USA > History > 2010 > Police (I)

Honoring Slain Officer, After a Battle

December 19, 2010
The New York Times
By DANIEL EDWARD ROSEN

It happened on a morning in April 1981, when Officer John G. Scarangella would normally have been home with his wife and four children. His wife, Vivian Scarangella, was battling breast cancer at the time, and in order to take her to a doctor’s appointment that day, he traded his evening shift with an officer who worked mornings.

Officer Scarangella and his partner, Officer Richard Rainey, both of the 113th Precinct in Queens, pulled over a dirty white van thought to be connected to a string of robberies in St. Albans. Two men, both former members of the Black Liberation Army, exited the van and fired 30 shots at the patrol car. Officer Rainey was shot multiple times but survived. Officer Scarangella, then 42, was shot twice in the head. Two weeks later, he died of his injuries.

With the 30th anniversary of Officer Scarangella’s death now less than five months away, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is about to sign a bill renaming part of Baisley Boulevard in front of the 113th Precinct station house as Officer John Scarangella Way.

This comes after a four-year battle by the Scarangella family and members of the 113th Precinct to have the new street name approved by Community Board 12 in Jamaica, Queens. The family never did win over the community board, but it found another sponsor.

“We kept getting opposition,” said Mark Lobel, 42, a detective in the 113th Precinct and a longtime friend of the Scarangella family who assisted in their campaign.

Officer Scarangella’s name already is on a park in Gravesend, Brooklyn, a patrol boat in the Police Department Harbor Unit, and a memorial plaque in the 113th Precinct station house. The name on the street was harder to achieve, as it often is for officers killed in the line of duty.

It took one year before Community Board 12 agreed to rename part of 91st Avenue for Edward R. Byrne, a rookie officer who was killed while guarding a witness in South Jamaica in 1988. Before the change was approved, Officer Byrne’s colleagues from the 103rd Precinct had to deal with a hostile board, which initially voted 26-0 against the renaming.

“I cannot recall feeling more unappreciated than at that time period,” said Ernie Naspretto, 52, who at the time was a sergeant in the 103rd Precinct.

“This 22-year-old cop got his brains blown out for you, and it’s like we’re the invading army,” Mr. Naspretto added.

The application for Scarangella Way had a similarly chilly reception. Community Board 12 rejected the family’s application in 2006, for failing to meet its criteria.

About a year ago, Adjoa Gzifa, chairwoman of Community Board 12, suggested that officers who died in the line of duty did not warrant an automatic street renaming. The board placed a moratorium on street renamings in May.

Ms. Gzifa did not return phone calls or e-mails asking for comment.

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who was in office when both Officer Scarangella and Officer Byrne died in the line of duty, said a police officer’s death should be commemorated with a street renaming.

“If they have rules barring naming a street or something, you waive them for police,” Mr. Koch said.

City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie, a Democrat whose district includes both the 113th Precinct and Community Board 12, has the authority to approve street renamings without Community Board 12’s recommendation.

In March, Mr. Comrie submitted the names of Officer Scarangella and Disdale Enton, an officer from the 113th Precinct who died of a brain aneurysm in 2002, to the City Council’s list of candidates for street renamings.

Both street renamings were passed and will be signed into law on Monday.

Honoring Slain Officer, After a Battle, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/nyregion/20sign.html

Photos Released in ‘Grim Sleeper’ Case

December 16, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — He was dubbed the “Grim Sleeper,” a serial killer who appeared to go on a three-year killing spree, paused for more than a decade and then began again.

But now the police are wondering whether he was sleeping at all.

The Los Angeles Police Department released on Thursday 180 photographs of women found in the home of Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who is already suspected of killing 10 people in South Los Angeles and dumping their bodies in streets or alleyways.

They hope the trove of pictures will be seen by people across the country who might recognize a face and help the authorities solve other killings. Mr. Franklin is accused of killing seven black women between 1985 and 1988 and three others between 2002 and 2007. Many of the victims were struggling and involved with drugs.

“We don’t believe there was a gap, but that’s what we hope to learn more about,” said Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, who has led the investigation for the last several years. “We know where he has not been — he has not been out of the country. He has been right under our noses the whole time.”

At a news conference Thursday, Police Chief Charlie Beck stood before the gallery of pictures, most of them of black women, and implored the public to look. Many of the women had their eyes closed, perhaps sleeping but possibly dead. But just as many of them were smiling at the camera, with one posing in a bra. The hairstyles and jewelry suggested the photographs were taken in recent decades.

It is impossible to ignore the discomfort some might have with looking at the images or even finding her own face among them.

“This is creepy,” Detective Kilcoyne said in an interview. “These might be hard to look at, but we need the public’s help. If someone is angry that their photograph is shown, I would tell them we just want to make sure they are all right.”

Some 75 calls from family members and friends of missing women have come in since Mr. Franklin was arrested in July, but most of those were not related to his case. The police said that for months, they have pored over scores of photos and videos they found in Mr. Franklin’s home and cars, but that they have been unable to identify the women in them.

Investigators are also reviewing 30 cases similar to the murders that Mr. Franklin is charged with committing. The police arrested Mr. Franklin in part by using DNA evidence, but they have said they do not have such evidence in the remaining cases. Mr. Franklin has pleaded not guilty to the charges and remains in jail.

After his arrest, detectives took dozens from the more than 1,000 photographs and hundreds of hours of video in Mr. Franklin’s home; many of the images showed the women nude or in sexually graphic positions.

Detective Kilcoyne said that Mr. Franklin apparently went about his life “as just a regular kind of neighborhood guy.”

“We hope many of these women are alive and well and some of them may have been taken with their consent,” Detective Paul Coulter said of the photographs. “But right now, there’s just no way to know.”

    Photos Released in ‘Grim Sleeper’ Case, NYT, 16.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/us/17sleeper.html

Jury Convicts 3 Officers in Post-Katrina Death

December 9, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — More than five years after a man named Henry Glover was shot and his body burned here by police officers in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a jury has weighed in on the circumstances of his death. Three police officers were found guilty Thursday night on nine federal counts in an emotionally charged case that painted a grim portrait of the city’s troubled Police Department.

David Warren, a former police officer, was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting of Mr. Glover; Officer Gregory McRae was convicted of obstructing justice and other charges for burning Mr. Glover’s body; and Lt. Travis McCabe was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice for drawing up a false police report.

Two other police officers were found not guilty on various counts. The mixed verdict, returned by the jury after nearly three days of deliberation, left relatives and friends of Mr. Glover with an incomplete sense of vindication.

“All of them should have been found guilty,” said Rebecca Glover, Mr. Glover’s aunt, as she left the courtroom. “They all participated in this. How are you going to let them go free?”

This was the first trial of an untold number of New Orleans officers being investigated by the federal authorities. There are at least eight other such investigations into actions by the city Police Department, including one into shootings on the Danziger Bridge on Sept 4, 2005, that left two civilians dead and six wounded.

Six police officers who were indicted in that case face trial, four of them charged in connection with the deaths. Five other officers have pleaded guilty. One of them, Michael Hunter, was sentenced to eight years in prison last week.

The horrific nature of some of the actions being investigated, as well as the city’s stubborn crime rate, led the Justice Department to begin conducting a full scale review of the department in May.

Few of the criminal cases contain such grisly details as the one involving Mr. Glover, which remained uninvestigated for years despite repeated inquiries by his family. In late 2008, an article about the killing was published by The Nation, in a joint investigative project with ProPublica. Federal investigators began looking into the case shortly afterward.

Preparing to leave the city, Mr. Glover, 31, and a friend drove in a stolen truck to a strip mall in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. They had come to pick up suitcases that had been looted from the mall but left behind earlier, prosecutors said.

Mr. Warren, who was patrolling the strip mall — which was being used as a detective bureau — shot Mr. Glover, who was unarmed. Mr. Warren claimed at trial that he had fired in self-defense, and that he had perceived something in Mr. Glover’s hand. His partner testified that he shot him in the back. Mr. Glover, his shirt covered in blood, was picked up by a stranger, William Tanner, who drove him, his brother and a friend to an elementary school that was being used as headquarters for a police special operations division.

There, Mr. Tanner says, he was beaten by Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer McRae, though they were both found not guilty on this count. Officer McRae did not deny taking Mr. Tanner’s car, with Mr. Glover’s body inside, and driving it to a levee behind a police substation. There, Mr. McRae used flares to set afire the car and the body.

The other two defendants, Robert Italiano, a retired lieutenant, and Lieutenant McCabe, were charged with creating a false report to cover up the killing. Lieutenant Italiano was found not guilty.

All of the testimony was haunted by the specter of Hurricane Katrina, and a debate about the nature of law and order within catastrophe.

“When you take into account reasonable versus unreasonable,” Rick Simmons, who represents Mr. Warren, said in his closing arguments, “you have to take into consideration the conditions under which he was living.”

But prosecutors, who described Mr. Warren as zealously looking for an opportunity to use his expensive personal assault rifle, said that even under the harrowing conditions after the hurricane, the rule of law was never abandoned.

“Hurricane Katrina didn’t turn petty theft into a capital offense,” said Jared Fishman, a federal prosecutor in his closing arguments.

    Jury Convicts 3 Officers in Post-Katrina Death, NYT, 9.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/us/10katrina.html

The Shame of New York

October 29, 2010
The New York imes
By BOB HERBERT

The whole notion of the rule of law, critical to a democracy, is sabotaged when the guardians of the law — in this case the officers of the New York City Police Department — are permitted to violate the law with impunity.

The police in New York City are not just permitted, they are encouraged to trample on the rights of black and Hispanic New Yorkers by relentlessly enforcing the city’s degrading, unlawful and outright racist stop-and-frisk policy. Hundreds of thousands of wholly innocent individuals, most of them young, are routinely humiliated by the police, day in and day out, year after shameful year.

Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University and a widely recognized scholar on the subject of police and citizen interactions, has filed a report in support of a federal class-action lawsuit challenging the stop-and-frisk policy as unconstitutional. Based on analyses of the department’s own statistics, he found, as the plaintiffs and other observers have argued all along, that seizures of weapons or contraband as a result of the stops “is extremely rare.”

The rate of gun seizures is near zero — 0.15 guns seized for every 100 stops. “The N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk tactics,” wrote Professor Fagan, “produce rates of seizures of guns or other contraband that are no greater than would be produced simply by chance.”

More important, after studying six years’ worth of data, the professor concluded that many of the millions of stops are violations of the Constitution. One of a number of constitutional problems, according to Professor Fagan, is that the police frequently use race or national origin rather than reasonable suspicion as the basis for the stops.

“I provide evidence that the N.Y.P.D. has engaged in patterns of unconstitutional stops of city residents that are more likely to affect black and Latino citizens,” he wrote.

From 2004 through 2009, city police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times. Many were patted down, frisked, made to sprawl face down on the ground, or spread-eagle themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car. Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

An overwhelming majority of the people stopped were black or Hispanic. Blacks were nine times more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, but no more likely than whites to be arrested as a result of the stops.

While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped has been going up. More than 575,000 stops were made last year — a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.

If the stops go up when crime goes down, it’s fair to wonder what might happen if there was no crime in the city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly might decide that it is necessary to frisk everybody. The use of such stops has more than quintupled on their watch.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the class-action suit, wants the Police Department barred from engaging in what the center describes as race-based and “suspicionless stops and frisks.”

Professor Fagan, in his report filed in connection with the suit, found that nearly 150,000 stops over the six-year period that he studied lacked any legal justification at all. An additional 544,252 stops lacked sufficiently detailed information from the officers involved to determine their legality.

I’ve no doubt that the professor’s findings are, in fact, conservative. But even his figures show the police to be violating the Constitution on a scandalously vast scale. The police use such specious justifications as “furtive movements” or an alleged “bulge” in someone’s pocket as the basis for stopping people. If you believe all those furtive-movement and bulging-pocket stories, I’ve got some antiques spanning the East River that you might be interested in.

It’s important to keep in mind that what we are talking about here, in the overwhelming number of cases, are innocent people, not criminals. No one wants to stop the police from going after the bad guys. But what keeps happening with this lousy policy is that the cops target skin color, not the likelihood that a crime might be in progress, or have taken place. As Professor Fagan found, “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than whites, even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially heterogeneous or predominantly white.”

It doesn’t matter if innocent black or Hispanic kids are in a high-crime area or low, a minority area or white, they stand a good chance of being harassed by New York City cops.

    The Shame of New York, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/opinion/30herbert.html

Study Finds Street Stops by N.Y. Police Unjustified

October 26, 2010
The New York imes
By AL BAKER and RAY RIVERA

Tens of thousands of times over six years, the police stopped and questioned people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing so, a new study says.

And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.

The study was conducted on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s stop-question-and-frisk policy. The department denies the charges.

The study examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009 that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk them, a crime-fighting strategy the department has put more emphasis on over the years.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has rejected the accusation of racial profiling, and said the racial breakdown of the stops correlated to the racial breakdown of crime suspects. Mr. Kelly has also credited the tactic with helping to cut crime to low levels in the city and with getting guns off the street.

But as the number of stops has jumped — to more than 570,000 last year from 313,000 in 2004 — the practice has come under increasing scrutiny, from lawmakers at City Hall and Albany and from civil libertarians including the constitutional rights center and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Professor Fagan found that in more than 30 percent of stops, officers either lacked the kind of suspicion necessary to make a stop constitutional or did not include sufficient detail on police forms to determine if the stops were legally justified. The study also found that even accounting for crime patterns in the city’s various neighborhoods, officers stopped minorities at disproportionate rates.

Nearly 150,000 of the stops — 6.7 percent of all cases in which an officer made a stop based on his own discretion, rather than while responding to a radio call in which some information had already been gathered — lacked legal sufficiency, the study concluded.

Stops were considered unjustified if officers provided no primary reason articulating a reasonable suspicion for the stop.

For example, if an officer conducted a stop solely because a person was in a high-crime area — without listing a primary reason, like the person “fits a description” of a crime suspect or appeared to be “casing” a store — the stop was considered unjustified.

If an officer cited only “other” as the reason for the stop, with no other details, it was deemed unjustified in the study.

An additional 544,000 cases, or 24 percent of all discretionary stops, did not have enough information on the forms that officers are required to fill out after such encounters.

The United States Supreme Court has held that in order for police officers to stop someone, they must be able to articulate a reasonable suspicion of a crime. To frisk them, they must have a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous.

Darius Charney, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the study crystallized the primary complaints in the lawsuit. “It confirms what we have been saying for the last 10 or 11 years, which is that stop-and-frisk patterns — it is really race, not crime, that is driving this,” Mr. Charney said.

Mr. Kelly, responding to the professor’s study, said on Tuesday, “I think you have to understand this was an advocacy paper.” He also noted that Professor Fagan was paid well to produce the report.

“We haven’t had a chance to look at it,” Mr. Kelly added, “but I wouldn’t take the position that this is an objective document.”

The commissioner acknowledged that the department was paying its own expert, Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, to produce its own study in the case.

Police officials have pointed to a 2007 study of the practice by the Rand Corporation, which found no racial profiling being done by officers.

They said the study, commissioned by the Police Department, showed that stops mirrored crime — that while a large percentage of stops involved blacks, an even larger percentage of violent crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims.

Professor Fagan challenged the Rand report’s findings and methodologies because the report used as a benchmark violent crime, which accounts for 10 percent of all criminal cases. And in half of those, his study found, the races of the suspects are not known.

Another of the Fagan study’s main areas of focus was where stops were concentrated.

It found that the highest proportion of stops occur within police precincts that cover areas with large numbers of black and Hispanic residents. A chart in the study shows that in the quartile of the city with the highest concentrations of black residents, the police stopped people at a rate two to three times as much per criminal complaint than in the quartile of the precincts with the lowest percentage of black residents.

A report in The New York Times in July found that the highest concentration of stops in the city was in a roughly eight-block area of Brownsville, Brooklyn, that was predominately black. Residents there were stopped at a rate 13 times as much as the city average.

Professor Fagan said he would not speak about the study until he was deposed in the case. He was chosen to do it based on his experience in studying race and policing for three decades, Mr. Charney said.

Other findings in the study echoed some familiar ideas about the practice.

Force was 14 percent more likely to be used in stops of blacks and 9.3 percent more likely for Hispanics, compared with white suspects.

Guns were not often found (they were discovered in 0.15 percent of all stops). And weapons and other contraband were seized nearly 15 percent less often in stops of blacks than of whites, and nearly 23 percent less often in stops of Hispanics.

If stops that resulted in some form of sanction, blacks were 31 percent more likely than whites to be arrested than issued summonses.

Mr. Charney said Professor Fagan could serve as a witness in a potential trial.

    Study Finds Street Stops by N.Y. Police Unjustified, NYT, 26.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/nyregion/27frisk.html

Police Are Charged in Post-Katrina Shootings

July 13, 2010
The New York imes
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — Four current and two former New Orleans police officers have been charged in connection with the killing of unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, federal law enforcement officials announced here on Tuesday.

Four of the men — former Officer Robert Faulcon, Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, Sgt. Robert Gisevius and Officer Anthony Villavaso — were charged with federal civil rights violations in the killing of 17-year-old James Brissette and the wounding of four others, all members of the same family, when the officers came across a group on the bridge in eastern New Orleans and opened fire.

In addition, Mr. Faulcon, who was arrested Tuesday morning by F.B.I. agents in Fresno, Tex., was charged with shooting Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man with severe mental disabilities, in the back, killing him, as he tried to flee.

All four of the men could face the death penalty.

The Danziger case is the most high-profile of at least eight incidents involving New Orleans police officers that are being actively investigated by federal law enforcement officials. The case became a flash point, in the city and throughout the nation, a symbol of the violence, disorder and official ineptitude in the storm’s wake.

In particular, it shined a spotlight on New Orleans’s long-troubled Police Department, the target of a major corruption investigation in the 1990s. Two former officers are sitting on death row.

In May, at the formal invitation of the city’s newly inaugurated mayor, Mitch Landrieu, Justice Department officials announced they were conducting a full review of the Police Department, a process that often ends in a consent decree, a legally binding agreement for systemic reform.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who spoke at a news conference here on Tuesday, put the indictment in that context.

“It will take more than this investigation to renew the New Orleans Police Department and to allow it to thrive,” Mr. Holder said, adding later, “We want to look at this in a holistic way.”

The four men who were charged with killing Mr. Brissette are in custody, federal officials said, who added that the investigation was continuing. The three officers have been suspended without pay, a police spokesman said.

Two other men charged on Tuesday — one an officer and the other a recent retiree — received summonses, said a spokeswoman for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

“We’ve known it was coming for at least six months and suspected it was coming for a year,” said Frank DeSalvo, a lawyer for Sergeant Bowen. “It’s not a shock. We’re ready.”

Eric Hessler, a lawyer who represents Sergeant Gisevius, said federal officials should have considered the chaos that the police were operating in during the first few days after Hurricane Katrina.

“The federal government has clearly forgotten or chosen to ignore the circumstances police officers were working under and clearly chose not to factor in any of those circumstances when they decided to charge them with an intentional act of murder,” Mr. Hessler said in an interview.

Lawyers for the other men who were indicted could not be reached or did not return calls seeking comment.

Starting in February, police officers, often one at a time, began to plead guilty to lesser charges like conspiring to obstruct justice in the Danziger case; five former officers and a civilian have done so to date.

The 27-count indictment handed up by a grand jury on Monday paints a harrowing picture of the events on the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, when much of the city was still underwater.

The details of the shootings on the bridge that began to emerge, and which were elaborated on in the indictment unsealed Tuesday, were ghastlier than many in the city had expected.

Responding to a call that the police were under fire, officers drove to the bridge over the Industrial Canal in eastern New Orleans in a Budget rental truck. Some were armed with assault rifles, others with a shotgun or a semiautomatic pistol.

Mr. Brissette and five members of the Bartholomew family were walking across the bridge to get food and other supplies from a supermarket, the indictment reads, when the officers opened fire. Four members of the Bartholomew family were shot. Susan Bartholomew, at the time 38, lost part of her arm; her husband, Leonard Bartholomew III, was shot in the head. Mr. Brissette, who was killed, was shot seven times.

Some officers then traveled to the other side of the bridge and found two brothers, Ronald and Lance Madison, who were on their way to check on a dentist’s office that belonged to their oldest brother, Dr. Romell Madison. According to the indictment, Mr. Faulcon then shot Ronald Madison to death with a shotgun. Afterward, it continues, Sergeant Bowen kicked and stomped on Mr. Madison as he lay dying on the ground.

Lance Madison was arrested at the scene and later held on eight counts of attempted murder of a police officer. He was never formally charged and was released after three weeks in custody.

“Our family has waited a long time for justice in this case,” Dr. Madison said in a statement. “These indictments represent another step forward toward that goal.”

The three officers and Mr. Faulcon were also charged along Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and former Sgt. Gerard Dugue, both homicide detectives who were assigned to investigate the shootings, in connection with a cover-up of the shootings. Sergeant Kaufman faces up to 120 years in prison, while Mr. Dugue, who recently retired, faces up to 70.

The cover-up described in the indictment is methodical and blatant. It recounts a scene in the abandoned Seventh District police station where, it says, Sergeant Kaufman and Mr. Dugue met with other officers to ensure that their stories were consistent. Sergeant Kaufman is also accused of creating fictional witnesses and planting a pistol at the scene of the shootings.

In 2006, the Orleans Parish district attorney charged the four men now indicted in the killing of Mr. Brissette and three others with murder and attempted murder. In 2008, a judge dismissed those charges, citing improprieties in the handling of the case. The three others have since pleaded guilty to involvement in the cover-up.

Shortly after that dismissal, Jim Letten, the United States attorney for the district that includes New Orleans, announced that his office would open an investigation, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.

The other federal inquiries are continuing.

Last month, five police officers were indicted in connection with the killing of Henry Glover, a 31-year-old man who was shot to death in the Algiers neighborhood in the days just after the hurricane and whose body was later found in a burned car behind a police station.

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at the news conference that he and Mr. Holder had discussed the New Orleans Police Department in one of their first conversations after Mr. Perez joined the Justice Department in October 2009.

Justice Department officials began considering the possibility of stepping in and systemically reforming the department, and Mr. Landrieu, who was elected mayor in February, began discussing such a step with federal officials before he even took office.

Two days after his inauguration, Mr. Landrieu formally requested federal involvement in the New Orleans police force, describing it as “one of the worst police departments in the country.”

    Police Are Charged in Post-Katrina Shootings, NYT, 13.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14justice.html

‘Grim Sleeper’ Arrest Fans Debate on DNA Use

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — The arrest in the case of the “Grim Sleeper” — a serial killer who terrorized South Los Angeles for two decades — has put one of the hottest controversies in American law enforcement to its first major test.

Only two states, Colorado and California, have a codified policy permitting a so-called familial search, the use of DNA samples taken from convicted criminals to track down relatives who may themselves have committed a crime. It is a practice that district attorneys and the police say is an essential tool in catching otherwise elusive criminals, but that privacy experts criticize as a threat to civil liberties.

This week, law enforcement struck a significant blow for the practice when the Los Angeles Police Department used it to arrest a man who they say murdered at least 10 residents here over 25 years. It is the first time an active familial search has been used to solve a homicide case in the United States.

Lonnie D. Franklin Jr., 57, was charged Thursday with 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder after the state DNA lab discovered a DNA link between evidence from the old crime scenes and that of Mr. Franklin’s son, Christopher, who was recently convicted of a felony weapons charge.

The information developed from the state’s familial search program suggested that Christopher Franklin was a relative of the source of the DNA from the old crime scenes. The police confirmed the association of Lonnie Franklin through matching of DNA from a discarded pizza slice. The match provided the crucial link in a seemingly unsolvable crime that struck terror and hopelessness throughout one of the city’s poorest areas for years.

Chief Charlie Beck of the Los Angeles Police said Thursday that he expected to connect Mr. Franklin, who is being held without bail, to other murders.

“This is truly a breakthrough,” said Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose office wrote the DNA policy, in a telephone interview. The use of the practice demonstrates that law enforcement can “stop criminals in their tracks and lock up some of the most vicious and dangerous members of our society,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s why this technology is so important.”

The arrest in the protracted, gory case could settle the internal debate among lawmakers and the law enforcement agencies across the country currently considering the use of familial search, evidence law experts said. California is awaiting a court ruling on whether its DNA database can be expanded to include people who have been arrested.

The Los Angeles case “shows why it can be tremendously useful in cases that seem pretty dead and hard to crack,” said Jennifer Mnookin, a law professor and evidence expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “So therefore we will very likely see an increasing use of these techniques, and at a minimum one hopes it is done in a sensitive way that is thoughtful and attentive to the concerns” of its critics, she said.

At least some of those critics remain skeptical.

“Familial searching is a tool, and at this point it is a very imprecise tool,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who added there was the possibility of innocent people being harassed in the pursuit of a crime. “It has the potential to invade the privacy of a lot of people,” he said.

Many law enforcement agencies collect DNA samples of convicted felons in hopes that DNA from other crime scenes can be matched to those individuals.

In the case of a close but imperfect match between crime scene DNA and that of someone locked up, forensic scientists say, the person responsible in that crime may well be a relative of the person locked up. Through a software tool, scientists are then able to painstakingly parse the DNA to determine sibling or parent-child relationships, information the police use to pursue possible suspects.

While the practice is common in England, it has been limited largely to Colorado in the United States. But in 2008, the California Department of Justice began using familial searches — in the face of significant protests — to solve hard crimes. The state restricted the practice to major, violent crimes in which all other investigative techniques had proved fruitless.

Those who oppose the technique argue that there are inherent privacy concerns, and that it serves, in essence, as a form of racial profiling because a higher proportion of inmates are members of minorities.

“I can imagine lots of African-American families would think it is not fair to put a disproportionate number of black families under permanent genetic surveillance,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about this issue.

Further, Mr. Rosen said, if other jurisdictions were not as strict at California about the technique’s application — expanding it to nonviolent crimes, for instance — the issue would be even more complex. “The technique is not inherently good or evil,” he said. “It all has to do with what crimes it is used for, who’s in the database, how the database is regulated and what is done with the samples.”

Investigators here had tried for years to solve the case of the Grim Sleeper, so known because of a 13-year hiatus in the killing streak, who committed the majority of his killings in the 1980s but in recent years had restarted his spree. The department, in conjunction with the state attorney general’s office, ran a familial DNA search for the first time in 2008 that was unsuccessful, said Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, who led the investigation, at a news conference on Thursday.

About a year and a half later there was the second run through the system, the detective said, and the department “learned of a man that as we know now turned out to be a direct relative of our suspect.” The authorities were then able to narrow their focus to the elder Mr. Franklin over the past weekend based on the proximity of his residence to the crime scenes, race, age and other factors.

Police then conducted around-the-clock surveillance of Mr. Franklin, following him as he walked or went on drives, and retrieved a plate and napkin he had thrown away after eating pizza, which provided the DNA match.

Only after closely guarded procedures were the victims’ families alerted and Mr. Franklin arrested Wednesday as he went to move his car.

The Grim Sleeper began his killing of women (and one man) in South Los Angeles in 1985, shooting his victims and leaving them in alleyways and Dumpsters. The killer stopped in 1988, then started again in 2002.

Gurtha Cole, 80, lives with her 38-year-old granddaughter in a building across the street from the home of Mr. Franklin, who the police say worked as a mechanic for the city’s Department of Transportation. She expressed surprise. “He’s very social with us,” she said. “On holidays and stuff he would invite the neighbors to come over to a picnic, and host everyone.”

At a news conference in downtown Los Angeles, a smattering of victims’ relatives squeezed together into the crowd, wearing solemn expressions. LaVerne Peters held a photo of her daughter Janecia Peters — the most recent victim, killed in 2007 — wearing a green cap and gown.

“This presents some relief,” Ms. Peters said. “There is nothing worse than having a child murdered.”


Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting.

    ‘Grim Sleeper’ Arrest Fans Debate on DNA Use, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us/09sleeper.html

An Easy Call

July 5, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

Gov. David Paterson is being urged to veto a bill that would prohibit the New York City Police Department from adding any more innocent individuals to its vast computerized database of personal information on the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers stopped, questioned and often frisked by police officers.

This should be an easy call for the governor. He should ignore this awful advice, which is coming from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and others. Allowing the police to continue accumulating these permanent files on the innocent, an abomination in and of itself, would also encourage the cops to continue their Jim Crow stop-and-frisk policy, which has led to the systematic harassment and humiliation of young black and Latino residents who have done absolutely nothing wrong.

This racist policy needs to stop — and stop now. As Al Baker reported in The Times two months ago, black and Latino New Yorkers were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in 2009. But once stopped, they were no more likely than whites to actually be arrested.

An overwhelming majority of the people stopped, questioned and searched by the police are innocent of any wrongdoing and are sent on their way after the encounter. This illegal and inhumane policy has gotten completely out of control. From 2004 through 2009, police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, an astounding figure. Nearly 90 percent were completely innocent, minding their own business.

These wholly unnecessary interactions with police officers are frequently traumatic and degrading. Men and women, boys and girls — in a vast majority of cases, black or Hispanic — are routinely ordered to sprawl face down on the sidewalk or in the street, or to spread-eagle themselves against a wall. They are frisked and often verbally humiliated. And I have been told time and again by people who have been through these encounters that police officers have threatened to charge them with disorderly conduct if they dared to raise any objections.

The Police Department has compounded this outrage by loading information on these innocent New Yorkers into its permanent database of stop-and-frisk encounters. The database is one of the first stops for cops investigating actual crimes. Thus, these innocent individuals become a permanent focus of the police, not because of anything they’ve done wrong but primarily because of their ethnic background.

The legislation Governor Paterson is being urged to veto would prevent police officers from putting personally identifiable information into the database on people who are stopped but who are not given a summons or arrested. The Police Department would be able to keep the data it has already compiled but would have to stop putting information into its files that would identify people who have done nothing wrong.

The bill has been passed by both the Senate and Assembly and awaits the governor’s signature. He should sign it with dispatch.

The bill would not curb the department’s stop-and-frisk policy. But as Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, noted on Monday, it would stop the continued expansion of the database, which is one of the policy’s objectives. She also said, “It would send the message, loud and clear, that whatever pass the Police Department has gotten from city government on these policies, the state is being much more attentive.”

That most New Yorkers do not seem to care about the way young black and Latino New Yorkers are treated by the police does not make that treatment any less noxious or vile. And it doesn’t make it legal. Stopping and searching people without good reason is unconstitutional.

The stops and searches are an affront to the dignity of the people who are unfairly targeted. If these individuals are not violating any laws, they have the same right as anyone on Park Avenue in Manhattan to be left alone by the authorities. When you listen to the people who have been subjected to this relentless harassment, you get a sense of the awful personal consequences. People are made to feel low, intimidated, worthless, helpless. They dread the very sight of the police.

As one young man told me, “You can’t do nothing when they roll up on you. If you say something, they tell you, ‘Shut up.’ ”

The range of emotions of people who are stopped include anger, rage, sorrow and feelings of depression. A teenaged girl who was humiliated by officers as she walked to a subway stop in Brooklyn told me she was so mortified by the encounter that she hates to leave her apartment building — even to go to school.

Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly and the city’s police officers should not be allowed to impose that kind of toxic burden on innocent New Yorkers.

    An Easy Call, NYT, 5.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/opinion/06herbert.html

2 Men Arrested, Suspected of Calif. Police Attacks

July 3, 2010
Filed at 8:54 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Two men who investigators believe are linked to a series of booby trap attacks on police in a town in the Southern California desert have been arrested, authorities said Saturday.

Seventy-eight police officers, deputies and federal agents served a series of warrants Friday night and raided the homes of two suspects -- Nicholas John Smit, 40, of Hemet and Steven Hansen, 36, of Homeland, Hemet Police Chief Richard Dana said at a news conference Saturday that included representatives from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

Smit was being held on a suspicion of making a booby trap and assault on a police officer with intent to commit murder, Dana said. He was already facing charges for marijuana cultivation, Dana said.

Dana discussed few details of the case, but said Smit did express his distaste for the police department.

''He made a couple statements that made us believe that he didn't like us very much,'' Dana said.

Hansen was being held for parole violation and weapons charges.

Police reached by phone Saturday did not know whether either man had hired an attorney.

Authorities said they are still seeking two other suspects, and have offered a $200,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of those responsible for the attacks.

Since late last year, Hemet law enforcement officials and city property have been targeted seven times through booby traps and arson fires that investigators believe originated with the same group of suspects.

No one has been injured.

The most recent attack was a fire that set off ammunition at a police evidence building before dawn Wednesday.

Other incidents include a natural gas pipe was rerouted into the headquarters of an anti-gang unit on Dec. 31. The building filled with flammable vapor, but an officer smelled the danger and the building emptied before anyone was hurt.

In another attack, a ballistic device strapped to a fence at a gang task force compound sent a bullet within inches of an officer's face.

There also have been fires at a police rifle range and another that burned four city trucks in a parking lot several blocks from the Police Department.

    2 Men Arrested, Suspected of Calif. Police Attacks, NYT, 3.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/07/03/us/AP-US-Police-Booby-Traps.html

Fmr. Chicago Police Lt. Denies Torturing Suspects

June 17, 2010
Filed at 12:51 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) -- Former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge says he never physically abused two men who testified against him at his perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

Burge has been notoriously tightlipped about numerous allegations of torture spanning decades, but took the stand in his own defense Thursday. He's pleaded not guilty to lying in a civil lawsuit when he denied seeing or participating in the torture of suspects.

Under defense questioning, Burge denied ever suffocating, shocking or beating two witnesses who testified for the prosecution. He also walked jurors through his lengthy police career and list of commendations.

Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993 over allegations he mistreated a suspect. No charges were filed.

    Fmr. Chicago Police Lt. Denies Torturing Suspects, NYT, 17.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/17/us/AP-US-Police-Torture-Trial.html

Bias Seen in ‘Police-on-Police’ Shootings

May 26, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A governor’s task force studying mistaken-identity confrontations between police officers found that racial bias, unconscious or otherwise, played a clear role in scores of firearms encounters over the years, most significantly in cases involving off-duty officers who are killed by their colleagues.

The task force, formed last June by Gov. David A. Paterson to examine confrontations between officers and the role that race might have played, conducted what it said it believed was the first “nationwide, systematic review of mistaken-identity, police-on-police shootings” by an independent panel outside of law enforcement.

“There may well be an issue of race in these shootings, but that is not the same as racism,” said Zachary W. Carter, a former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who served as the task force’s vice chairman. “Research reveals that race may play a role in an officer’s instantaneous assessment of whether a particular person presents a danger or not.”

The report by the task force found that 26 police officers were killed in the United States over the past 30 years by colleagues who mistook them for criminals. It also found that it was increasingly “officers of color” who died in this manner, including 10 of the 14 killed since 1995.

More specifically, in cases involving a victim who was an off-duty officer, the task force reported that 9 of the 10 officers killed in friendly fire encounters in the United States since 1982 were black or Latino, including Omar J. Edwards, a New York City officer who was fatally shot in Harlem last May by an on-duty colleague, and Officer Christopher Ridley, an off-duty Mount Vernon officer shot and killed by at least three uniformed Westchester County officers in White Plains in January 2008.

The last killing of a white off-duty officer by an on-duty colleague in a mistaken-identity case in the United States happened in 1982.

“In short, there are many issues besides race present in these shootings, and the role that race plays is not simple or straightforward,” according to the report, which was delivered to Mr. Paterson this week.

But in searching for trends, the report said the conclusion of the task force was clear: “Inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in ‘shoot/don’t-shoot,’ decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities.”

The task force, headed by Christopher E. Stone, the Guggenheim professor of criminal justice at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, made nine recommendations — directed at local, state and federal levels of government, including the United States Justice Department, he said.

It commended the New York Police Department for initiating a program, in the wake of the Edwards shooting, to test officers for unconscious racial bias, something Mr. Stone said he hoped would be replicated across the country.

Laurie O. Robinson, assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs in the Justice Department, said the recommendations were something it would “review and consider very seriously.” She said she had shared them with colleagues.

The recommendations are aimed at “blunting” any unconscious racial bias, Mr. Carter said. They call for establishing protocols for off-duty conduct, increasing testing for racial bias among officers and improving how police departments manage such encounters when they occur within their ranks. One focused on prosecutors, calling for them to disclose publicly as much detail as possible about such encounters, and early on, to avoid having facts disappear in a fog of grand jury secrecy.

The 67-page report outlined the facts of the Edwards and Ridley shootings, as well as some of the 24 other fatal encounters since 1981. The task force spoke with current and former officers. It drew on three public hearings held around the state — in Albany in November and in Harlem and in White Plains in December. It identified several trends in reviewing the cases and in analyzing existing research on the topic.

Most of the 26 victims were male. Of the 10 off-duty victims, 8 worked in plainclothes, and 6 worked undercover.

Of the 26 fatal shootings, 5, including Officer Ridley’s case, involved an off-duty officer who came across a crime in progress and moved to help other officers or a civilian, the report found. In five other cases, including the Edwards shooting, an off-duty officer was a crime victim and then tried to make an arrest or to take police action, the report found. The only other New York City case the group studied involved Officer Eric Hernandez, who was off duty when he was shot by a colleague who responded to a 911 call and saw him in the aftermath of a brawl at a White Castle restaurant in 2006.

In all but 2 of the 26 fatal shootings of officers that were examined, the victim was holding a gun and had it “displayed” when he or she was shot, the report found. Indeed, it noted, “many of the victim officers with guns displayed reportedly failed to comply with the commands of challenging officers who ordered them to freeze or to drop their weapons.”

The report added, “This failure to comply is often simply the rapid turning of the head and body to determine the source of the verbal command.” The report referred to this reaction as “reflexive spin.”

The authors acknowledged that training for such instances was difficult because of the “rush of adrenaline” involved.

Deaths from friendly fire encounters — representing a small fraction of such confrontations — can tear at police officers and departments. In their wake, minority officers often second-guess their career choices, or are peppered with questions by relatives or friends, particularly those who have had difficult experiences with law enforcement, the study found.

A department’s recruitment efforts, in turn, can be hampered.

“Departments that had never imagined that such a tragedy would occur within their ranks find themselves unprepared to handle the inevitable emotion and trauma, sometimes leading to a loss of credibility and respect, not only with the public, but also among sworn members of their own law enforcement agencies,” the report’s executive summary said.

Yet, if patterns hold, such fatalities will afflict departments this year, next year and “so on into the future,” the summary said.

    Bias Seen in ‘Police-on-Police’ Shootings, NYT, 26.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/nyregion/27shoot.html

Jury Selection Begins in Ill. Police Torture Trial

May 23, 2010
Filed at 2:27 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) -- For decades, black men across Chicago described torture at the hands of former police Lt. Jon Burge and his officers, and for decades no one listened. Suspects landed in jail and even on death row for crimes they say they didn't commit after Burge and his men coerced confessions using terrifying methods including suffocation, a form of waterboarding and electric shocks.

Finally those complaints from the 1970s and 80s are being taken seriously -- and it could be Burge's own words that send him to prison.

Jury selection begins Monday in Burge's trial on federal obstruction of justice and perjury charges. He's accused of lying when he denied in a civil lawsuit that he and other detectives had tortured anyone. He faces a maximum of 45 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

Burge has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is free on bond.

Authorities have, to a degree, acknowledged that Burge may have committed these horrifying acts, but he does not face torture-related charges because the statute of limitations has run out. The police department fired him in 1993 for mistreatment of a suspect, but did not press charges. A decade later, then-Gov. George Ryan released four condemned men he said Burge had extracted confessions from using torture.

The allegations of torture and coerced confessions eventually led to a still-standing moratorium on Illinois' death penalty and the emptying of death row -- moves credited with re-igniting the global fight against capital punishment. But they also earned Chicago a reputation as a haven for rogue cops, a place where police could abuse suspects without notice or punishment.

The scandal has extended to the highest levels of city and county government, and the trial's witness lists include Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who was Cook County state's attorney during Burge's tenure, fellow former State's Attorney Dick Devine, and Daley's predecessor in the mayor's office, Jane Byrne.

Prosecutors are expected to call former police officers and at least a half dozen men who say they were tortured by Burge or those under his command. The more than 100 victims say the torture started in the 1970s and persisted until the '90s at police stations on the city's South and West sides.

Burge is the first Chicago officer accused of torture to be criminally charged in the case.

''I'm just glad it came to trial in my lifetime, because it looked like it wasn't going to happen,'' said Jo Ann Patterson, whose son Aaron Patterson was one of the four whom Ryan freed from death row because he believed he had been tortured.

The Republican governor later cleared all of death row, saying the torture of innocent men at the hands of Chicago police had tainted the state's entire death penalty system.

''How many more cases of wrongful convictions have to occur before we can all agree that the system is broken?'' Ryan said at the time.

In July 2006, two special prosecutors named to look into the allegations said evidence indicated that dozens of suspects had been mistreated during the 1970s and '80s but that the cases were too old to bring charges. The statute of limitations on the offenses they identified in the report is three years.

Two years later, Burge was charged with lying under oath in a civil lawsuit in which he denied he knew about or took part in beatings, threats and torture methods such as ''bagging'' -- forcing a confession by a putting a plastic typewriter cover over a suspect's head.

Other alleged victims spoke of beatings, gun threats and a mysterious black box used to emit electric shocks. One said his tormentors poured soda into his nose.

The police department fired Burge in 1993, and he now lives in retirement in Florida. He's been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his trial was delayed for months while he recovered from treatment.

The 62-year-old Army veteran wasn't prosecuted for torture even after police officials agreed that he'd participated in it, and some in the legal community say he wouldn't be facing charges at all if it wasn't for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

''There were a lot of people who could've done something about it and didn't,'' said Jon Loevy, an attorney who's represented several alleged torture victims. ''There were a lot of lost opportunities, and finally Mr. Fitzgerald's office is going to do something about it.''

Victims, lawyers and police officers said they have mixed feelings about the trial. Some, like Patterson, are just glad it's finally happening. David Bates, who says he was tortured by men under Burge's command, called the trial a ''win-win.''

But attorney Flint Taylor, who's represented alleged victims over the last 20 years, isn't satisfied, pointing to the dozens of alleged victims still in prison.

''There really can't be any full justice until the torturers are all in jail, and the torture victims are released and given fair trials,'' he said.

Burge's trial in front of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow is expected to last six weeks.

    Jury Selection Begins in Ill. Police Torture Trial, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/23/us/AP-US-Police-Torture-Trial.html

Serpico on Serpico

January 24, 2010
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

HARLEMVILLE, N.Y. — He looked like some sort of fur trapper, this bearded man walking through the snowy woods here in upstate New York. But then, Frank Serpico has always been known for his disguises.

Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film “Serpico” knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.

This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.

Four decades later, Frank Serpico is still bearded, handsome and a flamboyant dresser. At 73, he seems spry enough to chase down and collar a perp; on that wintry walk through the woods, he interrogated a man carrying a sled, and followed a trail of blood drops in the snow until it disappeared. Not long before, he had sniffed out a dumper of garbage on his property and reported him to the police.

Mr. Serpico still carries the detective shield he was awarded as he left the department on a disability pension and, often, his licensed revolver, with which he takes target practice on his 50-acre property not far from this Columbia County hamlet. He also still carries bullet fragments lodged just below his brain from the drug shooting; he is deaf in his left ear, and has nerve damage in his left leg.

For many, “Serpico” conjures the face of Al Pacino, who won his first Golden Globe award for his star turn in the film. The movie — along with news reports and the best-selling biography of the same name — seared the public memory with painful images: of the honest cop bleeding in a squad car rushing to the hospital, where, over months of rehabilitation, he received cards telling him to rot in hell. Instead, Mr. Serpico took his fluffy sheepdog, Alfie, and boarded a ship to Europe; the film’s closing credits describe him as “now living somewhere in Switzerland.”

Which was true at the time. After years traveling abroad, Mr. Serpico returned to the United States around 1980 and lived as a nomad, out of a camper. He finally settled about two hours north of New York City, where he lives a monastic life in a one-room cabin he built in the woods near the Hudson River. In 1997, he spoke out after the brutal beatings of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn station house, but mostly he stays far from his old nemesis.

Now, all these years later, Mr. Serpico is working on his own version of the harrowing adventures chronicled by Peter Maas’s biography, which sold more than three million copies (royalties from the book and the movie have helped him live comfortably without working). The memoir begins with the same awful scene as the film: Serpico shot in the face during a heroin bust on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Feb. 3, 1971. Working title: “Before I Go.”

“It’s the rest of the story,” he said recently over lunch in the self-service cafe of a health-food store here in Harlemville. “It’s more personal. I used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’ ” Though he is healthy, he added, “I’m getting close to the line, so I figure I better get busy.”

It is, ultimately, a story of healing. He wandered in Europe and across North America, he said, because “I wanted to find my life.”

“I had gone through a near-death experience,” he explained, “and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what’s important.”

After he settled here, his journey turned inward. He eschewed what he sees as an ugly American addiction to consumerism and media brainwashing. He eats mostly vegetarian and organic food, cooking on the wood-burning stove that heats the cabin, where there is neither television nor the Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”

Mr. Serpico relies on Chinese medicine, herbs and shiatsu. He practices meditation, the Japanese Zen flute and African drumming, and dance: ballroom, tango, swing. He takes long walks at sunrise and rescues wounded animals. He raises chickens and guinea hens. He has a girlfriend: she is French, a schoolteacher, age 50.

None of which has exorcised the demons of being Serpico.

“I still have nightmares,” he said. “I open a door a little bit and it just explodes in my face. Or I’m in a jam and I call the police, and guess who shows up? My old cop buddies who hated me.”

•

Growing up the son of Italian immigrants in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, young Frank revered the local cops. He loved detective stories on the radio and dreamed of wearing the uniform. He had also cultivated a bit of worldliness from visiting Italy as a child and traveling abroad with the Army after enlisting at age 18. He joined the New York Police Department in 1959 and passionately pursued big game.

His partners and bosses resented his hippie looks and his zealousness to make arrests even while off-duty or on the turf of other officers. His intrigues with the ballet and opera rubbed against the conservative culture of the station house. He lived a bohemian life, with a small garden apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, where he was known as Paco and hid his police badge.

The street-savvy but idealistic Officer Serpico was appalled at the cliquishness and the payoffs — free meals as well as big, blatant bribes — from criminals, gamblers, numbers men and ordinary merchants whom he saw as a beat cop in Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct and later while working vice and racketeering. He refused to accept such grease, and became despised for it both inside and outside the department.

In 1967, Mr. Serpico began telling what he knew to high-ranking officials at police headquarters and City Hall. He presented names, places, dates and other information, but no action was taken. Frustrated, he and a friend on the force, David Durk, a graduate of Amherst College who had become an officer in 1963 after quitting law school, contacted a reporter for The New York Times.

The front-page story by David Burnham on April 25, 1970, pressured Mayor John V. Lindsay to form the Knapp Commission, before which Mr. Serpico testified that “the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.”

The commission carried out the most extensive investigation of police wrongdoing in the city’s history and exposed a pattern of entrenched corruption and cover-up that helped usher in reform.

“It was terrifying in those days — they were really sticking their necks out,” recalled Mr. Burnham, who now works at a data-gathering and research firm. “We really shamed the city, and things really changed.”

Mr. Serpico does not exactly agree. He believes the department still does not acknowledge its internal problems because the leadership’s top priority is to avoid scandal.

“I hear from police officers all the time; they contact me,” he said. “An honest cop still can’t find a place to go and complain without fear of recrimination. The blue wall will always be there because the system supports it.”

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, dismissed Mr. Serpico’s indictment by saying, “It’s a very different department now.”

“Things have changed vastly,” Mr. Browne said, “and he is literally old enough to be the grandfather of some police officers now on duty.”

Mr. Serpico avoids the city now, but there is a part of him that has never left its station houses. Several years ago, he showed up at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan to confront Patrick V. Murphy, the police commissioner at the time of the shooting, who was in the audience. “I’ve been carrying a bullet around in my head for 35 years and I hold you responsible,” Mr. Serpico recalled telling Mr. Murphy, who did not respond.

Michael Bosak, a 27-year veteran of the Police Department who has served as its informal historian since retiring in 1995, said that for a time he kept in touch with Mr. Serpico by e-mail, and that his messages tended to be long diatribes on various topics, seemingly unaffected by the passage of decades. “The N.Y.P.D. is a thousand times more honest than it was 40 years ago,” Mr. Bosak said. “I think he’s still in a lot of pain. Going through what he went through, it can drive you off your rocker.”

Indeed, Mr. Serpico still brims with bitterness that he was made third-grade detective, rather than the top tier of first-grade; that the department’s museum in Lower Manhattan declined his offer of his uniform and his service revolver; that its leadership never asks him to speak about corruption or reform. The Medal of Honor he was awarded — the department’s highest commendation — remains tossed “in some drawer.”

“They never even had a ceremony for me,” he said of the honorary promotion. “They handed it to me over the counter with the Medal of Honor, like a pack of cigarettes.

“The department never recognized me for standing up for what’s right,” he added, “because I violated the omertà; I spoke out.”

•

During his years in Europe, Mr. Serpico bought a farm in the Netherlands and married a Dutch woman with two young children. But after the woman died of cancer, her parents took custody of the children and Mr. Serpico sold the farm and moved back to the United States. He wandered the continent from Mexico to Canada in his camper.

In 1980, a lover had a son and brought a paternity suit. He claimed to have been “deceived and entrapped” by the woman, and then waged a lengthy and unsuccessful court fight to avoid child-support payments. He did not raise the son, Alex Serpico, and has had limited contact with him in recent years.

Mr. Serpico refused to reveal the exact location of his current home. Instead, he was interviewed in various coffee shops and restaurants where he is a regular in a few small villages north of Hudson, N.Y., just off the Taconic State Parkway. He is known to the locals as Paco, his off-duty nickname in the Village in the late 1960s.

At lunches in the Harlemville health-food store, Mr. Serpico slipped a bottle of red wine out of his bag and poured it into paper cups. Afterward, cigars.

True to his cinematic self, he always showed up in a different outfit and hat: one day as the sheepherder, the next day the prospector, then the monk. He wears an earring in each ear and a magnifying glass around his neck for fine print. He would spout esoterica and draw from his knowledge of Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Arabic and Russian. In a coffee shop, he might quote from Dante’s “Inferno,” or pull out his harmonica and play “Danny Boy.”

Mr. Serpico said he had played, in local productions, the Arab in Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” Gonzalo in “The Tempest,” a detective in “Ten Little Indians” and Johann Most in Howard Zinn’s “Emma.”

“My acting career began on the streets of New York,” he said. “When I was a cop, I played many impressive roles, from derelict to a doctor, and my life often depended on my performance.”

Back then, as he became suspect among fellow officers, Mr. Serpico began spreading the word that he was writing a book, but only as a bluff. “I said, ‘I’m going to name names, and if anything happens to me, I got it all written down right there,’ ” he recalled. “But I never really wrote anything.”

After several frustrating attempts at collaboration with co-writers — “They just don’t get it,” he said — Mr. Serpico enrolled in a weekly workshop through an arts group in Troy, N.Y., where his classmates also do not always understand his stories. “How could they?” he said. “We have women in the class writing about their kids — they don’t know what a bag man is.”

Frank Serpico writes out the story of his life daily in longhand, at the cabin, then types the pages on a computer at the public library, using the two-finger method he honed filing arrest reports on station house typewriters, gathering the pages in a manila folder. The memoir begins on the night of the Williamsburg drug bust, his bleeding body cradled by an elderly tenant who called for assistance when his fellow officers did not, the narrator floating above and recounting the life path that led him there.

It is not unlike the opening scene of the film. He said he had never seen the full movie, but agreed to watch it with me — on my laptop, propped on a windowsill at the public library in Kinderhook, N.Y. As Pacino, near death, was rushed to Greenpoint Hospital, the real Mr. Serpico stared out the window, unable to watch — too painful, he said.

He provided a running commentary: His own wardrobe was much better than in the film, as were his police disguises. The scene in which the police commissioner hands him a gold detective shield in the hospital bed was conjured; in reality, he picked it up from a clerk at police headquarters.

Afterward, Mr. Serpico seemed spent. He looked out at the snow and trees graying in the descending darkness.

“They took the job I loved most,” he said. “I just wanted to be a cop, and they took it away from me.”

    Serpico on Serpico, NYT, 24.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/nyregion/24serpico.html