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Tuesday, February 14. Laws currently in effect in four states (California, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia) limit the purchase of handguns to one a month. Studies by ATF and others indicate that these restrictions reduce the flow of guns to areas with restrictive laws such as Washington and New York and make it more difficult for criminals to get the new, large-caliber guns they want. Your blogger, a retired ATF agent who specialized in gun trafficking investigations, heartily agrees: he even testified before the California legislature when it was considering its bill. So what’s up? Well, Virginia, whose own study said the law works, is moving to do away with it. Proponents of the repeal say that the law is unnecessary, in part because it’s supposedly full of loopholes, and in part because handgun buyer criminal record checks already take care of the problem. Problem is, trafficked guns are sold on the street, not at a store. Naturally, Washington D.C. and New York are hollering. Click here for a related post...
Monday, February 13. Interesting new developments in the aftermath of the freeing of Texas man Michael Morton, who served nearly 25 years in prison for murdering his wife, a crime that it turns out was committed by an intruder, just like Morton claimed all along. An investigation by his lawyers and the Innocence Project revealed that prosecutor Ken Anderson, now a judge, withheld critical evidence during Morton’s trial that might have resulted in his acquittal. Another judge has now ruled there is probable cause that Anderson broke the law, but left it to the state supreme court to decide whether to try him as the criminal that Morton wasn’t. Click here for a related post...
Friday, February 10. A big brouhaha is brewing in Rose Parade land, where a recent switch to encrypted digital radios makes it impossible for outsiders to listen in on police chatter. Pasadena cops welcome the change, which they say enhances both public and officer safety by denying criminals with scanners the ability to keep one step ahead of the fuzz. Of course, an upshot is that the media may not get timely notice of potentially newsworthy events like police shootings. Here’s what the local paper’s senior editor had to say: “This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. I am continually amazed by the Pasadena Police Department's disregard for the right of the public to be aware of what they are doing.” PPD’s chief says nonsense, just file an FOIA request and you’ll get what you need. Still, he’s offered to loan out a scanner. But his offer, which supposedly carries conditions, is yet to be accepted...
Thursday, February 9. If you’ve got the stomach, read on. Remember the incident in 2009 when a parolee shot dead four Lakewood, Washington police officers who were having coffee in a restaurant? Donations for their families poured in from around the country. Many, like this blogger’s, were sent to the officer’s union. Well, the guild treasurer, officer Skeeter Manos, was just indicted for taking $150,000 worth of contributions for his own use. Some of the loot was reportedly spent in Las Vegas, other for toys including fancy home electronics. The embezzlement was discovered by an accountant who found reference to a strange bank account while going through the association’s books. Click here for a related post...
Wednesday, February 8. Can you really have it both ways? Sure, says New York City council speaker (chairwoman) Christine Quinn, who wrote in an open letter to NYPD that she supports stop-and-frisk but worries it can drive a wedge between the department and minority communities. She is especially concerned about reports of an implicit stop-and-frisk quota, warning that it could lead to the controversial strategy’s excessive use. Her carefully-worded missive is apparently meant to boost (or at least not impede) her expected bid for the mayoralty, which is supported by current Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He and his good buddy NYPD Commish Raymond Kelly are convinced that whatever the technique’s P.R. costs, they’re more than offset by its supposedly dampening effect on gun-carrying, and by extension on crime and violence. In any case, stop-and-frisk has become so integral to the department’s M.O. that one wonders what all those coppers (yes, we’re jealous) would do to pass the time if it got taken away. Click here for a related post...
Tuesday, February 7. Do cops matter? Ask Long Beach, California, where Part I crimes jumped a surprising 9.4 percent in 2011. Long Beach PD hasn’t run an academy for years, and its staffing is down fifteen percent since 2009. It’s bad enough to lose officers, but with the budget tight there’s no money for detective overtime, either, so follow-ups aren’t getting done in a timely manner. That means cases aren’t being made and evildoers aren’t getting locked up. As for near-term relief, forget it. Even if it could hire, LBPD, with fewer than 900 officers, insists on training its own, so getting a class up and going will take time, resources and a considerable upfront outlay...
Monday, February 6. A blistering multipart series by the Las Vegas Review-Journal documenting allegedly flawed shootings and excessive uses of force by Las Vegas PD led its beleaguered chief to call in DOJ. Mind you, not the civil rights division, which is already in town responding to citizen complaints, but the COPS office. COPS will review the last two decades’ worth of officer-involved shootings, compare them against established “best practices” and come up with recommendations. But whether summoning a component that has no enforcement powers will be enough to satisfy DOJ’s newfound appetite for taking on what it considers rogue police departments seems highly unlikely...
Thursday, February 2. “Broken Windows” might seem old-fashioned to some but it’s alive and well in the Big Apple. NYPD is celebrating a record number of arrests for marijuana possession - 50,700 in 2011, the most in a decade. Combatting disorder, cops say, is key to keeping violent crime down. It’s the same rationale that drives stop-and-frisk, another approach that NYPD has wholeheartedly embraced. Nay-sayers of course say no, but those who remember the city from the crime-plagued 80s and 90s find its transformation truly dramatic. Whether the new, peaceful ambiance is due to hard-nosed policing or to something else, like stiff sentencing, is a matter of debate. Click here and here for related posts...
Wednesday, February 1. And for this week’s believe-it-or not, we have...Milwaukee! That’s where a judge released a man charged with robbery-murder without requiring that he post bail. An error? Nope - it’s what his score in a brand-new “evidence-based” pretrial release program called for. Based on two years’ worth of data, it plugs in various factors, such as a defendant’s ties to the community, to assign a flight risk. Well, the “community” got up in arms, so the judge recalled the man - who showed up - and hiked his bail to $30,000 cash, which he couldn’t post. So at least for now everyone knows where he is. What the geniuses who devised the plan didn’t “plug in” was the risk to cops who inadvertently run across dangerous fugitives (we think robbery-homicide qualifies) or to the warrant squads that have to track them down. Think the threat’s exaggerated? Read our prior post...
Tuesday, January 31. House Democrats released a stinging report condemning ATF cross-border “gun walking” operations that let firearms fall into the hands of criminals and the Cartels. According to the report, it was all ATF’s idea, not the Administration’s. Agents said they turned to the tactic because U.S. Attorneys placed insuperable obstacles in the way of prosecuting guns to Mexico cases, including requirements that firearms be recovered before straw purchasers could be charged. The climate they describe is far worse than what your blogger experienced as an ATF agent in Arizona in the 70s. But it resembles what he at times encountered elsewhere. Click here for a related post...
Does a town of less than 30,000 really need its own police force? More to the point, can it afford one? That’s what the residents of East Haven, Ct. must be wondering after the arrest of four of their cops for civil rights violations. It’s rumored that DOJ, which recently concluded that the agency systematically discriminated against Latinos, may be preparing more indictments, and one could name the chief. An unindicted co-conspirator in this round, he’s just submitted his resignation, angering citizens who demanded he be fired. Meanwhile his buddy the mayor is also looking shaky, especially after announcing that he would eat tacos to make things right...
Monday, January 30. Things are getting uglier by the day in Oakland, where weekly Occupy marches have devolved into violent confrontations between protesters and police. Just this weekend cops using tear gas and non-lethal projectiles arrested 400 protesters who vandalized City Hall, took over a YMCA and tried to break into the convention center. As police and protesters point fingers at each other for instigating trouble, citizens complain that the distraction is delaying response to 911 calls. Click here and here for related posts...
Friday, January 27. Think your community has problems? Consider Trenton, New Jersey, pop. 85,000, which according to CQ Press has the fourth-highest crime rate in the nation for a city its size. Trenton laid off one-third of its cops last September, causing havoc with patrol coverage to say nothing of the impact on morale. Now the mayor’s come up with an “all hands on deck plan” that would recall off-duty officers via Blackberry when crime spikes. But the union insists that being forced to keep the phones on 24/7 is like being on duty. In any event, with the fiscal year only half over the department’s already burned through three-quarters of its overtime funds, so any form of intensive policing may be out of reach...
Wednesday, January 25. Moviegate? Things are getting curioser and curioser in the Big Apple, where Deputy police commissioner Paul Browne suddenly remembered (that is, after being confronted by reporters with e-mails) that he had urged Commissioner Kelly sit for an interview in “The Third Jihad,” an appearance that his boss now deeply regrets. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was more direct, calling the decision to show the controversial documentary to 1,500 officers “terrible judgment”. But laying it all off on Browne hardly seems fair. After all, Kelly’s the one who forcefully moved to position NYPD as the FBI’s counter-terrorism equal, going so far as to run its own sting operations and station cops overseas...
Tuesday, January 24. Now that elaborate rope-a-dopes have corralled dozens of would-be domestic terrorists it should finally be safe to come out and play, right? Apparently not in New York City, where a “wacky” documentary warning that Muslim extremists are preparing to violently overthrow the U.S. government (an Islamist flag is depicted flying over the White House) was shown to 1,500 cops as part of their training regimen. Produced by a small, obscure firm and financed by murky sources, “The Third Jihad” features a past interview with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, who is prominently featured on the film’s website...
Monday, January 23. Police Issues is two-for-two! Like we guessed, the Supremes ruled in U.S. v. Jones that using a GPS device to track a vehicle is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and therefore requires a warrant. While we’re not particularly crazy about the distinction that implies between GPS and beepers, which can be planted without a warrant, there’s no doubt that the surveillance of Jones went far and beyond what could have been accomplished with a conventional tracking device. In fact, a warrant had been obtained, but the GPS didn’t get planted until a day after the warrant expired. Click here and here for related posts...
Is this what the future holds? After FBI agents seized Megaupload, a file-sharing site that was making huge profits helping users exchange pirated audio and video files, the notorious “Anonymous” hacker group swung into action, flooding DOJ and entertainment industry websites with denial of service attacks. Seven of Megaupload’s principals have been indicted; four were arrested in New Zealand and held without bail, while the other three are on the lam. “Anonymous” got its fifteen minutes of fame by staging similar attacks against PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, in their case for canceling the online accounts of WikiLeaks, thus slashing the flow of donations...
Thursday, January 19. Are we splitting hairs or atoms? According to the Supremes, when a criminal lawyer misses a deadline to file an appeal, their client isn’t normally entitled to dispensation from the courts, because “the principal bears the risk of his agent’s negligent conduct.” But in Maples v. Thomas, an Alabama death penalty case, a prisoner who tried to stay in touch with lawyers appealing his first-degree murder conviction didn’t realize that he had been abandoned until it was too late. That, said the justices, was sufficiently different from the general rule to merit relief. Oh, O.K. By the way, the basis for appealing his conviction was...drum roll...inadequate assistance of counsel. And no, we’re not kidding...
Wednesday, January 18. Chicago prosecutors dismissed indictments that accused four men of a 1994 rape/murder to which they had been pressured to confess as youths. In 2011 DNA from the victim was matched to a known rapist, leading to the release on bond of two of the four members of “The Englewood Four” who were still in prison. Two others had already completed their sentences, one in 2011 and one in 2010. Now that the men have been officially exonerated Innocence Project lawyers are asking that authorities investigate all convictions of youth during that period that were based on confessions. Click here for a related post...
Tuesday, January 17. Remember “The Academy”? It was a reality TV series based at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Academy during 2007-2008. Episodes featured stern drill sergeants screaming at scared rookies going through a training program that prided itself on a “stress” approach. One trainee who didn’t make it was Henry Marin, not because he couldn’t stand being yelled at but due to poor performance. To make things as humiliating as possible they gave him the boot on camera. But not all was lost. Like we pointed out in “Sheriff Baca’s ‘Police Academy’,” the heat was on to hire (and, ostensibly, pass) as many recruits as possible, so those who flunked out - including Marin - were encouraged to reenroll and try again. Marin did and made it the second time around. He got his badge and wound up working the jail at the Los Angeles County Courthouse. Now he’s on suspension and out on bond, charged with sneaking heroin to a prisoner in 2010...
Monday, January 16. Word’s out that one-time Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Gilbert Michel, 38, has agreed to plead guilty to Federal charges that he passed a cell phone and other goodies to a county jail inmate who turned out to be an FBI snitch. Michel has reportedly been singing arias to the Feds about former coworkers who allegedly beat up on inmates. As we mentioned in LASD Blue, that nosy outsiders would dare enter what he considers his exclusive domain got Sheriff Baca very upset. Indeed, at one point he even half-threatened to seek charges against the FBI undercover agent who bought Michel’s corrupt services. Well, sheriff, charges are coming, but they won’t be against Federal cops...
Weekend update. Just how high can you build that fence? U.S. agents stationed at the southern border recorded 223 incursions by ultralight aircraft during the 2010-2011 fiscal year. Smuggling in hundreds of pounds of contraband by air, all in a few minutes and while literally flying under the radar, is becoming the hot new trend. Loads are simply dropped to waiting confederates so there’s no need to land, making deliveries so quick that no one’s likely to notice...
Thursday, January 12. It looks like plenty of folks were dismayed by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s last-minute pardons (see Tuesday’s post.) There were actually 203, mostly for persons long released, but including a couple dozen current inmates. It turns out that the law requires publishing a legal notice thirty days prior to release, and in some cases it doesn’t look like that happened. So now a judge has required that the pardons be reviewed for compliance, including those of the five trustees mentioned below. They’re already on the street but have been told to check in daily. Incidentally, a Governor’s pardon automatically restores one’s Federal right to have guns, which is another little concern that’s raising eyebrows...
Wednesday, January 11. As most observers expected, the Supremes refused to require pre-trial hearings in disputes over witness identification when there is no evidence that the State purposely crafted a suggestive scenario. So the witness ID of Barion Perry - thus, his conviction - will stand. Perry was picked out from a distance by an eyewitness as he stood detained at the scene of car burglaries. Police, said the Supreme Court, did not try to influence the witness, so Perry’s identification was properly admitted as evidence at trial, where jurors could make up their own minds. Click here for a related post...
Tuesday, January 10. In Mississippi a select few can legally get away with murder. They’re the trustees who work at the Governor’s residence. Just days ago outgoing Governor Haley Barbour pardoned the last of eight inmates, all of whom had served in the mansion. Seven had been in for murder, one for manslaughter, mostly for killing spouses and girlfriends. One example, David Gatlin, shot and killed his wife while she held their baby, then wounded a family friend. Barbour isn’t the only chief executive who’s been accused of abusing his clemency authority while on the way out. Remember Schwarzenegger? And Bill Clinton?...
Are elaborate FBI sting operations the only way to handle obviously disturbed individuals who run around espousing Jihad? Sami Osmakac, 25, had been banned from Tampa-area mosques for spouting hate-filled rants against The Great Satan. Shunned by local imams who considered him “mentally unbalanced,” Osmakac is now cooling his heels in a Federal lockup for trying to buy a large quantity of explosives and two machineguns from - you guessed it - an FBI undercover agent. He had been telling a helpful informer since September that he needed weapons to carry out terror attacks, first against one place, then another. Osmakac even let himself be filmed sitting on the floor cross-legged, guns at his side, while elaborately justifying his lethal fantasies (for posthumous use only, of course.) Click here for a related post...
Monday, January 9. California recently transferred responsibility for confining and supervising non-violent prison inmates and those newly convicted of non-violent felonies to county jails and probation departments. And they’ve been arriving at local facilities in droves. Nearly a third suffer from mental health issues and sixty percent are addicts. Many refuse treatment. The State shifted some funds to counties to help pay for their new responsibilities, but local authorities complain the amounts are wildly insufficient. This “realignment,” which was set off by a Federal mandate to reduce prison overcrowding, has all the hallmarks of the deinstitutionalization movement, which emptied state mental hospitals, dumping patients on the streets and creating a new class of homeless and mentally ill. For a related post click here...
Weekend update. In 1992 Juan Rivera was convicted of rape/murder. He was retried twice, most recently in 2005, when jurors learned that a new DNA test proved Rivera wasn’t the sperm donor. But they nonetheless convicted, agreeing with prosecutors that the victim might have had multiple sex partners. Bottom line: Rivera had confessed to police, ergo he’s guilty. But his lawyers persisted, and finally convinced a judge to have another look-see. What he discovered, including a confession that bears all the hallmarks of coercion if not outright torture, wasn’t pretty. Rivera’s been released, and while prosecutors insist that he’s guilty, they’ve elected not to retry him. Click here for a related post...
Friday, January 6. Believe it - or not! During 2009-2010 Jerry Ramrattan, a 39-year old New York City crime aficionado, made up a string of elaborate scenarios, then paid others to accuse ex-girlfriend Seemona Sumasar of robbing them on the street. Why the frame-up? Ramrattan was angry that Sumasar had charged him with rape. His tales were so artfully staged - one even involved handcuffing pretend victims to a pole - that prosecutors ignored Sumasar’s alibis and were getting ready to go to trial when an insider blew the whistle. By then the frame-ups and jailing had cost the petite woman her Wall Street career. Ramrattan did go to trial. He was just convicted and got thirty-two years...
There is a good reason why experienced cops try to avoid taking enforcement action while off duty. On December 31, John Capano, 51, an off-duty ATF agent, shot a robber, then tackled him outside the pharmacy he had just held up. Meanwhile, a retired police lieutenant and an off-duy NYPD officer ran up. They had been alerted to the robbery by a patron but had no idea who was whom. It ended tragically, with the retired cop shooting and killing the ATF man. Realizing the mistake, the NYPD officer then shot and killed the robber...
Thursday, January 5. An epidemic of prescription drug abuse is leading to another epidemic - of arrests of physicians who allegedly make big, easy money by supplying painkillers to addicts. Looking to Southern California alone, there is last August’s arrest of Inglewood doctor Tyron Reece, who prescribed Vocodin 920,000 times in 2010, the October arrest of Orange County physician Alvin Yee, who serviced users coming from as far away as Detroit, and yesterday’s arrest of Santa Barbara Dr. Julio Diaz, whose practice was linked by the Feds to at least twelve overdose deaths. And don’t forget the recent involuntary manslaughter conviction of Dr. Conrad Murray, who got four years for injecting a killer dose of propofol into Michael Jackson’s veins. Click here for a related post...
Wednesday, January 4. Detroit PD intends to close police stations to the public between 4 pm and 8 am. While Chief Ralph Goodbee insists that’s to put more officers on the street, in these days, when police require that citizens come to the cop shop to report everything from traffic accidents to thefts and even burglaries, the consequences of limiting such visits to certain times are easily predictable. Your blogger, for one, has long suspected that forcing citizens to file reports at precinct houses rather than sending out a car, a shift that began in large cities a couple decades ago, artifactually contributed to the so-called “Great Crime Drop” that began in the early nineties...
 Tuesday, January 3. The Mount Rainier shooter mentioned yesterday was found dead, apparently from exposure. Here’s a photo furnished by Washington state police that depicts him at home with his guns.
Making a big fuss in Federal court then running around setting fires is not a good plan. That’s what German national Harry Burkhart, 24 discovered when he was arrested while driving through one of the areas beset by a string of more than fifty car arsons over New Year’s weekend. Burkhart had recently blown his stack at a hearing for his mother, who is facing extradition to Germany on fraud charges. One of the Feds who was in court later recognized him as possibly being the “person of interest” depicted in surveillance photos shown on the news. Evidence of fire-setting was reportedly found in Burkhart’s vehicle, and LAPD Chief Beck said he was “confident” they had the right man...
Monday, January 2. Gun mayhem struck the new year with a vengeance. A heavily armed Washington state man shot four persons at a party, critically wounding two, then used an assault rifle to shoot a National Park Service ranger  dead hours later at a roadblock in Mount Rainier. He exchanged fire with responding officers, keeping them from reaching the victim for more than an hour, then fled on foot, leaving his vehicle behind. Inside were more guns and a ballistic vest. An armada of cops from multiple agencies is now tracking the suspect through the back country. Dead is ranger Margaret Anderson, 34, a mother of two. Click here for a post that discusses the exceptional threat that long guns pose to police...
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