History > 2007 > USA > Police (I)

1 -    A view from a Children’s Aid Society surveillance video

released by the New York Police Department

shows part of a gunfight in Greenwich Village Wednesday night

that left four people dead.

Above, the gunman runs up the sidewalk,

to the right, behind the dark volvo.

2 -    The gunman (light-colored shirt)

runs across the street toward an auxiliary police officer

who is trying to duck behind a car.

3 -    The gunman closes in on the officer.

4 -    The gunman shoots the officer.

5 -    The gunman runs from the scene.

6 -    The gunman crosses back over the street

and is shot at by another officer approaching the scene.

7 -    Police officers rush to the fallen auxiliary officer.

8 -    Officers carry the fatally wounded officer to their car

to rush him to the hospital.

 

NYPD

    Lives Intersect Violently on a Busy City Street        NYT        16.3.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/nyregion/16cops.html?hp

Cops: 'Gin and tonic bandit'

skipped out on same meal

5 weeks straight

30.3.2007
AP
USA Today

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — A scofflaw who came to be known as the gin and tonic bandit went to the same restaurant each Wednesday, ordered two drinks and a rib-eye steak, then skipped out on his $25.96 bill.

His dining, drinking and dashing days may be over.

Police arrested the man on preliminary charges of theft and resisting law enforcement. He was being held early Friday at the Monroe County Jail on $2,000 bond, authorities said.

Each Wednesday night for four weeks running, the same man came into the same O'Charley's restaurant and ordered the two drinks and the steak, restaurant manager Teresa Tolbert told police.

At the end of each meal, the wait staff would present him with his bill for $25.96, and he would excuse himself to use the restroom, then skip out without paying.

The man appeared a fifth time Wednesday night, but the restaurant was ready for him, police said.

When his server presented the bill, he again claimed he needed to use the bathroom. But when he walked out of the restaurant, four employees were waiting for him. They confronted him about the unpaid bill, which he offered to pay with a check, police said.

After Tolbert told him the restaurant didn't accept checks, the man "got nervous and ran," according to the police report.

Officer Randy Gehlhausen caught up with the man as he was trying to open his car door. The diner struggled with Gehlhausen, who wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him.

Cops: 'Gin and tonic bandit' skipped out on same meal 5 weeks straight, UT, 30.3.2007,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-03-30-gin-tonic-bandit_N.htm

4 Police Officers Charged in Assault

March 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:27 p.m. ET
The New York Times

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. (AP) -- The acting police chief and three officers in a small resort town on Fire Island were indicted Tuesday in the beating of a vacationer who had been picked up for littering.

The victim was beaten so severely he suffered severe internal injuries, including a ruptured bladder that required 10 days in a hospital, Assistant District Attorney Bob Biancavilla said.

Acting Chief George Hesse pleaded not guilty Tuesday to first-degree assault, gang assault and unlawful imprisonment in the August 2005 beating of tourist Samuel Gilberd, a software executive from New York City.

''It was a police department gone wild,'' Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota told a news conference afterward. ''There was no control at all.''

They ''acted as thugs in police uniforms,'' he said.

Hesse attorney William Keahon said the indictment ''means nothing.''

''The presumption is my client is innocent,'' he said.

Hesse posted $100,000 bail.

The three other defendants were charged with unlawful imprisonment, reckless endangerment and hindering prosecution. Officers Paul Carollo, Arnold Hardman, and William Emburey are accused of filing a false report about the incident and failing to get prompt medical attention for the victim. Each posted $10,000 bail.

All four defendants, who displayed no visible emotion, were ordered to return to court April 20.

Emburey's lawyer, John Ray, said the incident occurred on his client's first night on the job. He said Emburey had nothing to do with the allegations and was charged only because the it occurred on his shift.

A week after the alleged beating, Gilberd was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, allegations the district attorney subsequently dismissed. Gilberd has filed a $22 million federal lawsuit against the village and its police.

Ocean Beach is a popular tourist destination whose population swells from 138 year-round residents to more than 6,000 summer renters and day-trippers. The village is nicknamed the ''Land of No'' because of odd ordinances such as a ban on eating cookies on public walkways.

Ocean Beach Mayor Joseph Loeffler declined to comment.

The Ocean Beach police department, which has 2 full-time members and 24 part-time members, had been the subject of a county grand jury probe since December.

Last week, five former police officers claimed they were wrongfully fired by Hesse, who they said associated with a drug dealer, had sex in department headquarters and covered up cases of brutality. In an interview with Newsday, Hesse would not say why he fired the five officers.

Doug Wigdor, a former prosecutor who is representing the five officers in a wrongful-termination lawsuit, claimed Hesse was ''running the police department like a fraternity house.''

Village and police officials have declined to comment on the lawsuit. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court seeks millions in damages -- an exact amount will be determined at trial -- and the restoration of their jobs.

At the time, the officers said they were targeted by the acting chief over fears they were cooperating with the Suffolk County inquiry into corruption in the department. Their lawyer said they were cooperating now that they had been fired.

4 Police Officers Charged in Assault, NYT, 27.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ocean-Beach-Police.html

Auxiliary Officers

to Get Bullet-Resistant Vests

March 27, 2007
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN

New York City will begin providing bullet-resistant vests to its 4,800 auxiliary police officers, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced today at a news conference in Greenwich Village, where two auxiliary officers were fatally shot by a gunman on the night of March 14.

The decision to buy the vests for the auxiliary officers — unpaid volunteers who are unarmed but wear uniforms identical to those of regular officers — comes less than two weeks after two auxiliary officers, Nicholas T. Pekearo, 28, and Yevgeniy Marshalik, 19, were shot to death.

They had followed and confronted a gunman, David R. Garvin, who moments earlier had fatally shot a pizzeria worker. Mr. Garvin dropped a bag containing a loaded firearm and ammunition, but minutes later, he came back toward Officers Pekearo and Marshalik and shot them both. Only a half-dozen auxiliary officers have been slain in the line of duty in the half-century that the all-volunteer force has existed.

The city will spend $3.3 million on the vests, and will take nine months to outfit the entire force. The vests will be Level 3A — meaning they are supposed to resist a 9-millimeter of 44 Magnum bullets. The vests are the same as those provided to regular police officers; they were recently redesigned after the slaying of an officer, Dillon H. Stewart, who was fatally shot last November while pursuing a driver who ran a red light in Brooklyn. On patrol, he drew up alongside the suspect’s car and the gunman fired five shots, striking Officer Stewart in the heart. Though mortally wounded, he kept driving for blocks in pursuit of the gunman, before collapsing.

Mayor Bloomberg made the announcement around noon today at the Sixth Precinct, where Officer Pekearo, an aspiring writer, and Officer Marshalik, a sophomore at New York University, were both based.

Numerous elected officials — including several members of Congress and members of the City Council — had called for the city to furnish bullet-resistant vests to auxiliary officers. As recently as last week, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly was noncommittal when asked about the idea, saying he was concerned about cost and logistical issues. The mayor has set up a committee to examine a range of issues involving auxiliary officers and how they can be better protected.

Auxiliary Officers to Get Bullet-Resistant Vests, NYT, 27.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/nyregion/27cnd-mayor.html

City Police Spied Broadly

Before G.O.P. Convention

March 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, confirmed that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had been an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention.

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. When the detectives went out of town, he said, the department usually alerted the local authorities by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York — like those in many other big cities — have operated under special limits as a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu.

“All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu review,” Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, was “central to the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,” Gerald C. Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department, said in a federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the Police Department have fought in federal court over how to balance public safety, free speech and the penetrating but potentially disruptive force of police surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police commissioner in January 2002, “took the position that the N.Y.P.D. could no longer rely on the federal government alone, and that the department had to build an intelligence capacity worthy of the name,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities was essential to fighting terrorism. “Given the range of activities that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the N.Y.P.D. must be available to conduct investigations into political activity and intelligence-related issues,” Mr. Cohen wrote in an affidavit dated Sept. 12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest — coincidentally, three days before the convention — of a man who spoke about bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative, detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the department had security worries — in particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison Square Garden, where events would be held — and logistical concerns about managing huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

“We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including vandalism,” Mr. Browne said. “Our goal was to safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike.”

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests — marked “Secret” — were circulated weekly under the heading “Key Findings.”

Perceived Threats

On Jan. 6, 2004, the intelligence digest noted that an antigentrification group in Montreal claimed responsibility for hoax bombs that had been planted at construction sites of luxury condominiums, stating that the purpose was to draw attention to the homeless. The group was linked to a band of anarchist-communists whose leader had visited New York, according to the report.

Other digests noted a planned campaign of “electronic civil disobedience” to jam fax machines and hack into Web sites. Participants at a conference were said to have discussed getting inside delegates’ hotels by making hair salon appointments or dinner reservations. At the same conference, people were reported to have discussed disabling charter buses and trying to confuse delegates by switching subway directional signs, or by sealing off stations with crime-scene tape.

A Syracuse peace group intended to block intersections, a report stated. Other reports mentioned past demonstrations where various groups used nails and ball bearings as weapons and threw balloons filled with urine or other foul liquids.

The police also kept track of Richard Picariello, a man who had been convicted in 1978 of politically motivated bombings in Massachusetts, Mr. Browne said.

At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. For his master’s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg devised a “wireless bicycle” equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or street.

The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence report noted. Mr. Kinberg’s bicycle was “capable of transferring activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks,” according to a report on July 22, 2004.

“This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of escape,” the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC’s “Hardball” program during the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held for more than a year.

Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest, detectives with the terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs.”

He added: “There’s no reason I should have been placed on any kind of surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech, and the ability of thousands of people who were sending in messages for the bike, to exercise their free speech.”

New Faces in Their Midst

A vast majority of several hundred reports reviewed by The Times, including field reports and the digests, described groups that gave no obvious sign of wrongdoing. The intelligence noted that one group, the “Man- and Woman-in-Black Bloc,” planned to protest outside a party at Sotheby’s for Tennessee’s Republican delegates with Johnny Cash’s career as its theme.

The satirical performance troupe Billionaires for Bush, which specializes in lampooning the Bush administration by dressing in tuxedos and flapper gowns, was described in an intelligence digest on Jan. 23, 2004.

“Billionaires for Bush is an activist group forged as a mockery of the current president and political policies,” the report said. “Preliminary intelligence indicates that this group is raising funds for expansion and support of anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.”

Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for Bush, said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by federal agents — not necessarily police officers — during weekly meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004.

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’ ”

The Billionaires try to avoid provoking arrests, Mr. Ceglie said.

Others — who openly planned civil disobedience, with the expectation of being arrested — said they assumed they were under surveillance, but had nothing to hide. “Some of the groups were very concerned about infiltration,” said Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization founded in 1923. “We weren’t. We had open meetings.”

The war resisters publicly announced plans for a “die-in” at Madison Square Garden. They were arrested two minutes after they began a silent march from the World Trade Center site. The charges were dismissed.

The sponsors of an event planned for Jan. 15, 2004, in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday were listed in one of the reports, which noted that it was a protest against “the R.N.C., the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.” It mentioned that three members of the City Council at the time, Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook, “have endorsed this event.”

Others supporting it, the report said, were the New York City AIDS Housing Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the Liberation of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project.

Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the city Law Department said the preconvention intelligence justified detaining them all for fingerprinting.

Mr. Browne said that 18 months of preparation by the police had allowed hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that the Republican delegates were able to hold their convention with relatively few disruptions.

“We attributed the successful policing of the convention to a host of N.Y.P.D. activities leading up to the R.N.C., including 18 months of intensive planning,” he said. “It was a great success, and despite provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of police officers, the N.Y.P.D. showed professionalism and restraint.”

City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention, NYT, 25.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html

On Patrol, and Now on Edge

March 25, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL

The news has been dreadful for two weeks now, a steady rain of shootings and beatings and knifings and indictments for members of the nation’s largest police department. Even officers stoic by nature confess to being rattled.

Police Officer Nelida Flores gives a tour of her beat in Greenwich Village: This is where a drunk knocked her out cold, this is where she tackled a beefy guy twice her (diminutive) size, this is where some guy called her a sellout for wearing police blues.

Her nickname is “the pit bull”; she loves her job and shrugs off insults.

Now this voluble woman falls silent. She stands at the corner of Sullivan and Bleecker Streets, a few steps from where, 11 days ago, a gunman killed Auxiliary Officers Yevgeniy Marshalik, whom everyone called Eugene, and Nicholas T. Pekearo. They both reported to Officer Flores.

“My body is shaking — I’m in a fog really.” She shakes her head, a thick ponytail flowing from beneath her hat. “I loved Nick and Eugene. I promised their parents I’d take care of them. It’s a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

The 36,500-strong New York City Police Department is a vast and balkanized kingdom, bisected by units and divisions. After being celebrated for the crime drop in the mid-1990s, when relatively few citizens and reporters questioned their tactics, officers now say they’re underappreciated and underpaid, their uniforms rendering them walking targets.

Such sentiments are not new, but the storm of the past few weeks, with the attacks and the legal charges, feeds a palpable sense of worry and grievance and, sometimes, anger.

An officer with six years on the beat stood outside a high school near Union Square in Manhattan last week. He ticked off the mayhem of the past two weeks: A plainclothes officer shot in Harlem, a transit officer stabbed on a subway platform in Brooklyn, the two auxiliaries gunned down, and three detectives indicted in Queens. (In the latest attack, a gunman fired at officers responding to a shooting outside a Bronx deli on Friday night, though none were hit.)

The officer said he felt “very scared, very panicked.”

“We never know when we go outside what is going to happen to us,” he said. “We are an easy target.”

Another officer in the Bronx said he used to wear “N.Y.P.D.” T-shirts when he was off duty. Not anymore. He plans to buy a shirt with a removable chest plate that he can use off duty, at a cost of about $1,000.

“It feels like open season on cops,” he said. “It really feels like you got a target on your back.”

These two officers were among a dozen interviewed last week, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is against department policy to do so without approval. The Police Department asked Officer Flores — and two of her precinct’s commanding officers — to speak on the record.

A sergeant in Brooklyn with a decade in uniform waved off talk of fear: He is annoyed. For a grand jury to indict the three detectives in the shooting of Sean Bell just two days after two auxiliary officers were killed? That is a bitter draught to swallow.

The sergeant took a poke at a minister and a councilman who led the call for indictments, whose names evoke snorts of disgust from some officers: “I’d like to see the Rev. Al Sharpton or Charles Barron chase down an armed gunman when they’ve got nothing but a stick.”

If the pendulum of public opinion is swinging back a touch, some of the reasons are grounded in recent history. Police tactics accompanying the city’s 14-year-drop in crime often drew complaints. The street crimes unit gained a reputation for frisking far more African-Americans than it arrested; the department eventually disbanded the unit in the face of protests and lawsuits.

But if many black residents are unwilling to credit such explanations, their views could reflect the past decade’s alienation.

“Look, we understand that some of these tactics are intrusive and that a lot of people don’t like them,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. “We need to do a better job of saying: ‘Hey, we got the wrong person. We apologize.’ ”

Police officers stopped 508,540 people last year, an average of 1,393 per day. That was up from 97,296 stops in 2002; the police said the rise was due in part to more faithful reporting.

New York City remains much safer not just for civilians but also for police officers. In 1971, 14 officers died in the line of duty. Eleven died violently in 1974. Last year, two officers died, which is in keeping with the recent trend.

Some police discontent may owe little to the two bloody weeks. Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former beat officer in the city, said the department focused on driving down crime numbers to the exclusion of more subtle measures. Just as teachers balk at being measured by test scores, police officers bridle at constantly being told to bring in better numbers.

“We’re driving enforcement in a bad way, and it’s demoralizing for cops,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “The job is not seen as having the luster it once did.”

No officer expects riches, but the pay is not great by New York City standards. Officer Flores, 38, makes around the median household income in the city, which is just under $60,000. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “I told my daughter, ‘Keep your grades up, because you need the scholarship.’ ”

Lt. Michael Casey, 40, who works alongside Officer Flores in the Sixth Precinct, agreed that the salary was not so hot. But he shrugged off suggestions that the events of the past two weeks, not least the indictments in Queens, might inhibit officers.

“When you’re chasing after a guy with a gun, I guarantee you’re not thinking of a legal case in Queens,” Lieutenant Casey said. “You’re not thinking of anything until it’s over and you exhale.”

Other officers said they read of the indictments with a nagging thought: But for the grace of different assignments, they might be facing similar charges. “I don’t know what was going through their heads,” a five-year veteran in the Bronx said of the indicted detectives. “They might have made a mistake, but I don’t think they deserve to be facing criminal charges.”

He said self-doubt roiled him. “Every car I pull over, I think, ‘Am I going to get indicted for this?’ ” he said.

Police Department statistics suggest that officers overcome such worries. Arrests as a result of stops more than doubled last year from 2002, and summonses more than quintupled.

Officers said the recent violence served to remind them that armor and armaments provide just so much protection. Once a suspect pulls a gun or a knife and an officer responds, anything can happen.

“When you engage in an argument with a perp or whatever, you have to be in the officer’s shoes,” explained a young officer with three months on the beat in East Harlem. “When you’re shooting, you don’t realize how many times you shoot. It goes so fast, you don’t realize.”

Mr. Kelly, who fired his gun three times as a young beat officer, said he gained an acute awareness that bullets fly in unintended directions. “You’re running around and the adrenalin is surging, and, quite frankly, sometimes that’s the attraction of it,” Mr. Kelly said. “But you also have to exhale and think.”

Age and experience might figure in. Younger officers often spoke of feeling embattled, while veterans seemed inclined to distinguish between the potential for violence and the reality, which is that it is rare.

Back in the Sixth Precinct, where the two young auxiliary officers died, the randomness confounds. One square mile, the Sixth Precinct runs from the Hudson River to the prosperous center of Greenwich Village.

A shopkeeper on Bleecker Street spotted Officer Flores, walked over and gave her a long embrace. A woman with a worn face and a gray ponytail waved: “Hi, officer.”

Officer Flores waved back, then explained that she had arrested the woman “like six times for drug possession.”

The most common crime here is grand larceny, which the precinct commander, Deputy Inspector Theresa J. Shortell, defined thusly: “It means some lady went to the bathroom at a restaurant and left her purse in her chair.” Inspector Shortell rolled her eyes. “I mean, you know, hello?”

Yet last week Inspector Shortell found herself handing the departmental colors to a bereaved mother.

Officer Flores resisted the notion, put forward by a number of the officers interviewed, that officers feel like passengers on the Titanic. She has been knocked dizzy, the bureaucracy sometimes gets to her, the salary could be better — but still.

“I’m nosy, I like to be in people’s business, I can take a drunk out at the knees,” she said, smiling. “Most days I enjoy coming to work.”

She walked down a darkened Sullivan Street, to where Officer Marshalik, 19, died and then to where Officer Pekearo, 28, died. She examined the handwritten notes and the tulips, roses and carnations taped to a lamppost. “They were trying to do what I taught them, they were trailing behind until he turned around,” she said. “Their parents used to worry, and I would say: ‘You tell them that I’ll be your mother away from home.’ ”

There was silence. Rain misted on her visor.

“I think every cop wants to get out, retire, without shooting a gun,” she said. “But danger is always there. You know that, and still your heart breaks.”

Cassi Feldman, Manny Fernandez and Michael Wilson contributed reporting.

On Patrol, and Now on Edge, NYT, 25.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25voices.html




 

 Three Detectives Plead Not Guilty in 50-Shot Killing        NYT        March 20, 2007

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/nyregion/20cops.html 

Three Detectives

Plead Not Guilty

in 50-Shot Killing

March 20, 2007
The New York Times
By ELLEN BARRY and COLIN MOYNIHAN

The three detectives left their homes in the predawn darkness yesterday. They walked in the back entrance of the courthouse in Queens to Central Booking, where they went through a routine that must have seemed familiar: fingerprints, waiting, mug shots, more waiting, paperwork, more waiting.

The three men had logged hundreds of arrests. But this time, they were turning themselves in.

All three pleaded not guilty to numerous charges — including, for two of them, first- and second-degree manslaughter — in the death of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man who fell in a volley of police gunfire as he was leaving a Queens nightclub early on Nov. 25, the morning of his scheduled wedding. Mr. Bell and his two friends were unarmed, though the officers apparently believed there was a gun.

The case has reopened wounds in a city where both crime and racial strife seemed to have abated.

Yesterday’s proceedings, with the unsealing of an eight-count indictment, brought the case into a very public phase.

In court, the three detectives stood with their shoulders squared, facing the judge. In a wheelchair behind them, staring at their backs, was Joseph Guzman, who was shot multiple times in the barrage. “R.I.P. Sean Bell,” read his hooded sweatshirt.

“Today we got an indictment — Round 1,” said Mr. Guzman, who rose from his wheelchair to speak with reporters after the arraignment. “We got a hard road to go. We lost somebody dear. We’re going to fight all the way until we get justice.”

Five police officers had fired into the car carrying Mr. Bell, Mr. Guzman and a third man, Trent Benefield, during a chaotic confrontation outside Club Kalua on Liverpool Street in Jamaica.

The most serious charges are against Detective Michael Oliver, who fired 31 shots, and Detective Gescard F. Isnora, who fired 11 times. Both face counts of first- and second-degree manslaughter and second-degree reckless endangerment. Detective Oliver, 35, also faces charges of first-degree assault and second-degree endangerment; Detective Isnora, 28, faces a charge of second-degree assault. Those charges could bring a maximum sentence of 25 years.

Detective Marc Cooper, 39, who fired four times, faces two charges of reckless endangerment, misdemeanors that carry a maximum sentence of one year. The two other officers were not indicted. Detectives Isnora and Cooper are black; Detective Oliver is white.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged New Yorkers to “respect the result of our justice system.”

Mr. Bloomberg added: “It also needs to be said that being a police officer, as we were reminded several times last week, is a very dangerous job. And although a trial will decide whether crimes were committed in this case, day in and day out the N.Y.P.D. does an incredible job under very difficult circumstances.”

The three detectives arrived at the courthouse in Kew Gardens at 7 a.m., then spent much of the next six hours in a stuffy room in Central Booking, where they sat for mug shots and fingerprints. James Culleton, a lawyer for Detective Oliver, called it “a slow day, a slow process, but it’s usually what happens when you surrender a client.”

Mr. Culleton said Detective Oliver was “very nervous.”

“He was very upset; these are very serious charges,” Mr. Culleton said.

The wait was a somber one, said Philip E. Karasyk, who represents Detective Isnora. “There is nothing more heart-wrenching than to a see a police officer put through the system, especially one who didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Karasyk said.

By the time the three detectives entered the courtroom about 2:30 p.m., every seat was taken. On the left side of the courtroom were supporters of the officers: their families, union officials and rows of men wearing detective badges pinned to dark business suits. On the right were relatives of Mr. Bell, several holding children, wearing buttons with his photograph. One of them, George Taggart, had fixed his gaze across the courtroom, toward the door where the officers would enter.

“We’ll get a chance to see them up close and personal,” he said.

Last to file in was a caravan of a dozen people led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Behind him was Nicole Paultre Bell, Mr. Bell’s fiancée, wearing a black suit, her hair sleek and bobbed. Mr. Benefield was behind her, walking with a crutch. Mr. Guzman’s wheelchair was on the aisle.

Finally, Justice Randall T. Eng entered the courtroom, and asked that the defendants be brought forward.

Lawyers for all three police officers entered their not guilty pleas to each count. As they spoke, Valerie Bell, Mr. Bell’s mother, covered her face with her hands. Justice Eng set bail at $250,000 bond, or $100,000 cash, for Detectives Isnora and Oliver; their lawyers said they would post it. Detective Cooper’s lawyer, Paul P. Martin, asked that his client be released on his own recognizance.

“He is the father of three, and his wife and children are in the audience,” he said. Justice Eng agreed, and adjourned the case until April 11.

All three officers filed out through a side door, 23 minutes after they had entered. About a half-hour later, they climbed into a line of vehicles and were whisked away.

Outside, the weather had turned colder, and Mrs. Bell held her handbag tightly. She read to reporters from a piece of notebook paper covered with handwriting. “I miss him desperately,” she said of her son. “Countless times I tried to bring forth my own understanding only to be humbled by the weight of my own thoughts.”

She added, “This is truly one of the most devastating and challenging times of our lives.”

Ms. Paultre Bell emerged, too, and spoke two quiet sentences. “Today was just a baby step in this long road we have ahead of us,” she said. “We are here to fight, and we’re going to continue to pray for justice.”

The Police Department will now undertake its own investigation of the officers who were not indicted, including formal interviews with the officers and a Firearms Discharge Review Board, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday. He said the police could not investigate until the prosecutor had decided whether criminal charges were warranted.

Mr. Kelly said that Detectives Isnora, Cooper and Oliver had been suspended without pay, and the two officers who were not indicted — Officer Michael Carey and Detective Paul Headley — had been placed on modified assignment, as was Lt. Gary Napoli, who was leading the team on Nov. 25.

Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said at a news conference early in the day that the grand jury proceedings were “as thorough and complete as I’ve ever participated in.”

His office’s investigation, he said, drew in 100 witnesses and 500 separate exhibits. He said the grand jury “acted in the most responsible and conscientious fashion,” and noted that he could not recall a grand jury that deliberated for three days on a case, as this one did.

“This was a case that was, I’m sure, not easy for them to resolve,” he said.

Mr. Sharpton, who met with Mr. Brown for an hour after the arraignment, told reporters afterward that he hoped to see “an aggressive prosecution, with no plea-bargaining or harassment of witnesses.” He said the two surviving victims, Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman, would not cooperate with the authorities if the trial was moved to another venue.

“There is no victory here,” Mr. Sharpton said of the arraignment. “But we hope we can get justice. Now it’s time for at least these three to pay for what they did on Nov. 25, 2006.”

Michael Palladino, the president of the Detectives Endowment Association, said defense lawyers might move for a change of venue, but had not made a decision. “Once we put a full legal team together we’ll definitely research that issue,” he said.

At a news conference after the proceedings, he said the manslaughter charges implied that the officers intended to kill Mr. Bell, which he called “a chilling message to all of law enforcement.”

“It’s a dark day for our detectives and the N.Y.P.D.,” he said. “However, I think it is a good day in that we can finally get involved in the process. Our defense begins today.”

At 4 p.m., the detectives were gone and the courthouse had mostly emptied. Mr. Bell’s family marched west, in a group of about two dozen, down Queens Boulevard. The police removed the barricades in front of the courthouse, and the last demonstrators packed up and went home.

Behind them, a handmade sign fluttered on a tree.

“Detective Cooper,” it read. “You took a father and a husband.”

Reporting was contributed by Ann Farmer, Daryl Khan, Sean McManus and William K. Rashbaum.

Three Detectives Plead Not Guilty in 50-Shot Killing, NYT, 20.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/nyregion/20cops.html

A Slain Officer’s Mother

Tells of Her Sad Intuition

March 17, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

Nicholas T. Pekearo’s mother knew.

She was waiting up for him Wednesday night. He always stayed at her apartment in the West Village after he worked a shift as an auxiliary police officer. “I wanted to hear him coming up those stairs,” she said, even if it was 1 or 2 in the morning.

“The minute I heard those sirens coming down Morton Street, I knew it,” said Iola Latman, the officer’s mother. “I was on the phone with my daughter. I said, ‘I hope Nick’s O.K.’ I put the phone by the living room window so she could hear. It was just so unreal.”

It was unreal, but it was all too real. She knew it when she called her son and told his voicemail, “It’s 10 o’clock, please call me right back.”

And she knew it for sure a few minutes later when a man in a blue uniform rang the doorbell.

Things had not gotten much less unreal by yesterday afternoon. Ms. Latman found herself sitting before a display of the latest models of funeral urns in an upstairs conference room at a funeral home on West 14th Street.

Downstairs, the place was filling up with people she had never met. Most of them wore blue uniforms, too. Auxiliary officers, street officers, emergency services officers — it made no difference.

They had all come to pay tribute to her son, 28, a wisecracking bookseller and aspiring noir novelist by day, auxiliary officer by night, who was killed with his partner in the line of duty by an aspiring and apparently delusional horror-film director who had just murdered a bartender at an Italian restaurant.

The doors of the chapel at Redden’s Funeral Home opened. The long line of blue snaked in. Inside, the real jostled with the unreal. Wreaths of flowers lined the side walls. In the front, in an open coffin, rested Officer Pekearo, his hat by his side. He looked peaceful.

At the back of the chapel, grim, abrasive music seeped quietly from a portable stereo. It was Nick Cave, chronicler of the unsaved and unsavable and one of Officer Pekearo’s favorites. The CD was called “Abbatoir Blues.”

“Well most of all nothing much ever really happens,” Mr. Cave crooned sickly, “and God rides high up in the ordinary sky/Until we find ourselves at our most distracted/And the miracle that was promised creeps quietly by.”

Auxiliary police officers do not tend to get killed out on patrol. They are the unarmed, all-volunteer eyes and ears of the paid police force.

But sometimes the impossible, the unreal, happens. Auxiliary Police Officer Christian Luckett, recalled attending the funeral of the last auxiliary officer killed in the line of duty, in 1993. Officer Luckett was 10 at the time. His father, a career police officer, brought him along.

“I hope that we can push to get more,” Officer Luckett said. “More recognition. More status.”

Officer Pekearo and his partner, Auxiliary Officer Yevgeniy Marshalik, at any rate, are being recognized. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he was granting special awards for heroic acts to the officers’ families.

The awards come with $66,000 each — money that the families would not otherwise have received since the officers were not eligible for line-of-duty benefits granted to paid officers. The mayor said the city would help the families apply for other government benefits that would add up to $411,000 per family.

Officer Pekearo’s funeral will be today, as will the wake for Officer Marshalik, whose funeral is scheduled for tomorrow. The funeral for the restaurant worker, Alfredo Romero, will be Monday.

At the wake, the slain officers’ colleagues vowed to carry on in their memory.

“I don’t know how to recover from this,” said Auxiliary Lt. Vera T. Reale, the senior auxiliary officer at the Sixth Precinct, where the officers worked. “But I’m not going to let it stop me from doing my job. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’m not going to stop now.”

Police Officer Gregory Abbott of the Sixth Precinct, a 14-year veteran, praised Officers Pekearo and Marshalik. “They had to be brave to do what they did unarmed,” he said.

On the receiving line of grief stood Officer Pekearo’s companion, Christina Honeycutt, chewing gum and wearing a smile that seemed composed of equal parts exhaustion and shock.

“Thank you so much” she said to an auxiliary officer who had not approached her yet. The officer froze, then shook her hand for a few seconds, unsure of what to say. “We all feel he was doing the right thing," he finally managed. “Thank you so much,” Ms. Honeycutt said again, and turned to the next mourner.

Rebecca Cathcart and Ray Rivera contributed reporting.

A Slain Officer’s Mother Tells of Her Sad Intuition, NYT, 17.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/nyregion/17wake.html

50-Shot Barrage

Leads to Charges for 3 Detectives

March 17, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A grand jury voted yesterday to indict three city police detectives — two black men and a white man — in the killing of an unarmed 23-year-old black man who died in a burst of 50 police bullets outside a Queens strip club hours before he was to be wed last year, defense lawyers and police union leaders said last night.

The jury charged two of the detectives — Gescard F. Isnora, an undercover officer who fired the first shot, and Michael Oliver, who fired 31 shots — with manslaughter, two people with direct knowledge of the case said. The third detective, Marc Cooper, who fired four shots, faces a lesser charge of reckless endangerment, those two people said.

Detectives Isnora and Cooper are black; Detective Oliver is white. They were among five police officers who fired into a gray Nissan Altima carrying the bridegroom, Sean Bell, and two friends during a chaotic confrontation in Jamaica early on the morning of Nov. 25. Neither Mr. Bell nor his friends, both of whom were wounded, were armed, although the police officers apparently believed that they were.

The grand jury reached its decision after three days of deliberations and nearly two months of hearing evidence in an emotionally charged case whose stark outlines — five officers firing 50 bullets at three unarmed men who had been out celebrating — prompted an outpouring of anger in some minority communities, and widespread comparisons to the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African street peddler who was felled by 19 of 41 police officers’ bullets fired at him in 1999.

The grand jurors, who dispersed into the wintry afternoon yesterday, indicted the three officers on less-serious charges than the second-degree murder charges filed against the four police officers who shot Mr. Diallo. All four were acquitted.

It was unclear whether Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, sought the indictment of the other two officers who fired at Mr. Bell, Detective Paul Headley, 35, who fired one shot, and Officer Michael Carey, 26, who fired three shots. All five of the officers testified voluntarily before the grand jury without immunity from prosecution.

Mr. Brown scheduled a news conference on Monday morning. Lawyers for the indicted detectives said they had been told to have the men surrender on Monday — the next day that State Supreme Court in Queens is in session. Mr. Brown’s office, which would not confirm the indictments, said the grand jury’s decision had to remain sealed until at least one officer was formally charged in court.

The person with direct knowledge of the case who said Detectives Isnora and Oliver faced manslaughter charges did not know if they were first- or second-degree counts. Second-degree manslaughter is defined as recklessly causing the death of another person. First-degree manslaughter is defined as causing the death of a person while intending to cause serious physical injury to that person or causing the death of a third person under those circumstances. The three officers may also face additional lesser charges.

Some leaders in the black community expressed muted optimism as news of the indictments spread late yesterday, while others felt the indictments did not go far enough. In Jamaica, some detected a sense of relief that at least some of the officers would face charges.

“As long as I know that somebody got something, I can live with that,” said Bishop Lester Williams, who was to officiate at Mr. Bell’s wedding on the day he died. “I have some degree of relief.”

If there had been no indictments, he said, “you have groups out there that would not have been calm. The youth of this city would have responded.”

Lawyers for the indicted officers criticized the grand jury’s action.

Philip E. Karasyk, who represents Detective Isnora, said, “Obviously, my client is upset, and he’s looking forward to having his day in court, and we’re all confident he will be vindicated.”

Paul P. Martin, a lawyer for Detective Cooper, 39, said: “I am disappointed with the grand jury’s decision, but this is just the first stage of a long process, and I am confident that once all the facts are considered by a jury of Detective Cooper’s peers that he will be exonerated of all charges.”

James J. Culleton, the lawyer for Detective Oliver, said the indictment “was not unexpected — a grand jury presentation is one-sided,”

"I firmly believe that he will be found not guilty," he said of Detective Oliver, 35, who, with Detective Isnora, 28, were considered the most vulnerable to criminal charges. Detective Oliver fired far and away the most bullets, emptying one magazine, reloading and emptying a second, and Detective Isnora opened fire first, touching off the 50-shot barrage. Detective Isnora fired 11 shots, emptying his gun.

Michael J. Palladino, the president of the Detectives Endowment Association, confirmed the indictments but said he did not know the charges and would not know them until Monday, when they were unsealed.

“I know the grand jury worked very long and very hard on this particular case,” Mr. Palladino said at a late-afternoon press conference, surrounded by officials of his association. “I respect their decision. However I firmly disagree with the decision to indict these officers.”

Mr. Palladino predicted that the jury’s vote would have a chilling effect on police officers in the city and nationwide.

“The message that’s being sent now is that even though you’re acting in good faith, in pursuit of your lawful duties, there is no room, no margin for error,” he said.

Stephen C. Worth, a lawyer for Officer Michael Carey, described the moment he learned his client had not been indicted:

Mr. Worth said he got a call from Charles Testagrossa, the prosecutor who presented evidence to the grand jury, who “told me there was no true bill as to my guy.”

“Obviously,” he said, ”we are gratified by the grand jury’s decision as to Mike, and I have always believed that he acted professionally on the night of this incident.”

Police Department procedures call for the suspension of officers who are charged with a crime, and the three detectives will be ordered to surrender their shields; all five officers are already on paid leave without their weapons. Those who are suspended will be unpaid.

If indictments of police officers are unusual, convictions are even more so. Many saw a jury’s decision to acquit the officers who opened fire on Mr. Diallo after a two-month trial as a firm rejection of the powerful charges against them. In recent years in New York City, Bryan Conroy, a police officer who shot a peddler in a Chelsea warehouse had faced second-degree manslaughter charges, but was convicted of the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide by a judge, who sentenced him to probation.

The detectives indicted in the Bell case were in a larger group seeking prostitution arrests outside the Club Kalua, a topless bar in Jamaica that had been plagued by narcotics and prostitution activity, under-age drinking and guns.

Detective Isnora had trailed Mr. Bell’s party, which was broken into two groups of four men, believing that Joseph Guzman, one of Mr. Bell’s companions, had a gun and was about to use it, according to a person familiar with the detective’s account.

The detective approached Mr. Bell’s car. But Mr. Bell drove forward, clipping him, and then hit a police minivan, backed up, nearly hitting the detective again and slammed into the minivan a second time, the police have said.

Detective Isnora, with his shield around his neck, said he opened fire, according to the person familiar with his account. This led to the fusillade of shots, with some of the officers apparently believing that their colleagues’ muzzle flashes were those of assailants.

Mr. Bell was killed as he sat in the driver’s seat. Trent Benefield, 23, who was in the passenger seat, was struck three times, in the leg and buttock, and Mr. Guzman, 31, who was in a back seat, had at least 11 bullet wounds along his right side, from his neck to his feet.

Like the officers, the wounded men told their stories before the grand jury.

Protests that followed the shooting were mostly peaceful. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg convened a meeting of black religious leaders and elected officials at City Hall. He emerged from it calling the circumstances “inexplicable” and “unacceptable,” and said, “It sounds to me like excessive force was used.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s quick reaction was viewed as a salve to the situation and a turnabout from the approach of his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who did not reach out to black leaders in the immediate aftermath of the fatal shooting of Mr. Diallo.

The panel of grand jurors began its work on Jan. 22 and met as often as three times a week in an auditorium-style room in an office building in Kew Gardens.

The officers testified in the reverse order of the number of rounds they fired: Detective Headley and Officer Carey testified on March 5; Detectives Cooper and Isnora, testified on March 7; and Friday last week, Detective Oliver testified in the zenith of the process.

Deliberations seemed to move slowly and in fits and starts. After Mr. Testagrossa read the charge — the instructions on the law that the panel had to consider as it weighed the evidence — the panelists were left alone to deliberate.

Reporting was contributed by Cara Buckley, Diane Cardwell, Jim Dwyer, Manny Fernandez, Colin Moynihan and William K. Rashbaum.

50-Shot Barrage Leads to Charges for 3 Detectives, NYT, 17.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/nyregion/17grand.html?hp

Police Nab Dad

Accused of Stabbing Baby

March 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:59 p.m. ET
The New York Times

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- A man accused of stabbing his 11-month-old son with a kitchen knife and throwing him out a car window was arrested Friday, two days after fleeing the scene, police said.

Kevin Chandler, 30, was arrested without incident in a home in suburban Lawrence, according to police in suburban Speedway, where the boy was injured Wednesday.

Police say Chandler stabbed Devon Chandler and then dumped him out the parked car and onto the pavement with the knife stuck in the toddler's back.

The baby was in good condition Friday after surgery, police said.

Police believe the incident occurred as Chandler and the boy's mother, Angela Limbrock, were in a car preparing to leave Limbrock's apartment to visit a friend.

Limbrock realized the child's car seat was inside. She handed the baby to Chandler, who was in the back seat. As she got out, she heard Chandler swear at the child and turned around to see him throw Devon out, according to a police report.

Chandler fled, sparking a search. His arrest came after an anonymous tip from a woman.

Police Nab Dad Accused of Stabbing Baby, NYT, 16.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Toddler-Stabbed.html

Lives Intersect Violently on a Busy City Street

March 16, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

They weren’t cops’ cops. They weren’t sons of police officers, born with blue in their blood, like many in the New York City Police Department. They didn’t even tell some people about their jobs. Bookish, even naïve young men, each brought an eccentric back story to his role as an auxiliary police officer, and to their partnership on the street.

The younger officer, Yevgeniy Marshalik, 19, whose Russian family fled the war in Chechnya when he was a young boy, was a star member of his high school debating team who would go back to his New York University dorm to tell his classmates tales of the streets.

The other man, Nicholas T. Pekearo, was nine years older, but in a way, more the boy — a crime and comic-book buff, blessed with a vivid imagination and a morbid curiosity, who longed to write his own noir novels, his friends said.

His death could have been a dark ending to one of his own stories. Mr. Pekearo, a salesman at a small bookstore on the Upper East Side, had saved up to buy his own bulletproof vest — the department does not provide them to auxiliary officers .He was wearing it Wednesday night when a gunman killed him with six shots in the torso and shoulder at point-blank range on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village.

The gunman killed his partner, Mr. Marshalik, seconds later with a single shot to the back of his head.

The deaths were captured on a startling surveillance videotape that the police showed on television yesterday.

Police officers chased the gunman, David R. Garvin, who had killed a bartender moments earlier, and fatally shot him on Bleecker Street.

The deaths of the two other men, who had chased an armed suspect — something auxiliary officers are instructed not to do — shocked the city in large measure because they were unarmed volunteers, not full-fledged police officers.

No one felt it more powerfully than the real police officer, Nelida Flores, who trained them. Last night she told a group of auxiliary officers, “They were my kids.”

Friends and family of the two officers, asked what drew them to the role, spoke of their earnestness and altruism, of a simple wish to do good.

“The moment they met, they clicked,” Officer Flores said.

The Marshalik family emigrated from southwest Russia 13 years ago, and Mr. Marshalik’s father, Boris, settled them in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he opened a practice as a pediatrician. Yevgeniy, who was known to his friends as Eugene, quickly threw himself into school, a driven, curious child who loved the Discovery Channel.

In fourth grade, Yevgeniy won an essay competition about the United States Constitution. “They gave him a medal,” said his mother, Maya Marshalik. “I was so proud, this boy who came here only some years ago. He could become anyone.”

“This city, Manhattan, was his city,” she said. “He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

At the city’s elite Stuyvesant High School, he was a standout member of the debating team. “The only thing he seemed to enjoy more than debating was helping other kids to learn to debate,” said a former teammate, Zach Frankel, 17. “The fact that he could get up and give an eight-minute speech, impromptu, about issues ranging from the philosophy of Nietzsche to policy in the Western Sahara, in such an eloquent manner, is just a testament to how hard he worked and how smart he was.”

He joined the city’s auxiliary police program early last year, not telling even his mother at first, because he knew she would worry. He tried to calm her concerns, she said, telling her over and over: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. The last time they shot an auxiliary, it was a long time ago.”

“We never pressed him,” she said. “This is what he chose.”

Mr. Frankel, his former debating teammate, was startled to see him in uniform months later: “I see him and he has a cop uniform, handcuffs and a nightstick,” he said. “I remember thinking, is Eugene joking around? He explained it.

“It makes sense to me. He had a real impulse to help people out, and I think he liked the idea of fulfilling what he viewed as a civic duty.”

A fellow auxiliary officer, Glenn E. Sabas, said they were fast friends. They talked about girls, about Mr. Marshalik’s unrequited crush on a woman he had known since he was 11. They talked about the job.

He completed his annual quota of hours on patrol in a matter of few months, Mr. Sabas said. “He loved it,” he said. “He loved going out.”

Mr. Marshalik hoped to become a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office, and Mr. Sabas said he held a part-time job at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, where he worked as an elevator operator and a doorman. Friends said he was generous with his time, driving once to Binghamton to visit a homesick friend at college there.

“That was one of his most amazing qualities,” the friend, Irina Kaplan, said in an e-mail message. “He was fiercely loyal, and he would do anything for the people he cared about.”

A friend of the Marshalik family, Andrew Zaretsky, 47, said of the teenager: “He always wished to act like a man, a real man. He wanted to protect our society.”

Mr. Zaretsky said relatives who gathered yesterday at the parents’ home in Valley Stream, on Long Island, struggled to understand how Mr. Marshalik could have been caught so defenseless. “They are not blaming the Police Department,” he said, “only questioning why he was so ill-prepared.”

His partner, Mr. Pekearo, grew up in the neighborhood he served. That was the whole idea, said his girlfriend, Christina Honeycutt, 34.

“He’d gone through the dark years of New York City as a kid, tripping over hypodermic needles in the street, and he’d come into this time of relative ease in the city and he just wanted to give back,” she said. “He wanted to help anyone, like talking down a guy who wanted to kill himself one night. Nick was the one who stood with him.”

Mr. Pekearo worked at Crawford Doyle Booksellers on Madison Avenue five days a week for the last five years. “He was steeped in hard-boiled, noir kinds of things,” said the shop’s business manager, Ryan Olsen. “He was our go-to guy for mysteries. He grew up with comics — that was still a love of his.”

He and Ms. Honeycutt met when she started working at the shop in 2004. “He had the classic New York sense of humor,” she said. “Self-deprecating, ironic, sarcastic. You’d feel comfortable with him.”

The couple moved in together and were living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, over a gourmet store. He fed squirrels out on the fire escape. By then, he had been with the police for more than a year, since 2003. He said of his job, “ ‘I know it can definitely be dangerous.’ ” she said. “But he had a lot of faith in the force.”

Besides, she said, Mr. Pekearo rarely encountered serious peril as an auxiliary police officer. “It was a lot more trying to get drunk people rides home,” she said. “Every now and again, he’d go into Starbucks and there would be some riffraff and he’d try to mediate.”

At Hercules Fancy Grocery in the West Village, the owner, Hercules Dimitratos, sold him Gatorades by day and saw him in uniform at night. “He’d pass by all the time and he’d say, ‘Be careful, Hercules,’ ” Mr. Dimitratos said. “He was always giving advice. ‘If you have any trouble, call us.’ ”

He took classes at Empire State College in Manhattan, anticipating graduating within the year, and found a mentor in his literature and creative writing instructor, Shirley Ariker, 66. “He was very inventive, very imaginative,” she said. “He wrote stories about people struggling to do the right thing.”

One novel that several people recalled reading involved a werewolf struggling to do right in a Vietnam-era time of troubles — “how to create good in the world from what is so bad about him,” Ms. Ariker said.

“Nick is a very tender person, a very kind person and a very loving person. I think that’s what he was struggling with. How do you do good in a world where so much bad happens? He talked about his police work as a chance to help people, to do good things.

“I think Nick was a romantic and he wanted to make the world right, like Dashiell Hammett’s characters,” she said. “He wanted to do right.”

The werewolf book had piqued the interest of an editor, and Mr. Pekearo was working on a revised draft. “He was just super talented,” said the editor, Eric Raab, of Tor Books. “I see thousands of manuscripts a year. When I saw his, I thought, man, this guy’s got something I’ve got to nurture.”

His girlfriend said his writing showed a clear-cut moral vision. “A lot of his ideas were about the struggle between death and life, good and evil, justice and corruption. He was a guy who grew up on comic books.”

Another friend, a manager of a condominium building next door, Peter Roach, said he learned only yesterday that Mr. Pekearo was an auxiliary officer.

“If I’d known, I would have tried to talk him out of it,” he said. “He just wasn’t cut out for that. He was a very mild guy. I would have told him he didn’t have the personality. He was a bookworm. I just couldn’t see Nick on the street chasing bad guys. There wasn’t a tough bone in his body, and you got to be tough to be a street cop in New York.”

The police video released yesterday tells a different story. As the gunman runs along the east sidewalk of Sullivan, Mr. Pekearo shadows him on the opposite side.

Both men were well liked at the Sixth Precinct station house where they worked.

They were valuable in fighting quality-of-life and other crimes, like theft, common in a precinct of bars and clubs. “They are our eyes and ears,” one lieutenant said.

At the bookshop, a doorman from down the street approached a bookseller and said only, “Our Nick.”

Both men will receive full police honors at their funerals this weekend. That news cheered Mr. Roach, who imagined Mr. Pekearo hearing it.

“He’d definitely get a kick out of getting full police honors,” he said.

Lives Intersect Violently on a Busy City Street, NYT, 16.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/nyregion/16cops.html?hp

Uniformed Eyes and Ears

on the Front Lines

2 Auxiliary Officers Among 4 Killed

in Village Gunfight

March 15, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER and AL BAKER

Two unarmed auxiliary police officers were fatally shot last night during a chase with a gunman on a busy stretch of bars and restaurants in the heart of Greenwich Village, the authorities said.

The gunman was shot and killed about 9:30 p.m. by regular police officers who quickly responded to the scene, the authorities said.

The attack began after the gunman entered a pizzeria on Macdougal and West Houston Streets and shot a bartender who worked there, the authorities said. The two auxiliary officers — volunteers who dress in uniforms virtually indistinguishable from regular police officers — followed the gunman toward Sullivan Street, where he suddenly turned and shot them, the authorities said.

The identities of the two slain officers and the gunman were unavailable early this morning. The bartender, whose name was also unavailable, was killed as well, the authorities said.

It was the second time in two nights that city officers were attacked in the line of duty. On Tuesday night, one police officer was shot in a Harlem restaurant only 90 minutes before another was stabbed in the head at a Brooklyn subway station. Both survived.

Witnesses to last night’s shooting described a wild scene in which as many as 30 shots were fired, creating pandemonium as patrons spilled out from Village watering holes like the Lion’s Den and the Back Fence. In one case, a comedy act in a basement club on Bleecker Street was briefly interrupted — although the show in fact went on.

“I was in the middle of my set and I heard a series of pops and someone came running downstairs and said, ‘A person is being shot outside,’ ” said Hassan Madry, 28, who was performing on stage at the Village Lantern. “I tried to calm everybody down. I told some of my jokes. You know, you got to go on with it.”

It was unclear last night what lay behind the first shooting at the pizzeria, DeMarco’s at 146 Macdougal Street. The authorities said the auxiliary officers followed the gunman as he left the place and minutes later were shot outside 208 Sullivan Street, which once housed the former Triangle Social Club, the mob redoubt of Vincent (The Chin) Gigante.

Hilary Elkins, 28, who lives on Sullivan and Bleecker Streets, said she saw a man in civilian clothes running south on Sullivan about 9:30 p.m. with a gun in his hand. Five police officers were giving chase, she said, then suddenly opened fire on the man.

“There was fire coming from everywhere,” Ms. Elkins said. “There was a cop who was shooting and then took cover behind a pole.”

Stephen Smitty, 48, a bar bouncer from Staten Island, was standing outside the Back Fence talking with a friend when the gunfire erupted.

“I was chit-chatting and all of a sudden it sounded like fireworks,” Mr. Smitty said. “I saw a cop on his knees with no hat on and soon people started talking about a dead cop.”

About 4,800 unarmed auxiliary officers work on a volunteer basis with the New York Police Department. They wear a blue uniform much like regular officers but instead of a silver badge wear a seven-pointed star that resembles a sheriff’s shield. The last time an auxiliary officer was killed in the line of duty was 14 years ago.

Seventh Avenue outside St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan had been cordoned off by yellow police tape after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly arrived. The officers had been taken to the hospital before they died. Several officers in uniforms lingered near the entryway last night.

Even as police helicopters whipped in the sky above and squad cars by the dozen converged on the scene of the shootings, witnesses spoke of separate bursts on gunfire that split the night.

Ray Cline, 56, was at his mother-in-law’s apartment on LaGuardia Place when the gunfire interrupted their dessert.

“I was eating cherry pie with my mother-in-law on the 26th floor and then what sounded like a string of firecrackers rang out,” he said. “There were at least a dozen shots within four or five seconds and then sirens came within a minute or two.”

Jonas Skybakmoem, a 26-year-old musician visiting New York from Norway with his girlfriend, was having dinner at an Italian restaurant near Sullivan and Bleecker when the shots rang out.

“We heard the shots and I saw people in the restaurant across the street getting under the tables,” he said. “People were also running into the restaurant.”

Mr. Skybakmoem said that two dozen or so people in the restaurant he was in immediately sought cover in the bathrooms in back.

Mr. Madry, the comedian, said the police and the club’s management kept patrons safely inside the bar.

“At first people panicked,” he said. “People started freaking. One girl started crying. I kept telling everyone to stay calm.”

Cassi Feldman, Serge F. Kovaleski, Colin Moynihan and Conrad Mulcahy contributed reporting.

2 Auxiliary Officers Among 4 Killed in Village Gunfight, NYT, 15.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/nyregion/15cops.html?hp

2 New York City Police Officers

Seriously Injured

March 14, 2007
the New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

Two New York City police officers were seriously injured in separate incidents last night, one in Harlem and one in Brooklyn.

A plainclothes police officer was shot twice and seriously wounded in a gunfight in Harlem with a suspect who was killed, the authorities said. The officer was hospitalized and expected to survive.

The gunfight broke out about 9:30 p.m. after the officer, Robert Tejada, 35, approached the suspect with three other officers at a small restaurant on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard near West 136th Street called Café 22, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

Mr. Kelly said that a four-man team from the Police Department’s Anti-Crime Unit had been dispatched to the cafe after a detective who had been following the suspect for some time as part of a continuing investigation radioed his colleagues that the suspect had been seen with a gun.

When the officers entered the restaurant, Mr. Kelly said, they frisked the suspect, and discovered a 9-millimeter pistol. But a struggle began, Mr. Kelly said, in which the suspect managed to draw the gun and shoot Officer Tejada once in the chest and once in the ankle. The officers returned fire, shooting the suspect four times. He was taken to Harlem Hospital Center, where he died about two hours later.

Distraught relatives and friends of the suspect gathered outside the hospital early this morning. Charles Stevenson, who said he was the suspect’s father, identified him as Corey Mickins, 25, of the Soundview section of the Bronx. He said his son did some maintenance work and had a girlfriend.

Mr. Stevenson said that he heard from his son’s friends that he “was hanging on the corner at 136th Street. Police came up. They started checking him and pushing him around. He ran away and they started shooting at him after he ran. I guess he returned fire.”

Steven Mickins, 48, who said he was Corey Mickins’s uncle, called Mr. Mickins “just a good guy. He was never in no real trouble.” At a news conference at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, where Officer Tejada was in serious condition, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the officer was a seven-year veteran and a former marine.

“He’s in some pain, but he’s doing fine,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “The surgeons said he’ll probably carry that bullet around in his ankle for the rest of his life.”

Mr. Kelly did not describe the investigation that resulted in the gunfight but said the suspect had prior arrests on assault and attempted murder charges.

The scene of the shooting was crisscrossed by yellow police tape as dozens of police officers converged there. The area sits at the heart of one of Harlem’s busiest districts, near the 32nd Precinct station house and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Esynce Ealeey, 18, who lives a half-block away, said she was at home last night when she heard several shots. It sounded as if someone had opened fire and drew fire in return, she said.

“It was fast,” Ms. Ealeey said, “like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.”

She said that a cousin, who was also at the house, went downstairs to find out what had happened and returned with the news that a police officer had just been shot.

Kenny Lantigua, 18, who works across the street from Café 22 at an International House of Pancakes, said he heard two shots and then watched a swarm of officers descend on the block.

“I heard boom, boom,” Mr. Lantigua said, “and I came out here, and in under five minutes there were cops everywhere.”

Charles Drum, 55, was standing in a liquor store directly across the street from Café 22 when he heard shots and someone ran through the door saying there was a gunfight inside the restaurant. Mr. Drum then said that everyone inside the liquor store jumped to the floor as another shot was fired.

At New York-Presbyterian, scores of police officers milled in the lobby and through the brightly lighted halls. More than a half-dozen squad cars had pulled up outside the hospital on Broadway, which the police had closed off between 167th and 168th Streets.

In East New York, Brooklyn, about an hour later, an officer was attacked on the platform of the J train in the massive Broadway Junction subway station, the police said. The officer and his partner had attempted to give a summons to a man, and asked another man, Hugo Hernandez, for his identification. Mr. Hernandez then slashed the officer in the face with a 6-inch knife, the police said.

The officers opened fire on Mr. Hernandez, who was injured and taken to Brookdale Hospital. Officer Angel Cruz sustained a fractured skull and was taken to Jamaica Hospital’s Trauma Center where he was in surgery early this morning. Fellow officers held vigil in the otherwise barren lot behind the hospital.

Early this morning, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly spoke about the attack on Officer Cruz, a rookie who had only been on the force for 14 months.

“This is a totally irrational act,” Mr. Kelly said. “A person responds to a summons for smoking with a six-inch knife.”

Kelly said the other man, who was being issued the summons, fled once Hernandez attacked Officer Cruz.

Officer Cruz managed to draw his service weapon and fire off five shots at Hernandez.

“He acted valiantly,” Kelly said of Officer Cruz’s reaction. “He was able to respond even after his skull was fractured.”

Ross Cunningham, 20, of Queens said he was reading his Bible while waiting for a Queens-bound J train when he heard four shots in a corridor above the entrance to the platform.

“When everyone heard the shots everyone took off running. There was chaos,” Mr. Cunningham said. “People were like, ‘What’s going on?’ Everyone knows what gunshots sound like. I knew what they were when they heard them, People just went with their instincts. They ran and I followed.” He said everyone ran to the head of the platform, away from the entrance. In the confusion, he added, he lost his wallet.

The police flooded the station and the surrounding streets and as the investigation unfolded early today, service on the A, C, L, and J lines was disrupted.

Reporting was contributed by Rebecca Cathcart, Daryl Khan, Nate Schweber and Matthew Sweeney.

2 New York City Police Officers Seriously Injured, NYT, 14.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/nyregion/14cnd-cops.html

Lawyers Call 2 Detectives

in Fatal Shooting Most Vulnerable

March 14, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
and CARA BUCKLEY

Lawyers for several of the five police officers involved in last year’s fatal shooting of Sean Bell in Queens said yesterday that the undercover detective who shot first — firing 11 times — and a detective who fired 31 shots, the most of any of the five, are the most vulnerable to criminal charges.

A grand jury has been hearing evidence since Jan. 22 and could vote as early as today on whether to hand up charges. The panel heard testimony last week from all five of the officers, each of whom testified voluntarily without immunity from prosecution.

Gescard F. Isnora, an undercover detective, fired the first of 50 bullets that police officers discharged into a car in Jamaica early on Nov. 25, killing Sean Bell, 23, and wounding two of his friends. Detective Michael Oliver fired 31 of those shots — emptying, reloading and again emptying his pistol’s magazine.

The lawyers, who discussed the grand jury’s options on the condition of anonymity, said these two men appear to be in the most legal peril.

The lawyers’ speculation came as city officials, the Police Department, community leaders and Mr. Bell’s family and friends awaited the grand jury’s decision. The panel could indict some or all of the officers on a range of charges, or not indict any of them.

“I’m sure there will be some hotheads no matter what happens,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking yesterday at a news conference in Washington. “There’ll be people that think there should have been more indictments, there’ll be people that think there’ll be less.”

But Mr. Bloomberg said he expected muted reaction from the community.

“We are not going to have any unrest,” he said. “We’ll make sure that everybody is protected. You will be as safe going out on the streets after a decision as you were before the decision.”

Several lawyers involved in the case have maintained that while the officers might have used poor tactics and bad judgment, and might have been poorly supervised, they did not commit a crime.

James J. Culleton, who represents Detective Oliver and would not discuss the details of the case, criticized speculation that his client was one of those most vulnerable.

“My client came in and told the grand jury what happened; I think now it’s up to them,” he said, adding that “making comments and guesswork and speculation” were not “appropriate at this time. Let’s let the grand jury do their job. It’s up to them.”

He said, “The officers react to the situation that is in front of them and if deadly physical force is being used or about to be used they can use deadly physical force in return — to prevent it from being used against them.”

Detective Isnora’s lawyer, Philip E. Karasyk, said that the officers’ actions did not rise to the level of a crime. “I am hopeful that the grand jurors, now having heard all of the evidence, have realized that none of these officers intended to injure or kill anyone that night,” he said.

“You need far more culpability, far more intentional conduct, to make something criminal and there is no way under any version of events that these officers intended to injure anyone or kill anyone,” he said. “Nor did their actions rise in any way to the level of recklessness or depraved indifference.”

Another lawyer gave several reasons why the two detectives were more likely than the others to face charges.

Ronald P. Fischetti, a lawyer who represented an officer convicted in federal court of brutalizing Abner Louima in a Brooklyn stationhouse in 1997, said the state grand jury in the Bell case could determine that Detective Isnora fired when there was no discernible danger, spurring the other officers to shoot. And Mr. Oliver, he said, could be seen to have used excessive force because he had time to reload, and did.

“The first person who shot has a greater liability,” said Mr. Fischetti. And Detective Oliver, he said, “had the time to make a determination whether or not it was necessary to continue firing.”

The Police Department has put 1,700 officers on alert in anticipation of grand jury action, the commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday. The department is already preparing for two St. Patrick’s Day parades, two antiwar demonstrations and a march up Third Avenue by the health workers’ union, within the next week, he said.

He said thousands of officers have been reassigned to two potentially busy shifts, one from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., the other from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Mr. Kelly would not specify which locations the police considered high priority, with the exception of the courthouse in Queens, where any officer who was indicted would appear.

The many protests held since Mr. Bell’s shooting, all peaceful, do not suggest there will be a violent outpouring of emotion now. The events have included solemn marches, candlelight vigils and fiery verbal outbursts, and community leaders have criticized what they characterized as rampant police profiling of black men. Many drew comparisons with the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who died in a hail of 41 police bullets in 1999.

And since the shooting, Mr. Bloomberg has met 10 times with church and community leaders in southeast Queens, where the shooting took place, trying to allay tensions and defuse further unrest. Yesterday, he met with roughly a dozen community representatives again, in a catering hall in St. Albans, where he again referred to the Police Department’s recent hiring of a consultant to review firearms training.

Still, several community leaders and activists predicted outrage if the grand jury does not indict all five officers.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who led protests and worked closely with Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, as well as with Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, who were shot but survived, said he would call for a special prosecutor to take over the case if he considered the grand jury’s action “insufficient.”

And Bishop Lester Williams, who was to officiate at Mr. Bell’s wedding on the day he was shot but instead later presided over his funeral, said neighborhoods in southeast Queens were “not as calm as people have led them to believe.”

Referring to Mr. Bell’s mother, Valerie, Bishop Williams said: “Let’s say there’s no indictment. That boy dies again to her.”

The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, whose office presented the evidence to the grand jury, was personally involved in writing the charge for the jurors — the instructions on the law that they must consider as they weigh the evidence, a person with knowledge of the process has said.

Mr. Brown has said since the shooting that he sought to conduct a careful, thorough impartial investigation, despite critics who urged his office to move more swiftly.

After a prosecutor reads the charge to the grand jurors, they are left alone to deliberate, according to an official familiar with the process.

“They close the door and they’re on their own,” the official said. “They can ask for testimony to be read back and they have a right to look at the exhibits.”

Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry, Diane Cardwell, Sewell Chan, Anemona Hartocollis, Trymaine Lee and Thomas J. Lueck.

Lawyers Call 2 Detectives in Fatal Shooting Most Vulnerable, NYT, 14.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/nyregion/14grand.html

Two Officers Speak to Grand Jury

on Killing of Unarmed Black Man

March 6, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Two of the five police officers involved in the killing of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man who died in a hail of 50 police bullets, testified yesterday before a grand jury in Queens that is weighing evidence in the case.

The two officers, Detective Paul Headley and Officer Michael Carey, testified voluntarily without immunity from prosecution in the case, officials said. Union officials and lawyers for the men said they had been eager to talk about what occurred on Nov. 25, when they and their colleagues opened fire on Mr. Bell’s car outside the Club Kalua strip club in Jamaica, Queens.

Yesterday’s events were noteworthy because city police officers who are the focus of grand juries sometimes stay silent about their roles in such shootings. And the first public appearances by the officers — more than three months after the shooting of Mr. Bell — made for a day filled with emotions.

In the morning, Detective Headley, 35, was surrounded by about a dozen people, including his lawyer and union officials, when he strode toward the office building in Queens where the grand jury is seated. He wore a blue suit, stepped confidently and appeared to be at ease. He testified for about two hours and then left the building about 2:30 p.m., again surrounded by supporters.

Officer Carey, 26, arrived later, about 3:30 p.m., also wearing a business suit but appearing tenser as he kept his expression fixed, his eyes set straight ahead. He testified, then left the building about 5:20 p.m. with supporters, including Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, by his side.

Separately, each officer declined to discuss his testimony. But union officials and their lawyers spoke for them. “My client is relieved that he had the opportunity to answer the questions the grand jury posed to him,” said John Arlia, the lawyer for Detective Headley. “He is relieved he had the opportunity to speak to them and tell his version of the events.”

Stephen C. Worth, the lawyer for Officer Carey, said, “This officer stood there and answered all of their questions.” He said his client testified for about an hour and a half.

Each lawyer declined to discuss whether he had asked the grand jurors to hear additional witnesses, an option in such matters.

Mr. Bell, 23, and his friends were celebrating his bachelor party just hours before his scheduled wedding when the shooting occurred. Two of his friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, were wounded. Mr. Benefield, who is black, and Mr. Guzman, who is Hispanic, testified before the grand jury last week.

Of the five officers who fired the 50 shots, three are black and two are white. Detective Headley, who is black, fired one bullet and Officer Carey, who is white, fired three, officials said. On Wednesday, Detective Marc Cooper is expected to testify, as is the 28-year-old detective who fired the first of the 50 shots and who has not been officially identified by the authorities because of his undercover status.

It remains uncertain whether Detective Michael Oliver, who fired 31 of the shots, will testify before the grand jury. Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said he expected Detective Oliver to testify on Friday.

When the grand jury will finish its work — to determine whether any of the five officers who opened fire on Mr. Bell’s car will face criminal charges — is unclear, but officials said it could be as early as the end of this week or sometime next week.

Yesterday, Mr. Palladino said that the actions of the officers did not rise to the level of criminality.

“I hope the grand jurors see these officers for who and what they are,” Mr. Palladino said. “All of the officers involved are sincere, humble individuals and the actions that they took that night were during the performance of their duty and they were acting in good faith.”

He added: “There was no criminality in their hearts, nor in their minds, when they took the actions they took.”

Mr. Lynch said he was happy that Officer Carey could finally speak about the shooting, to “put some facts to some of the fiction that ran in the street.”

“We’re pleased that today has come where we have the opportunity for this police officer to go out and tell his side of the story: the thoughts he had at the time, the facts that he dealt with out in the street that night,” Mr. Lynch said.

Two Officers Speak to Grand Jury on Killing of Unarmed Black Man, NYT, 6.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/nyregion/06grand.html

Dismembered wife's husband found

5 March 2007
USA Today
By Suzette Hackney, Christy Arboscello,
Joe Swickard and Amber Hunt, Detroit Free Press

BLISS TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Stumbling shoeless and frozen through hip-deep snowdrifts, a man accused of killing and dismembering his wife was tracked down Sunday, hiding under a fallen tree in a state park in northern Michigan.

Police used tracking dogs, snowmobiles and helicopters to find Stephen Grant, who fled over the weekend after police found the torso of his wife in their suburban Detroit home.

Tara Lynn Grant, 34, was likely strangled before her body was dismembered, Macomb County Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz said Sunday.

Stephen Grant, 37, was charged in her death Saturday. He had reported her missing from their Washington Township home in February. Macomb County police said Tara's torso was found in the garage, and her head and other body parts were found scattered through the outskirts of Stony Creek Metropark, where the Grants sometimes rode bikes.

For 10 hours, Grant had plowed on foot through Wilderness State Park, a desolate area along Lake Michigan, with police and Indian tribal lawmen on his trail, according to the Michigan National Guard. Grant charged through the woods, sometimes jogging, after ditching a borrowed truck near the shores of Lake Michigan, the Guard said.

Grant's lawyer, David Griem, said he got calls from Grant that he described as almost incoherent rambles that left him sure Grant was about to take his life. Emmet County Sheriff Peter Wallin said Grant phoned his sister Saturday afternoon, and authorities traced the call to the north. Wallin said officers tracked him to the vicinity of Wilderness State Park.

By dawn Sunday, Grant was overwhelmed by fatigue and frostbite and hiding under a tree, Wallin said. His shoes had been lost somewhere in the snow. He had no jacket, and his clothes were soaked. "Obviously, he was not dressed for the conditions," Wallin said. "I don't think he could have made it much longer. It was 14 degrees last night. I wouldn't want to be out there unless I was dressed for it."

Barbara Allen, spokeswoman for the Northern Michigan Hospital in Petoskey, said Grant was treated for frostbite on his extremities and hypothermia.

Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said Grant spoke with investigators after his capture, and "some things … came out."

"We think we have the right man based on some of his statements," he said.

Tara Grant was an international business executive and mother of the couple's two children, a 6-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy. The children are staying with relatives.

Macomb County prosecutor Eric Smith said Grant may be arraigned as early as Tuesday on charges of murder and mutilating a corpse.

Contributing: Wire reports

Dismembered wife's husband found, UT, 5.3.2007,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-04-torso_N.htm

Newark Officer Is Killed in Crash

While Chasing a Suspect

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN HOLL
and MANNY FERNANDEZ

NEWARK, March 3 — A Newark police sergeant was killed early Saturday morning when his car flipped over as he chased a handcuffed suspect who had managed to drive away in another squad car, the authorities said.

The sergeant, Tommaso Popolizio, 33, was among several officers trying to crack down on drag racing on Doremus Avenue, a flat, straight stretch of road in an industrial corner of the city’s East Ward that has become notorious for late-night illegal races.

Shortly before 4 a.m., the police pulled over a car that was leaving the area, officials said, and one of the men inside, William Rodriguez, 22, was taken into custody. Mr. Rodriguez, of Cranbury, N.J., was placed in the back seat of a marked police vehicle with his hands cuffed behind his back, the police said.

But Mr. Rodriguez somehow maneuvered his hands and arms to his front, made his way into the front seat and drove away. As Sergeant Popolizio pursued Mr. Rodriguez, the two vehicles crashed, causing the sergeant’s car to overturn.

Sergeant Popolizio, who suffered severe head injuries, was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at University Hospital in Newark, the authorities said. Mr. Rodriguez was found soon afterward hiding in tall weeds in an abandoned lot.

In a news conference Saturday at the hospital, Mayor Cory A. Booker called Sergeant Popolizio a Newark hero and a “cop’s cop.” The officer had been with the police force for 12 years. He was married and had four children.

Police work was a family tradition for Sergeant Popolizio: Two of his three brothers were Newark officers and had served on the force with him. One of them, Nicola B. Popolizio, died in December at age 38 after suffering a heart attack, officials said.

Calling Sergeant Popolizio’s death a tragedy, Mr. Booker said, “A hero here died in the line of duty protecting our citizens, keeping us safe.”

Sergeant Popolizio, the third officer killed in the line of duty in Newark since 2003, was remembered by friends as a committed officer, an avid paintball player and a doting father who was known as Paps.

One day in March 1999, he and a partner rushed into a burning, smoky building on Sunset Avenue to rescue three young children trapped inside. “All in a day’s work,” he told The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Mr. Rodriguez was charged with first-degree aggravated manslaughter, auto theft, possession of a weapon by a convicted felon and four other offenses. Officials said he had previously been arrested nine times, including an arrest last month in nearby Hamilton, N.J., on charges of eluding the police and resisting arrest.

Numerous questions remain about how Mr. Rodriguez was able to maneuver his arms from behind his back while handcuffed and get behind the wheel of a police vehicle as officers stood nearby. Mr. Booker and the Newark police director, Garry F. McCarthy, said such questions were part of the investigation.

Newark squad cars have sliding plexiglass partitions that separate the back seat from the front. It is virtually impossible to slide open the partition from the back seat. It was not known Saturday whether one of the back doors had been left open.

The Essex County prosecutor, Paula T. Dow, said she was outraged that Mr. Rodriguez had tried to escape in such a dangerous manner.

“It shows a risk that officers have to face every day, even on such an innocent thing like stopping drag racing,” said Ms. Dow, who added that she did not blame the officers who first apprehended Mr. Rodriguez.

“I don’t fault anyone at all,” she said, “except the defendant in this case, who is directly responsible, in my opinion, for this horrific accident.”

Most handcuffed suspects remain seated in the back of squad cars. But it is not unheard of for one to try to escape by stealing the vehicle, according to news reports.

In 2001, a 19-year-old man in Tooele County, Utah, moved his cuffed hands from behind his back to the front of his body and stole a sheriff’s sport utility vehicle, then eluded deputies for a while by tracking the chase on the police radio.

In October, a 20-year-old woman in Delhi Township, Ohio, was handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser. The woman removed one of the handcuffs, reached out an open window to open the door and jumped into the driver’s seat, taking the police on a six-mile chase.

Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said escapes of this nature usually involve some deviation from procedure and should prompt the Newark Police Department to review its policies. “There is a long history of these things ending in tragedy whenever you fail to properly secure people in custody,” said Mr. O’Donnell, a former New York police officer and trainer.

In Newark, the chain of events that led to the sergeant’s death began when officers went to the area of 354 Doremus Avenue in response to a complaint of drag racing. Officers pulled over a car leaving the area. Mr. Rodriguez, one of four people in the vehicle, tossed a gun from the window as police approached, officials said. The serial number on the gun, a 9 millimeter Glock that was later recovered by police, had been removed.

Mr. Rodriguez was arrested on a charge of possession of a handgun, handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, the authorities said. The officers were attending to the other suspects when Mr. Rodriguez drove away.

After the crash, Mr. Rodriguez fled from the police vehicle. He took off several items of clothing and hid in tall weeds in an abandoned lot on Doremus Avenue, the police said. He was later found by officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. One of the officers received a minor injury during Mr. Rodriguez’s arrest.

Mr. Rodriguez is expected to be arraigned Monday morning. His bail was set at $1 million, Ms. Dow said.

The street, a nearly three-mile straightaway that runs parallel to the New Jersey Turnpike, has been popular among drag racers for years. Mr. McCarthy, the police director, said that officers had made a number of arrests in the area in the past, and that in light of Saturday’s fatal pursuit, he would explore new ways to curtail racing there.

The Newark police enacted strict guidelines on car chases several years ago after police pursuits that resulted in deadly crashes. Officials said that the chase yesterday was an authorized pursuit, given the location, time of day and circumstances of the case.

Sergeant Popolizio graduated from Barringer High School in Newark, and had grown up on Mount Pleasant Avenue, one in a family of four boys and three girls.

He later took to playing paintball, and about three times a year, he and a group of friends would visit a range in northern New Jersey and splatter each other with shots. One of the group, Alberto Padilla, 33, said Sergeant Popolizio was always the best shot.

“Everybody made sure they had him on their team,” said Mr. Padilla, who had known the sergeant for 20 years.

On Eagle Rock Avenue in Roseland, N.J., where Sergeant Popolizio lived with his wife and children, people embraced and talked on the porch of the modest wood-frame house with green trim. A Newark police officer on the street outside said that family members declined to comment.

Miles away, at the scene of the crash on Doremus Avenue, a bouquet of white roses lay beside a wooden telephone pole. One of the police cars in the chase appeared to have struck the pole. It was splintered at its base, and there were skid marks in the dirt next to the road. Both cars had been removed by late morning.

Marcelino Arce, a friend of the sergeant’s, had left the roses. Mr. Arce and Sergeant Popolizio used to live in the same building in Newark and became fast friends, going to Yankee games and shooting pool together. “He loved the job,” Mr. Arce said. “His heart was the job.”

Andrew Jacobs, Anthony Ramirez and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

Newark Officer Is Killed in Crash While Chasing a Suspect, NYT, 4.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/nyregion/04newark.html

Judge Limits New York Police Taping

February 16, 2007
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups.

In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

Citing two events in 2005 — a march in Harlem and a demonstration by homeless people in front of the home of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — the judge said the city had offered scant justification for videotaping the people involved.

“There was no reason to suspect or anticipate that unlawful or terrorist activity might occur,” he wrote, “or that pertinent information about or evidence of such activity might be obtained by filming the earnest faces of those concerned citizens and the signs by which they hoped to convey their message to a public official.”

While he called the police conduct “egregious,” Judge Haight also offered an unusual judicial mea culpa, taking responsibility for his own words in a 2003 order that he conceded had not been “a model of clarity.”

The restrictions on videotaping do not apply to bridges, tunnels, airports, subways or street traffic, Judge Haight noted, but are meant to control police surveillance at events where people gather to exercise their rights under the First Amendment.

“No reasonable person, and surely not this court, is unaware of the perils the New York public faces and the crucial importance of the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to detect, prevent and punish those who would cause others harm,” Judge Haight wrote.

Jethro M. Eisenstein, one of the lawyers who challenged the videotaping practices, said that Judge Haight’s ruling would make it possible to contest other surveillance tactics, including the use of undercover officers at political gatherings. In recent years, police officers have disguised themselves as protesters, shouted feigned objections when uniformed officers were making arrests, and pretended to be mourners at a memorial event for bicycle riders killed in traffic accidents.

“This was a major push by the corporation counsel to say that the guidelines are nice but they’re yesterday’s news, and that the security establishment’s view of what is important trumps civil liberties,” Mr. Eisenstein said. “Judge Haight is saying that’s just not the way we’re doing things in New York City.”

A spokesman for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly referred questions about the ruling to the city’s lawyers, who noted that Judge Haight did not set a deadline for destroying the tapes it had already made, and that the judge did not find the city had violated the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, Judge Haight — at times invoking the mythology of the ancient Greeks and of Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker — used blunt language to characterize the Police Department’s activities.

“There is no discernible justification for the apparent disregard of the guidelines” in his 2003 court order, he said. These spell out the broad circumstances under which the police could investigate political gatherings.

Under the guidelines, the police may conduct investigations — including videotaping — at political events only if they have indications that unlawful activity may occur, and only after they have applied for permission to the deputy commissioner in charge of the Intelligence Division.

Judge Haight noted that the Police Department had not produced

evidence that any applications for permission to videotape had ever been filed.

Near the end of his 51-page order, the judge warned that the Police Department must change its practices or face penalties.

“Any future use by the N.Y.P.D. of video and photographic equipment during the course of an investigation involving political activity” that did not follow the guidelines could result in contempt proceedings, he wrote.

At monthly group bicycle rides in Lower Manhattan known as Critical Mass, some participants break traffic laws, and the police routinely videotape those events, Judge Haight noted. That would be an appropriate situation for taping, he said, but police officials did not follow the guidelines and apply for permission.

“This is a classic case of application of the guidelines: political activity on the part of individuals, but legitimate law enforcement purpose on the part of the police,” Judge Haight wrote. “It is precisely the sort of situation where the guidelines require adherence to certain protocols but ultimately give the N.Y.P.D. the flexibility to pursue its law enforcement goals.”

Gideon Oliver, a lawyer who has represented many people arrested during the monthly bicycle rides, said he was troubled by the intensive scrutiny of political activities.

“I’m looking forward to a deeper and more serious exploration of how and why this surveillance has been conducted,” Mr. Oliver said.

In the past the Police Department has said that it needed intelligence about the Critical Mass rides in order to protect the streets from unruly riders.

Patrick Markee, an official with another group that was cited in the ruling, the Coalition for the Homeless, said the judge’s decision ratified their basic rights to free speech.

“We’re gratified that Judge Haight found that the police shouldn’t engage in surveillance of homeless New Yorkers and their supporters when they’re engaged in peaceful, lawful political protest,” Mr. Markee said.

The Police Department’s approach to investigating political, social and religious groups has been a contentious subject for most of four decades, and a class action lawsuit brought by political activists, including a lawyer named Barbara Handschu, was settled in 1985. Judge Haight oversees the terms of that settlement, which are known as the Handschu guidelines, and which he modified in 2003.

At the time, Judge Haight said that the police could “attend any event open to the public, on the same terms and conditions of the public generally.”

But in yesterday’s ruling, he said that permission “cannot be stretched to authorize police officers to videotape everyone at a public gathering just because a visiting little old lady from Dubuque (to borrow from The New Yorker) could do so. There is a quantum difference between a police officer and the little old lady (or other tourist or private citizen) videotaping or photographing a public event.”

The judge said he bore some responsibility for misinterpretation of the guidelines.

“I confess with some chagrin that while the text of this opinion and its implementing order, read together, may not be as opaque as the irritatingly baffling pronouncements of the Oracle” at Delphi, “they do not constitute a model of clarity,” he wrote.

Judge Limits New York Police Taping, NYT, 16.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/nyregion/16police.html

To Protect, Serve,

and if Necessary,

Stand and Shiver

February 16, 2007
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

Five layers buffered Police Officer David Kantor from the world, and the enemy still got through.

It easily cut past his navy jacket, his sturdy bulletproof vest, his turtleneck and double-layered long underwear. It was 10 p.m. on an icy stretch of Times Square, and Officer Kantor still had six hours of an eight-hour foot patrol ahead of him. Protected as he was, strapped to handcuffs, an expandable baton and a gun, he was still, after all, merely mortal. The frigid arctic blasts found their mark.

“It doesn’t help when the winds whip around,” Officer Kantor said through clenched teeth as an icy gust tore clouds of breath from his mouth. “In the cold of winter, you can’t get warm.”

Police officers on foot patrol and traffic agents routinely meet their match during New York’s wintriest shifts. There may be fewer thieves and murderers on the city’s streets than there used to be, but the cold is stubborn, merciless, everywhere. So over the years police officers have amassed a few tricks for staying warm, or at least for trying to.

Finding pockets of warmth in places like hotel lobbies, building alcoves and even funeral parlors is crucial. Racing up and down stairs helps get the blood flowing. (Ditto for chasing bad guys.) Layers are important, but one should not bundle up to the point of immobility.

“You know the kids in those suits that zip all the way up, that waddle down the street? That’s what you feel like,” said Sgt. Michelle L. Martindale, who works with the department’s Community Affairs Bureau. “You still have to be able to move, and not split your pants.”

Common-sense strategies work, too. If it is daytime, walk in the sun. Hang out on top of subway vents. Stock up on instant hand and foot warmers; ideally, buy them in bulk.

Some night posts come with sweet spots. Officers patrolling Times Square can avail themselves of the light-bulb-studded marquee overhang of the 42nd Street McDonald’s. It is outfitted with a row of heat lamps: on icy nights, officers flock to them like moths.

Even then, the chill finds its way in.

“It’s got heated lamps, but you still got to be out here,” said a police officer working the McDonald’s post. Because of department regulations, she was not allowed to give her name. She also had to patrol the outlying sidewalks, which meant leaving the heat lamps’ warm grasp. “You can’t stay under them the whole night,” she said.

The department recently issued a balaclava, which sells for $8.75 and can be worn when the temperature goes below 40 degrees. When it is less than 32 degrees out, a winter cap, lined with imitation fur, can also be worn. It resembles the trendy Russian-style winter hats, like the one worn by Elmer Fudd, and costs just $13. Still, it has not caught on with most officers, who prefer the traditional, and thermally challenged, eight-point caps.

When the temperature gets below 18 degrees with the wind chill, police horses are normally pulled from the streets and taken back to the barn. The officers who ride them are sent back out on patrol.

The duty jackets, which is what the uniform’s blue coats are called, are worn from November to June. While not especially toasty, they are roomy enough for multiple layers underneath.

Earmuffs can be worn year round.

In the old days, decades ago, officers had to settle for a long, cumbersome jacket known, with little affection, as a horse blanket. It was as infamous for trapping in the cold air as it was for its deep pockets, rumored to be perfect for concealing whiskey flasks. Officers usually kept guns in those pockets, too, because the coat made their holsters too hard to get to.

In those days, sergeants were known to keep tabs on freezing foot patrol officers by touching their badges. Cold badges meant the patrol officers were duly sticking to their outdoor posts. Warm badges were giveaways: their wearers had been hiding indoors.

“There were dodges and little games you played with your sergeant,” said John F. Timoney, a former first deputy police commissioner in New York and now the chief of police in Miami. “In order to get warm or stay warm, you had to violate the rules.”

Chief Timoney’s favorite dodge was hiding his own car around the corner from his foot post, and hopping in to thaw out once his supervisors were out of sight.

He once got caught, though, and as penance he was assigned to a month of night shifts, hauling emotionally disturbed people to Bellevue Hospital Center.

Chief Timoney used to patrol the South Bronx and Washington Heights where, when the temperatures plunged, he sought sanctuary late at night in funeral parlors, or near radiators in old tenements.

“I’m freezing just thinking about those days,” he said from Miami, where the temperature was 82.

Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said he favored long underwear and a blue quilted jacket during his patrol days, and wore them without complaint.

“They used to make me look more muscular,” the fitness-conscious commissioner said. “And I liked that.”

Of course, certain behavior is forbidden for police officers. They cannot, for example, bounce about or jog in place to keep warm.

“It doesn’t look too professional, jumping around,” said one police officer, who was recently assigned to security detail at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

The officer noted that his eyeglasses stripped him of the possibility of hiding indoors during an outdoor post, because of their propensity to fog up. “If I’m hiding, and go out, my glasses will change,” he said. But, he added, he was a little bit chubby, which helped defang winter’s bite. “I’ve got my own coat,” he said, patting his belly.

Another officer, also on security detail, noted that the peak of summer is a rough time for police officers, too. “You’re sweating like a pig,” he said.

Asked when it was a good time to be an officer, his answer was immediate: “Spring.”

But summer does offer respite, at least for the transit police. During those months, they are allowed to wear Bermuda shorts.

Mr. Kelly noted that one day New Yorkers may get to feast their eyes on even more bared police officer legs.

“Global warming’s going to take care of all this,” he said. “Another 50 years, and everybody’s going to be using Bermuda shorts.”

To Protect, Serve, and if Necessary, Stand and Shiver, NYT, 16.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/nyregion/16cold.html

Officer Is Critically Hurt

in Brooklyn Shooting

February 11, 2007
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

A plainclothes police officer was shot while patrolling a brownstone-lined street in Brooklyn early yesterday, the police said, and the husband of another officer was charged with attempted murder.

Officer Jacqueline Melendez Rivera, the wife of the accused man, was charged with hindering prosecution and was suspended from duty. About 4 a.m. at Prospect Place and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, the Police Department said, a man pulled up in a sport utility vehicle alongside a car carrying four plainclothes officers. He opened fire, hitting the driver, Officer Andrew Suarez. The officer’s partners shot back.

When the police went looking for the gunman’s car, a white Acura with bullet holes, they found it a little more than a mile away. Behind the wheel was Officer Rivera, a law enforcement official said, and she told the police that she was moving the car because her husband had parked it illegally. Officer Rivera and her husband live less than two blocks from the site of the shooting.

Officer Rivera, 37, and her husband, Jose Rivera, 31, were brought in for questioning, although detectives did not think she had been in the car during the shooting, a law enforcement official said.

Mr. Rivera was accused of attempted murder, defacing a firearm, criminal possession of marijuana and other charges, the police said. Besides being charged with hindering prosecution, Officer Rivera was accused of tampering with evidence, possession of marijuana and obstructing governmental administration, the police said.

Officer Suarez was in critical but stable condition, city officials said, and the shooting left a trail of shattered glass and bullets at Prospect and Sixth.

Officer Suarez and three other members of the department’s anti-crime unit were patrolling in an unmarked car when they locked eyes with people inside the Acura, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“Initially there was a glance exchanged, but no words were exchanged,” he said.

Mr. Kelly, who with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg visited the injured officer at New York Methodist Hospital, gave this account of what happened next:

The Acura began tailing the unmarked car, and Officer Suarez, a policeman for three and a half years, pulled over. The Acura then drew alongside them, and its tinted passenger window slid down.

The Acura’s driver leaned across the passenger, and yelled, “You got a beef?”

Then the driver pulled out a gun and fired twice, just as Officer Suarez raised his arm in defense. A bullet pierced his underarm, just clearing his bulletproof vest, and tore across his back before lodging beneath his neck.

Then the Acura sped off, and the other three officers opened fire on it, firing 13 shots in all. One of the bullets went through the front and back windows of an unoccupied Subaru Legacy Outback parked nearby, ricocheted upward and was later found 20 feet up in a tree, the police said.

Bullets also pierced the Acura and shattered several of its windows, but no one inside was hit, the police said.

Officer Suarez’s colleagues then took the wheel of the police car and drove him to Methodist Hospital.

Helicopters buzzed overhead as dozens of officers descended on the neighborhood, taping off the site of the shooting and searching the streets for the Acura. It was spotted at Prospect and Fourth Avenues, with Officer Rivera driving.

Investigators also went to 33 St. Marks Avenue, where the Acura was registered, a four-story row house near where Officer Suarez had been shot.

Officer Rivera lives there with her husband and three young boys, neighbors said. Mr. Rivera and another man were seen being led from the house in handcuffs by the police shortly before dawn yesterday, neighbors said. The identity of the second man was not released. And another woman and three small children were also led out, neighbors said.

The police also went to the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Officer Rivera works, and took her guns from her locker. Investigators did not believe they had been used in the shooting, a law enforcement official said.

About 5 p.m. yesterday, the police said they found a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun, with one round in its chamber, in the bushes at the fence line in the backyard of 33 St. Marks Avenue. The gun had not been issued by the Police Department, the police said, and it was not yet known whether it was used in the shooting.

Yellow tape and police cars sealed off access to Officer Rivera’s house and neighboring homes into the evening yesterday, drawing curious stares from passers-by pushing strollers.

Neighbors were not sure how long the Riveras had been married but said they met about four years ago, salsa dancing at a club. Officer Rivera, whose two oldest sons are from a previous marriage, is pregnant with her fourth child and was recently overjoyed to find out the baby was a girl, neighbors said.

Mr. Rivera is on parole for first-degree assault, after having served four and a half years for shooting someone in the leg and the chest after an argument in Brooklyn, according to records from the State Department of Correctional Services. More details of that shooting were not immediately known.

Officer Rivera was taken to the 78th Precinct, and was being questioned there along with the two men believed to have been in the Acura, one of them her husband, the police said.

Millie Santiago, 58, a longtime neighbor, said Officer Rivera inherited the row house from her parents and rented out its upper floors. “She’s a good parent, she’s a good wife,” Ms. Santiago said. Officer Rivera is a veteran of the Persian Gulf war and has been with the Police Department for 13 years, the police and neighbors said.

Other neighbors said lately there had been friction on the street because Officer Rivera parked her car outside the house in front of a fire hydrant, with her Police Department permit displayed on the dashboard.

Officer Suarez underwent surgery yesterday, and was expected to fully recover, Mr. Kelly said. It was not clear whether the gunman initially knew he was firing at an officer, a law enforcement official said. Officer Suarez was the first New York City police officer to be shot on duty this year, Mayor Bloomberg said.

Ann Farmer and Kate Hammer contributed reporting.

Officer Is Critically Hurt in Brooklyn Shooting, 11.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/nyregion/11officer.html

Suicide rates jolt police culture

Posted 2/8/2007 11:26 PM ET
USA Today
By John Ritter

The warning signs that police officer Steve Martin was a suicide risk were clear enough in hindsight: erratic behavior, disgust with his job, heavy drinking, a strained marriage. But the lack of foresight is what leaves his wife, Debbie, angry more than a year later.

"When officers came and told me what had happened — and I have a roomful of witnesses to this — they said, 'We knew he was in serious trouble,' " she says. "I remember thinking, OK, so why didn't you do anything about it? How can you sit there and tell me after he put a gun to his head that you knew he was bad off?"

What happened in Wichita is tragically familiar across the country, say psychologists and former officers who have studied law enforcement suicide. The crime-fighting culture is about strength and control, and most officers think asking for help is a badge of weakness. Police are supposed to solve problems, not be the problem.

"These folks are taught to suppress their emotions and soldier forward," says Elizabeth Dansie, a psychologist who works with California police agencies in the aftermath of suicides. "It's very difficult for them to admit they need help."

More law enforcement agencies are trying to prevent suicide in their ranks.

Changing the culture

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) is developing training for suicide awareness and prevention after eight troopers killed themselves in eight months last year, for a total of 13 since September 2003. The CHP toll is "the largest cluster I've seen for a department that size," says Robert Douglas, executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police is circulating a proposal, obtained by USA TODAY, to make suicide prevention tools available to all of the nation's nearly 18,000 state and local police agencies. "Current police culture … tends to be entirely avoidant of the issue," leaving suicidal officers with "no place to turn," a draft of the proposal says.

The suicide foundation says it has verified an average of 450 law enforcement suicides in each of the last three years, compared with about 150 officers who died annually in the line of duty. Douglas says no more than 2% of the nation's law enforcement agencies have prevention programs.

Suicide rates for police — at least 18 per 100,000 — are higher than for the general population, according to Audrey Honig, chief psychologist for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Large departments (New York City, Milwaukee) and small ones (Holland, Ohio; Lavallette, N.J.) had suicides last year.

Police departments in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Washington State Patrol are among the few agencies with comprehensive programs, including videos, brochures and posters, peer-support training, coaching on warning signs and psychological outreach.

The Los Angeles sheriff's program started in 2001. Since 2002 the force has had just two suicides among its 9,000 officers. "Our personnel are receptive to getting assistance when they need it," Honig says.

In the past, law enforcement suicides often were ruled accidental deaths, and they are still underreported, Dansie says. "Most of us agree that the statistics are probably much higher than we actually know, because of the shame factor."

CHP's reaction was typical, says John Violanti, a former New York state trooper and now a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Fallout from suicide, he says, "lasts a long time, and morale goes down the tube. I've seen entire departments go into states of depression."

CHP will hire a clinical psychologist to oversee a broad prevention program called "Question, Persuade and Refer," says deputy chief Ramona Prieto. "It won't just be putting up a few posters and hoping people understand," Prieto says. "It will be training at every level for every employee."

Police bear the same stress from work, family and illness that civilians do. What's different is the stress of the street and the access to a gun. "Research has always shown that availability of firearms, comfort with firearms, increases suicide rates," Honig says.

Police acquire "image armor," says James Reese, a former FBI agent who started the bureau's stress- management training in the 1980s. "It's their need to always be in control, always be fine, always be right. We never hear cops say, 'I'm afraid. I made a mistake.' "

The FBI has no mandatory suicide prevention training outside of its stress program, says spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan. Since 1993, 20 agents have killed themselves, she says.

Avoided counseling

Steve Martin, a 6-foot-6, well-liked veteran of the Wichita force, was 44 when he shot himself on Halloween 2005. Debbie Martin says she tried repeatedly to get her husband into counseling.

"He kept canceling the appointments," she says. "He said he was afraid the department would find out he was going, that he had a serious drinking problem, and he'd be fired."

Martin couldn't leave the job at the station, and what he saw over 15 years, several on a gang unit, began to wear him down, his wife says. He couldn't let go of one incident — finding a 2-year-old girl in a car, shot in the head after a gang shootout.

The couple separated but spent a lot of time together. Martin was drinking daily, cursing his job, she says. He threatened her and once pulled his gun on her.

Martin's suicide threw the force of 690 officers into turmoil. "A lot of people were in denial," says Lt. Sam Hanley, his former sergeant. "A lot of them were angry at Steve himself, because they worked with him and he hadn't said anything."

Hanley was ordered to develop suicide-prevention training, and Wichita officers attended mandatory four-hour sessions.

"Suicide has always been kind of hush-hush in the police community," he says. "When it happens to one of your people, all of a sudden everybody wants information."

Suicide rates jolt police culture, UT, 8.2.2007
 http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-08-police-suicides_x.htm

Police Officer Is Attacked in Queens

February 5, 2007
By AL BAKER
The New York Times

A New York City police officer was hospitalized in serious but stable condition this morning after being attacked by a man with a baseball bat while on foot patrol in Queens, the police said.

The attack took place at about 1:20 am at 102d Street and 39th Avenue in Corona, about a mile west of Shea Stadium, a spokesman for the police department said. The officer, whose name was not released, was assigned to an "impact post," meaning a foot patrol in a high-crime area.

The officer was attacked by a man with a baseball bat, who stole his gun after beating him over the head, the police said. The incident was witnessed by a second officer who saw the commotion from a distance, unaware that it was a fellow officer who had been attacked. He chased the bat-wielding man, capturing him and recovering the gun before making an arrest. The suspect was not immediately identified.

The officer who was struck with the bat was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital. He was alert when he was brought in, and early this morning he was listed in serious but stable condition, according to the police.

Police Officer Is Attacked in Queens, NYT, 5.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/nyregion/06attackcnd.html

Number of People Stopped by Police

Soars in New York

February 3, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and EMILY VASQUEZ

The New York Police Department released new information yesterday showing that police officers stopped 508,540 individuals on New York City streets last year — an average of 1,393 stops per day — often searching them for illegal weapons. The number was up from 97,296 in 2002, the last time the department divulged 12 months’ worth of data.

After inquiries by the City Council and civil rights advocates, the department delivered four bound volumes of statistics to the Council in midafternoon. The raw data showed that more than half of those stopped last year were black: an average of 67,000 per quarter.

At the same time, the average number of people arrested per quarter as a result of such stops almost doubled to 5,317 last year, from 2,819 in 2002, and summonses nearly quintupled, to a quarterly average of 7,292 last year from 1,461 in 2002.

Until yesterday, the most recent information released by the Police Department about how and why it stops people to search them, sometimes looking for illegal guns, was from 2003, according to city officials and city and court records. Some officials have said that lag put the department at odds with a pair of legal requirements that sprang from public outrage at the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler.

The department, which rejects such assertions, has not released numbers from 2004 and 2005, or from the last three months of 2003.

Those who review the data are now grappling with dual issues: determining why the Police Department waited so long to release any new figures, and why it is stopping more people and searching them.

The issue of these police-public encounters — called “stop and frisks” — became an emotional flashpoint after the shooting of Mr. Diallo, whose death in a barrage of 41 police bullets led to weeks of protests and scores of arrests outside 1 Police Plaza, in Lower Manhattan.

Many of the protesters contended that there was a pattern of racial profiling in stop-and-frisks. A state study later in 1999 confirmed racial disparities in such stops.

The guidelines to monitor stop-and-frisks in detail were set forth in a city law signed in 2001, and in a federal court case settled by the Bloomberg administration in 2004. Both called for the Police Department to release to the City Council, four times a year, basic data about the people who are stopped and questioned by officers, and the reasons for such encounters.

But until yesterday, it had been a year since the department reported its stop-and-frisk activity, and those numbers dated from a three-month period ending in September 2003.

In the meantime, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city agency that investigates charges of police misconduct, found that complaints involving stops and searches have more than doubled in recent years, increasing to 2,556 last year from 1,128 in 2003. Complaints involving police stops now account for 33 percent of all complaints, up from 20 percent in 2003.

At a City Council hearing on Jan. 24, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly assured council members that his officers were not practicing racial profiling in street stops.

“Officers are stopping those they reasonably suspect of committing a crime, based on descriptions and circumstances,” Mr. Kelly said, “and not on personal bias.”

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that the department’s analysis of the numbers showed that while 55.2 percent of the stop encounters last year involved blacks, 68.5 percent of crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims (or by witnesses, in the case of homicides). Hispanics, he said, made up 30.5 percent of those stopped and 24.5 percent of suspected offenders. For whites, he said, the numbers were 11.1 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.

Mr. Browne said that aggressive street enforcement was partly responsible for the increase in stop-and-frisks. Also, he said, “careful accounting” of such encounters by the department in recent years made the increase seem greater. “Part of it is taking guns off the street and responding to complaints where we use stop-and-frisk,” he said.

It was unclear last night how much of the increase in stops was due to suspected gun possession or how many led to gun arrests. Mr. Browne could not confirm a direct line between gun arrests and increases in stops, and said officers’ efforts to take guns off the streets were just one facet of the crime suppression the stop-and-frisk forms reflected.

The 2006 figures, delivered yesterday by two officers in plain clothes, were contained in four books of about 250 pages each. Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., chairman of the Council’s public safety committee, said his staff was unable to interpret the numbers immediately.

The department’s lag in releasing the numbers came to light after the fatal shooting in November of another unarmed black man, Sean Bell, and has been seized on by civil rights advocates, academics and current and former government officials. Mr. Bell’s death was not related to a stop-and-frisk operation, but it has become a valve for frustrations over relations between the police and minority residents. But members of the City Council said they had been requesting the material even before the Bell shooting.

Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University who studied the issue in 1999 for Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general, said he was not surprised that the number of stop-and-frisks went up “during a period of no accountability.”

But, he added, “it is an astonishing fact that stop rates went up by 500 percent when crime rates were flat.” Police officials and a city lawyer said there were several reasons the department had fallen behind in releasing the numbers. Compiling the reports, they said, has been hampered by antiquated technology, especially since the numbers have risen. The department has been working to modernize its reporting system, officials said, and has not been withholding the data deliberately.

Some observers questioned whether producing data on street stops remained on the department’s front burner during the age of terrorism.

“I just don’t think it’s a priority,” Dr. Fagan said of the data collection.

The total number of stops includes cases in which the officers acted to prevent what could have been terrorist activity, the police said. But those stops are relatively rare, they said, and there is no separate category for keeping track of them. Searches of subway riders’ bags are not considered stop-and-frisk encounters because people willing to forgo entry to the subway can decline them.

Joel Berger, who monitored matters of police conduct as an executive in the city’s Law Department from 1988 to 1996, said: “It is particularly frightening that the Police Department is not following the statute that requires reporting on stop, question and frisks. It is the thing that happens most often and most troubles people, and the failure to report the numbers is, effectively, very alarming.”

Mr. Spitzer first dug into the issue of street stops after the Diallo shooting and found that Hispanics and blacks were being disproportionately targeted. After adjusting for varying crime rates among racial groups, his analysis found that blacks were stopped 23 percent more often than whites. Hispanics were stopped 39 percent more often than whites.

In the wake of those findings, the city signed a law allowing the Council to collect the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data on a quarterly basis. Separately, the federal class-action lawsuit, Daniels v. City of New York, alleged that the police habitually used racial profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. When the city’s corporation counsel settled the case in January 2004, the agreement required the police to disclose data on such encounters through 2007.

The idea was that increased transparency about police stops would not only foster analysis of one of the department’s most crucial tactics for reducing crime, but also would help restore the public’s trust.

Mr. Spitzer’s study reviewed police records known as UF-250s. Officers must fill them out after making forcible stops, including those in which a person is frisked or searched. His report noted that officers did not always fill them out. The form shows the race of the person stopped as well as the reason.

Under a system begun in the spring of 1999, police officials said, forms completed at individual precincts were taken to 1 Police Plaza, where their 50 points of data were gathered. Envisioning a daunting backlog, Mr. Kelly in 2005 directed that the process be decentralized so that the raw data could be recorded quickly, at the precinct level.

Mr. Kelly told officials at the Jan. 24 hearing that the data for the remainder of 2003, and for all of 2004 and 2005, would take longer to provide. That is “because it must be compiled manually, rather than in a technologically advanced way,” according to a letter sent Thursday from the Law Department to a plaintiff in the federal case.

“We’ve been patiently waiting for years now,” Councilman Vallone, told Mr. Kelly at the hearing. “We would again request that you give us that information.”

For a time, the police gave the data to the City Council with some regularity. But the frequency of the reports slowed, and in February 2006, the department released data for the third quarter of 2003.

Then, the flow of data stopped. Until yesterday.

But city leaders came under criticism as well for failing to more forcefully demand the data. “The City Council has failed to ensure that the Police Department is producing the reports, as required by the statute,” said Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “As a result, it has not been doing any monitoring of stop-and-frisk activity, which was the very point of the statute.”

 Number of People Stopped by Police Soars in New York, NYT, 3.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/nyregion/03frisk.html

In Los Angeles,

Antigang Efforts Start on the Street

January 29, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 28 — At twilight on Friday, in the heart of the territory of the latest notorious Los Angeles gang, a woman in a passing car calls out a tip to Officer Dan Robbins, sending him racing toward a corner and a man he believes is a member of the 204th Street gang.

As Officer Robbins’s black-and-white patrol car speeds forward, the man, Jose Covarrubias, 20, turns away and drops what appears to be a small pipe.

“Come here! Get your hands up!” Officer Robbins of the Los Angeles Police Department shouts as he jumps out of the car and handcuffs Mr. Covarrubias, arresting him on suspicion of possessing drug paraphernalia, a methamphetamine pipe.

“You arresting all the black people here on Harvard Boulevard, too?” Mr. Covarrubias asks, now seated on a curb, making plain the racial tension in this neighborhood, Harbor Gateway, that has commanded the city’s attention.

They know each other, this gang unit officer and Mr. Covarrubias, who Officer Robbins says is a relatively new member of 204th Street, a Latino gang that gained notoriety last month when two members were charged in what the police said was the racially motivated killing of a 14-year-old black girl, Cheryl Green.

The crime stunned the city as a sign of growing violence among blacks and Latinos in some struggling neighborhoods and brought renewed promises from the mayor, the police chief and the F.B.I. director to reverse a surge of gang violence. They have promised more officers chasing the worst gang members, more school and community counselors and more cooperation among agencies.

In the department’s Harbor Division, far from the worst in gang crime but the focus of political and news media attention since the killing, officers have started joint patrols with other police agencies. A deputy city attorney, Panagiotis Panagiotou, has ridden with Officer Robbins for part of his shift in an effort to broaden prosecutors’ gang knowledge.

Crucial to the effort are the knowledge and wherewithal of gang unit officers like Officer Robbins, whose focus is tracking gangs operating in and near Harbor Gateway, a compact 12-square-block collection of apartment houses and single-family homes in a narrow sliver of Los Angeles 20 miles from downtown.

Officer Robbins, 36, has been on the force for 12 years, the last two with the Harbor Division gang unit.

He embodies in many ways the newest incarnation of the gang enforcement detail, which has a storied but troubled past.

Los Angeles has long been a model for other cities in gang enforcement. Police officials from across the country and Latin America will gather here on Feb. 7 to share information and strategize. Chief William J. Bratton, visiting Washington this week, plans to meet with members of Congress and federal officials to advocate for more sharing of intelligence on gangs, terrorists and organized crime groups.

Yet as much as gang crime has bedeviled Los Angeles, so has controversy over tactics to fight it, most notably a scandal in the Rampart Division that came to light in 1999. A gang unit officer who had been charged with stealing cocaine from an evidence locker said officers had beaten, shot and framed innocent people, leading to the reversal of scores of convictions and $70 million in legal settlements.

The police abolished an elite antigang unit known as Crash, and a federal consent decree was imposed requiring a more stringent system of checks and balances among gang enforcement units.

The effect of that order is immediately evident in Officer Robbins’s attire. He wears a standard uniform and drives a marked squad car, albeit without lights on top, making him and other gang officers more visible, for better or worse.

Gang officers also generally serve in the new units, known as Gang Impact Teams, or GIT, for three years, with extensions requiring layers of approvals.

“We do lose some of the institutional knowledge,” said Lt. Roger Murphy, who commands the Harbor Division’s gang officers. “It takes two to three years to get to know a gang. But we have to follow these strict protocols.”

With a reporter and photographer allowed to accompany him for several hours of his nearly 12-hour shift, Officer Robbins offered a primer on the 204th Street gang.

He knows its history, how it broke long ago from Tortilla Flats, now a bitter rival.

He knows its numbers: more than 100 members, with about 30 hard-core devotees, relatively small for a Los Angeles gang, some of which number into the thousands.

He knows that it earns money dealing marijuana and methamphetamine, but that the income is not enough for several members, who have legitimate day jobs.

He knows that members of 204th Street dislike blacks, who are the newer arrivals in the neighborhood, and he has learned from members that their disdain arises from racial hatred and rivalry with black gang members they accuse of dealing drugs on their turf.

And he knows Mr. Covarrubias, who has been arrested and jailed for burglaries and other offenses and has been a suspect in other gang-related crimes.

It was Officer Robbins, his commanders said, who put months of “gathering intel” on the gang to good use by recognizing instantly that the car described by witnesses to Cheryl’s killing was connected to certain gang members.

That was a major break, said Capt. Joan T. McNamara of the Harbor Division, that led to the arrest and murder charges against two of the gang’s members.

And so Officer Robbins and Mr. Covarrubias kept up a running banter, sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial, for the few hours it took to complete paperwork at a nearby stationhouse and book Mr. Covarrubias into a holding jail at another division.

“I don’t have anything on me, sir,” Mr. Covarrubias said shortly before the drive to the stationhouse.

“Jose,” Officer Robbins replied with a smirk, “it’s not worth arguing about.”

On the drive to booking, Officer Robbins pumped Mr. Covarrubias for information about his intentions this Friday night and about gang life.

Mr. Covarrubias offered clipped answers if any at all. A wave of paranoia has swept through the gang over talking to the police, officers said, and the killing of one of their members, stabbed 75 times and left on a dead-end street miles from the neighborhood, is being investigated for connections to Cheryl Green’s death.

“You run into Stranger?” Officer Robbins asked, part of a stream of cryptic queries laced with gang members’ nicknames that Mr. Covarrubias nevertheless seemed to understand.

He was most forthcoming with his plans to move to another state, to make an effort to break from the danger of the streets.

As he escorted Mr. Covarrubias into the station, Officer Robbins quipped, “Here you are again, Jose.”

“Yeah, and I hope it’s the last time I see this place, too,” he replied.

To Officer Robbins, it was a good arrest. Though a misdemeanor charge, it kept Mr. Covarrubias in jail and off the streets for the weekend, since the next opportunity to see a judge was not until Monday.

Knowing that gang members can readily identify him or his car, he sometimes parks around a corner and walks into the neighborhood, hiding in bushes to observe gang members or jumping fences to surprise them.

He drove the streets in and around Harbor Gateway for hours on Friday night, watching men he said were gang members hanging out on driveways and in front yards. He read fresh graffiti for signs of tensions. He noticed two young boys on a bike and a skateboard who seemed to trail him as he made the rounds.

“They are probably ones or twos, maybe lookouts,” he said, using a code he has devised to rate the longevity and intensity of membership, with five being the highest.

When fighting broke out at a rap concert in the San Pedro District, he rushed to the scene with other gang officers, donning riot gear and helping disperse the crowd, which he said included a number of Harbor-area gang members.

But all in all, the focus on 204th Street has largely driven gang members inside apartments and “underground.” That has made it more difficult to catch them red-handed in street crime, making the arrest of Mr. Covarrubias something of welcome surprise.

“With all that’s been going on,” Officer Robbins told him at one point, “I can’t believe you are out here.”

Mr. Covarrubias stared blankly at the street.

In Los Angeles, Antigang Efforts Start on the Street, NYT, 29.1.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/us/29gangs.html

Mississippi Man Arrested

in Killing of 2 Blacks in ’64

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, Jan. 24 — A 71-year-old man was arrested Wednesday in Mississippi on federal kidnapping charges stemming from the 1964 killing of two black teenagers who were tied to trees, whipped and drowned.

The suspect, James F. Seale, a former crop-duster, was indicted in Jackson and taken into custody in the southwestern Mississippi town of Roxie, not far from where the two young men were seized.

The charges against Mr. Seale, some seven years after the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the case, are the latest in a string of prosecutions of racially motivated slayings from the 1950s and ’60s. While virtually all the prosecutions so far have proved successful, investigators have long warned that every passing year makes it more difficult to build a case.

Many of those killings became nationally infamous, like the murder of three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — portrayed decades later in the movie “Mississippi Burning.” But like dozens of lynchings in that era, the deaths of the two victims in this case, Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore, both 19, were far more obscure.

The discovery of their bodies, in the Old River near Natchez, Miss., attracted attention mainly because it was initially thought that they might be those of two of the three missing rights workers, who, as the nation looked on, were being sought by federal agents, dozens of volunteers and 400 Navy sailors.

Still, the F.B.I. took on the Dee-Moore case, and in November 1964 Mr. Seale, the son of a chapter leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and another man, Charles M. Edwards, were arrested. Local authorities never prosecuted them, however, even though Mr. Edwards, according to the case file, had told federal agents that he, Mr. Seale and others had beaten Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore, who, Mr. Edwards said, were alive when he left them.

Mr. Dee was a sawmill worker; Mr. Moore had recently been expelled from college after participating in a student demonstration. According to a variety of accounts pieced together from F.B.I. files, the Klan mistakenly believed that they were Black Muslims involved in plotting an armed uprising.

That season had been dubbed Freedom Summer by civil rights volunteers hoping to get blacks onto the voter rolls, but in and around Natchez it was a time of terror spread by the Klan. When Klan members saw Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore hitchhiking in early May, they returned with reinforcements and ordered them into a car.

The two were taken deep into the Homochitto National Forest, where they were secured to trees and beaten. They were then driven across the nearby state line to Louisiana, where they were tied to an engine block and thrown into the river with tape covering their mouths.

Mr. Edwards is still living, although The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson reported Wednesday that he was not expected to be arrested and was a potential witness in the case against Mr. Seale. James Newman, the sheriff of Franklin County, which includes Roxie, said Mr. Seale was in poor health and used a cane to walk.

Mr. Edwards is described in the documents from the time as an admitted Klansman. In an interview in 2000 with Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger, who has written extensively about the case, Mr. Seale denied being a Klansman or knowing any members, although his family’s involvement in the Klan is well documented.

The F.B.I. reopened the case in 2000 after investigative files that had been thought lost were recovered, and after Mr. Mitchell reported that the killings had most likely occurred on federal land, giving federal prosecutors jurisdiction in what was seen as a case potentially involving murder charges. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined Wednesday to explain the decision to charge Mr. Seale with kidnapping, and a spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Jackson did not return phone calls.

In 2002, Mr. Seale’s son began telling newspaper reporters that his father was dead. But Thomas Moore, the elder brother of Charles Moore, returned to the area with a documentary filmmaker on a trip in 2004, and a local resident directed him to the mobile home where Mr. Seale lived. Mr. Seale ran inside and shut the door.

Mississippi Man Arrested in Killing of 2 Blacks in ’64, NYT, 25.1.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/us/25mississippi.html

8 Arrested in 1971 Killing

of San Francisco Police Officer

January 24, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 23 — Eight men, including seven described as members of the radical Black Liberation Army, were arrested on Tuesday on charges of murdering a police officer here in 1971 and waging a violent five-year battle against the police and federal authorities.

The arrests, in morning raids in California, Florida and New York capped an investigation by San Francisco police into the murder of Sgt. John V. Young, who was killed by a shotgun at a desk in the Ingleside stationhouse on Aug. 29, 1971.

A civilian clerk was wounded.

New York police officials said two of the men arrested were the gunmen, Francisco Torres, 58, who was seized at his home in Queens, and Herman Bell, 59, who was rearrested at a New York prison where he is serving a murder sentence.

The rest of the aging men were said to have been lookouts, getaway drivers and participants in the assault on the police station and other attacks.

A statement by the San Francisco police characterized Sergeant Young’s killing as a part of a “conspiracy to kill law enforcement officers” from 1968 to 1973, a plan that included the murders of two New York police officers, four attempted murders of law enforcement personnel, the bombing of a police officers’ funeral at a San Francisco church and the attempted bombing of another San Francisco police station, as well as three bank robberies, two here and one in Georgia.

In New York, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the arrests dealt a blow to the legacy of the protest group, a violent offshoot of the black nationalist Black Panthers, which operated from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. Mr. Kelly said the arrests testified to the long memory of the police, especially for the killing of one of their own.

“It is a good day for police officers in New York and San Francisco and everywhere else,” Mr. Kelly said in a telephone interview from Washington. “It underscores the fact that the law enforcement community is never going to forget.”

Soon after the arrests, current and former defense lawyers for several of the men said they were skeptical of the charges in the nearly 36-year-old case, saying the police had harassed their clients for years.

Three men were charged with Sergeant Young’s killing in 1975, The Associated Press reported, including one of the men arrested on Tuesday, but that case was dismissed.

A lawyer who represents Mr. Bell, Stuart Hanlon, said he thought that the case against Mr. Bell was based on a 30-year-old confession by a suspected Black Panther member that a judge threw out in the mid-’70s because it had been physically coerced.

“I think the police are outraged, and rightfully so, that one of their own was gunned down,” Mr. Hanlon said. “They believe they are right. But the belief does not make it so.”

Mr. Torres was one of the first arrested, taken from his red-brick home in Jamaica, Queens, before dawn. Also arrested in New York State were Mr. Bell, 59, and Anthony Bottom, 55, who were in prison for the murders in May 1971 of two New York City police officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini.

All three men were charged with murder and conspiracy.

In San Francisco, the police arrested Richard Brown, 65, and Richard O’Neal, 57. They were held in $3 million bail with Mr. Brown charged with murder and conspiracy, and Mr. O’Neal, who is not believed to be a member of the so-called army, was charged with conspiracy.

The Los Angeles County sheriff confirmed the arrests of Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, and Henry Watson Jones, 71, both of Altadena.

The police in Panama City, Fla., confirmed that they had taken Harold Taylor, 58, into custody without incident. He was held on $3 million bond.

The authorities said they were also seeking Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, on charges of murder, conspiracy and assault. Mr. Bridgeforth is thought to be living abroad.

In their statement, the San Francisco police said that in 1999 they began investigating again several killings of their officers after advances in forensic science had led to the discovery of new evidence in one case.

In 2005, a grand jury was convened to look into Sergeant Young’s killing. Four of the men arrested on Tuesday were called to testify. They refused, and were briefly jailed.

A spokesman for the San Francisco police, Sgt. Neville Gittens, said the investigation into Sergeant Young’s case and the other attacks would continue. Sergeant Gittens said the police and state attorney general were confident that enough evidence had been gathered to bring charges.

Mr. Hanlon said he doubted that the police had any new evidence.

“The only thing I can think of is the evidence they have from 1971 has been analyzed using a more sophisticated forensic science,” he said. “But that is not the same as having new evidence.”

Mr. Hanlon suggested that the police had long focused on the Black Panthers and other black power groups.

“I think there is a hatred of the Panthers,” he said. “Police who were around then hated them, and the animosity was clear.”

Mr. Torres’s lawyer, Michael W. Warren, said Mr. Torres was innocent.

“He’s been around in the community in New York for a number of years,” Mr. Warren said. “The F.B.I., as well as the San Francisco police, have known his whereabouts for all these years. He has been an integral part of this community.”

The police said Mr. Torres tried to ignite dynamite in the Ingleside stationhouse in 1971.

Outside police headquarters in Manhattan, Mr. Torres said as detectives escorted him, “It’s a frame up.”

Al Baker contributed reporting from New York, and Carolyn Marshall from San Francisco.

8 Arrested in 1971 Killing of San Francisco Police Officer, NYT, 24.1.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/us/24frisco.html

Mother of Victims Killed by Police Car

Questions Handling of Inquiry

January 21, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURA MANSNERUS

UPPER TOWNSHIP, N.J. — At least five people saw the New Jersey State Police car as it sped along Stagecoach Road one night in late September. One witness guessed it was going 80 miles an hour; another described it simply as a “white streak.”

The car slammed broadside into a Dodge minivan, killing two teenage sisters on their way home from buying a gallon of milk. The trooper received minor injuries.

Four months later, there is still no word on whether the trooper who was driving the car will be criminally charged, leading the victims’ mother and some of the witnesses to question how the investigation has been handled. The case has renewed concern about the practice of letting the state police investigate matters regarding its own officers, and revived distrust of an agency that has struggled to restore its reputation since revelations a decade ago about widespread racial profiling in its ranks.

“I am so livid,” said Melinda Lipstein, who saw the crash from a parking lot about 50 feet away. “What he did was wrong, but everybody’s protecting him.”

The deaths last Sept. 27 of Christina Becker, 19, a student at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and her sister, Jacqueline, 17, a senior at Ocean City High School, are under investigation by the prosecutor’s office in Cape May County in southern New Jersey, and by the state police. Both agencies refused to discuss the case in any detail. The Cape May County prosecutor, Robert L. Taylor, said in a brief interview that since the state police has jurisdiction over the roads in Upper Township, it “is normally the first agency that investigates.”

The victims’ mother, Maria Cafaia, the principal at the Northfield Middle School in nearby Atlantic County, has filed a notice of intent to sue the state. Ms. Cafaia’s lawyer, Lewis April, said the authorities have refused to turn over any information, including police reports from the night of the accident.

Ms. Cafaia, who has no other children, said troopers at the scene of the crash turned aside her questions even as she paced behind the morgue truck, telling her only after more than two hours had passed that the victims were her daughters.

“I left that night without knowing how they got in the accident,” she said. “I found out the next morning from the newspaper that there was a trooper involved and that he ran a stop sign.”

The authorities say that the trooper, Robert Higbee, 34, ran the stop sign where Stagecoach crosses Tuckahoe Road, crashing into the Beckers’ minivan and pushing it into a third vehicle, another minivan, whose occupants suffered minor injuries.

The trooper was ticketed for careless driving and failure to stop. He has been assigned to administrative duties, according to a spokesman for the state police.

Mr. Higbee’s lawyer, D. William Subin, said he could not respond to witnesses’ comments to reporters, and called the case “a tragic accident.”

“We prefer to wait until this matter is resolved in a proper forum rather than attempt to give information piecemeal to the media,” Mr. Subin said. “Trooper Higbee would like to have this matter resolved as soon as possible. His heart goes out to the family of the victims.”

While the authorities say Trooper Higbee was following a speeder, several of the witnesses said in interviews that they saw no car ahead of him, and that he was not using overhead lights or a siren. The police and prosecutor’s office say the trooper was tailing a speeder but was not officially in pursuit, which would have required him to turn on overhead lights and the siren.

Mr. April, the lawyer for the victims’ mother, said even if the trooper was trying to make a traffic stop, he should have obeyed the stop sign.

The authorities have not stated publicly whether Trooper Higbee was speeding; several witnesses say he was traveling well over the posted 35-mile-an-hour limit.

“He was hauling,” recalled Mary Pomlear, who said she looked out her bedroom window at 10 p.m. and saw the state police car speeding on Stagecoach Road almost a half-mile before it crashed. “I’d say he was going 70 or 75.”

Karen Giblin, who lives about 300 feet from the intersection, ran outside upon hearing a racing noise. Ms. Giblin said that she did not see the impact but that “I would guess that he was going at least 80.”

The driver of the second minivan, Robert C. Taylor, who is not related to the prosecutor, declined to be interviewed for this article. But Mr. Taylor has told The Press of Atlantic City that he and his son, who was seated in the passenger seat, saw the police car coming at them, “going way too fast down the road.”

Melinda Lipstein said that she and a friend, Anthony R. Cinaglia, saw the crash from a parking lot near the corner. Ms. Lipstein said they were startled by the trooper’s car, which Mr. Cinaglia described as a “white flash,” and then saw the crash. “He was flying down the road, with no lights on,” Mr. Cinaglia said.

Like the other witnesses, Mr. Cinaglia said he saw no other cars. “I was so close to the road that if there had been somebody else I would have known,” he said.

Mr. Cinaglia and Ms. Lipstein said that a few days after the accident they were interviewed at the state police barracks by a trooper and an investigator from the prosecutor’s office. Mr. April said that the Taylors were interviewed immediately after the crash, but have not heard from the police or prosecutors a second time.

Ms. Giblin, who placed a 911 call at the crash scene, said a police investigator called to question her about a week after the crash. Ms. Pomlear said she had not been contacted by the state police or the prosecutor’s office.

Mr. April criticized the state police for keeping much of the evidence from the crash, including the crumpled vehicles, at the barracks where Trooper Higbee worked, and said the investigation has been stymied by a “blue code of silence.”

Mr. Cinaglia, one of the witnesses, said that state troopers “put themselves in harm’s way and they should be commended.”

But, he added, “whether it was an accident or error, this woman lost both her daughters.”

Mother of Victims Killed by Police Car Questions Handling of Inquiry,
NYT, 21.1.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/nyregion/21trooper.html