, a former FBI executive, may have a lot to learn about P.R....
A stunning investigation by the Washington Post into the sources of guns used to murder police officers revealed that about a third had been legally bought by the killers...
Friday, November 19. In response to the attempted 2009 Christmas day bombing by an explosives-laden Nigerian terrorist the TSA has implemented full body scanning and pat-downs so thorough that passengers are complaining. TSA’s chief says he’s not going to change a thing even though confrontations between passengers and screeners are mounting. Lawsuits challenging the new practices have also been filed. Instituted three weeks ago, the methods are thought by some to go so far beyond what’s reasonable that they require particularized suspicion. That, of course, is something the courts will have to determine...
Thursday, November 18. Only one? That’s the widespread reaction after Federal jurors convicted Ahmed Ghailani, the first Gitmo detainee to be tried in Federal court, of conspiracy but acquitted him on 284 other counts relating to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa where hundreds were killed. Ghailani, who faces a mandatory 20-to-life, had been tortured while held incognito by the CIA for five years, thus rendering his statements and other evidence inadmissible. Some say the solution is to avoid the nettlesome civilian justice system altogether. Here’s a more American idea: Don’t torture...
Wednesday, November 17. NIMBY. That’s what some Chicago aldermen are saying to plans by Chicago PD Chief Jody Weis to realign patrol coverage so as to better coincide with the distribution of crime. With hundreds fewer officers than several years ago and no money to replace all who leave, the department wants to concentrate its forces on “hot spots.” But the cops have to come from somewhere, which in practice will have to mean more affluent, lower-crime areas. Robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn’t sound good if you’re Peter...
Monday, November 15. As we mentioned in “When a Pharmacist Kills”, gun-rights groups have pushed through “castle laws” in many states, giving anyone the absolute right to use deadly force if they feel threatened in any way, and without needing to (if possible) back off. Prosecutors in Ohio are now complaining that the law is being used to defend criminals who try to rip each other off. A legislator says that the only purpose was to protect honest citizens from being unjustly prosecuted and if the law is being misused he’ll seek to amend it...
Saturday, November 13. Federal agents know that IRS taxpayer information is usually off-limits for any purpose other than tax law enforcement. Apparently there’s a small exception for child abduction cases, but as a recent case shows even that is very tightly drawn. Attempts to relax the rule have met opposition. Some fear, and not without reason, that granting a broad exception would create a slippery slope, invading taxpayer privacy and, not incidentally, discouraging voluntary compliance with tax laws and honest self-reporting...
Friday, November 12. Remember the case of Cameron Willingham, the Texas man who was put to death for an arson that experts keep saying never happened? Now the Lone Star state is accused of the wrongful execution of a second man. This time the crime was a liquor store holdup, and the hair used to place him at the scene turns out not to have been his. Sure, he was a career criminal, a terrible guy, but still...
And this just in: In sunny San Diego, clouds roll in over soon-to-be ex-Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido, who apparently made one too many off-color remarks while having her courtroom filmed as a pitch for a reality TV show...
Thursday, November 11. Council members are upset that in lightly-patrolled Los Angeles 93 able-bodied cops (and an additional 61 on light duty) are rotating through clerical assignments because the department is 120 civilians short. Things will soon be getting worse as 90 more cops get taken off the streets to help staff a new, manpower-intensive jail which replaces an old lockup that’s run by non-sworn staff. But with Mayor Villaraigosa trying to keep the number of cops up there’s simply no money to hire more civilians...
Wednesday, November 10. And here we go again. A just-released DOJ report faults ATF efforts to interdict the flow of guns to Mexico, saying that the agency focuses on small-time dealers instead of big traffickers. Its intelligence, coordination and gun-tracing efforts are also found wanting. In reply, the agency says it’s doing as well as it can with the puny resources it’s allocated. To that this retired ATF guy can only add, “Amen!”
Tuesday, November 9. “Capturing the Friedmans,” a fascinating 2003 documentary (it won at Sundance) follows the travails of a father and son who are accused of and ultimately plead guilty to child molestation. But as the movie unfolds it looks more and more like they’re innocent. Alas, the father committed suicide in prison, while the son was paroled after doing 13 years. New York’s high court has since said that the son may have been wrongfully convicted. Now the Nassau County D.A. has convened a panel to reexamine the entire affair...
Monday, November 8. Seventeen years ago three West Memphis, Arkansas youths were imprisoned - one was put on death row - for murdering three boys in an alleged Satanic ritual. In a stunning decision, the Arkansas Supreme Court has ordered a court hearing to determine whether newly discovered DNA evidence exonerates the defendants, known as the West Memphis Three, and whether jurors improperly considered the confession of one of the youths (he was tried separately) in finding the other two guilty. For more on a case that reeks of police and prosecutorial misconduct see our prior posting...
Friday, November 5. A civil rights lawsuit challenging Philadelphia’s stop and frisk practices reports that officers stopped more than two-hundred fifty thousand pedestrians in 2009. During that year NYPD reportedly made 570,000 such stops. As we recently argued in “Too Much of a Good Thing,” aggressive policing practices have stretched Terry’s “reasonable suspicion” standard beyond recognition. Abuse it, and you’ll lose it...
Thursday, November 4. Common sense has prevailed, at least at the local court level, with a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruling that residency restrictions imposed by state law on convicted sex offenders are unconstitutional. Among other things the law sets the minimum distance between an offender’s residence and a school or public park at 2,000 feet (a bit more than 1/3 mile.) That can make it nearly impossible to find affordable housing in a city, leading to homelessness and making supervision even more problematic. In some areas offenders wind up clustering in certain fleabag hotels and apartment buildings, creating bizarre outposts that are unwelcome by local residents and police.
Wednesday, November 3. Add this to your believe-it-or-not file. A former LAPD officer is rightfully $4 million richer today because a civil jury decided that he had been fired in retaliation for truthfully testifying at a Federal civil trial that the department pressured supervisors to bend overtime rules. That testimony was used against him in a department hearing for...violating overtime rules! Former chief Bratton (so long, it’s been not so great to know ya) overruled a recommendation to suspend the cop for one day and fired him instead. He was a field training officer with eighteen years on the job...
Tuesday, November 2. Trust us. That’s NYPD’s response to a New York Times report that they haven’t reported non-Part I crime stat’s for eight years. They say it’s because of software problems. Um, maybe, but in light of accusations that NYPD commanders purposely downgraded Part I crimes to look good on Compstat, it leaves one to wonder whether somebody’s trying to hide something...
Monday, November 1. Retired and current California police chiefs are duking it out over Proposition 19, an initiative to legalize recreational marijuana. San Jose’s former chief, Robert McNamara, thinks that police resources are best expended elsewhere. But one of the measure’s leading opponents, Covina chief Kim Raney, says it would turn California into a social science experiment and calls the retired chiefs out of touch. See news clips for more...
For a horror story about compassionate sentencing gone wrong check out the news clip about the 20-year old gangster in Milwaukee, who allegedly shot and killed a man in a stickup ten months after drawing probation for a vicious armed robbery...
Friday, October 29. A new Vera Institute of Justice report says that after decades of growth correctional budgets across the U.S. are finally coming down, if only slightly. That’s due to the economy, and because authorities and policymakers are supposedly recognizing that severely punishing nonviolent and drug offenders doesn’t work. Those, like this blogger, who credit falling crime rates to the incapacitative effects of stiff sentencing aren’t so sure. For more see our prior post...
Thursday, October 28. Do patrol officers really spend much of their time “aimlessly” driving around? Yes, if you believe Lincoln (Neb.) police chief Tom Casady. No, if you believe the incredulous readers who commented on a PoliceOne article touting the wonders of predictive policing. Here’s an example one PP booster suggested: use DMV records to find out where the types of cars most often stolen are likely to be, then send officers there! Don’t believe it? Read the article for yourself. Then check out our prior post...
Wednesday, October 27. NYPD is catching more flak over its stop-and-frisk campaign, with a new report claiming that nearly seven percent of discretionary stops between 2004-2009 may have been legally unjustified. In a city as active as the Big Apple, where an incredible 570,000 stops were made in 2009 alone, the number of questionable encounters -- 150,000 -- isn’t exactly chicken feed. Click here for a related post...
Meanwhile a breathless report in the Washington Post says that the gun lobby makes it tough for ATF to regulate the gun industry. Um...so what’s new?
Tuesday, October 26. Remember the police chief who was paid $437,000 to oversee a force in a tiny, impoverished L.A.-area community? He and other top officials were forced to quit, and several, including the city manager (he was making $800,000) were indicted for corruption. Now some current and former cops are accusing the chief of having looked the other way all along...
Monday, October 25. Fresh from its explosive investigation into misconduct by current and former officials of the City of Bell, the Los Angeles Times is taking on long-standing L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, alleging that he opened an investigation to please a contributor. For more see news clips...
Friday, October 22. Recent polls have California’s marijuana legalization initiative trailing by twelve points. It’s popular with likely voters under 40 but a loser with older persons, women, Latinos and conservatives. Of course, even in the unlikely event that the measure passes its implementation will undoubtedly be held up while the Feds pursue a Constitutional challenge under the Supremacy Clause. See last week’s post for details...
Thursday, October 21. Blackwater may have been forced to change its name (it’s now called “Xe services”) but the series of killings in Iraq and Afghanistan that caused its reputation to crumble haven’t lead to any convictions. That’s the typical result when the Feds try to prosecute American contract employees for crimes allegedly committed overseas. Click here for some of the reasons...
Wednesday, October 20. Does pot impair driving? Some, including a university researcher who advises NORMAL say no. But forget the academics. The results of an informal test conducted by police on two Southern California media personalities (both with medical marijuana cards) are now in, and the results are hardly surprising...
Tuesday, October 19. Spurred by a San Jose newspaper series and a damning law school study, the California Bar has opened an inquiry into possible misconduct by 130 of the state’s prosecutors. And while you’re at it, check out our recent post, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry”...
Monday, October 18. Four Muslim men just convicted of plotting to bring down planes and bomb synagogues in the Bronx claimed, with justification, that they were induced to do so by a government informer. Only problem is, they ran their mouths so much that jurors listening to surveillance tapes concluded that they were nonetheless predisposed to commit acts of terror. And in Federal practice, predisposition trumps everything...
Heads are starting to roll at NYPD over allegations that officers have been fudging crime statistics, for example, by not filing reports or downgrading their severity to make their precincts look good. For a recent post on this topic check out Liars Figure...
Friday, October 15. Clandestine meth labs have been the scourge of rural America for decades. All that was needed to get a key ingredient, authorities say, was to send someone to the local CVS pharmacy, where they could buy as many packages of cold remedies as they wished. Trouble is, multiple sales on the same day to the same person violate Federal law, and now CVS must pay...
Thursday, October 14. In 2004 Arkansas sent Maurice Clemmons on interstate parole to Washington. Five years later they refused to take him back even after he was arrested for rape. Released on bond, he went on to kill four Lakewood (Wash.) police officers. New provisions just adopted by the agency that regulates interstate compacts -- and reportedly resisted by Arkansas -- requires that states take back parolees who commit acts that could lead to revocation...
Wednesday, October 13. Being mistakenly arrested and charged with murder would devastate anyone, and especially a cop. Click here to read what a “rush to judgment” did to an Illinois officer, and how a bit of computer sleuthing managed to get him off the hook...
Municipal budget shortfalls continue playing havoc with police departments around the country. Check out what’s happening in Pontiac (Michigan) and Newark...
Tuesday, October 12. Fifty-percent off for good behavior? Facing a budget crisis, that’s the provision that some Washington state legislators want to revive. While some think it’s too much, others see it as an incentive for good behavior. More cynically, it’s also a good way to look tough on crime on the front end while allowing slippage out the back. And without quality post-release monitoring, which is always a challenge money or not, high rates of recidivism plus early outs inevitably place pressure on the crime rate...
Monday, October 11. Adrian Schoolcraft, the suspended NYPD officer who secretly recorded hundreds of hours of audiotapes to prove that the department had productivity quotas and fudged crime statistics now has his own website, www.schoolcraftjustice.com.
Fruit of the poisoned tree. That’s the doctrine that a judge is using to bar the testimony of a witness who said he sold TNT to Ahmed Ghailani, the first Gitmo detainee to be tried in Federal court. Ghailani had disclosed the witness’s name while being held and, assumedly, tortured in a CIA dungeon. Government lawyers say they won’t appeal as they have enough other evidence to convict...
Weekend update. Three officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles this weekend. See news clips for details...
Calling for an end to the saga of Bruce Lisker, a Los Angeles man who served 26 years for a murder that he likely didn’t commit, a Federal judge refused to reconsider her order freeing him last year. Lisker’s liberty had seemed assured, as the District Attorney announced that there was insufficient evidence for a retrial.
But in a surprising turn, Attorney General Jerry Brown (he’s running for Governor) stepped in to demand that the judge return Lisker to prison because his claim of innocence, even if true, wasn’t enough to overcome the fact that it had been filed too late under Federal law. Now the judge has fired back, ruling that Brown’s objection was itself filed too late, so the matter is closed. Meanwhile Lisker’s Federal lawsuit against the County proceeds...
Friday, October 8. In New York City, a black mother says that for her son and his peers, being stopped and frisked by NYPD has been a “part of growing up.” Now a college senior, he tries to act nonplussed when it happens, but she’s convinced that the shrug conceals bitterness and humiliation...
Thursday, October 7. Do you like the puzzlers on Car Talk? Then try this one on for size. Imbler v. Patchman (Supreme Court, 1976) gave individual prosecutors full immunity from Federal civil suit even if they knowingly used false testimony and failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. That’s been the law to date. Now, in Connick v. Thompson, the Supreme Court is considering whether a prosecutorial office can be sued for failing to properly supervise and train its prosecutors to avoid disclosure violations. They appeared to have said “no” last year in Van de Kamp v. Goldstein. But now they’ve accepted Thompson, which on first blush seems to be a nearly identical case. Are they considering splitting some very fine legal hairs, and if so, what could these be...? Related post
Wednesday, October 6. LAPD, moans Chief Charlie Beck, hasn’t been able to buy squad cars in two years. So how could it afford a billion dollars to equip its officers with personal jetpacks as reported by “Fox & Friends”? Turns out that some overeager “journalists” bit on a tongue-in-cheek story that appeared on the website of the former supermarket tabloid The Weekly World News. Of course, should you happen to see some cops hopping, skipping and jumping around, please do let us know...
Tuesday, October 5. Step aside, stop-and-frisk, now there’s “knock-and-talk,” with cops in Florida door-knocking residences of which they’re suspicious and asking to be let in. A police commander said it’s an efficient way to screen tips, but as a bizarre shooting attests, bad things can happen...
“The government is allowed to walk up to a complete stranger and say, ‘Do you want to do this horrible thing?’ — without any information of who that person is or what they are like. And if they say, ‘Yes, I do,’ and that’s it, and they do it, they were not entrapped.” That, says a New York Times reporter, is what a prosecutor told the judge at the trial of four New York men who were prodded by an FBI informer to agree to blow up synagogues and military cargo flights...
Monday, October 4. Those pesky students at Santa Clara Law School (the same ones who host the Northern California Innocence Project) are at it again. Poring through a decade’s worth of musty records, they’ve uncovered 707 instances of prosecutorial misconduct. Click here to read their report’s executive summary...
Meanwhile the Justice Department is complaining that a USA Today series taking their prosecutors to task for - you guessed it, prosecutorial misconduct - fails to give proper credit to the vast majority of DOJ lawyers, who do their thankless job well. Um, OK, so what about that Federal prosecutor who reacted to the exoneration of a man he helped unjustly convict by saying “it’s of no concern to me”...?
Weekend wrapup. Remember the West Memphis 3? One of the three convicted, Damien Echols, who’s been sitting on death row for seventeen years, just had his say before the Arkansas supreme court. His argument, that DNA links one of the victim’s stepfathers and his friend to the scene, moved a justice to ask the prosecutor why the defendants, against whom there was no physical evidence, shouldn’t get a new trial. “The harm is the criminal justice system’s interest in finality,” answered the lawyer...
Friday, October 1. It seems that nearly every day we hear of another mass shooting, usually in connection with a family dispute. A Wisconsin organization that’s been tracking such things for a decade repots that more than a third of that state’s homicides are the product of domestic violence...
Thursday, September 30. Cuts in personnel, training and in specialized units threaten to unleash a new crime wave and undermine the tactical and community advances made by police in the past decades, say U.S. police chiefs at a meeting of the Police Executive Research Forum...
Compstat: The Game? That could be one spinoff from a new online section just unveiled by the Los Angeles Times, which places near-real time crime information from LAPD and the Sheriff’s on maps so that viewers can track what’s happening around the city by neighborhood and even block segment...
Wednesday, September 29. Even in the midst of the Great Recession, with high unemployment and cuts to the police, property crime keeps going down. Chiefs are quick to credit their hard work and “innovations” like hot-spot policing. Some criminologists, including Carnegie-Mellon’s Alfred Blumstein, partly agree. Others, like ASC president Richard Rosenfeld, seem less sure that police are the key...
Tuesday, September 28. Check out this priceless Dilbert cartoon...
The suicide of a man armed with an “AK-47” type rifle at the UT Austin library is a chilling reminder of the 1966 massacre when a heavily armed gunman climbed the campus’ clock tower and shot and killed fourteen, wounding dozens more...
Monday, September 27. Watch out Facebook and Blackberry! Complaining that newfangled technology is complicating the fight against crime and terror, the FBI is seeking legislation to force social networks and other communication carriers (including Blackberry, which offers encrypted channels) to insert back doors that make court-ordered snooping possible. See news clips...
A new study using ATF trace data confirms that the interstate gun pipeline which agents have battled for decades remains alive and well, with traffickers acquiring guns in weak-law states for distribution in strong-law states. Links and details in news clips...
Ventura County restricts jail inmates to postcards, in and out. But L.A. County says no, that it would only make mental health problems worse. Meanwhile in Colorado, the ACLU is contesting postcard-only rules as First Amendment violations. See news clips...
Weekend update. LAPD officers working the same area where Jamines was shot subdued a knife-wielding woman by firing two beanbags. A department spokesperson said that “from here on out” non-lethal weapons might be issued to bike officers and those on foot...
A powerful story in the L.A. Times depicts the rural Guatemalan village that was home to Manuel Jamines, the day laborer shot and killed by an LAPD officer three weeks ago. For more on the incident see Every Cop Needs a Taser...
Friday, September 24. Freeing a man imprisoned for a 2004 murder, Texas’ highest court ruled that dog-scent lineup evidence cannot be the sole or principal basis for a conviction. Whether it’s valid at all wasn’t considered. See news clips for details...
Thursday, September 23. Bell, the small working class city near L.A. where eight present and past officials were recently jailed for corruption paid its police chief (he wasn’t charged) a stunning $437,000 per year. According to the L.A. Times the salary was structured to make it tough for nosy outsiders to figure out. The chief was also guaranteed to be certified as disabled when he retired, meaning that half his pension wouldn’t be taxed...
Wednesday, September 22. Denver’s apparent slowdown in officer self-initiated activity, linked to heightened discipline, is exactly what happened in Los Angeles when then-chief (now councilman) Bernard Parks tightened the screws. Blowback from the police union was severe, and Parks wasn’t offered a second term. See news clips for details...
See news clips for a link to the Chicago Tribune’s excellent series depicting the “iron pipeline” that brought the .45 caliber pistol used in the killing of a Chicago police officer from Mississippi, where a straw buyer purchased it in a store...
Tuesday, September 21. Do we feel safer now? After eighteen months of contacts with an informer, a 22-year old alleged lone-wolf terrorist gets snagged by the FBI as he plants an inert bomb in a trash can near Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Um, guess who gave him the device...
Who says money’s tight? Customs and Border Protection awarded a near half-million contract to “facilitate” communications among its own executives. The recipient? An obscure firm that includes the agency’s former head...
Police Issues isn’t in the habit of making movie recommendations, but by all means go see “Mesrine: Public Enemy #1,” a gripping, superbly acted and staged French thriller now in limited release. It’s based on the real story of ruthless bank robber and escape artist Jacques Mesrine. By film’s end we’ll guarantee that you’ll be rooting for the flics to pull the trigger. (By the way, this is the second of two parts -- the first is “Killer Instinct” -- but “Public Enemy #1” is reportedly the best)...
Monday, September 20. Memphis PD and IBM credit crime prediction software with taking a big bite out of crime. But some cops point out that crime was falling anyway, and credit any improvements on common sense and overtime. Meanwhile an academic who participated in the effort admits that other police and community initiatives were also going on. So here’s the question: other than for supporting researchers and vendors, can increasingly fine-tuned crime analysis techniques be of practical value? For more see our recent post on Predictive Policing...
Weekend wrap-up. Check out news clips for the incredible story of two Mississippi men who were exonerated after doing thirty years in prison for a rape/murder they confessed to but didn’t commit. A third man in the same boat died in prison eight years ago...
Things in Phoenix are getting curioser and curioser. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who once had two county supervisors indicted on bogus conflict-of-interest charges, faces renewed scrutiny thanks to a leaked memo from an underling that suggests the department’s number two man oversaw a political dirty-tricks campaign. Sheriff Joe has asked another Sheriff’s office to investigate, but the angry supervisors insist he call in the FBI...
Friday, September 17. You’ve heard of the FBI using informers to rope-in big talkers who brag about doing Jihad. Now the FBI’s arrested a 75-year old physicist (and his 67-year old wife) for accepting large bundles of cash in exchange for A-bomb information that was supposed to go to Venezuela. Except that it was all made up. A colleague described his elderly friend as “gullible.” You think?...
Thursday, September 16. Two weeks ago in Seattle a police officer shot and killed a drunk man who allegedly advanced on him with a folding knife. It turns out that the victim was an Indian totem carver. This incident has caused an uproar, especially since officers have been involved in a series of controversial uses of force. As an inquiry into training, use of force and community relations policies gets underway, the chief ordered that more Tasers be handed out...
Wednesday, September 15. Ruling en banc, the Ninth Circuit held that a search warrant for computerized drug test results on ten baseball players can’t be extended under the “plain view” doctrine to justify seizing positive results for more than a hundred others (see news clips, 9/13/10). Trolling through databanks, the judges said, requires the Government to exercise special care so that “plain view” doesn’t become moot. Still, it’s clear that lots of ballplayers have been juicing...
Tuesday, September 14. In an unprecedented move the University of Virginia law school posted on the Internet a remarkable assortment of documents from thirty-nine cases where false confessions led to convictions and lengthy prison terms. Each defendant was eventually exonerated by DNA...
Monday, September 13. NYPD’s quota imbroglio deepens, with the department insisting that setting minimum productivity standards for a shift isn’t a quota, which is forbidden under a new state law. Disagreeing, the union and the State Senator who wrote the statute point to a captain’s secretly-recorded threat to punish officers who don’t contribute...
Weekend wrapup. Step aside, Phoenix Sheriff Joe, here comes Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeau! According to the East Valley Tribune, the polished and affable Massachusetts transplant is riding the anti-illegal alien wave to dizzying heights. For a retired cop’s insight about the Arizona GOP’s new “rising star” check out Bill Richardson’s column...
Friday, September 10. NYPD commanders are feeling the heat with the release of an audio tape of a supervisory meeting in which a captain sets explicit ticket quotas, saying that he’s ready to fire any officer who doesn’t comply. The secret taper, a sergeant, said he did it to express solidarity with a suspended cop who recorded roll-call sessions to prove that Compstat pressures were leading officers to underreport crimes...
Thursday, September 9. Three years after ordering a Milwaukee gun dealer to close for a string of record-keeping and illegal sales problems (it was allowed to stay open pending District Court review), ATF now says it must really, really shut its doors. But another appeal is expected, and if not, the dealer is likely to transfer his license to a nephew, which would return everything to zero. Meanwhile Congress is deliberating the NRA-sponsored “ATF Modernization Act,” which gun control organizations vehemently oppose as it would make gun dealer oversight even less meaningful...
Wednesday, September 8. After an LAPD bicycle officer shot and killed a man armed with a knife Chief Charlie Beck pointed out that less-than-lethal weapons aren’t carried on bikes...
Tuesday, September 7. Misconduct and abuse complaints suggest that the Border Patrol’s hiring spree may be coming home to roost. See news clips for details...
A fascinating story in the New York Times describes how the Supreme Court’s unprecedented ideological polarization is reflected in justices’ choice of law clerks...
Monday, September 6. Budget cuts have apparently lengthened sheriff’s emergency response times in Los Angeles County. But is the situation being made worse because the department has taken on more contract work? Apparently the L.A. Times didn’t ask...
Weekend roundup. The scandal in Bell (Calif.) grows, with cops now saying they were ordered to impound cars to help the small, poor city with sky-high executive salaries stay afloat...
Tapes played during the trial of four men accused of plotting to bomb synagogues in the Bronx reveal that the government informer kept pressing the main defendant to go through with the plot. See news clips for details...
And the gun madness goes on. Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies are looking for two suspects who shot dead a 14-year old girl and wounded six other young persons, several critically, at a house party in the desert suburb of Lancaster. A local TV station reported that “bullet casings, shattered windows and victims spread out over the length of a city block”...
Friday, September 3. Governors might be getting reluctant to execute condemned inmates whose convictions relied solely on eyewitness evidence. Check out news clips for what just happened in Ohio...
Thursday, September 2. Remember Bruce Lisker, the possibly wrongfully convicted Los Angeles man who did 26 years before he was freed by a Federal judge? Now the California A.G. -- that’s right, liberal Jerry Brown -- wants the judge to return Lisker to prison because of Lee v. Lampert, a Ninth Circuit decision that, among other things, forbids late filers from being granted habeas corpus...
It took less than a day for the Illinois governor to criticize Chicago’s gang-leader call-in as misguided. Get their assault weapons first, he said...
Wednesday, September 1. Will wonders never cease! Following the Ceasefire model, Chicago PD and the Feds called in gang leaders to warn them and get their underlings to quit killing each other. After a while the gangsters walked out. See news clips...
A tragic recent example in West Hollywood demonstrates that, yes, marijuana clinics are a supply point for illegal dealers. And mass shootings continue, with a man who was recently arrested for a restraining order killing five, including his estranged spouse. See news clips for details...
Well, here’s the revamped PoliceIssues, sporting a somewhat cleaner look, a new font (Georgia) and a slightly different structure, which users won’t notice except for occasionally having to click on a navigation buttons to go across years. Too much information was accumulating to leave topics on a single page...
If you notice any glitches -- and there are certainly more than a few -- please let me know! And fear not, we’re returning to our regular weekly postings this weekend...
By the way, your blogger hasn’t noticed any local press coverage on the L.A. Sheriff’s nifty new heat weapon. Check out news clips for more...Weekend roundup. NYPD officers fed up with pressures to build up the “numbers” by making “chickenshit” arrests and stop-and-frisks, and to show that Compstat works by downgrading or not taking crime reports turned to the ultimate weapon: secret tape recorders. See news clips...
It’s not just Minneapolis (see below.) Indianapolis officers are also in the hot seat over misconduct and use of force issues, so much so that the Indianapolis Star claims it’s dominated local news this summer...
Thursday, August 26. Little-known outside Minnesota, the scandal surrounding the Minneapolis Gang Task Force, disbanded last year, has resulted in a proposed settlement of $3 million. An official report documented numerous instances of misconduct, including citizens being bullied from their property, false record-keeping and the misappropriation of valuables for the officers’ personal use. A federal investigation is under way...
Wednesday, August 25. The judge’s decision is in, and it doesn’t look good for Troy Davis, the internationally celebrated death-row inmate who says someone else did the foul deed. Except that “someone else” isn’t talking. See news clips and our posting for more details...
Is the Ninth Circuit living up to its well-earned reputation? Read U.S. v. Maddox and let us know what you think...
Tuesday, August 24. Denver’s new public safety manager lasted just three months. Criticized for taking it too easy on the cops, former Secret Service executive Ron Perea failed to follow a new, hard-fought policy that requires firing officers who lie. See news clips for a link and more details...
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, they’ve finally got around to realizing that yes, criminals do get guns through straw buyers and at gun shows (see news clips). Natch, the NRA remains in denial mode...
Monday, August 23. Watch out, America: here comes “predictive policing”! A new take on computerized crime pin-maps, it uses real-time and historical data about the characteristics of crimes and criminals to estimate probabilities that certain types of crimes will occur at certain places. Considering that there are only so many cops available, just how much real-world difference such technologies can make is up in the air. But with agency budgets pinched and Federal money to develop PP available, competition to be first out of the gate is intense...Weekend roundup. California legislators are once again trying to force police to track DNA collected from sex crimes and report each year how much is yet to be analyzed (see news clips). Victim groups laud the measure but police tend to oppose it, partly because of the record-keeping hassle, and partly because it’s expensive to process DNA and not always necessary. Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill last year...
Friday, August 20. How many drunk-driving convictions does it take before they rip up your driver license forever? In Delaware there’s apparently no limit. Check out news clips...
Just how much “discretion” do cops really have? And how should they use it? Watch for this weekend’s post, which was inspired by a sheriff lieutenant’s memorable memo...
Thursday, August 19. A newly-released report paints a grim picture of the North Carolina crime lab, and particularly its suspended serology unit. Meanwhile Ronal Serpas, the new chief at New Orleans PD, tells USA Today that things are even worse there than he thought. Check out “Before JetBlue” for some historical tidbits about NOPD that will curl your hair...
Wednesday, August 18. Reports about the Blagojevich trial lay most of the blame for the hang-ups on a single juror. Yet it’s clear that the panel was, as the chairperson suggested, uncomfortable with the lack of a “smoking gun.” One, a sophomore criminal justice student, said that the Government’s presentation “confused people. They didn’t follow a timeline. They jumped around.” You can bet that the prosecution’s case will improve with the next bite of the apple...
Tuesday, August 17. How did a well-regarded police department get beset with internal problems? That’s what Glendale’s citizens want to know. Read all about it in news clips and “Not All Cops Are Blue”...
Monday, August 16. Now that Federal circuits disagree, whether police need warrants to electronically track vehicles over prolonged periods may be heading to the Supremes. See news clips...
Do you ever shudder when a ridiculous sentence gets handed down in, say, China? Well, a Los Angeles judge released a 48-year old homeless and mentally ill man who earned his third strike, and mandatory life term, for busting into a church, supposedly to look for food. That was thirteen years ago. The D.A. says he favored the release, but it took students at a Stanford legal clinic to make it happen...
Weekend roundup. And the toll from senseless shootings goes on, with four shot dead and four wounded at a wedding party in an upscale Buffalo restaurant. Among the dead was the groom...
An official report absolving L.A. Sheriff’s employees of wrongdoing fails to stem anger in the case of Mitrice Richardson, a bipolar young woman who was released from a Sheriff’s station in the middle of the night last September after being booked for not paying a restaurant tab. Her body was discovered in a remote area August 9...
A sheriff’s lieutenant stirs a hornet’s nest with a memo urging deputies to consider the personal consequences to those they arrest...
Friday, August 13. Despite promised Federal aid, police jobs throughout the U.S. continue to be threatened by the economic turndown. See news clips for a current example in New Jersey. You’ll also find a link there to the remarkable story of a Texas man who was freed after doing 27 years for a rape he didn’t commit...
Thursday, August 12. Relaxed release policies are under fire as inmates set free ahead of time go on to commit violent crimes. See the Updates in The Great Debate (Part II) for more...
The long, sad saga of Thomas Goldstein, a California man who served more than two decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, has finally come to an end (see news clips.) Goldstein, who was railroaded with the help of notorious jailhouse informant Edward Fink, agreed to settle his lawsuit against the City of Long Beach for $8 million. Fink (there’s an appropriate name!), now acknowledged to have been a liar, had testified against Tommy Thompson in a different case. Thompson was later executed...
Tuesday, August 10. A series of articles in the Raleigh News-Observer promises to paint a devastating portrait of the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation and of the state’s crime lab. Cautioning that “many agents don’t cheat,” the writers nonetheless argue that deep-rooted problems pervade the system. Today’s profile, of a severely retarded man who spent fourteen years wrongfully locked up for murder, is gut-wrenching...
Monday, August 9. Sure it’s commonplace -- that’s the point. A Pittsburgh apartment complex for the elderly and disabled is the setting for the first known multiple-victim shooting by an “ordinary person” after yesterday’s posting. See the Updates section of Say Something for details...
Weekend roundup. Yes, cops matter. From Oakland to New York City, our lousy economy has depleted police budgets throughout the U.S., forcing layoffs and corresponding cutbacks in everything from detectives to patrol. And as Flushing Township, Michigan demonstrates (see news clips), it’s the smaller jurisdictions where the impact has been the most dramatic. Counties and state police would come to the rescue, but they’re strapped, too. Some might applaud that the public sector is getting trimmed, but as the New York Times recently pointed out, putting government workers on the street has only added to the nation’s economic woes...
Friday, August 6. No, it wasn’t just a problem in the “old days.” Recent news clips from Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Camden and a host of smaller cities suggest that forty years after the publication of Larry Sherman’s “Scandal and Reform” police misconduct and corruption remains a serious problem throughout the U.S. Watch for a posting on this issue in the forthcoming weeks.
Thursday, August 5. Now that Chicago’s finally placed a Taser in every patrol car reports are that their use has gone up four-fold. Is that good news or bad? Hopefully it’s much more of the first. There’s no doubt that fewer cops will get hurt wrestling suspects to the ground and fewer citizens will get whacked with clubs, or possibly even shot. Of course, there are tradeoffs. The trick is for officers to keep seeking voluntary compliance and avoid abusing their new toy, which given the frustrations of being a street cop isn’t easy. Taking care in placing darts and minimizing the length of zaps are also crucial...
Wednesday, August 4. Another stunning piece in the Los Angeles Times, this time about the more than 100 women, mostly black and poor, who were murdered in the 80’s and 90’s in south L.A. Until DNA fingered their killers, the victims were mostly forgotten. Click here for a related post...
Tuesday, August 3. The AEDPA places strict time limits on filing a Federal appeal after a state death sentence is imposed. What happens if a lawyer accidentally lets the period pass without appealing? So far the Federal courts have ruled that their clients must suffer the consequences. Now the Supreme Court is being asked to correct what to non-lawyers seems a bizarre injustice...
Monday, August 2. How many breaks does a misbehaving cop deserve? For one Louisville officer the sky’s apparently the limit. Click here for the startling account. (Thanks to the Crime Report for alerting us.)
Weekend update. Be sure to read the fascinating Los Angeles Times series about a program that placed skid row residents in housing without forcing them to abandon their evil ways. It’s an unforgettable account of people struggling against their demons and the dedicated volunteers and social workers who are trying to get them off the street. Click here to link to the first installment.
Friday, July 30. Bloodstain pattern analysis is now off-limits in North Carolina (see news clips.) Yet somehow the practice endures, with experts running around the country testifying about a technique that the National Academy of Sciences said is replete with “enormous uncertainties.”...
No surprise here. As nearly everyone expected, the Supreme Court’s 2005 Booker decision, which made adherence to sentencing guidelines optional, has led to growing disparities in Federal sentences, most notably in cases of child pornography and major fraud. DOJ has asked the Sentencing Commission to investigate, but since their opinions don’t much count anymore, it’s unclear what that could accomplish. Check news clips for links...
Thursday, July 29. “...reported crime in the eight major categories tracked by the FBI has decreased for 10 consecutive quarters in Milwaukee - every quarter since Police Chief Edward A. Flynn took over the department in 2008.” So says the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Interestingly, this is the same chief who, to conserve on manpower, discontinued sending officers to every call (see July 26 blog entry)...
Law enforcement isn’t happy, but Congress has approved reducing the Federal disparity between powder and crack cocaine. More crack will have to be sold or possessed for sale (28 grams instead of just 5) to trigger a mandatory 5-year minimum sentence. (Powder remains at 500 grams.) There will be no mandatory minimum for simple crack possession. Whatever the equity issue, slapping crack dealers with a minimum will be more difficult, as they’re going to have to be caught holding a far larger amount...
Wednesday, July 28. With the heart of Arizona’s immigration law on hold, the battle moves to the appellate courts...
Recent accounts of crimes committed by inmates granted early release (see news clips) are causing some to rethink the wisdom of saving money by dumping large numbers of convicts on the streets or exempting them from supervision. Unless we adequately fund the system so that parole agents have manageable caseloads and parolees get suitable reentry assistance all we can do is keep persons locked up as long as possible and hold our breaths once they’re released...
Tuesday, July 27. The official report on the Cambridge fiasco is out. Its main conclusion was summed up by the title of our first posting: “When (Very) Hard Heads Collide.” However, nothing is mentioned about the contradiction between what the officer wrote in his report -- that the witness told him she saw two black males with backpacks -- and what the witness said she told him, which was basically nothing. For more on this see “He Said That She Said; But Did She?”...
Monday, July 26. An article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (see news clips) brings up an interesting issue: are citizens so fed up with poor police response that they’re not reporting crimes? Even if that’s true, criminologists doubt that accounts for falling crime rates, since underreporting has always been a problem. But Milwaukee’s chief says that to conserve manpower and have officers available for other duties and for emergencies the practice of sending cops on every call was discontinued some time ago. That can’t help but discourage reporting. If it reflects a trend, it could be another reason, along with pressures from Compstat and, perhaps, witness intimidation, why reported crime is down...
Friday, July 23. A nationwide, years-long subsidence in gun violence may be coming to an end, with reports coming in from many areas, most recently in Minneapolis and Columbus, of substantial increases in shootings and homicides. There’s no question but that police will be responding more sternly; for example, as in Minneapolis, by implementing Project Exile (see news clips). At a time of decreasing budgets this may also mean the end of any programs that aren’t directly involved in crime suppression.
That small-city chief who made $457,000 a year is out, as is the city manager who earned nearly $800,000. What’s more, they worked in one of the poorest municipalities in Los Angeles County. Read all about it in the Los Angeles Times.Thursday, July 22. At a time when shootings and violence are ticking up in many areas, budget woes have forced agencies to retrench, canceling academy classes, shutting down specialized units and limiting initiatives...
Wednesday, July 21. Do you read John Jay’s The Crime Report News? It’s an excellent CJ news aggregator. That’s where we found links to the Tulsa debacle and the NLEOMF mid-year police officer deaths report. See news clips for links...
Is a chief who oversees 33 cops worth nearly a half-million bucks a year? Bell, California apparently thought so...
Tuesday, July 20. By popular demand (and because of a scolding from my Albany mentor) we’re adding “print” links to the bottom of each post. These bring up that post’s contents in .pdf format, suitable for saving and printing. We’ve started with Conduct and Ethics and Crime and Punishment, but over the next couple of weeks all posts will be readily downloadable...
Monday, July 19. After laying off ten percent of its force Oakland PD says it can’t respond to property crimes without suspects. Citizens are still urged to come in to file reports or, better yet, do it online. Quietly, that’s been the trend in large cities for decades. Has it discouraged inner-city residents from filing reports? Might it have contributed to the “great crime drop”? (And please don’t trot out the NCVS, which may not accurately reflect what goes in in crime-impacted areas)...
Weekend roundup. California and the ACLU are slugging it out before a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel over the state’s recently-instituted practice of collecting DNA from felony arrestees. A Federal judge refused to put the kebosh on it last December...
This weekend’s post, the second of a two-part series on Arizona’s new immigration law, considers its potential consequences on police behavior... (Click here for the first post)...
Friday, July 16. No recession, you say? Then why did Oakland just lay off eighty cops?...
Long-running DOJ and Congressional inquiries into CIA torture are quietly coming to an end. Check out what the co-author of the infamous “torture memos” had to say about waterboarding...
Thursday, July 15. If you get convicted of a crime, never, ever brag that you can do the sentence “standing on your head”...
Wednesday, July 14. Jay’s letter to the editor, published in today’s Los Angeles Times, criticizes “overblown” concerns about the privacy implications of familial DNA...
Tuesday, July 13. Considering the layoffs, furloughs, hiring freezes and reduced public hours that have been visited on L.A.’s jam-packed justice system, maybe it’s time to quit spending taxpayer dollars chasing around after the likes of Roman Polanski, Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson...
Monday, July 12. Is the NYPD overdoing stop-and-frisk? Can officers really develop “articulable facts” over twelve-thousand times a year in an eight-block area? It’s not just the New York Times that’s wondering. Be sure to check out our recent posting on this topic, Too Much of a Good Thing? (May 16)...
Sunday, July 11. While gun-toting poseurs parade around upper-crust Hermosa Beach carrying (unloaded) firearms, four are shot in a gang-related drive-by on the mean streets of Long Beach. Hey, maybe if that well-fed white guy with the rifle slung around his shoulder had been...nah, it’s too frightening to imagine...
Saturday, July 10. In the Los Angeles Times, an op-ed contributor worries about the intrusiveness of familial DNA. Meanwhile an article details the extreme measures taken by the state to cater to such concerns...
Move over, Mary Jane, here comes K2! See news clips...
This weekend’s post examines the cases of Chester Turner, John Thomas and, most recently, “Grim Sleeper” Lonnie Franklin, the three -- that’s right, three -- alleged serial killers arrested in L.A. since 2007. Turner, who’s been sentenced to death, and Franklin, who probably will be once jurors rubber-stamp his all-but-certain conviction, are said to have murdered dozens of south-central area prostitutes, mostly in the 1980’s and 1990’s. And we’ve recently learned that Dallas prostitutes are willingly giving up their DNA in advance should they, um, disappear...
Friday, July 9. DOJ announces it will investigate the Oakland BART shooting for possible civil rights violations...
Thursday, July 8. In an apparent compromise verdict, jurors convicted ex-BART cop Johannes Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter. How Oakland’s rowdier citizens will react is anyone’s guess. (Friday addendum: well, not so much anymore.) Click here and here for detailed postings on the case...
It was coming. Four citizens and a merchant just filed a Federal lawsuit challenging Chicago’s tough new handgun ordinance, which was enacted to replace a law whose provisions the Supreme Court recently ruled unacceptable. See news clips...
Serial killer or not, to some the privacy rights of gun buyers are paramount. See news clips...
Wednesday, July 7. A long-sought serial killer was done in by a familial match to his son, then by a slice of pizza. Moral: clean your plates! See news clips...
Jurors are deliberating the fate of Johannes Mehserle, the ex-BART cop who fatally shot an unarmed man in Oakland last year. Mehserle claims he accidentally drew his pistol instead of a Taser. He can be found guilty of murder, an unlawful killing “with malice aforethought.” (The judge has restricted it to second degree.) Or he can be found guilty of a non-malicious killing, either voluntary manslaughter, killing “upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion,” or involuntary manslaughter, killing during an illegal act that isn’t a felony, or while doing a legal act unlawfully or “without due caution or circumspection.” Or he can be acquitted. Click here for the statutes...
Another cop saved by a vest, this time in a nightmarish incident involving a man handcuffed behind his back. See news clips for details...
Tuesday, July 6. Juror replacements are forcing deliberations to begin anew tomorrow, so a verdict in the Mehserle case is still some days away. Even so, Oakland, fearing a riot should the ex-BART cop be acquitted, is already battening down the hatches...
US Holocaust Memorial Museum establishes the Stephen Tyrone Johns Summer Youth Leadership Program in honor of the fallen special police officer murdered by a white supremacist one year ago.
A Los Angeles jury begins its second day of deliberation in the murder case against former BART cop Johannes Mehserle, who fatally shot an unarmed man in Oakland last year, an incident captured on video. Mehserle claims that it was an accident caused when he mistakenly drew his gun instead of a Taser. Based on past experience it’s doubtful that jurors will convict Mehserle of murder. But if jurors they think he was negligent -- or don’t want to completely let him off the hook -- a manslaughter conviction (against defense wishes, the judge allowed that option) is possible. Venue was changed to Los Angeles because of publicity.
Monday, July 5. L.A.’s love-hate affair with the evil weed has turned a new chapter as LAPD narc’s hit unauthorized pot clinics, dragging away employees and seizing pot and oodles of cash. Check out news clips for details...
Sunday, July 4. Payoffs to news reporters manhandled by LAPD during the 2007 Mac Arthur Park incident continue, the most recent being a cool $1.7 million. Former Chief Bratton quickly conceded that his officers goofed and tried (unsuccessfully) to get several fired, so the question for jurors is not whether the city’s liable but whether individual plaintiffs deserve compensation and, if so, how much. With the city nearly bankrupt, all taxpayers can do is wince and soldier on...
Friday, July 2. Inspired by the recent tragic deaths of five CHP officers, this weekend’s post will focus on accidental deaths, and particularly the risk of being struck down during traffic stops (see 6/28/10 news clip)...
Maywood PD officers hang up their hats, turn in their badges. An L.A. Times photo depicts the poignant moment...
While many brush off the Russian spy ring as a bunch of unproductive amateurs, sleeper agents can serve as points of contact and help orient spies who come over on special assignments, such as to liquidate turncoats; for example, the poisoning death of renegade Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in Great Britain in 2006...
Thursday, July 1. In a blow to the defense, jurors will be allowed to consider manslaughter charges against ex-BART officer Johannes Mehserle, who is on trial for murder in a killing that he said was caused by mistakenly drawing his pistol instead of a Taser.
Wednesday, June 30. Remember the dust-up in Cambridge, where a police sergeant suspected a college professor of being a burglar, then, after he knew better, arrested him for mouthing off? A newly-released official report blames both for being hard-headed. Nothing is mentioned about the the sergeant’s police report, whose account of what a witness said seemed to us highly questionable. Click here and here for postings.
Tuesday, June 29. It’s hard to sympathize, but Claude Jones, a paroled killer who was executed in 2000 for allegedly committing another murder, is having his DNA tested on the latter case. He could wind up being Texas’ second posthumous DNA exoneree. (Unlike Jones, the first, Timothy Cole, merely died in prison.)
Hard to believe but true. A man on parole for a knife murder stabs and kills four more. Details in news clips.
Did you know there was a California Crime Lab Task Force? Or that it had issued a comprehensive report on forensic science? Nope, us neither. Details in news clips.
Monday, June 28. Precautions taken after a similar rash of incidents in previous years have apparently failed to keep CHP officers safe, with three struck and killed by cars this month alone, two on freeway shoulders during traffic stops, one on a surface street while waiting for a tow. See news clips for details and officer photos.
As anticipated, the Supreme Court extended the Second Amendment to the states. But the decision isn’t all one-sided. See news clips for details.
Weekend update. The murder trial of former transit cop Johannes Mehserle, who testified that he mistakenly pulled his pistol instead of a Taser, is coming to an end. Los Angeles, where the trial is being held, and Oakland, where the incident took place, are girding for demonstrations should jurors acquit. Click here for a detailed post.
Friday update. Former transit cop Johannes Mehserle tearfully testified that he had intended to Tase the victim but mistakenly pulled and fired his pistol instead. He said that under the circumstances “the thought of using my gun never entered my head.”
Friday, June 25. Just as L.A. is trying to enforce an ordinance cutting back on pot shops, workers at two dispensaries are shot dead. Click here for a prior post.
After two days of testimony a Savannah Federal judge ended the habeas hearing for Troy Davis, a condemned inmate who won a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court. Davis’ prospects look bleak as the judge wouldn’t let any more witnesses testify that another person confessed to the murder for which Davis was convicted, calling it hearsay without that individual’s presence. He also chastised the defense for inexplicably waiting until the hearing to try to serve the man with a subpoena (they couldn’t find him.) Police officers strongly denied pressuring anyone to testify against Davis, as four witnesses who recanted their testimony alleged, while the prosecutor called evidence of Davis’ guilt “overwhelming.” A ruling is expected in July...
Former BART officer Johannes Mehserle, on trial in Los Angeles (venue changed from Oakland) for the on-duty killing of an unarmed passenger, testified about the tumult in the subway station before the shooting. His lawyer said in opening arguments that Mehserle drew his pistol instead of the Taser by mistake, and today the defendant is expected to repeat that in court. A rigorous cross-examination is anticipated, particularly as Mehserle didn’t tell other officers right after the shooting that he hadn’t meant to fire his pistol. We believe him, but predicting what jurors might do is a fool’s game...
On a lighter note, Boston PD has taken to posting mugs of gang-bangers to, um, “shame” them. Check out the news clips for details and a link to the article...
Thursday, June 24. KNX-1070 radio got documents showing that LA Airport police occasionally leave, sometimes en masse, to backup cops in nearby cities. It undoubtedly breaks the monotony and provides hands-on experience, but when twenty-seven zoom out at once it’s cause to wonder whether they’re overstaffed...
Just out, a detailed Special Master’s report to the New Jersey Supreme Court recommends that pre-trial hearings be held whenever eyewitness ID will be used...
Also today the US Supreme Court issued a mixed ruling in the Skilling/Enron case, upholding the controversial honest-services fraud statute but limiting its coverage to cases involving bribery or kickbacks. Since Skilling was convicted of other offenses whether it will help him is hard to say. For the same reason the Justices also reversed convictions in the Hollinger case...
An unusual drama is playing out in Federal court in Savannah. Troy Davis, a condemned man who won a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court, is trying to prove that he is “clearly” innocent of murdering a police officer twenty-one years ago. So far two former witnesses against Davis have recanted while two others pin the crime on a man whose whereabouts are unknown. Our posting on the case surmises that Davis is guilty, yet if there’s a retrial proving it anew might be impossible...
Wednesday, June 23. Will wonders never cease? University of Maryland’s star criminologist John Laub was finally confirmed as NIJ Director, the first from academia. For more check out the news clips...
Underway in Los Angeles, the trial of former San Francisco BART officer Johannes Mehserle provides fascinating insights into how cops fall apart under stress. Mehserle claims that he intended to Taser an uncooperative suspect but accidentally fired his gun instead. The Oakland D.A. didn’t buy it and charged him with murder. Our postings (click here and here) describe what happened and have updates on the trial...
We seldom call what takes place at NIJ extraordinary, but those present at the opening plenary session of this year’s national conference got a rare treat. Introducing a panel on Texas’ much-criticized execution of Cameron Willingham, NIJ’s Mary Lou Leary called it an opportunity “to help us learn from our mistakes.” For a post and more click here...
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