History > 2012 > USA > Police (I)
Woman Accused
of Hate-Crime Murder
in Subway Push
December 29, 2012
The New York Times
By MARC SANTORA
A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with
second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a man who
was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens and crushed
by an oncoming train.
The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to be a
Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said.
“The defendant is accused of committing what is every subway commuter’s
nightmare: Being suddenly and senselessly pushed into the path of an oncoming
train,” Mr. Brown said in an interview.
In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having
told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus
and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating
them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to
the police and in her target for attack, officials said.
The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was
raised Hindu.
Mr. Sen “was allegedly shoved from behind and had no chance to defend himself,”
Mr. Brown said. “Beyond that, the hateful remarks allegedly made by the
defendant and which precipitated the defendant’s actions should never be
tolerated by a civilized society.”
Mr. Brown said he had no information on the defendant’s criminal or mental
history.
“It will be up to the court to determine if she is fit to stand trial,” he said.
Ms. Menendez is expected to be arraigned by Sunday morning. If convicted, she
faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. By charging her with murder as a hate
crime, the possible minimum sentence she faced would be extended to 20 years
from 15 years, according to prosecutors.
On Saturday night, Ms. Menendez, wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt, was
escorted from the 112th Precinct to a waiting car by three detectives. Greeted
by camera flashes and dozens of reporters, she let out a loud, unintelligible
moan. She did not respond to reporters’ questions.
The attack occurred around 8 p.m. on Thursday at the 40th Street-Lowery Street
station in Sunnyside.
Mr. Sen, 46, was looking out over the tracks when a woman approached him from
behind and shoved him onto the tracks, according to the police. Mr. Sen never
saw her, the police said.
The woman fled the station, running down two flights of stairs and down the
street.
By the next morning, a brief and grainy black-and-white video of the woman who
the police said was behind the attack was being broadcast on news programs.
Patrol officers picked up Ms. Menendez early Saturday after someone who had seen
the video on television spotted her on a Brooklyn street and called 911, said
Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department. She was taken to
Queens and later placed in lineups, according to detectives. Police Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly said on Friday that, according to witnesses’ accounts, there
had been no contact on the subway platform between the attacker and the victim
before the shove.
The case was the second this month involving someone being pushed to death in a
train station. In the first case, Ki-Suck Han, 58, of Elmhurst, Queens, died
under the Q train at the 49th Street and Seventh Avenue station on Dec. 3. Naeem
Davis, 30, was charged with second-degree murder in that case.
Mr. Sen, after years of saving money, had opened a small copying business on the
Upper West Side this year.
Ar Suman, a Muslim, and one of three roommates who shared a small first-floor
apartment with Mr. Sen in Elmhurst, said he and Mr. Sen often discussed
religion.
Though they were of different faiths, Mr. Suman said, he admired the respect
that Mr. Sen showed for those who saw the world differently than he did. Mr.
Suman said he once asked Mr. Sen why he was not more active in his faith and it
resulted in a long philosophical discussion.
“He was so gentle,” Mr. Suman said. “He said in this world a lot of people are
dying, killing over religious things.”
Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum, Wendy Ruderman,
Jeffrey E. Singer and Julie Turkewitz. Susan C. Beachy
contributed research.
Woman Accused of Hate-Crime Murder in
Subway Push, NYT, 29.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/nyregion/
woman-is-held-in-death-of-man-pushed-onto-subway-tracks-in-queens.html
Woman
Helped Firefighters’ Killer Get Gun
He Used
in Ambush, Police Say
December
28, 2012
The New York Times
By MARC SANTORA
The police
arrested a woman in western New York on Friday who they said helped a man
acquire the weapon he is believed to have used to kill two firefighters in an
ambush that left two others injured.
According to the police, the woman, Dawn Nguyen, 24, bought a Bushmaster
semiautomatic rifle and a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun from a gun shop more than
two years ago on behalf of William Spengler Jr., who as a felon was not
permitted to buy or own a gun.
Mr. Spengler apparently used the rifle on Monday to kill the firefighters, whom
he lured to his home in Webster, N.Y., near Lake Ontario, by starting a fire,
the authorities said. After shooting at other emergency responders, Mr. Spengler
shot himself in the head with another weapon, a handgun, an autopsy revealed.
The fire destroyed seven homes.
Ms. Nguyen went with Mr. Spengler to buy the weapons at a shop in June 2010,
according to a criminal complaint filed by the United States attorney in the
Western District of New York.
When the police asked her about the purchase after the shooting, she claimed the
guns were for her own protection. She also said they had been stolen from her
car, although the police said no report had been filed to support that claim.
The complaint said Ms. Nguyen had told a friend that she bought the weapons for
Mr. Spengler. The police said that assertion was corroborated by what Mr.
Spengler wrote in a suicide note, in which he said a neighbor’s daughter helped
him acquire the guns.
Since the guns were not intended for her, the complaint said, she made a false
statement when she bought them, a felony that is punishable by up to 10 years in
prison.
Ms. Nguyen is “the person who purchased that rifle and that shotgun found next
to William Spengler,” William J. Hochul Jr., the United States attorney for the
Western District of New York, said at a news conference in Rochester on Friday.
Ms. Nguyen’s lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Webster police chief, Gerald L. Pickering, said that based on the distance
between Mr. Spengler’s hiding place and where his victims were found, he most
likely used the Bushmaster.
A similar gun was used in the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, which prompted a
renewed debate about the nation’s gun laws. Much of the discussion has been
focused on whether military-style assault weapons like the Bushmaster should be
banned.
On Thursday, the State Police released the autopsy results of the two
firefighters who were killed and their attacker.
Michael Chiapperini, 43, died as a result of a gunshot wound and Tomasz
Kaczowka, 19, died as a result of two gunshot wounds, the police said. Mr.
Spengler, 62, was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot to his head.
Funeral and memorial services are planned for Mr. Chiapperini and Mr. Kaczowka
during the weekend. Hundreds of firefighters and police officers from around the
region were pouring into Webster on Friday.
The police have also recovered human remains in Mr. Spengler’s home, which was
among the buildings that burned, but the remains have yet to be positively
identified. Earlier this week, Chief Pickering said the police believed that the
remains belong to Cheryl Spengler, 67, Mr. Spengler’s sister.
The two had fought bitterly in the past, friends and neighbors said, and they
may have been involved in a dispute over who would take ownership of the family
home following the death of their mother, Arline, in October. Mr. Spengler
served 17 years in prison for the 1980 murder of his grandmother, whom he killed
with a hammer.
It remained unclear what motivated him to target emergency responders, but he
made his intentions clear in the note he left behind: he wanted to kill as many
people as he could.
When the police arrived at the scene of the fire just before dawn on Monday,
they were met by a fusillade of bullets. A SWAT team was called in to help
thwart the gunman. As the gun battle raged, the fire spread.
The autopsy report showed that Mr. Spengler was not struck by any bullets fired
by law enforcement officers.
Michael D.
Regan contributed reporting.
Woman Helped Firefighters’ Killer Get Gun He Used in Ambush, Police Say, NYT,
28.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/nyregion/woman-helped-firefighters-killer-get-ambush-guns-police-say.html
Detectives ‘Found Nothing’
in
Search of Shooting Victim’s California Home,
Mother
Says
December
13, 2012
The New York Times
By WENDY RUDERMAN and J. DAVID GOODMAN
No drugs.
No weapons. No evidence of any kind was removed by New York City detectives from
the California home of the man who was gunned down this week in Midtown
Manhattan, the victim’s mother said Thursday.
“They handed me back the key to his condo and said they found nothing,” said
Sandra Wellington, 56, the mother of Brandon Lincoln Woodard, 31, who was shot
in the back of the head near Columbus Circle on Monday.
Despite the seemingly fruitless search of her son’s Playa del Rey condominium on
Wednesday evening, two detectives drove to Ms. Wellington’s Los Angeles home and
offered her some hope, she said.
“One of the detectives said they are very close,” Ms. Wellington said in a
telephone interview.
“The detectives promised me that they will find the people who did this to my
son,” she added.
Yet a day after what appeared to be a break in the case — the discovery of the
rented getaway vehicle in Queens — the New York police commissioner, Raymond W.
Kelly, said investigators still had no suspects.
“We’re certainly not in the position to identify a suspect here,” he said at an
unrelated news conference.
However, Mr. Kelly’s statement seemed to contradict reports saying the driver
had been identified and citing a law-enforcement official familiar with the
investigation.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, later said in a
statement — released to some reporters — that the police were concerned about
reports that the driver had been identified, adding that the gunman, “who
appears to be a professional,” may want to kill the driver.
Mr. Kelly said detectives knew who had rented the car, a Lincoln MKZ, from an
Avis location in Long Island, but he declined to provide details on what
relationship they had, if any, to the calculated killing on 58th Street, a block
from Central Park.
Detectives on Wednesday questioned a person who they believed may have
information on the killing. By Thursday, they had homed in on a name for the
driver of the car, according to a person familiar with the case.
The driver was characterized as a low-level criminal from Queens, and detectives
were operating on the theory that the gunman had a similar background, the
person said.
The absence of new details fueled the mystery surrounding the killing, which
appeared to have been highly planned and carried out with a chilling degree of
calm in a busy area. Rumors swirled among friends of Mr. Woodard in Los Angeles.
“Everyone is scared,” said one friend.
With microphones and cameras pressed in to record his words, Mr. Kelly chastised
the news media for publishing what he described as leaked information. “I would
also say that leaks in this case are undermining — or certainly have the
potential of undermining — the investigation,” he said.
Detectives had told Ms. Wellington that they would provide her with an inventory
sheet listing any items taken from her son’s three-story home. But after about
two hours of searching, two detectives from New York drove over to Ms.
Wellington’s Los Angeles home at about 9 p.m. on Wednesday and told her there
was no need to sign any police paperwork, she said.
“They just didn’t have a piece of paper for me to sign because they didn’t have
anything,” she said. She added that investigators already had her son’s laptop
because Mr. Woodard had left it with his luggage, which he had dropped with a
lobby valet at the hotel where he was staying.
The police have said that Mr. Woodard, a University of West Los Angeles Law
School student, had been arrested at least 20 times, mostly on drug offenses,
but had spent little time in jail. He had a court date next month in Los Angeles
on a cocaine possession charge.
William K.
Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Detectives ‘Found Nothing’ in Search of Shooting Victim’s California Home,
Mother Says, NYT, 13.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/nyregion/police-identity-one-suspect-in-midtown-killing.html
David Durk, Serpico’s Ally Against Graft, Dies at 77
November 13, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
David Durk, a New York police detective who with Officer Frank
Serpico shattered the infamous blue wall of silence to expose widespread
corruption in the city’s Police Department in the 1960s and ’70s, died on
Tuesday at his home in Putnam County, N.Y. He was 77.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his wife, Arlene, said. He had been treated for
mesothelioma for the past two years, she said.
An Amherst College graduate who studied law at Columbia University, Mr. Durk
joined the Police Department in 1963. He imagined a life of public service, as
he put it rosily years later, to help “an old lady walk the streets safely” and
“a storekeeper make a living without keeping a shotgun under his cash register.”
But what he found was a culture of corruption: of officers and superiors taking
payoffs from gamblers, drug dealers, merchants and mobsters for protection and
information, like the names of informers they wanted to kill; of officers
stealing and dealing drugs, riding shotgun for pushers and intimidating
witnesses.
In precinct after precinct, Mr. Durk found cash “pads” — lists of payoffs from
gamblers — with shares for officers, sergeants and higher-ups. And behind the
corruption, he discovered, was a litany of unwritten rules amounting to a
pervasive acceptance of the wrongdoing, even among those not on the take — a
code of silence, called the blue wall, which was corroding morale.
Mr. Durk refused to join in, and became a pariah. While he made many arrests and
was promoted to detective sergeant, he was shuttled among assignments, often
just to get rid of him.
In 1966, while attending classes for new plainclothes investigators, he met
Officer Serpico. He too had refused to take payoffs, and had been shunned — and
threatened — by fellow officers.
Beyond hating graft, they had little in common. Mr. Durk was a clean-cut
collegian with friends in government and the news media, wore conservative suits
and lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife and two daughters.
Officer Serpico was a shaggy, bearded loner who grew up in Brooklyn, served in
the Korean War, joined the police in 1959 and lived in Greenwich Village, a
serape-clad bohemian called Paco.
But in 1967 they became allies, and over the next few years they complained to
high-ranking police and City Hall officials, including Jay Kriegel, Mayor John
V. Lindsay’s police liaison, and Arnold G. Fraiman, the commissioner of
investigation.
They provided names, dates, places and other information, but were told that
nothing could be done. Mr. Fraiman later said the information was not specific
enough. Mr. Kriegel said City Hall was worried about alienating the police in a
period of civil disturbances.
As Mr. Durk recalled, “The fact is that almost wherever we turned in the Police
Department, wherever we turned in the city administration, and almost wherever
we went in the rest of the city, we were met not with cooperation, not with
appreciation, not with an eagerness to seek out the truth, but with suspicion
and hostility and laziness and inattention, and with our fear that at any moment
our efforts might be betrayed.”
Frustrated, they went to The New York Times. In a series of articles based on a
six-month inquiry, David Burnham reported in 1970 that drug dealers, gamblers
and merchants were making “illicit payments of millions of dollars a year to the
policemen of New York.”
Mayor Lindsay created a commission, with the lawyer Whitman Knapp as chairman,
to investigate. After testimony in 1971 from Detective Durk, Officer Serpico and
others, the commission found corruption was endemic. It said the mayor and the
former police commissioner Howard R. Leary had failed to act.
But the fallout was minimal. Dozens of officers were prosecuted, but no senior
police or city officials were charged. Politically, however, the hearings
virtually ended Mayor Lindsay’s presidential aspirations. Officer Serpico,
promoted to detective, was shot in the face in a drug raid in 1971, and retired
in 1972. But Detective Durk, promoted to lieutenant, remained in the department
for more than a decade, at times in elite investigative units but often in
lesser posts.
The 1973 Sidney Lumet film “Serpico,” based on the Peter Maas book “Serpico: The
Cop Who Defied the System,” minimized Mr. Durk’s role in the exposés. The film
lionized Mr. Serpico, played by Al Pacino, but gave Mr. Durk short shrift. (A
minor character based on Mr. Durk was given a fictional name.)
In a book review for The Times, Mary Perot Nichols, who headed radio and
television stations operated by New York City, called Mr. Serpico “honest and
brave,” but said it was Mr. Durk who had sustained their campaign with his
persistence and contacts. “It would be fair to say that without Durk, there
would have been no police corruption exposé in The New York Times, no Knapp
Commission investigations into the matter,” she wrote.
A 1996 biography by James Lardner, “Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career of
Detective David Durk,” offered a sympathetic treatment of its subject, who
received a share of the book’s earnings.
Books and films aside, Mr. Durk had been his own most eloquent spokesman.
“Corruption is not about money at all,” he told the Knapp Commission, “because
there is no amount of money that you can pay a cop to risk his life 365 days a
year. Being a cop is a vocation or it is nothing at all, and that’s what I saw
destroyed by the corruption of the New York City Police Department, destroyed
for me and for thousands of others like me.”
David Burton Durk was born in Manhattan on June 10, 1935, one of two sons of a
Manhattan doctor. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Amherst
with a degree in political science in 1958.
He married Arlene Lepow in 1959. In addition to her, he is survived by their two
daughters, Joan and Julie Durk.
After a year at Columbia, Mr. Durk sold East African carvings for a time, then
joined the Police Department. He patrolled in Harlem and Midtown Manhattan for
several years, arresting muggers and pickpockets.
College-educated officers were rare, and he moved up to jobs in the Chief of
Detectives office, the city’s Department of Investigation and the Internal
Affairs Division. In 1969, on a federal grant, he spent a year recruiting
officers on college campuses.
After the Knapp hearings, he continued pressing corruption reforms, but he found
himself largely persona non grata in the department, in other agencies he worked
for and even among some reporters, who regarded him as obsessively overzealous.
In 1973 and 1974 he worked with a federal investigation of underworld influence
in the garment center, but it was called off after 18 months. He was banished to
a small police office in Queens, then took a year’s leave at the United Nations
to study crime issues. He and his wife and Ira J. Silverman, an NBC producer,
wrote a book on heroin traffic, “The Pleasant Avenue Connection.”
In 1979, he took another leave to work on enforcement in the city’s Finance
Department. He pounced on tobacco companies that failed to pay taxes on
cigarettes given away in promotional campaigns. In 1985, he retired on a police
pension of $17,000 a year, and in later years was a professed whistle-blowers’
consultant.
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
David Durk, Serpico’s Ally Against Graft,
Dies at 77, NYT, 13.11.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/nyregion/david-durk-detective-who-exposed-police-corruption-dies-at-77.html
A Jane Doe Gets a Back Story
November 12, 2012
The New York Times
By JAMES GORMAN
As cold cases go, this one was frozen. Forty-one years ago a
young woman’s badly decomposed body was found floating under a highway overpass
at the southern end of Lake Panasoffkee, in central Florida, about an hour and a
half northeast of Tampa.
There was no clue to her identity, but one clear sign of her fate. “A man’s belt
was wrapped around her neck,” said Darren Norris, an investigator with the
Sumter County Sheriff’s office who is now in charge of the case. (The original
lead investigator was William O. Farmer, who is now sheriff.)
She was pulled from the water on Feb. 19, 1971, and detectives spent thousands
of hours in a futile effort to determine who she was and who might have killed
her. She was buried as Jane Doe.
But such cases are not easy to let go. A young woman’s life and body had been
thrown away. Detectives could not help but think of the family somewhere who had
lost a daughter. In 1986, the body was exhumed, for further investigation, which
again led nowhere. What the detectives had to go on, based on forensic science
at the time, was frustratingly sketchy: She was 17 to 24 years old, might have
had children, and seemed to be white or Native American. It wasn’t enough, and
as it turns out it was only partly correct.
Early this year, Detective Norris brought the skeleton of the victim, who early
on became known as Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee, to Erin Kimmerle, a forensic
anthropologist who directs the Tampa Bay Cold Case Project at the University of
South Florida.
Dr. Kimmerle reconstructed the woman’s face and clothing, took shavings of her
tooth enamel and bones, and recruited George Kamenov, a geochemist at the
University of Florida in Gainesville, to analyze chemical traces in those
shavings of lead, carbon and other elements that can give a surprisingly
detailed history of diet and environment.
This kind of study, called isotope analysis, is part of the tool kit of
geologists, archaeologists and paleontologists, but has only recently been used
in criminal cases.
Last week Dr. Kamenov reported at a meeting of the Geological Society of America
in Charlotte, N.C., on his work with Dr. Kimmerle and Detective Norris. His
conclusions were startling.
The young woman was not Native American, he told the society. The best evidence
suggested that she grew up in Greece and came to the United States less than a
year before she was killed. (Tarpon Springs, north of Tampa, has a large
Greek-American population.)
The research, said Detective Norris, “turned the case upside down.” Based on the
findings, he provided information for an article that was published Oct. 11 in
The National Herald, an international Greek-language newspaper. It was
accompanied by the new reconstructed image of the victim and her clothing.
The case is still not closed. The woman’s identity has not been determined, and
Detective Norris acknowledges that it is still a long shot.
But he is confident that he is on the right track. “The best lead that has ever
come in this case came because of the science,” he said — science that has
changed remarkably in the decades since the body was found.
Among the changes are better databases for skull measurements used to determine
ancestry; 3-D identification software for processing measurements and aiding in
producing reconstructions of a face; and isotope analysis. A forensic
investigation can now involve scientists from an array of fields, including
anthropology and chemistry.
“We’re all working together,” said Ann H. Ross, who developed the software
program “3D ID” and is professor of anthropology at North Carolina State
University. “That’s where it has changed dramatically.”
Isotope analysis is one of the newest tools. “It’s in its infancy now” in
criminal cases, Dr. Ross said.
One of the first times it was used in a criminal investigation was in the
gruesome case of the torso of a young boy, who came to be called Adam, found in
2001 in the Thames River in England. Traces of strontium and other elements that
accumulate in bones and other tissues led to Nigeria, and eventually to an area
near Benin City. He was eventually identified, but no one has been charged with
his murder.
The reason such an analysis can be done is that elements come in different
versions, called isotopes, that vary by mass. Rocks and soil in different
geographic locations have characteristic percentages of these isotopes, a kind
of signature. Geologists have been documenting these signatures for years,
creating geographic databases. Now, with mass spectrometers, a scientist can
read the signature of an element like strontium from a small sample of rock,
bone, hair or other material and match it to a location. In Adam’s case the
strontium signature matched pre-Cambrian rock in Nigeria.
Dr. Kimmerle, the Florida anthropologist, was working on human rights cases in
Benin City, Nigeria, when she talked to the police chief about Adam. “That’s
what inspired me,” she said. She now collects sample isotopes for all her cases.
And that’s why she recruited Dr. Kamenov, a geochemist, to whom she sent tooth
enamel and bone shavings from the remains of the murder victim.
Lead in the victim’s tooth enamel was what led Dr. Kamenov to his first
discovery — that she grew up in Europe. In the 1950s, both Europe and America
used leaded gasoline, and so lead ended up in the air, the dirt, the food and
the teeth of growing children. But the lead came from different sources, with
different signatures.
European gasoline had lead from Australia, Dr. Kamenov said. “The whole of
Europe was contaminated with this Australian lead,” he said. The young woman’s
tooth enamel showed she had grown up in Europe.
But where in Europe? For that, Dr. Kamenov looked at another element, oxygen,
also incorporated in growing teeth. People living near the sea have more of the
heavier oxygen isotopes: when seawater evaporates, the heavier molecules
(hydrogen and oxygen) fall closer to the coastline. The victim’s tooth enamel
showed heavier oxygen, which suggested she was from southern Europe.
He also looked more closely at databases showing fine variations of lead isotope
signatures in teeth and narrowed down her probable geographic origin to Greece,
probably south of Athens. But, he cautioned in an e-mail that this is just “the
most likely scenario based on all the data.” He put the probability at 60-70
percent that she was from Greece, but said there could be other locations in the
region with a similar lead signature. A final piece of evidence came from carbon
in her hair. Corn and wheat have different carbon signatures and Europeans have
a more wheat-based diet than do Americans.
In looking at samples from the growing root of the hair and the old tip, Dr.
Kamenov found a change: “The last hair that grew showed heavier carbon
isotopes.” The woman had moved to a corn-based diet during the time her hair was
growing, less than a year. She was a recent arrival in the United States.
And that discovery has given Detective Norris a slim edge in pursuing a very
old, very cold case. People who knew the victim may well be dead now, so such a
case is very hard to pursue. (Anyone with information may call the sheriff’s
office at (888) 231-2168.) But, Detective Norris said, “the advantage is modern
science comes along.”
He has another purpose in publicizing the case, he says: the hope that knowledge
of new forensic techniques will spread to other investigators.
“This science exists,” he said. “You can use it. It’s a great tool.”
A Jane Doe Gets a Back Story, NYT,
12.11.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/science/isotope-analysis-provides-clues-in-a-florida-cold-case.html
Crime Increases in Sacramento
After Deep Cuts to Police Force
November 3, 2012
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE
SACRAMENTO — At first, it seemed just an unwelcome nod to
frugality. Overtime for police officers was reduced. Vacant positions went
unfilled.
But each year brought more bad news for this city’s Police Department. In 2011,
faced with the biggest budget cuts yet — $12.2 million — Chief Rick Braziel was
forced to take drastic action: he laid off sworn officers and civilian
employees; eliminated the vice, narcotics, financial crimes and undercover gang
squads, sending many detectives back to patrol; and thinned the auto theft,
forensics and canine units. Police officers no longer responded to burglaries,
misdemeanors or minor traffic accidents.
Earlier this year, the traffic enforcement unit was disbanded. The department
now conducts follow-up investigations for only the most serious crimes, like
homicide and sexual assault.
“You reach the point where there is nothing left to cut,” Chief Braziel said.
The shrinking of Sacramento’s police force has been extreme; the department has
lost more than 300 sworn officers and civilian staff members and more than 30
percent of its budget since 2008. But at a time when many cities are curtailing
essential services like policing — the Los Angeles Police Department said last
week that it could lay off 160 civilian employees by Jan. 1 — the cutbacks in
this sprawling city of 472,000 offer a window on the potential consequences of
such economizing measures, criminal justice experts say.
“Sacramento may be a good city to watch in terms of what we can predict for the
future,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive
Research Forum.
Noting that crime rates have plummeted across the country in the last two
decades, Mr. Wexler said, “You could argue that the police have been doing
something right.” But with budgets being cut, he continued, “police chiefs are
caught between saying, ‘Look what we have done,’ and having to rethink the
strategies that have been successful.”
Chief Braziel said he had tried to make the cuts strategically, making sure that
the public’s highest priority — having a police officer respond in a timely
fashion when a 911 call comes in — is met and preserving a focus on violent
crimes. (“There’s no law that says you have to investigate homicides, but you
don’t just stop investigating homicides,” he said.) Detectives serve on regional
task forces led by the F.B.I. that focus on gangs and trafficking. To help
morale, Chief Braziel has also offered short-term rotations to patrol officers,
providing some variety now that their chances for promotion are severely
limited.
“I could cry all day long about the budget cuts and the 30 percent and the loss
of people and everything else,” Chief Braziel said. “But it doesn’t do any good
because you get dealt a hand of cards with a budget crisis and you’re playing
stud poker — you can’t give back the cards and say deal me two or three more.”
“You’ve got to figure out within the new rules of the game how to do it better,”
he said.
But he is not blind to the effects of paring down a police force to its core.
In 2011, Chief Braziel said, the cuts, in his opinion, went past the tipping
point. While homicides have remained steady, shootings — a more reliable
indicator of gun violence — are up 48 percent this year. Rapes, robberies,
aggravated assaults, burglaries and vehicle thefts have also increased, though
in smaller increments.
Complicating matters, the cutbacks have coincided with a flow of convicted
offenders back into the city as California, heeding a Supreme Court ruling, has
reduced its prison population. Once released, former inmates have less
supervision — the county’s probation department also suffered cuts.
Chief Braziel, an optimist by nature, said the reductions have in fact had some
benefits — more experienced officers on street patrols, for example. But the
gaps are increasingly evident.
When a patrol officer stopped a car a few weeks ago and found the driver in
possession of half a pound of recently cooked methamphetamine, worth $20,000 on
the street, there was no one to spend the 10 hours it would take to write up and
execute a search warrant for the man’s residence, despite the suspicion that a
meth laboratory would be found there.
“It’s frustrating,” said the officer, Darrald Bryan, who had worked his way up
to an investigative job in the robbery unit but was sent back to patrol last
year along with 24 other detectives, a demotion that involved a 5 percent pay
cut, a switch to the graveyard shift in order to keep his weekends off and the
loss of his take-home car.
“You just don’t have the manpower,” said Officer Bryan, adding that the best he
could do was arrest the man for possession and sale of narcotics. Now that the
gang squad is gone, patrol officers take turns in 90-day assignments that focus
on gang activity. But undercover work is a thing of the past, and a highly
successful program called Ceasefire, intended to reduce gang violence, was
halted for lack of money, staffing and community resources.
Sacramento has consistently ranked at the top for traffic accidents among cities
of similar size in California. But with the demise of the traffic enforcement
unit, citations are down, volunteers have to be called in for large-scale events
like races and parades, and efforts to analyze the city’s most collision-prone
intersections and address their hazards have been abandoned.
Teams of police officers — known as problem-oriented policing teams — once
worked the city’s troubled neighborhoods, following up with residents, landlords
and government offices to solve problems identified on patrol. But those teams,
too, were a casualty of the 2011 cuts.
“Would I rather be a drug dealer, a speeder or, if I was involved in the
prostitution trade, would I rather be involved in that today as opposed to four
years ago? Absolutely,” said Lt. Justin Eklund of the major crimes section. “The
issue comes down to, ‘If we have X amount of bodies, what are we going to do?’ ”
Not every attempt to prioritize has worked out as planned. Burglaries had been
dropped from the list of crimes that officers responded to. But that policy has
now been reversed, after patrol officers heard complaints and residents resisted
filing the online reports that were intended as a substitute.
For many residents, said Deputy Chief Dana Matthes, “the one time in their life
they have to call the police is because their house is burglarized, and we tell
them: ‘Oh, report that online. We can’t come out.’ It doesn’t send that customer
service message that we’re there for them.”
A local sales tax measure on the ballot in Tuesday’s election could restore some
financing for the Police Department and other essential services in Sacramento.
But Chief Braziel said the budget crisis had forced the department to re-examine
how it is organized and what its priorities should be. Even when the economy
relents, he said, some things may be done differently. “You’ve got to have a
business model,” he said. “The world’s changing, and you’ve got to change.
You’ve got to get out in front of it.”
Bernard K. Melekian, the director of the Department of Justice’s Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services, said a similar rethinking was taking place
across the country as departments coped with dwindling budgets. Many are
consolidating services or merging with other agencies to form regional law
enforcement authorities — in November, Camden, N.J., will close its department,
terminating 273 officers and ceding control to a county police force.
The result, Mr. Melekian said, will be significant shifts in how policing is
practiced. Whether the outcome will be simply an increase in efficiency or an
increase in crime is anyone’s guess.
“That’s the big question that everybody is looking at,” he said.
Crime Increases in Sacramento After Deep
Cuts to Police Force, NYT, 3.11.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/us/after-deep-police-cuts-sacramento-sees-rise-in-crime.html
Upper West Side Nanny Is Charged With Murder
in 2 Children’s Deaths
November 3, 2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
A nanny accused of killing the two young children she was
caring for on Oct. 25 in their Upper West Side apartment was charged on Saturday
night with first-degree murder, the police said.
The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, was charged with fatally stabbing the children,
Lucia Krim, 6, and her brother, Leo, 2, shortly before their mother, Marina
Krim, returned from a swimming lesson with her other young daughter.
The police said they had delayed charging Ms. Ortega for more than a week
because she was intubated and unable to speak as doctors treated wounds she
received when she stabbed herself in the throat and slashed her wrists.
Ms. Ortega talked with New York City detectives on Saturday afternoon from her
bed at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she remains
under police guard, Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said in a
statement.
Mr. Browne gave no details about Ms. Ortega’s condition nor any indication of
when she would leave the hospital.
He also declined to give information about a possible motive.
On the day of the killing, Ms. Krim returned home in the early evening with her
3-year-old daughter to find her two other children dead of knife wounds in the
bathtub. As Ms. Krim walked into the bathroom, police said, Ms. Ortega plunged a
kitchen knife into her own throat.
Ms. Ortega, who police said was a naturalized American citizen from the
Dominican Republic, had been referred to the Krims by a family friend and had
worked for them for about two years. Police said there was no record of her
having committed a previous crime or any indication that there were tensions
between her and the Krims.
But relatives and friends of Ms. Ortega have said that she seemed to have been
unraveling lately and had sought help from a mental health professional. Her
home, which she shared with several relatives including her teenage son, was
crowded, and she had financial difficulties.
Upper West Side Nanny Is Charged With
Murder in 2 Children’s Deaths, NYT, 3.11.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/nyregion/upper-west-side-nanny-is-charged-with-murder.html
Police: Man Charged in Ore. Killing Left Evidence
October 27, 2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon man charged in the Oct. 16
death of a 21-year-old barista unwittingly left a trail of evidence as police
followed him in the hours before his arrest, court documents show.
On Oct. 19, Jonathan Holt discarded one handgun in bushes at his north Portland
workplace, according to documents released Friday.
Investigators say he dropped another handgun in the grass outside the suburban
Gresham Police Department, just before he entered for an interview at which
police say he confessed to sexually abusing and killing Whitney Heichel of
Gresham. Holt was arrested during that interview.
During a brief court appearance Friday, Holt, 25, was indicted on charges of
kidnap, robbery and sodomy. He was earlier charged with aggravated murder.
Lawyer Conor Thomas Huseby, appointed to represent Holt, declined to answer
questions.
Hundreds of people from around the Portland area gathered Friday at a Jehovah's
Witness Kingdom Hall in Gresham for a public memorial for Heichel.
Her husband, Clint Heichel, spoke to reporters outside the hall, saying the
family wanted to "give the community a hug" and thank people for their kindness.
"She was just a ray of sunshine," he said.
In the hours after the young woman failed to show up for work at a Starbucks
cafe on Oct. 16, relatives and friends launched a wide-ranging search. However,
Holt, who was a neighbor, an acquaintance and attended the same church, was
nowhere to be found, The Oregonian reported.
When friends finally spotted Holt nearly 12 hours later, court documents say he
told them he had been on his way to work that day when he was robbed at gunpoint
by two black men.
Holt didn't report that robbery to police that day but when questioned by
officers for the first time on Oct. 17, he said he'd been shaken by the
experience and spent the entire day walking and crying. Police say Holt
repeatedly changed his story about the supposed robbery.
Whitney Heichel's Ford Explorer, with the passenger side window smashed, was
found at a Walmart six hours after she disappeared, triggering an investigation
that ended with the discovery of her body on Larch Mountain, east of Gresham, on
the night of Oct. 19.
Court documents released earlier say that Holt told Oregon State Police Sgt. Jon
Harrington that he waited outside Heichel's apartment and asked for a ride as
she was leaving for work.
Minutes into the drive, he pulled a handgun and told her to drive to Roslyn
Lake, the document said.
Holt then forced Heichel to perform oral sex before fatally shooting her, the
affidavit stated, adding that Holt disposed of his cellphone at the lake before
driving to the mountain to conceal the body.
Heichel was shot four times.
___
Information from: The Oregonian,
http://www.oregonlive.com
Police: Man Charged in Ore. Killing Left
Evidence, NYT, 27.10.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/10/27/us/ap-or-barista-killed.html
Shot
After Interrupting a Robbery in the Bronx,
an
Off-Duty Officer Kills a Suspect
October 24,
2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
An off-duty
New York City police officer was shot in the chest on Wednesday evening after
interrupting a robbery on a Bronx street, but he continued to pursue three
fleeing suspects, fatally shooting one of them, the authorities said.
The encounter occurred around 6:30 p.m. near Bronx Community College, witnesses
said.
The officer, identified as Ivan Marcano, 27, lives in the area and was driving
with his girlfriend when they noticed two men who appeared to be robbing another
man in front of 1898 Harrison Avenue, the police said.
Officer Marcano stepped out of his car and displayed his badge and gun, Police
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference. One of the suspects
opened fire, hitting the officer in the chest, Mr. Kelly said. Officer Marcano
was in stable condition at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center late Wednesday.
After the officer was hit, the two suspects fled with a third man in a white
Mustang, and Officer Marcano returned to his car, intending to go to the
hospital with his girlfriend behind the wheel, Mr. Kelly said.
But within a block, the officer and the suspects crossed paths again. In their
effort to escape, the suspects had crashed into a livery cab and tried to run
away. After seeing the suspects again, Officer Marcano got out of his car and
drew his gun, the police said.
“Holding his left hand over his wound, with his gun in his right hand, Officer
Marcano moved to the middle of the street, took cover behind a livery cab,
yelled to passers-by to get down and fired,” Mr. Kelly said. “He moved a second
time, still holding his hand over his wound, to the west side of Harrison
Avenue, where he took cover behind a parked car and fired another round at the
suspects.”
It was unclear whether the suspects returned fire. Officer Marcano shot one in
the head, killing him, the police said. The other two suspects split up and ran
off. Officer Marcano chased one of them, but he got away. Both remained at large
late Wednesday.
Officer Marcano, who began his career as a transit officer in 2007, happened
upon an ambulance parked in the area and was taken to the hospital, Mr. Kelly
said. The officer had a bullet lodged in his chest, the police said. The round
had grazed his left arm, entered the left side of his chest, narrowly missing
his heart, exited and re-entered his right side, where it ricocheted, fractured
one of his ribs and lodged in the right side of his chest, the police said.
A .380-caliber semiautomatic weapon was recovered at the scene, the authorities
said.
Dozens of police officers, some wearing riot gear, converged on the area
Wednesday night, blocking off streets as they searched for the two suspects.
Some residents complained that they could not get home to their children. Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg, who visited Officer Marcano in the hospital, said 12 New
York police officers had been shot so far this year.
“Police Officer Marcano was protecting our city and putting his life on the
line, even when he was off duty,” Mr. Bloomberg said.
Wendy Ruderman
and Stacey Stowe contributed reporting.
Shot After Interrupting a Robbery in the Bronx, an Off-Duty Officer Kills a
Suspect, NYT, 24.10.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/nyregion/shot-after-interrupting-robbery-officer-kills-suspect-police-say.html
Police Fatally Shoot an Unarmed Driver
on the Grand Central Parkway
October 4, 2012
The New York Times
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and WENDY RUDERMAN
A New York police detective shot and killed an unarmed man,
whose hands, a witness said, were on the steering wheel of his Honda, after he
had been pulled over early Thursday for cutting off two police trucks on the
Grand Central Parkway in Queens, the authorities said.
The shooting, which occurred at 5:15 a.m., was the latest in a series of
episodes in which police officers fatally shot or wounded civilians. While the
Police Department had explanations in the other instances, it could not
immediately provide one for the shooting on Thursday.
The detective, Hassan Hamdy, 39, a 14-year veteran assigned to the Emergency
Service Unit, fired one bullet through an open window of the car, which his
squad had just pulled over with the help of a second police vehicle. The bullet
struck the driver, Noel Polanco, 22, in the abdomen. He was declared dead less
than an hour later at New York Hospital Queens.
Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, initially said there were
reports of movement inside the car, although he did not elaborate. Mr. Browne
said a small power drill was found on the floor on the driver’s side, but he
later appeared to play down the importance of that information.
“We looked for a weapon, we didn’t find any; we found a drill,” he said in a
news briefing at Police Headquarters. “I’m not saying it played a role. I’m just
saying we looked for a weapon. We did not find a weapon. The only thing we found
was that drill.”
A passenger in Mr. Polanco’s car, Diane Deferrari, said in a phone interview
Thursday night that just before pulling the car over, officers appeared irate
that Mr. Polanco had cut them off. She said that one of the officers — but not
Detective Hamdy — stuck up his middle finger and was screaming obscenities from
one of the moving police trucks.
“As soon as we stopped — they were rushing the car,” Ms. Deferrari said. “It was
like an army.”
She said a group of officers swarmed the car, yelling for the three people in
Mr. Polanco’s car to put their hands up. Mr. Polanco, whose hands were still on
the steering wheel, had no time to comply, Ms. Deferrari said. At that instant,
a shot rang out, and Mr. Polanco gasped for air, she said.
“I felt the powder in my face,” she said.
Officers then dragged Mr. Polanco from the car and onto the highway, where
traffic was snarled, as early-morning commuters slowed to look, she said.
“This is all a case of road rage on behalf of the N.Y.P.D. — that’s all this
is,” she said.
Mr. Browne said late Thursday that Ms. Deferrari’s assertions would “be
investigated in the ongoing review of the shooting by the district attorney and
Internal Affairs.”
The shooting followed a string of fatal police encounters. In August, the police
shot and killed a 51-year-old man armed with a long kitchen knife in Times
Square; the police said the man had lunged at them.
Also in August, two officers fatally shot an armed gunman who had just killed a
former co-worker outside the Empire State Building. In that shooting, nine
bystanders were injured by bullets or ricochet fragments.
Last month, an officer inadvertently shot and killed a Bronx bodega employee: he
was fleeing armed robbers and collided with the officer, whose gun accidentally
discharged. And last week, officers with the Emergency Service Unit killed a
Harlem man in the doorway of his apartment; the police said they had
unsuccessfully tried to subdue him and he had lunged at them with a knife.
Police union officials were perplexed by the shooting on the parkway.
“I see a spike in police shootings; I do,” said Edward Mullins, president of the
Sergeants Benevolent Association. “For the most part, they are all coming back
as justified. This is the first one that’s up for question.”
Mr. Mullins said the reason for the shooting was unclear. He said the shooting,
like any other, would be thoroughly investigated by the Police Department and
the Queens district attorney.
“It’s tragic and unfortunate,” he said. “Things like this happen. It’s sad. It’s
not supposed to happen.”
“I’ve never met a police officer who went to work to deliberately be involved in
this type of incident,” he added. “My understanding of this officer is that he
is highly thought of in the department.”
The episode began early Thursday at the Ice NYC in Astoria, Queens, where Mr.
Polanco, who worked at a local Honda dealership, also worked part time, in the
hookah part of the bar, where he filled and served tobacco waterpipes. He was
also a member of the New York Army National Guard.
Mr. Polanco, who lived with his mother, arrived at the club around 3 a.m., the
club’s manager, Moez Abouelnaga, said. “He came to pick up the bartender,” he
said, referring to Ms. Deferrari; they lived in the same apartment building.
“Anytime you need something, he would never say no.”
Brian Benstock, the general manager at Paragon Honda on Northern Boulevard,
where Mr. Polanco worked, said: “He was a hard-working guy, an active-duty
military guy — disciplined and polite. He did what he was supposed to do.”
Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said the bartender, Ms. Deferrari, who wrapped
up work sometime after 4 a.m., had served a Hennessy Cognac to Mr. Polanco and
her friend, an off-duty police officer, Vanessa Rodriguez, also at the bar.
Officer Rodriguez was on restricted duty because she was arrested in June and
accused of shoplifting.
Nelson De La Rosa, a party planner at the club, said Mr. Polanco was not drunk.
“He had a beer and a hookah,” he said. “I was sitting next to him since he got
there.”
After leaving the club around 5 a.m., the police said, Mr. Polanco, Ms.
Deferrari and Officer Rodriguez got into his car and he drove onto the parkway.
Less than 15 minutes later, the police said, the black Honda that Mr. Polanco
was driving crossed from the right lane into the middle lane and squeezed
between the two police trucks, which were from the Emergency Service Unit. The
officers in the trucks had just executed a search warrant in the Bronx and were
on their way to Brooklyn to execute another warrant, the police said.
The Honda, which the police said was speeding, then shifted to the left lane and
began to tailgate a car, the police said. Mr. Polanco then swung back between
the two police vehicles, and the officers in them turned on their sirens, Mr.
Browne said.
The police trucks sandwiched the car, forcing it to slow down and stop, the
police said.
Just before Mr. Polanco stopped the car, Ms. Deferrari was arguing with him,
urging him to slow down, Mr. Browne said.
“She was frightened by his driving,” Mr. Browne said.
At the stop, along a median of the busy parkway, two officers approached the
car, a sergeant at the driver’s side and the detective at the passenger side,
where the window was open, the police said. Ms. Deferrari, who was seated there,
later told the police that she had heard the officers tell those inside the car
to show their hands.
Officer Rodriguez was asleep in the back seat when the gun went off, the police
said. The blast woke her, and she identified herself as an officer, the police
said.
Mr. Browne said Ms. Deferrari told investigators that when the officers ordered
her to put her hands up, she complied, but Mr. Polanco, when last she looked,
had his hands on the steering wheel.
“What she said was that she complied with the officer’s directions to raise
their hands,” Mr. Browne said. “She said the last time she looked at the driver,
his hands were still on the wheel.”
At that point, Detective Hamdy fired a single shot through the open passenger
window, striking Mr. Polanco. Mr. Browne said he did not know exactly where the
sergeant, approaching the driver’s side, was standing when the shot was fired.
Mr. Browne said that what prompted the shooting was unknown, as investigators
had not yet interviewed Detective Hamdy.
For legal reasons, to protect officers from self-incrimination, investigators
cannot immediately interview officers directly involved in a police shooting.
Detective Hamdy, who joined the force in 1998, had never fired his gun on duty
before, the police said. He had worked his way up to the elite Emergency Service
Unit, where he had been recently assigned to a team of highly trained officers
who specialize in apprehending violent felony suspects.
Late Thursday night, friends and co-workers of Mr. Polanco gathered outside Ice
NYC, where people signed photos of Mr. Polanco that were taped to a lamppost.
Friends brought flowers, and a cardboard box filled with candles rested outside,
along with a hookah that some took turns puffing from.
Alain Delaquérière and Alex Vadukul contributed reporting.
Police Fatally Shoot an Unarmed Driver on
the Grand Central Parkway, NYT, 4.10.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/nyregion/police-stop-and-fatally-shoot-unarmed-driver-on-a-parkway-in-queens.html
To Fight Crime, a Poor City Will Trade In Its Police
September 28, 2012
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE
CAMDEN, N.J. — Two gruesome murders of children last month — a
toddler decapitated, a 6-year-old stabbed in his sleep — served as reminders of
this city’s reputation as the most dangerous in America. Others can be found
along the blocks of row houses spray-painted “R.I.P.,” empty liquor bottles
clustered on their porches in memorial to murder victims.
The police acknowledge that they have all but ceded these streets to crime, with
murders on track to break records this year. And now, in a desperate move to
regain control, city officials are planning to disband the Police Department.
The reason, officials say, is that generous union contracts have made it
financially impossible to keep enough officers on the street. So in November,
Camden, which has already had substantial police layoffs, will begin terminating
the remaining 273 officers and give control to a new county force. The move,
officials say, will free up millions to hire a larger, nonunionized force of 400
officers to safeguard the city, which is also the nation’s poorest.
Hardly a political battle of the last several years has been fiercer than the
one over the fate of public sector unions. But Camden’s decision to remake
perhaps the most essential public service for a city riven by crime underscores
how communities are taking previously unimaginable steps to get out from under
union obligations that built up over generations.
Though the city is solidly Democratic, the plan to put the Police Department out
of business has not prompted the wide public outcry seen in the union battles in
Chicago, Ohio or Wisconsin, in part because many residents have come to resent a
police force they see as incompetent, corrupt and doing little to make their
streets safe.
A police union has sued to stop the move, saying it is risking public safety on
an “unproven” idea. But many residents, community groups and elected officials
say that the city is simply out of money, out of options, out of patience.
“There’s no alternative, there’s no Plan B,” the City Council president, Frank
Moran, said. “It’s the only option we have.”
Faced with tight budgets, many communities across the country are considering
regionalizing their police departments, along with other services like
firefighting, libraries and schools. Though some governments have rejected the
idea for fear of increasing police response time, the police in Camden —
population 77,000 — are already so overloaded they no longer respond to property
crimes or car accidents that do not involve injuries.
The new effort follows a push by New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, a
Republican, and Democratic leaders in the Legislature to encourage cities and
towns to regionalize government services. They maintain that in a new era of
government austerity, it is no longer possible for each community to offer a
full buffet of government services, especially with a new law prohibiting
communities from raising property taxes more than 2 percent a year.
Most municipalities have so far remained committed to local traditions, fearing
a loss of community identity, but officials in Camden County say they expect
others will soon feel compelled to follow the city’s example.
Camden’s budget was $167 million last year, and of that, the budget for the
police was $55 million. Yet the city collected only $21 million in property
taxes. It has relied on state aid to make up the difference, but the state is
turning off the spigot. The city has imposed furloughs, reduced salaries and
trash collection, and increased fees. But the businesses the city desperately
needs to attract to generate more revenue are scared off by the crime.
“We cannot move the city forward unless we address public safety,” the mayor,
Dana L. Redd, said. “This is about putting boots on the ground.”
Even union officials acknowledge that the contract is rich with expensive
provisions. For example, officers earn an additional 4 percent for working a day
shift, and an additional 10 percent for the shift starting at 9:30 p.m. They
earn an additional 11 percent for working on a special tactical force or an
anticrime patrol.
Salaries range from about $47,000 to $81,000 now, not including the shift
differentials or additional longevity payments of 3 percent to 11 percent for
any officer who has worked five years or more. Officials say they anticipate
salaries for the new force will range from $47,000 to $87,000.
In 2009, as the economy was putting a freeze on municipal budgets even in
well-off communities, the police here secured a pay increase of 3.75 percent.
And liberal sick time and family-leave policies have created an unusually high
absentee rate: every day, nearly 30 percent of the force does not show up. (A
typical rate elsewhere is in the single digits.)
“How do I go to the community and say ‘I’m doing everything I can to help you
fight crime’ when some of my officers are working better hours than bankers?”
the police chief, J. Scott Thomson, asked.
Chief Thomson, who is well regarded nationally, is expected to lead the new
force. Though Camden County covers 220 square miles and includes 37
municipalities, the proposal calls for a division focused exclusively on the
nine-square-mile city of Camden.
Camden, in the shadow of Philadelphia’s glimmering towers, once had a thriving
industrial base — a shipyard, Campbell Soup and RCA plants along the waterfront.
About 60,000 jobs were lost when those companies moved or shifted them
elsewhere.
Nearly one in five of its residents is unemployed, and Broadway, once the main
shopping strip, is now a canyon of abandoned buildings.
The burned-out shell of one house, a landmark built by one of the city’s
founding families, has become a drug den.
This month, a heroin user there demanded that a passer-by give her some privacy
to use it. “Can you show me a little respect?” she said. “I’m in a park.”
Camden reorganized its Police Department in 2008 and had a lower homicide rate
for two years. Then the recession forced layoffs, reducing the force by about
100 officers.
The city has employed other crime-fighting tactics — surveillance cameras,
better lighting, curfews for children — but the number of murders has risen
again: at 48 so far this year, it is on pace to break the record, 58.
The murder rate so far this year is above 6 people per 10,000. By contrast, New
York City’s rate is just over one-third of a person per 10,000 residents.
Many of the drug users come to Camden from elsewhere in the county, getting off
the light-rail system to buy from the drug markets along what police call Heroin
Highway in the neighborhood of North Camden.
“That is cocaine, that is heroin, that is crack,” Bryan Morton, a community
activist, said recently as he used his car key to flick away empty bags while
his 3-year-old daughter played nearby. This summer, Mr. Morton tried to set up
the city’s first Little League in 15 years in nearby Pyne Poynt Park. Drug users
colonized even the portable toilets set up for the players, littering them with
empty glassine drug packets and needle caps.
Like other residents, he is resentful of the police union for making it so
prohibitive to hire more officers. “The contract is creating a public safety
crisis,” Mr. Morton said. “More officers could change the complexion of this
neighborhood.”
John Williamson, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, blamed the city
for creating the problems by shifting officers onto patrols, where they receive
extra pay, from administrative positions. He said he was open to negotiation but
believed that the city simply wanted to get rid of the contract.
“They want to go back to a 1930s atmosphere where employees and officers have
absolutely no rights to redress bad management and poor working conditions,” he
said.
Under labor law, the current contract will remain in effect if the new county
force hires more than 49 percent of the current officers. So county officials
say they will hire fewer than that. Nevertheless, they expect that the new force
will eventually become unionized.
Officials say that simply adding officers will not make all the difference,
given the deep suspicion many residents harbor toward the police. As the chief
and his deputy drove through the Whitman Park neighborhood this month, people
sitting on their stoops stood up to shake their fists and shout obscenities at
them. When police officers arrested a person suspected of dealing drugs in a
house on a narrow street in North Camden last year, residents set upon their
cars and freed the prisoner.
The new county officers will be brought in 25 at a time, while the existing
force is still in place, and trained on neighborhood streets, in the hopes that
they can become part of their fabric and regain trust.
Ian K. Leonard, a member of the Camden County Board of Freeholders and the state
political director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said
he did not blame the union officials who won the provisions. But he said he
believed that the contracts were helping to perpetuate the “most dangerous city
in America” title that he and others hate.
“If you add police, it will give us a fighting chance,” Mr. Leonard said.
“People need a fighting chance.”
To Fight
Crime, a Poor City Will Trade In Its Police, NYT, 28.9.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/nyregion/overrun-by-crime-camden-trades-in-its-police-force.html
Police Comb a Dense Forest for a Suspect in a Killing
September 26, 2012
The New York Times
By VIVIAN YEE and NATE SCHWEBER
Eugene Palmer was always a loner, his neighbors in the
Rockland County town of Haverstraw said. Armed with a shotgun, they said, Mr.
Palmer often menaced people who strayed uninvited onto his hilly, overgrown
property, and he was known to retreat into the woods near his home to camp and
hunt.
It was to those woods that he fled on Monday night after, the police said, he
killed his son’s estranged wife, Tammy Palmer, 39, who had lived with his son
and their two children in a trailer home 50 feet from Mr. Palmer’s house.
According to The Journal News, Mr. Palmer told his sister that he needed an hour
to escape the authorities, then, carrying at least one gun, he disappeared into
Harriman State Park, which stretches over more than 46,000 acres. That led the
police on a manhunt that had not ended by Wednesday night.
Charles Miller, the Haverstraw police chief, said about 30 armed officers were
scouring the woods in teams. Around 4 p.m. Wednesday, about a dozen officers
could be seen massing on the southwest side of Lake Welch, about two miles from
Mr. Palmer’s home and the scene of the shooting.
As the search dragged on, turning up possible traces of Mr. Palmer’s flight —
his green pickup truck abandoned here, an ashy campfire there — people in
Haverstraw began predicting a bad ending to what had already been several weeks
of violence and tension among Mr. Palmer, 73; his son John Palmer; and Tammy
Palmer over a restraining order that Ms. Palmer had filed against her husband
about a month ago.
“He’s very coldhearted,” John Pannirello, Ms. Palmer’s father, said of the elder
Mr. Palmer. “The detective says he won’t be surprised if something goes on
between us and him, if he has guns with him. I just have a bad, bad feeling.”
The police believe that Mr. Palmer, an avid outdoorsman who does not appear to
have a criminal record, is carrying a shotgun, and they said that a rifle was
also missing from his home. Chief Miller said his officers were prepared.
“They’re all armed, and they have bulletproof vests,” he said. “They’re being
diligent out there.”
The Palmers and Pannirellos have been intertwined since Ms. Palmer’s older
sister had a son with John Palmer’s older brother 20 years ago. Tammy and John
separated about five months ago, Mr. Pannirello said. She filed a restraining
order after he continued to show up at her home.
The couple had been married for about 17 years, Mr. Pannirello said — painful
years for his daughter. In the past few weeks, there had been a custody battle
for the children. Efforts to reach the younger Mr. Palmer on Wednesday were
unsuccessful.
The elder Mr. Palmer, whose family has lived in the same secluded acres at the
edge of Haverstraw for generations, did not make life much easier, Mr.
Pannirello said. He railed against the restraining order, demanding that Ms.
Palmer leave and shutting off the trailer’s electricity when she refused, Mr.
Pannirello said; he also spied on her through binoculars and hurled racial
epithets at his granddaughter’s friend. Days before the shooting, he told her,
“This is your last chance,” while holding a gun in his pocket, and Ms. Palmer
responded by threatening him with a log, Mr. Pannirello said.
Mr. Pannirello said that the police had asked him to give up his rifle and had
posted officers around his house, fearing that the elder Mr. Palmer might show
up, he said.
Mr. Palmer, a diabetic, had a heart attack last year, and the police do not know
if he is carrying any medicine, Chief Miller said.
On Tuesday, police dogs trailed a scent from Mr. Palmer’s abandoned pickup truck
to an area of the park known as the Irish Potato Trail before losing the scent.
The police also found the remnants of a campfire that they believed to be Mr.
Palmer’s. On Wednesday, the Department of Defense sent a helicopter equipped
with infrared technology to aid the search, which has been hampered by the
thickness of the woods.
At the home of Elaine Babcock, the elder Mr. Palmer’s sister, about a dozen
relatives and friends had gathered Wednesday, shooing away reporters.
“Right now, he’s a desperate man, and there’s no telling what he’s going to do,”
one neighbor who would give only his first name, Tommy, said of the elder Mr.
Palmer. “He’s definitely not right in the head right now.”
Marc Santora contributed reporting.
Police Comb a Dense Forest for a Suspect in
a Killing, NYT, 26.9.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/nyregion/police-search-harriman-state-park-in-hunt-for-eugene-palmer.html
Losing Faith in Stop-and-Frisk
September 26, 2012
The New York Times
The Bronx district attorney’s office showed sound judgment
when it told the New York Police Department that it would no longer prosecute
people stopped for trespassing, unless the officers could demonstrate that the
arrests were warranted.
The trespassing arrests are a variant of the broad stop-and-frisk program that
has been challenged by civil rights lawsuits filed over the last several years.
Last year, New Yorkers, nearly all of whom were innocent of any crime, were
stopped by the police nearly 700,000 times.
Documents filed this week in Ligon v. City of New York — a lawsuit brought on
behalf of people who say they were illegally stopped, ticketed or arrested for
trespassing, some in their own buildings — shows that the Bronx district
attorney’s office had serious concerns about such arrests as far back as three
years ago. These arrests were made in public housing developments or under the
Clean Halls program, which allows police to patrol the hallways of private
buildings to prevent crime.
As The Times’s Joseph Goldstein reported Wednesday, the Bronx district
attorney’s office quietly notified the Police Department in July that it knew of
people who had been arrested on charges of trespassing, though they were
identified as guests by residents in the buildings. As a result, the office
said, it would no longer automatically prosecute people charged with trespassing
in public housing or Clean Halls buildings.
This was apparently not the first time that the Bronx district attorney had
complained about this problem. Lawyers for the Ligon plaintiffs asserted that
the prosecutors had told the Police Department in 2009 that some trespassing
arrests were not legally justified. By 2011, the prosecutor had become so
concerned about the lawfulness of stops made outside of Clean Halls buildings
that it “started routinely to decline to prosecute” outdoor arrests, according
to court documents.
The Police Department says that it found no wrongdoing by police officers after
conducting a thorough investigation. The department asserts that the district
attorney did not provide specific examples of bad arrests and notes that it
retrained officers after receiving complaints.
Even so, descriptions of police conduct in this case are disturbingly consistent
with those cited by civil rights attorneys in Floyd v. City of New York, a
federal class-action suit that challenges the legality of the Police
Department’s stop-and-frisk program. In the Ligon and Floyd suits, analyses of
police records show that the cops routinely stopped people for vague “furtive
movements” and that stops often fail to meet legal standards, which require
“reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been committed or is about to take
place.
The Police Department is clearly fuming about the Bronx district attorney’s
stance. But that office should be applauded for sparing people unfair or
unlawful prosecution. Other district attorneys in the city should follow that
lead.
Losing Faith in Stop-and-Frisk, NYT,
26.9.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/opinion/losing-faith-in-stop-and-frisk.html
A Watcher of the Police Says He Is Now a Target
September 9, 2012
The New York Times
By KIA GREGORY
In the streets of his native Harlem, Joseph Hayden is a
familiar presence, patrolling the neighborhood with his video camera, ready to
document interactions between the police and the residents they stop — and doing
so at an age when most people have retired.
“Like I tell them,” Mr. Hayden, 71, said recently of the police, “I’m on your
side to make sure there is courtesy, professionalism and respect. Isn’t that
what you advertise on the side of your car?”
“Seems like you’d want me to do it,” he added, “unless what you’re providing is
not courtesy, professionalism and respect.”
Mr. Hayden found himself on the receiving end of police scrutiny one evening
last December, when he was arrested on charges of weapons possession after a
traffic stop.
Mr. Hayden, known as Jazz, said that his arrest was the product of a “bogus stop
and frisk,” and that it stemmed from his visible activism: he posts his videos
on a Web site, All Things Harlem.
“Our work galvanized them to push back, which resulted in my arrest,” Mr. Hayden
said as he drove his old Jeep through his neighborhood one afternoon.
As he fights to have the charges dropped, Mr. Hayden’s efforts have gathered
support. There is an online petition with more than 2,000 names, as well as a
letter-writing campaign to the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.,
whom Mr. Hayden interviewed for his Web site when Mr. Vance was running for
election. There have also been rallies, the most recent held last week outside
Mr. Vance’s office.
His supporters characterize him as a leader in the growing field of a certain
brand of citizen journalism, whose practitioners post videos or offer live
streaming of encounters involving the police.
“What Jazz is doing, it sparked this cop-watch thing,” said Christina Gonzalez,
25, a Harlem resident who, along with her partner, Matthew Swaye, has posted
videos of police actions on YouTube. Their work led to their being characterized
as “professional agitators” on a Police Department flier posted at the 30th
Precinct station house in Harlem. “Even if my card is full or my camera is
dead,” Ms. Gonzalez said, “I want officers to know they’re being watched.”
Mr. Hayden is a short, gray-bearded man with faint tattoos on his brawny arms.
He had a criminal history long before his current legal troubles. He was first
convicted at 16 for heroin possession, and his other convictions include ones
for manslaughter and laundering money for organized crime. But he said he
believed that the pending charges stemmed from a video that he recorded one
night outside the Seville Lounge in July 2011.
The video displays his usual journalistic style, which he concedes tends to be
aggressive. In it, he peppers officers with questions as they search a car, with
the two occupants standing by the curb: What had the occupants done to prompt
the search? Had they been violent, or displayed any weapons?
Several times, Mr. Hayden lets the officers know, “Yeah, I got you,” aiming his
camera into the glare of a police flashlight.
Mr. Hayden advises the driver not to give permission for the search, then
resumes his commentary. “This is what Harlem has turned into,” he says, “an
open-air prison. You can get stopped for anything.”
At some point, a man — Mr. Hayden said it was one of the officers — asks him:
“You done selling drugs yet or what? I know your rap sheet.”
“You done abusing your authority?” Mr. Hayden spits back. The two trade barbs.
Months later, Mr. Hayden said, the same officers pulled him over at West 132nd
Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. He said he was driving from
Riverside Church, headed to his daughter’s home after a prison ministry meeting,
when he saw flashing police lights.
“Hey, we know you,” Mr. Hayden said one of the officers told him. “Do you still
sell drugs?”
Mr. Hayden said the officers eventually told him that a taillight was broken on
his old Jeep, which Mr. Hayden disputes. The criminal complaint does not give a
reason for the stop.
Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said the
police interest in Mr. Hayden “was far more pedestrian” than drugs.
“He was pulled over for a broken taillight,” Mr. Browne said in an e-mail.
“Officers saw in plain view a wooden club in the rear of the auto and a
switchblade knife in the center console where Hayden began to reach. He was
removed from the auto and placed under arrest.”
Mr. Browne added that Mr. Hayden had 22 previous arrests, dating to November
1957, and noted his 12 years spent in prison for manslaughter in the death of a
sanitation worker.
Mr. Hayden, who now lives in Yonkers, acknowledges his arrest record. “I’m not
ashamed of anything in my life — nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said.
He also said his past bore no relevance to the man he is now. “I think Malcolm X
said, there’s nothing wrong with being a criminal — it’s staying a criminal,”
Mr. Hayden said.
He was charged was two counts of criminal possession of a weapon, a third-degree
felony. He spent the weekend in jail before his arraignment. Prosecutors
proposed bail, but the judge released him on his own recognizance. The case goes
before a grand jury on Thursday. If he is ultimately convicted, Mr. Hayden could
spend two to seven years in prison.
The weapons in question, according to Mr. Hayden and his lawyer, Sarah Kunstler,
were a souvenir small-scale baseball bat from a Yankees game, and a switchblade
that Mr. Hayden said was the sort “you can buy at any 99-cent store in the
country.”
In any case, Ms. Kunstler said, she is pressing for the case to be dismissed,
“given Jazz’s prior history with this officer, and how this case arose.” She
added that she now believed that the switchblade was no longer usable as
evidence.
At a recent meeting in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, “the assistant
spent five minutes fumbling with the knife,” Ms. Kunstler said, “and it became
apparent that she couldn’t get it open.”
“There’s a mechanism that’s bent that prevents it from opening fluidly,” she
explained.
“The screw in the knife fell out,” she said, “and we couldn’t open it anymore.
It was broken, and it’s certainly more broken now.”
When asked about the knife, Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for the district
attorney, said, “We will decline comment.”
Mr. Hayden said he had already turned down a plea deal, in which he would have
performed community service in exchange for admitting guilt to a lesser charge.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, man,” he said. “That’s what wrong with the system
now.”
A Watcher of the Police Says He Is Now a
Target, NYT, 9.9.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/nyregion/chronicler-of-police-says-his-arrest-was-payback-for-harlem-video.html
The Curious Case of Chavis Carter
August 3,
2012
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Let me
get this straight: A young man is stopped by police, who find $10 worth of drugs
on him; he had twice been searched by officers and then double handcuffed behind
his back and placed in the back of a police car; yet, somehow, he retrieves a
gun that both searches failed to find and uses it shoot himself in the right
temple?
That is what police in Jonesboro, Ark., say happened on the evening of Sunday,
July 29, to Chavis Carter, a 21-year-old African-American man from Southaven,
Miss., a suburb of Memphis. They say he committed suicide with a hidden gun
while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. According to a local CBS News
report, his mother was told that he shot himself in the right temple, but she
claims that Chavis was left-handed.
The strange circumstances of this case, which even the Jonesboro police chief,
Michael Yates, called “bizarre” and said “defies logic at first glance,” have
raised questions that sorely need answering.
First, some background on how Carter came into contact with police that Sunday
night.
According to a statement released Friday by the Jonesboro Police Department,
Chavis was a passenger in a “suspicious vehicle” mentioned in a 911 call because
it was “observed driving down the street with its lights off” at 9:50 p.m. Three
people were in the vehicle: the driver, Carter and another passenger.
According to the statement, Carter, who originally gave a false name — Laryan
Bowman — was “ ‘frisked’ or ‘patted down,’ not necessarily a full search at this
point” because the officers on the scene “did not know what they had nor if any
arrests were to be made.” During that first search, “a small amount of marijuana
and some small plastic bags commonly used to package drugs were discovered in
Carter’s pocket.” According to the police report, the estimated value of it was
$10.
The police then determined that Carter “had an active warrant out of
Mississippi.” According to The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, a warrant had been
issued for Carter’s arrest after he violated his probation. He had pleaded
guilty in 2011 to one count of selling marijuana.
He was placed in the back of one of the police cars on the scene without being
handcuffed.
The other two people in the car “had no drugs and no active warrants,” so they
were released.
Carter was then taken out of the police car, at which point officers “cuffed him
behind his back and searched his person again” and placed him back into the
police car.
Then things get strange. According to the police statement:
“As the officers then returned to their vehicles to leave, the second officer
entered his vehicle and noted the smell of something burning (gun smoke we
believe) and noticed Carter slumped over on the passenger side of the police
unit. The officer then opened the rear door and noticed Carter unresponsive with
a quantity of blood on him. At this point, he ran to the other officer to
prevent him from leaving and both officers returned to the second unit, opened
both doors and began to attempt to assist Carter (who was still handcuffed
behind his back) and summoned an ambulance. The ambulance arrived and
transported Carter to the hospital where he died a short time later.”
The statement continues:
“Investigators were called to the scene and began processing the evidence,
photographing and securing evidence. A small .380 caliber cobra semi-auto
firearm was discovered, as well as an expended case, and a projectile (which was
recovered in the rear of the vehicle).”
(The police say that the handgun had been reported stolen from a Jonesboro
resident in June.)
Police say that they have interviewed “a number of witnesses” to the incident
and that their “statements are consistent with the statements of the officers
and the evidence reflected by the dash-cam video of the responding officer,
along with audio evidence from the backup officer.”
According to the police, “the statements and video/audio evidence account for
the officers’ actions from the beginning of the stop until the arrival of the
ambulance and indicate that neither officer removed his weapon, fired a shot or
was in a position to enter the vehicle where Carter was detained in a manner
that would allow for them to injure Carter.”
Furthermore, “the windows on the patrol unit where Carter was detained were up
and intact, indicating no possibility of a bullet penetrating from the outside
of the patrol unit while Carter was detained.” Yet, “specifically, how Carter
suffered his apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound remains unexplained.”
That is the question, isn’t it? How do police officers search a man twice and
find a small amount of marijuana but miss a handgun? And how does that man, who
had been handcuffed, use that gun to shoot himself in the head?
The F.B.I. is now monitoring the investigation while a nation waits for answers
and wonders about a “suicide” that “defies logic.”
The Curious Case of Chavis Carter, NYT, 3.8.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/opinion/blow-the-curious-case-of-chavis-charter.html
Christie Accepts Monitoring of Muslims
May 24,
2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TRENTON
(AP) — The New York City police did not violate New Jersey laws when they
conducted cross-border surveillance of Muslim businesses, mosques and student
groups, Gov. Chris Christie’s administration said Thursday.
The determination, by the state attorney general, concerned tactics of the New
York Police Department like videotaping mosque-goers and collecting their
license plate numbers.
Such operations were part of a Police Department program to collect intelligence
on Muslim communities in New York and beyond, even when there was no evidence of
a crime.
Attorney General Jeffrey S. Chiesa, met with Muslim leaders on Thursday to
outline the findings. Afterward, one of the leaders, Aref Assaf of the American
Arab Forum, said, “I said to him it’s not only insulting, it’s offensive to our
sense of justice, that you bring us to Trenton to tell us that you accept as
legal and valid the actions of the N.Y.P.D.”
Muslim leaders said they would consider all legal options, including renewed
appeals to the federal Justice Department.
The interstate surveillance efforts, revealed by The Associated Press this year,
angered many Muslims and New Jersey officials. In response, the governor asked
Mr. Chiesa, who is his appointee, to look into the spying.
Christie Accepts Monitoring of Muslims, NYT, 24.5.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/nyregion/christie-accepts-new-yorks-monitoring-of-muslims.html
After
33 Years, Police Make Arrest in Case of Etan Patz
May 24,
2012
The New York Times
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
A New
Jersey man was arrested in the killing of Etan Patz, Police Commissioner Raymond
W. Kelly announced on Thursday, an extraordinary moment in a case that has
gripped New York City’s psyche ever since the 6-year-old boy vanished in SoHo on
his way to school in 1979.
The man, Pedro Hernandez, told investigators that he lured Etan to the basement
of a bodega where Mr. Hernandez worked at the time with the promise of a soda,
Mr. Kelly said. Once Etan was inside, Mr. Hernandez choked him, stuffed his body
into a bag and took the bag about a block and a half away, where he left it out
in the open with trash, Mr. Kelly said.
“He was remorseful, and I think the detectives thought that it was a feeling of
relief on his part,” Mr. Kelly said during a news conference at Police
Headquarters. “We believe that this is the individual responsible.”
The break in the case came a month after investigators spent five days
excavating a SoHo basement near the spot where Etan disappeared. The search for
his remains was fruitless.
But Mr. Kelly said the search had prompted a call to the missing persons squad
earlier this month from a person who led them to Mr. Hernandez. The commissioner
said that over the years since Etan’s disappearance, Mr. Hernandez told a family
member and others that he had “done a bad thing and killed a child in New York.”
Mr. Hernandez had been making the claims since as far back as 1981, Mr. Kelly
said, but he had never identified the child he had claimed to have hurt.
The news of the arrest was the latest chapter in a wrenching story that has
tormented New York City since Etan’s disappearance 33 years ago on Friday in a
neighborhood far grittier than today’s SoHo, with its tourist-clogged streets
lined with boutiques and restaurants.
It is unclear whether investigators have been able to corroborate the account
Mr. Hernandez has provided. Without any trace of human remains or other forensic
evidence, any possible prosecution of him would face significant evidentiary
hurdles.
Asked what about Mr. Hernandez’s confession had led detectives to find him
credible, Mr. Kelly responded, “The fact that he had told this story to others
in the past, and the specificity of what he said in the confession.” He said he
did not know what the motive might have been.
Mr. Hernandez, 51, was charged with second-degree murder by the police. Mr.
Kelly said he expected the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., to
present Mr. Hernandez for arraignment on Friday, but could not say what charges
would be filed.
Under the law, prosecutors will have to bring Mr. Hernandez before a grand jury
within six days of the arrest and present sufficient evidence to convince them
to vote for an indictment, or hold a preliminary hearing, an extremely rare
occurrence.
And it was unclear on Thursday what evidence, beyond Mr. Hernandez’s confession,
the prosecutors have in hand. Mr. Kelly acknowledged that there was no physical
evidence implicating Mr. Hernandez, though he said the investigation was
continuing.
Mr. Hernandez, who was 18 at the time Etan vanished, worked as a stockboy in a
bodega at 448 West Broadway that is now an eyeglass store, Mr. Kelly said. Etan
disappeared on the first morning his parents allowed him to walk alone from the
family’s home on Prince Street to a school bus stop on West Broadway.
Mr. Hernandez was working in the basement, which had a separate door to the
street, Mr. Kelly said. Etan was at the bus stop when Mr. Hernandez led him away
and to the basement, Mr. Kelly said.
“It’s unlikely, very unlikely,” that Etan’s remains would be recovered, Mr.
Kelly said.
Mr. Hernandez’s name was mentioned in a 1979 detective’s report as part of the
investigation into Etan’s disappearance, Mr. Kelly said. The report listed him
as an employee of the bodega, but Mr. Hernandez was never questioned by
investigators, Mr. Kelly said.
“I can’t tell you why, 33 years ago, he wasn’t questioned,” he said. “We know
that other people in the bodega were questioned.”
Etan’s family was told by the police ahead of time that Mr. Hernandez was going
to be arrested in their son’s murder, Mr. Kelly said.
His father was “taken aback,” said Lt. Christopher Zimmerman, the commanding
officer of the missing persons squad, and “overwhelmed to a degree.”
Shortly after Etan vanished, Mr. Hernandez left the store and moved to the
Camden area in southern New Jersey, where he has many relatives, law enforcement
officials said.
Investigators from the New York Police Department traveled to New Jersey and
questioned Mr. Hernandez for several hours on Wednesday in the Camden County
prosecutor’s office. Mr. Hernandez returned voluntarily to New York, where he
led investigators to the address where he worked and described to them what he
had done, Mr. Kelly said.
“They kept asking him, ‘Why did you do this?’ ” one law enforcement official
said. “And he kept saying: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”
Mr. Hernandez was placed into custody later on Wednesday and taken to the
offices of the Manhattan district attorney, whose prosecutors are overseeing the
inquiry by New York police detectives and agents from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Mr. Hernandez was emotional and broke down in tears during the confession, the
law enforcement official said, adding that it was videotaped, which is standard
practice in New Jersey.
During his time in South Jersey, Mr. Hernandez does not appear to have been in
any trouble with the local authorities.
He and his wife, Rosemary, live in an apartment in the back of a modest
two-story house in Maple Shade, a town of about 19,000 residents east of Camden.
The man who rents the front part of the home said Mr. Hernandez and his wife
worked with computers, were Pentecostals and hosted many holiday parties with
their friends and relatives.
“They were good people, and he was a good neighbor,” said the man, Dan Wollick,
71, adding that he and Mr. Hernandez shared chores like mowing the lawn, raking
leaves and shoveling snow.
The investigation into the boy’s disappearance and presumed death has seen a
parade of suspects and a range of theories over the years. Last month, the
F.B.I. and the Police Department tore apart the basement of a building on Prince
Street, just doors away from the longtime Patz family home. Etan’s parents still
live on the street. The search was based on a belief among investigators that a
local handyman who kept a workshop in the basement in 1979 had abducted and
murdered the boy and possibly buried his body there beneath a concrete floor.
A woman interviewed by The New York Times last month who ran a playgroup in SoHo
at the time Etan disappeared recalled seeing mounds of garbage bags in the days
after the boy vanished, which included Memorial Day weekend. “I always thought
there were so many garbage bags out and why did they not search them,” said the
woman, Judy Reichler, who now lives in New Paltz, N.Y. “For three days everyone
piled bags on the street and then they got picked up.”
The mobilization in the city to find Etan began a new era in the country, marked
by children’s faces on milk cartons and made-for-television dramas about
kidnapped children. Jim Bogie, 62, a window salesman in Flushing, Queens, said
his three children are now in their mid- to late 30s, about the same age Etan
would be, and remembered on Thursday being horrified by the disappearance three
decades ago.
“It was terrifying,” he said. “If it could happen to him, it could happen to
anybody.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke to reporters about Mr. Hernandez while he was
being questioned but before he was arrested. “I certainly hope we are one step
closer to bringing them some measure of relief,” the mayor said, referring to
Etan’s family.
Al Baker,
Noah Rosenberg and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
After 33 Years, Police Make Arrest in Case of Etan Patz, NYT, 24.5.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/nyregion/man-claims-he-strangled-etan-patz-police-say.html
Man Claims He Strangled Patz and Put Body in Box,
Police
Say
May 24,
2012
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
A man in
custody in Manhattan has confessed to strangling Etan Patz, the 6-year-old boy
who vanished in SoHo on his way to school in 1979, wrapping his body in a bag
and putting it in a box, a law enforcement official said on Thursday.
The man, Pedro Hernandez, told investigators that he left the box at a location
in Manhattan, but when he returned several days later the box was no longer
there, the official said. Investigators recently took Mr. Hernandez to that
location. A second official also said that Mr. Hernandez told the authorities he
had strangled the boy and discarded his body.
Shortly after Etan’s disappearance, Mr. Hernandez, who in 1979 worked at a
bodega near where the boy disappeared, moved to the Camden area, where he has
many relatives, a law enforcement official said.
Investigators interviewed Mr. Hernandez for much of the day on Wednesday in the
prosecutor’s office in Camden County in southern New Jersey.
Mr. Hernandez was taken into custody late Wednesday in New Jersey and was taken
to the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., whose
prosecutors are overseeing the inquiry by New York police detectives and agents
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Investigators were tracking down several of the relatives to interview them to
hear what, if anything, Mr. Hernandez has said about the crime. Investigators
believe he has alluded or confessed to the crime to several family members over
the years, the official said.
Mr. Hernandez was apparently very emotional during the confession, the official
said, adding that the confession was videotaped, which is standard practice in
New Jersey.
“An individual now in custody has made statements to N.Y.P.D. detectives
implicating himself in the disappearance and death of Etan Patz 33 years ago,”
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement issued early Thursday.
It is unclear whether investigators have been able to independently corroborate
the account Mr. Hernandez has provided. Without any trace of human remains or
other forensic evidence, any possible prosecution of Mr. Hernandez would face
significant evidentiary hurdles.
The 33-year-old investigation into the young boy’s disappearance and presumed
death has seen a parade of suspects and a range of theories. Last month, the
F.B.I. and the New York Police Department spent five days tearing apart the
basement of a building on Prince Street, just doors away from the longtime Patz
family home, along the route the boy took on the day he disappeared.
He was on his way to a school bus stop. It was the first time that his parents
had allowed him to go the stop by himself.
That search was based on a belief among investigators that a local handyman who
kept a workshop in the basement in 1979 had abducted and murdered the boy and
possibly buried his body there beneath a concrete floor. No obvious human
remains were found. Etan’s parents still live on Prince Street.
The focus on Mr. Hernandez is the latest investigative development since the
unsuccessful basement search.
Investigators have focused on Mr. Hernandez as a suspect in the past, one
official said, although it was not immediately clear when he became the subject
of renewed interest.
Mr. Vance said in 2010 that he would reopen the case, which focused national
attention 30 years ago on the problem of missing children and began a new era
marked by children’s faces on milk cartons and made-for-television dramas about
kidnapped children. President Ronald Reagan declared May 25, the day of Etan’s
disappearance, as National Missing Children’s Day.
The police have long had a prime suspect in the case, Jose A. Ramos, a convicted
child molester who lived on the Lower East Side and was an acquaintance of a
woman who worked for the Patzes as a baby sitter. Mr. Ramos remains imprisoned
for molesting a boy in Pennsylvania, but has denied kidnapping or killing Etan.
J. David Goodman contributed reporting.
Man Claims He Strangled Patz and Put Body in Box, Police Say, NYT, 24.5.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/nyregion/man-claims-he-strangled-etan-patz-police-say.html
No
Charges for Officer in Killing of Man, 68
May 3, 2012
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON and NATE SCHWEBER
A grand
jury voted not to indict a White Plains police officer who shot and killed a
68-year-old former correction officer and former Marine in his apartment last
November, the Westchester County district attorney said Thursday.
District Attorney Janet DiFiore called the shooting “a tragedy on many levels.”
But she said the grand jury had concluded that “there was no reasonable cause”
to indict Officer Anthony Carelli, who fired the shot that killed the victim,
Kenneth Chamberlain Sr.
Officer Carelli and several other officers were sent to Mr. Chamberlain’s
apartment after his medical-alert pendant went off and he did not respond to a
call from a medical-alert agency operator.
After Ms. DiFiore announced the grand jury’s decision, the White Plains police
released more than 200 pages of documents about the encounter, along with audio
and video recordings made as it unfolded. In one report, Officer Stephen Demchuk
described Mr. Chamberlain as “acting irrational” when the police arrived and
said he stuck an eight-inch butcher knife through a crack in the door.
Mr. Chamberlain made “continuous slashing motions towards my head and face,”
said Officer Demchuk, who was ordered to break down the door, but added that Mr.
Chamberlain held it shut “with the assistance of a chair.”
The officers eventually broke down the front door. Four officers entered and
tried to subdue Mr. Chamberlain, first with a Taser weapon, then with a shotgun
loaded with beanbag-type ammunition intended to disable someone without causing
serious injury. Officer Demchuk said Officer Carelli fired his .40-caliber
pistol when Mr. Chamberlain went after another police officer “with the butcher
knife raised.”
Mr. Chamberlain’s family issued a statement saying they were “profoundly
saddened” that the grand jury had not found reason to charge Officer Carelli.
Lawyers for the family said they would ask the Justice Department to investigate
the case.
David E. Chong, the White Plains public safety commissioner, whose department
oversees the police, said an internal review would now be finished.
Andrew C. Quinn, a lawyer for Officer Carelli, did not return a call seeking
comment.
Ms. DiFiore said the grand jury had heard from 42 witnesses, 21 of whom were
civilians — including the emergency room physician who examined Mr. Chamberlain.
Ms. DiFiore said that one officer, who was not identified, used a racial epithet
outside the first-floor apartment. “The use of a racial epithet in any context
is offensive to the dignity of all of us,” she said. When spoken by a police
officer, she added, “It’s intolerable.” But she said the grand jury had not
found it to be criminal. Mr. Chamberlain was black. Officer Carelli is white,
The Associated Press has reported.
The episode began when Mr. Chamberlain, who could not walk more than a short
distance without becoming short of breath, apparently set off his medical-alert
pendant accidentally. (An autopsy showed later that his blood-alcohol level was
0.11.)
Responding to the alarm signal, the system operator tried to establish contact
using a two-way speaker in the apartment. “Mr. Chamberlain, are you O. K.?” the
operator asked.
When he did not reply, the operator arranged for an ambulance. Patrol cars were
also sent.
Randolph M. McLaughlin, a lawyer for Mr. Chamberlain’s family, disputed the
police account. He said Mr. Chamberlain had not thrust a knife at Officer
Demchuk’s face, as he described, although Mr. McLaughlin said video, which had
been recorded by cameras in the officers’ Taser weapons, showed “a metal object
coming out” from behind the door.
He also said that Officer Carelli fired his pistol immediately after the shotgun
with the beanbag ammunition had been fired. “The shots are beanbag, beanbag,
beanbag, gun,” he said. “They weren’t giving him a chance, or themselves, or
react.”
The documents the police released on Thursday indicated that the officers
insisted on going in because they believed someone else might have been in the
apartment. They had heard Mr. Chamberlain talking to someone — someone he
addressed, according to one of the police reports, as “Mr. President.”
Michael Powell
contributed reporting.
No Charges for Officer in Killing of Man, 68, NYT, 3.5.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/nyregion/no-charges-in-polices-killing-of-sickly-white-plains-man.html
Stabbed in Brain, Officer Escaped ‘Death’s Door’
April 18,
2012
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and ANDY NEWMAN
The wild
swing connected to the left side of the police officer’s head, a presumed punch
until the blood started flowing. The officer, Eder Loor, reached to his temple
and felt the handle of a knife.
He pulled the knife out, his wife later learned, not realizing then just how
seriously injured he was.
By any odds, Officer Loor should have been killed or left brain-dead by the
knife that entered his skull on Tuesday, after a confrontation with a
26-year-old ex-convict in East Harlem. At best, he could have lost the ability
to speak, to talk to his pregnant wife or young daughter.
The head of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Joshua B. Bederson,
said Wednesday that none of that would come to pass.
“He is probably the luckiest unlucky man you could ever have,” Dr. Bederson said
at a news conference in New York.
The folding knife’s three-inch blade passed half an inch below structures that
control motor functions and another half-inch from structures that control
vision. It touched the nerve that gives sensation to the face and nicked, but
did not penetrate, a major artery, Dr. Bederson said.
“It was a millimeter from everything; it was ridiculous,” he said later in an
interview. “You don’t want to overemphasize, but he was at death’s door. He was
minutes away from crashing.”
Officer Loor’s wife, Dina Loor, sat beside the doctor at the news conference, a
picture of unfailing calm and poise. She answered questions in English and
Spanish as she spoke of her husband’s first words to her, and of how he never
showed fear, much as she hid her concerns from their daughter.
Ms. Loor said her husband told her: “Babe, I’m fine. It just hurts.”
The news conference, which was also attended by the officer’s sister, was a vast
departure from what typically follows a near-fatal attack on a police officer:
Information is guarded, and loved ones seek privacy at a critical time. It also
offered a welcome juxtaposition with the scene at Woodhull Medical Center in
Brooklyn this week, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered the news that Lt.
Richard A. Nappi of the Fire Department had died while fighting a blaze.
Throughout the news conference at Mount Sinai, it was made clear that Officer
Loor, 28, was fortunate not to have met the same fate.
Officer Loor and his partner, Luckson Merisme, were responding to an emergency
call by the mother of an emotionally disturbed man, Terrence Hale. The mother,
Vearry Hale, had called 911 to say her son was bipolar and had stopped taking
his medications. When the officers met her outside, she said her son was
upstairs and needed to go to the hospital, the police said.
The officers strode into the Franklin Plaza Apartments, a housing complex at
1945 Third Avenue, near 107th Street. Mr. Hale exited an elevator in the lobby
and walked past them as his mother asked him to go to the hospital, according to
an account given by the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly.
Mr. Hale responded, “I’ll go by myself,” and then walked out the door.
The officers caught up to him and said they would escort him there, the police
said. It was then that he suddenly produced the knife and stabbed Officer Loor,
they said.
By Wednesday evening, Mr. Hale had not been arraigned on charges that included
attempted aggravated murder. He had been arrested in the past, the authorities
have said, including for a knife attack in 2006, for which he served a term at
Sing Sing.
In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, his mother said she was angry
because she had called for an ambulance to help him, and not for the police. She
also accused the police of mishandling the situation and displaying a lack of
training for a sensitive domestic encounter, and said she planned to contact a
lawyer.
“They did not get backup, and they did not do their job right,” Ms. Hale, 51,
said. “My son was not feeling well; he was sick and said he wanted to go to the
hospital.”
After the stabbing, a call for an ambulance was received at 10:32 a.m. on
Tuesday, and Dr. Bederson cited the quick work of the emergency workers in
helping to save the officer. The doctor had moved fast, too: he had flown into
La Guardia Airport from a conference in Florida that morning and was running in
Central Park when the call came. He ran straight to Mount Sinai.
By the time Dr. Bederson arrived, the knife had been removed; the officer’s wife
said, “He pulled his own knife out.”
“Since he’s an E.M.T., he somehow managed to hold the pressure,” Ms. Loor said.
“Somebody on the street, I believe, handed him a towel.”
Although Officer Loor was alert at first, Dr. Bederson said, he “rapidly
deteriorated and was lethargic and sleepy.” The officer was bleeding inside and
outside the brain, he added, “and the hemorrhage was expanding and pressing on
the brain.” Doctors removed a bone flap, seven inches in diameter, from his
skull and stopped the bleeding.
The knife, which entered just behind the officer’s eye, went “deep into the
temporal lobe and all the way down to the skull base,” the doctor said.
It cut through the Sylvian fissure, which separates the frontal and temporal
lobes and contains major blood vessels. The knife cut the major vein of that
fissure and nicked the middle cerebral artery that supplies blood to the brain’s
left hemisphere. It missed the carotid artery by a millimeter.
Officer Loor, who joined the force six years ago, is likely to experience a
period of facial numbness and a depletion of energy, and will probably require
some anti-epileptic drugs, but he is expected to “make a complete recovery,” the
doctor said.
In a lighter moment at the news conference, the doctor said he imagined a debate
later with Officer Loor over when he would return to work: in one month, as the
officer might prefer, or in three, under doctor’s orders.
After the surgery, Ms. Loor, 25, said, she had brought their daughter, 4 ½, into
Officer Loor’s room for a bedside visit. The girl was happy “to see her dad,”
Ms. Loor said.
Their next child, a boy, is due in July.
As for her husband, she said, “all he wanted was a kiss.”
Dr. Bederson, asked if he would call the officer’s survival miraculous, said,
“If you want to call that a miracle, I guess you’re justified in calling that a
miracle.”
Joseph
Goldstein and Ivan Pereira contributed reporting.
Stabbed in Brain, Officer Escaped ‘Death’s Door’, NYT, 18.4.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/nyregion/new-york-officer-stabbed-in-head-is-called-luckiest-unlucky-man.html
Police
Chief Killed in New Hampshire Drug Raid
April 12,
2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GREENLAND,
N.H. (AP) — A man opened fire on police during a drug bust Thursday night,
killing a New Hampshire police chief just days from retirement and injuring four
officers from other departments. Early Friday, the shooter remained holed up in
the home with a woman, police said.
The shooting devastated Greenland, a town of 3,500 near the seacoast that had
just seven police officers including Chief Michael Maloney, 48, who was due to
retire in less than two weeks.
"In those final days, he sacrificed his life in public service as a law
enforcement officer in New Hampshire," Attorney General Michael Delaney said
early Friday.
Maloney had 26 years of experience in law enforcement, the last 12 as chief of
the Greenland department. Two officers were shot in the chest and were in
intensive care early Friday. Two others were treated and released, one with a
gunshot wound to the arm and the other with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. The
four injured officers were from other area departments and were working as part
of a drug task force.
John Penacho, chairman of the town's Board of Selectman, said Maloney was
married with children.
"It's a blow to all of us. You're stunned. It's New Hampshire, it's a small
town," he said. "We're stunned. I mean all of us. It's an unbelievable
situation."
Jacqueline DeFreze, who lives a half-mile down the road from the house where the
shooting happened, said she was devastated by reports that the chief had been
shot. She'd planned to attend a surprise party for his retirement.
"I'm a wreck. He was just the greatest guy," said DeFreze, a fourth-grade
teacher in nearby Rye. "He's kind-hearted, always visible in the community."
Early Friday, streets around the home were blocked off and officers stood at
roadblocks in the pouring rain.
State police and officers from many departments responded after the initial call
around 6 p.m. Delaney said he couldn't provide much other information about the
shooting.
"We do have an active armed standoff at a home and we're simply not going to
provide any information right now that may jeopardize that situation," he said.
"We are working with federal state and local law enforcement to try to obtain a
peaceful resolution."
Gov. John Lynch was at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, where the officers were
taken. He asked residents to pray for the injured officers and Maloney's family.
"My thoughts and prayers and those of my wife, Susan, are with the family of
Chief Michael Maloney. Chief Maloney's unwavering courage and commitment to
protecting others serves as an example to us all," he said.
The tree-lined street, closed off by police, features single-family homes and
duplexes. The shootings took place at 517 Post Road, a 2-bedroom, 1½ -story
structure that's listed as owned by the Beverly Mutrie Revocable Trust,
according to tax assessor records.
The Portsmouth Herald reported in February 2011 that Cullen Mutrie, 29, was a
resident of the home on 517 Post Road and had been arrested and charged with
possession of anabolic steroids.
The newspaper reported that the steroids were found in the home when officers
went to confiscate guns after Mutrie was arrested on domestic assault charges.
According to a police affidavit, the steroids were found in Mutrie's living room
on July 24, 2010, but were not verified by the state crime lab until Jan. 18.
The town's schools will be closed Friday, because law enforcement officers are
using the elementary school as a staging area.
Asked what the town will do to help residents cope with the tragedy, Penacho
said "We'll do whatever we need to do."
Now split by I-95, the town is one of the oldest settlements in the state.
___
Associated Press Writers Norma Love in Concord
and David
Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.
Police Chief Killed in New Hampshire Drug Raid, 12.4.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/04/12/us/ap-us-officers-shot-nh.html
Even as Violent Crime Falls, Killing of Officers Rises
April 9,
2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
WASHINGTON — As violent crime has decreased across the country, a disturbing
trend has emerged: rising numbers of police officers are being killed.
According to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 72
officers were killed by perpetrators in 2011, a 25 percent increase from the
previous year and a 75 percent increase from 2008.
The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects
than car accidents, according to data compiled by the International Association
of Chiefs of Police. The number was the highest in nearly two decades, excluding
those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in
1995.
While a majority of officers were killed in smaller cities, 13 were killed in
cities of 250,000 or more. New York City lost two officers last year. On Sunday,
four were wounded by a gunman in Brooklyn, bringing to eight the number of
officers shot in the city since December.
“We haven’t seen a period of this type of violence in a long time,” said
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of the New York Police Department.
While the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials cannot fully explain the
reasons for the rise in officer homicides, they are clear about the devastating
consequences.
“In this law enforcement job, when you pin this badge on and go out on calls,
when you leave home, you ain’t got a promise that you will come back,” said
Sheriff Ray Foster of Buchanan County, Va. Two of his deputies were killed in
March 2011 and two wounded — one of them paralyzed — by a man with a
high-powered rifle.
“That was 80 percent of my day shift,” he said.
After a spate of killings in early 2011, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
asked federal authorities to work with local police departments to try to come
up with solutions to the problem.
The F.B.I., which has tracked officer deaths since 1937, paid for a study
conducted by John Jay College that found that in many cases the officers were
trying to arrest or stop a suspect who had previously been arrested for a
violent crime.
That prompted the F.B.I. to change what information it will provide to local
police departments, the officials said. Starting this year, when police officers
stop a car and call its license plate into the F.B.I.’s database, they will be
told whether the owner of the vehicle has a violent history. Through the first
three months of this year, the number of police fatalities has dropped, though
it is unclear why.
Some law enforcement officials believe that techniques pioneered by the New York
Police Department over the past two decades and adopted by other departments may
have put officers at greater risk by encouraging them to conduct more street
stops and to seek out and confront suspects who seem likely to be armed. In New
York and elsewhere, police officials moved more officers into crime-ridden
areas.
“This technique has become more popular across the country as smaller
departments have followed the larger cities and tried to prevent crime,” said
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “Unlike
several decades ago, there is this expectation that police matter and that
police can make a difference.”
Commissioner Kelly said, “We try to put those officers where there is the most
potential for violence.” However, he pointed out that most of the officers who
have been shot in New York since December were not part of a proactive police
deployment but were responding to emergencies.
Some argue that the rise in violence is linked to the tough economy. With less
money, some states are releasing prisoners earlier; police departments, after
years of staffing increases, have been forced to make cutbacks.
“A lot of these killings aren’t happening in major urban areas,” said James W.
McMahon, chief of staff for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
“One of the concerns we are looking at is that a number of officers are being
laid off or furloughed or not replaced.”
The police chief in Camden, N.J., J. Scott Thomson, whose force of 400 was cut
by nearly half last year because of financing issues, said that having fewer
officers on the street “makes it that much more difficult to create an
environment in which criminals do not feel as emboldened to assault another
person, let alone a law enforcement officer.”
The murder of a veteran officer last April in Chattanooga, Tenn., was typical of
many of the 2011 episodes.
Sgt. Tim Chapin, a veteran nearing retirement, rushed to provide backup to
officers who had responded to reports of a robbery outside a pawnshop and were
under fire. Sergeant Chapin got out of his car and chased the fleeing suspect,
who had been convicted of armed robbery. During the pursuit, the sergeant was
fatally shot in the head.
As part of the F.B.I.’s efforts to prevent officer deaths, the bureau trains
thousands of officers each year, highlighting shootings like the one in
Chattanooga to teach officers about situations in which they are most
vulnerable. Those situations are typically pursuits, traffic stops and arrests,
said Michelle S. Klimt, a top F.B.I. official at its Criminal Justice
Information Services Center in Clarksburg, W.Va., who oversees officer training.
“Every stop can be potentially fatal, so we are trying to make sure the officers
are ready and prepared every single day they go out,” Ms. Klimt said. “We try
and teach that every day you go out, you are going to be encountered with deadly
force by someone trying to kill you.”
Michael S.
Schmidt reported from Washington, and Joseph Goldstein from New York.
John H.
Cushman Jr. contributed reporting from Washington.
Even as Violent Crime Falls, Killing of Officers Rises, NYT, 9.4.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/us/defying-trends-killings-of-police-officers-are-on-the-rise.html
Officer in Bell Killing Is Fired; 3 Others to Be Forced
Out
March 23,
2012
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and AL BAKER
The New
York City police detective who fired the first shots in the 50-bullet barrage
that killed Sean Bell in 2006 has been fired, and three others involved in the
shooting are being forced to resign, law enforcement officials said on Friday.
The decision came after a Police Department administrative trial in the fall
found that the detective, Gescard F. Isnora, had acted improperly in the
shooting that killed Mr. Bell on what was supposed to have been his wedding day
and that he should be fired.
“There was nothing in the record to warrant overturning the decision of the
department’s trial judge,” Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said on Friday
night.
Law enforcement officials said word of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s
decision came late Friday. Detective Isnora, an 11-year veteran, will not
collect a pension, one official said. “He loses everything,” the official said.
Three other officers — Detectives Marc Cooper and Michael Oliver, who fired
shots at Mr. Bell; and Lt. Gary Napoli, a supervisor who was at the scene but
did not fire any shots — are being forced to resign.
Detectives Isnora, Cooper and Oliver were acquitted in a criminal trial in 2008
on charges of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment.
A fourth officer who fired his gun during the episode, Detective Paul Headley,
has already left the department, and a fifth, Officer Michael Carey, was
exonerated in the department’s administrative trial.
Detective Cooper and Lieutenant Napoli, who worked in the department for more
than 20 years, will receive their pensions, a law enforcement official said.
Detective Oliver, who has served for 18 years, may collect on a pension on the
20th anniversary of his start date, the official said.
The shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, who did not have a gun, occurred in the early
morning on Nov. 25, 2006, as Mr. Bell and two friends were leaving a strip club
in Jamaica, Queens, where they had been celebrating. The case drew widespread
scrutiny of undercover police tactics.
Prosecutors questioned the judgment of the shooters, with one arguing in the
department’s trial that Detective Isnora overreacted, leading to “contagious
firing” from those who followed his cue.
Detective Isnora testified that he thought Mr. Bell and a friend were about to
take part in a drive-by shooting. He has said he believed, after overhearing a
heated argument in front of the strip club, that the friend had a gun.
In July 2010, the city agreed to pay more than $7 million to settle a federal
lawsuit filed by Mr. Bell’s family and two of his friends.
Sanford A. Rubenstein, a lawyer who has represented the Bell estate and the two
men wounded along with Mr. Bell, said, regarding Detective Isnora, “The police
commissioner followed the trial judge’s ruling, which was clearly appropriate
based on the evidence.” Of the other disciplined officers, Mr. Rubenstein said,
“I think the fact that they’re no longer on the police force is appropriate.”
Mr. Isnora’s lawyer, Philip E. Karasyk, said, “The commissioner’s decision to
terminate Detective Isnora is extremely disheartening and callous and sends an
uncaring message to the hard-working officers of the New York Police Department
who put their lives on the line every day.”
Michael J. Palladino, the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association,
called Detective Isnora’s firing “disgraceful, excessive, and unprecedented.”
He continued: “Stripping a police officer of his livelihood and his opportunity
for retirement is a punishment reserved for a cop who has turned to a life of
crime and disgraces the shield. It is not for someone who has acted within the
law and was justified in a court of law and exonerated by the U.S. Department of
Justice.”
Many detectives were bracing for the decision after Deputy Commissioner Martin
G. Karopkin, acting as the trial judge, recommended the punishment in November.
One law enforcement official said that, as the reality of the decisions sink in,
they could have a drastic impact on how detectives view their work, particularly
in the department’s undercover programs.
William K.
Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Officer in Bell Killing Is Fired; 3 Others to Be Forced Out, NYT, 23.3.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/nyregion/in-sean-bell-killing-4-officers-to-be-forced-out.html
Taking On Police Tactic, Critics Hit Racial Divide
March 22,
2012
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON
ALBANY —
Black and Latino lawmakers, fed up over the frequency with which New York City
police officers are stopping and frisking minority men, are battling what they
say is a racial divide as they push legislation to rein in the practice.
The divide, they say, is largely informed by personal experience: many who
object to the practice say that they have themselves been stopped by the police
for reasons they believe were related to race.
Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, recalled several occasions when,
as a high school student walking home in Flatbush, he was stopped by the police,
patted down, told to empty his pockets, produce identification and divulge his
destination.
Assemblyman Karim Camara, a Democrat from Brooklyn, remembers greeting a woman
who was walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when, he said,
officers in plain clothes approached him and demanded to know who he was, where
he was going and whether he had any guns or drugs.
And when Senator Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan Democrat, was just 14, he said,
detectives threw him against a wall and patted him down in Washington Heights,
in Manhattan, when he was on his way to buy a Dominican newspaper for his
father.
The lawmakers say the racial imbalance with which stop-and-frisk is applied has
a corollary effect: Many white legislators have remained silent on the issue, or
have supported the police, revealing a racial gap over attitudes toward the
practice.
“There is an ethnic divide on who’s being stopped and frisked, and there is an
ethnic divide on who’s fighting against the policy,” said State Senator Eric L.
Adams, a Democrat and a retired police captain from Brooklyn.
The lawmakers’ effort to set off a debate in Albany is taking place with an
increased focus on the interplay between race and public safety. It was
highlighted in New York by the fatal shooting last month of Ramarley Graham, 18,
by a police officer in the Bronx, and nationally by the fatal shooting last
month of Trayvon Martin, 17, by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The
young men were unarmed.
“Both illustrate the perils of racial stereotyping when individuals are
empowered with the capacity to make life and death decisions,” said Assemblyman
Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat. He said the shootings had “further
emboldened legislators to continue to fight to deal with the out-of-control
stop-and-frisk practices.”
The split among Albany lawmakers over the stop-and-frisk issue reflects a divide
among New York City voters: according to a Quinnipiac University poll released
on March 13, 59 percent of white voters approve of it, and 27 percent of black
voters do.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, facing increased complaints about the
practice, has pushed back hard against critics. Last week, assailed by the City
Council over the practice, Mr. Kelly said that the policy was an important
policing tool intended to reduce the violence that has victimized blacks and
Hispanics, and that, “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence
problems in these communities.”
“People are upset about being stopped,” he continued, “yet what is the answer?”
According to the Police Department, 96 percent of shooting victims last year,
and 90 percent of murder victims, were minorities.
“There’s more police assigned to a place like East New York than, say, a
precinct in Riverdale,” said the Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne,
“so the police are going to be in a position to observe suspicious behavior more
frequently.”
The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last
year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10
percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery
of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has
examined police data.
But the Police Department frames the numbers in a different way: last year, it
said, it recovered 8,000 weapons, 800 of them handguns, via stops. And over the
last decade, the number of murders has dropped by 51 percent, “in part because
of stop, question and frisk,” Mr. Browne said.
Some white elected officials have strongly criticized the stop-and-frisk policy.
They included the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and the public
advocate, Bill de Blasio, both of whom are likely candidates for mayor; and Brad
Lander and Daniel Dromm, who are on the Council. Senator Michael Gianaris, a
Democrat from Queens, has offered a bill that would make it illegal for the
department to set a quota for the number of stops officers must make.
Mr. Stringer said it was important for elected officials “who look like me” to
help broaden the coalition of New Yorkers fighting against stop-and-frisk.
But race continues to dominate discussion of the issue. Assemblyman Keith L. T.
Wright, a black Democrat from Harlem, is still smarting over a legislative
debate he had in 2008 with Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr., a white Republican
from central New York, on a proposal to prohibit racial profiling. Mr. Townsend
said part of good police work involved questioning people who seemed out of
place in a particular neighborhood, regardless of their race.
“If you were spotted in an affluent section of Oneida County where we don’t have
minority people living, and you were driving around through these houses, and I
was a law enforcement officer and a highway patrol, I would stop you to say, No.
1: ‘Are you lost? Is there something we can help you with, or what are you doing
here?’ ” Mr. Townsend said to Mr. Wright.
Two years ago, the Legislature passed a law requiring police officials in New
York City to no longer store the names and addresses of people stopped but not
charged. Gov. David A. Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor,
signed the measure despite objections not only from city officials, but also, he
said, from an all-white panel advising him on the issue.
In a recent interview, Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said his views of the measure
were informed by his own experience, which included being stopped three times by
the police.
“It’s a feeling of being degraded,” he said. “I think that’s what people who it
hasn’t happened to don’t understand.”
Now, Mr. Jeffries is sponsoring a bill that would make it a violation, not a
crime, to possess small quantities of marijuana in public view. The bill, he
said, would curb the tens of thousands of arrests each year that result when
officers stop people and ask them to empty their pockets, leading to the
revelation of small amounts of marijuana.
Mr. Wright has been urging passage of a bill that would prohibit police officers
from stopping people based solely on their race or ethnicity. Mr. Parker is
behind legislation to create the post of inspector general for the police.
And in the Council, Jumaane D. Williams has introduced bills that would require
officers to inform people they stop that they can refuse to be searched and make
mandatory and citywide a pilot program in which officers give those stopped a
business card with a phone number, in case they want to lodge a complaint.
Mr. Williams has had his own run-ins with police. He said he was stopped in
Brooklyn last year, after he had bought a BMW, by officers who said, “We want to
make sure it’s yours.” And, in an episode that drew widespread publicity, he was
detained by the police last year after an argument with officers over whether he
was allowed to use a closed sidewalk during the West Indian American Day Parade.
“We know that the legislation is not going to stop stop-and-frisk,” he said.
“What we’re trying to do is provide more accountability with the N.Y.P.D. and
their practices and policies.”
Taking On Police Tactic, Critics Hit Racial Divide, NYT, 22.3.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/nyregion/fighting-stop-and-frisk-tactic-but-hitting-racial-divide.html
More Human Remains Are Found on Long Island
February 18, 2012
The New York Times
By AL BAKER
Another set of human remains was discovered in a wooded area
of eastern Long Island that has become a dumping ground for bodies over the
years, the authorities said on Saturday.
The question now is whether the skeletal remains, found on Friday evening by a
man walking his dog on a trail in Manorville, represent an isolated death or is
the latest clue in a continuing serial-killer case that is confronting
investigators in Suffolk County.
“At this time, we cannot say if the remains are connected to any other cases,” a
spokeswoman for the police said on Saturday. “The scene will be processed and
re-evaluated,” he said, but that they were “at the preliminary stages of the
investigation”
The spokeswoman said investigators “cannot yet determine the age or gender of
the remains.”
The police said a forensic anthropologist from the New York City medical
examiner’s office would assist the Suffolk authorities in removing and
evaluating the bones, which they said were believed to have been in the woods
for several years based on the degree of plant growth around them.
Investigators are trying to solve the killings of 10 people whose remains have
been found since December 2010, spread amid the brush of Jones Beach Island,
which is about 45 miles west of Manorville.
A serial killer is believed to be responsible for the deaths of four of those
victims — all women who had worked as prostitutes.
Four other sets of human remains found off Ocean Parkway, on Jones Beach Island,
included body parts from two victims who had been dismembered and whose torsos
were discovered in Manorville, about four miles from where the newest remains
were discovered, the authorities said.
Most of the remains of one of those victims, Jessica Taylor, 20, were found by a
woman walking her dog off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville, shortly after Ms.
Taylor disappeared in July 2003. She had worked as a prostitute in Washington,
and briefly in New York. Her head and hands, were discovered in March off Ocean
Parkway, about a mile from the location of the bodies of the other four women.
In November 2000, most of the body of another victim — who has not been
identified but whom detectives refer to as Jane Doe No. 6 — was discovered in
the same heavily wooded area of Manorville where Ms. Taylor’s torso was
discovered.
The head, hands and other remains of Jane Doe No. 6 were found in April off
Ocean Parkway.
It was early evening on Friday when Matthew J. Samuel, 30, discovered the bones
in Manorville. This was about 350 yards from his house in an area he had passed
many, many times.
He was cutting through the woods after he had been out with his German
short-haired pointer, Molly, searching for the shed antlers of deer, when he
noticed “the top, cranial portion of the skull,” bleached white from exposure.
“I leaned in and looked a little closer and saw it was a skull from the seam in
the back,” said Mr. Samuel, a welder, who is studying education. “And then I
looked closer and it was human remains.”
He went home, called his older brother and a cousin and a friend. The four of
them returned to the site with a flashlight. They saw the outline of a body
seemingly face up, with a foot-high blueberry bush growing through it.
“We saw the pelvis bones sticking out,” said Mr. Samuel.
The body, partly buried, was wrapped in a worn bedsheet. The sheet appeared to
be covered in a black plastic garbage bag and wrapped with duct tape. Mr. Samuel
did not see shoes. “I think it was barefoot,” he said.
They called the police from there, he said, adding “I’m sure whoever it was, was
missed for a while,” he said.
More Human Remains Are Found on Long
Island, NYT, 18.2.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/nyregion/more-human-remains-are-found-on-long-island.html
t 9/11 Memorial, Police Raise Fears of Suicide
February
15, 2012
The New York Times
By AL BAKER
Amid the
serenity and solemnity of the National September 11 Memorial, the two sunken
granite pools that designate the footprints of the absent World Trade Center
towers have become a natural focal point, drawing visitors with artificial
waterfalls that extend three stories down.
But for the New York Police Department, the pools also represent a focal point
for an entirely different reason: the fear that people overwhelmed by grief may
try to commit suicide there.
Police officials and grief experts share concerns that the memorial poses a
unique risk because of its layout and its powerful relationship to the terrorist
act of Sept. 11, 2001, and because those who lost loved ones that day may still
have unresolved issues of loss.
The concern is as yet unrealized; there have been a million or so visitors to
the memorial since it opened last September, and there have been no suicide
attempts. Nonetheless, the police said a plan had been put in place.
“We have to think of these possibilities,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
said in an interview with Esquire magazine. “People might commit suicide. We’re
concerned about the possibility of somebody jumping in.”
Grief experts say memorials can set off negative psychological reactions,
especially for those who have a direct connection to the event being
memorialized. That effect could be magnified at the Sept. 11 memorial, where the
memory of what happened there may still be fresh.
Dr. Dana M. Alonzo, associate professor of social work at the Columbia
University School of Social Work, said there had been instances of people having
new episodes of post-traumatic stress disorder; after visiting the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, people have reported worsened symptoms.
“If they have not completed the mourning process, or the mourning process is
complicated, which is what generally happens when someone’s loved one dies in a
violent type of death,” Dr. Alonzo said, “then the grieving process can take on
the form of complicated grief.”
“The memorial, rather than serving as a source of comfort, can heighten feelings
of either ‘This is unjust’ or desires for revenge of some sort,” she added.
“They can feed into those negative feelings that the person is stuck in.”
Officials at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum said they were aware
of the power of a physical landmark to unearth strong emotions in people,
whether or not they had a connection to that place.
“Of course it is a trigger for grief; people died here,” Kari F. Watkins, the
executive director, said. “But when people experience this site, they see the
hope that comes out of the horror and the good that overcame evil.
“People come to these places and begin to understand the meaning of them. We’re
teaching lessons of remembrance and resilience, and no matter what people are
going through in their personal lives, they can relate to some story that is
told here.”
Since the Oklahoma City landmark opened in April 2000, on the fifth anniversary
of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, no one has made a
suicide attempt there, Ms. Watkins said.
But in New York, as the Sept. 11 memorial began to take shape in 2006, the
concern about possible suicide attempts was expressed by James K. Kallstrom, a
former adviser on counterterrorism. At the time, the greater concern was that
someone would throw a satchel laden with explosives or release an airborne
contaminant around the memorial’s twin, one-acre watery voids.
“Our big worry several years ago, in the original design, was terrorism, and now
we add suicide to the equation,” said Glenn P. Corbett, an associate professor
of fire science at John Jay College, who is advising the Skyscraper Safety
Campaign in its criticism of the memorial as inadequately safe and secure. “I
think it’s going to happen — a suicide. I think it is an unbelievably emotional
site.”
Sally Regenhard, whose son Christian, a firefighter, was killed in the terrorist
attack at the World Trade Center, acknowledged that the thought of suicides at
the memorial pools had “passed my mind — that people might think of really
jumping in, in grief.”
“When people see water, this is such a grief-stricken area that it is certainly
within the realm of possibility,” Ms. Regenhard added. “It’s something that
should be thought about.”
Commissioner Kelly did not go into detail about the police strategy to prevent
suicides there, saying only, “We actually have a plan for when that happens.”
As a practical matter, anyone trying to take his or her life in the waterfalls
would have to scuttle over a bronze parapet inscribed with the names of those
who died in the terrorist attacks in New York, Northern Virginia and
Pennsylvania, as well as those who died in the trade center attack in 1993. Once
the parapet is cleared, eight feet of water-covered marble must be navigated.
Michael Frazier, a spokesman for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum,
said the site was patrolled by officers from the police forces of New York City
and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He added that there had been
“no incidents in the pools, whatsoever.”
Mr. Frazier acknowledged that there was a rule banning off-duty or retired
officers from carrying weapons at the memorial site, but said it had nothing to
do with concerns about suicide attempts.
Nonetheless, Dr. Gail M. Saltz, a psychoanalyst in New York with the American
Psychoanalytic Association, said those who visited memorials to monumental loss
might bring with them “their own individual association to loss” that could stir
thoughts of suicide.
“Are we talking about people who lost someone on 9/11 and are having complicated
grief and therefore are exceedingly depressed and at risk for suicide?” Dr.
Saltz said. “Are we talking about someone who has a history of terrible loss
that could be standing at a place of loss that might stir those feelings?”
“We can’t always predict,” she said, adding that she was unaware of any suicides
at a memorial site.
Still, Dr. Saltz said: “Someone could plan to go there, or someone could be
visiting the memorial and be overwhelmed by the thought of suicide. An impulsive
act of jumping in may, to that person, be a way of joining their loved one.”
At 9/11 Memorial, Police Raise Fears of Suicide, NYT, 15.2.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/nyregion/at-9-11-memorial-police-raise-suicide-fears.html
Police
Evict Occupy Newark Protesters
February
15, 2012
The New York Times
By TIM STELLOH
NEWARK —
Authorities swept in shortly after midnight Wednesday and ended what appeared to
be a relatively harmonious co-existence between the city of Newark and its
occupiers.
At Military Park, the site of Occupy Newark, about two dozen police officers and
fire fighters disassembled what was left of the movement’s encampment and loaded
much of into the back of a city truck: more than a dozen tents, a canopy, a
sofa, pallets, blankets and other items.
Deputy Chief Tracy Glover of the Newark Police Department told protesters that
if they did not have a permit that allowed them to be in the park after a 9 p.m.
curfew, they had to leave immediately. By 1:30 a.m., most of the site had been
removed. No arrests were made, although about a dozen protesters in the park
taunted the officers as they worked.
“Carjackings are up 62 percent, but the tents are down,” said Teacher Iovino,
43. At its height, Occupy Newark was a cluster of tents that included a kitchen
and an information area. About 30 people stayed overnight at the encampment,
most of which was set up in November, and 50 to 60 people would be there during
the day, said Anthony Batalla, 20, who has been there since November.
The eviction marked a shift in the city’s approach to the protesters. In
November, the city’s police chief agreed to waive a permit required to assemble
in Military Park. Mayor Cory A. Booker brought them doughnuts and coffee. A
municipal councilman stayed there overnight, said one protester, Ibraheem
Awadallah, 27.
Last Tuesday, the city sent a letter to the encampment, said Cass Zang, 42, who
has been coming there since November.
“It said that they’ve decided not to continue lifting the ban” on the curfew,
Ms. Zang said, paraphrasing the note. “It said, ‘Respectfully, we appreciate
working together, but this is over.’”
Police Evict Occupy Newark Protesters, NYT, 15.2.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/nyregion/police-evict-occupy-newark-protesters.html
A Raucous Protest Against a Police Killing
February
6, 2012
The New York Times
By TIM STELLOH
It was a
dramatic conclusion to a day of protest: Leona Virgo, whose younger brother was
shot to death by a police officer in the bathroom of their family’s home on
Thursday, was hoisted above a sea of supporters outside the 47th Precinct
station house in the Bronx on Monday night.
As the crowd condemned a dozen officers positioned outside the station —
comparing them to members of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance — Ms. Virgo
remembered her brother, Ramarley Graham, for the crowd.
“I never wanted him to go out like this,” said Ms. Virgo, 22, tearing up. “He
was only 18 years old.”
But, she added: “This is not just about Ramarley. This is about all young black
men.”
That theme was echoed throughout the afternoon, as hundreds gathered outside the
family’s home on East 229th Street for what was, at times, a chaotic
condemnation of police violence and the killing of Mr. Graham, who was unarmed.
The authorities are investigating the shooting, which happened after narcotics
officers followed Mr. Graham into the apartment thinking that he was armed, the
police said. An officer confronted Mr. Graham, who was in the bathroom, possibly
trying to flush marijuana down the toilet, the authorities said. Moments later,
the officer fired a shot, killing him.
On Monday, a makeshift memorial of candles and flowers outside the family’s
home, a second-floor apartment in a three-story building, included more than
half a dozen posters scrawled with anti-Police Department slogans.
“Blood is on your shoulders NYPD Killer!!” one poster read.
Juanita Young, 57, came to support Mr. Graham’s mother. Her son, Malcolm
Ferguson, 23, was shot to death by the police in the South Bronx on March 1,
2000, for reasons still unclear to her. She received $4.4 million in 2007 after
the city settled a wrongful-death suit, she said. “I know this mother’s pain,”
Ms. Young said. “The pain we walk — can’t nothing touch that pain.”
Some feared that their children might be next; others wanted vengeance. “I don’t
want justice,” said Arlene Brooks, 49. “I want revenge.”
Despite that tension, there did not appear to be any violence, and the crowd
occasionally broke into song. About 6 p.m., Mr. Graham’s father, Franclot
Graham, addressed the group, telling supporters to remember to celebrate his
son’s life.
The raucous gathering was then led to the station house by Mr. Graham; his son’s
mother, Constance Malcolm; and his son’s grandmother Patricia Hartley.
Afterward, children riding bicycles down the street could be heard chanting one
of the protest’s mantras: “NYPD-KKK.”
A Raucous Protest Against a Police Killing, NYT, 6.2.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/nyregion/ramarley-grahams-family-leads-protest-of-police.html
After 11 Years, a Police Leader Hits Turbulence
February
3, 2012
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD, AL BAKER and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
The
officers who stand sentinel over New York’s streets and run the station houses
rarely intersect with the police commissioner. They see the man they call “boss”
at Police Academy graduations, at promotions, on the news recapitulating the
latest ugly crime or at police funerals. That is about it.
So it was jarring recently when some commanders got e-mails from the boss with
photos of vagrants taken by his personal staff. The messages cited “a condition
that requires your immediate attention.” They specified no action, but officers
said those highlighted sometimes later wound up in handcuffs.
The e-mails reminded some precinct commanders of the blanket control the
commissioner exerts — even the ceremonial unit of anthem singers and pallbearers
reports directly to him — and of his thirst for arrests, of almost any sort.
They also reminded them of something quite contrary: While his presence is
always sensed, it is unusual to have contact with a commissioner who seems to
have reigned for eons.
But that is Ray Kelly.
After years of undeniable suc-cess, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is going
through turbulent times, confronted with a steady drip of troublesome episodes.
They include officers fixing traffic tickets, running guns and disparaging
civilians on Facebook, and accusations that the Police Department encourages
officers to question minorities on the streets indiscriminately. His younger son
has been accused of rape, though he has not been charged and maintains his
innocence. On Thursday, in an episode that Mr. Kelly said concerned him, an
officer killed an 18-year-old drug suspect who was unarmed.
At 70, Mr. Kelly has now run the 52,000-member department longer than any of the
city’s 41 commissioners. Almost everything about him braids through the
department’s interlocking workings. Yet many inside and outside the force wonder
whether the pileup of scandals and his increasingly authoritarian use of power
have diminished his once-towering stature.
In Mr. Kelly’s two tenures — 16 months in the early 1990s under Mayor David N.
Dinkins, and since 2002 under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — he has now served 11
½ years. Lewis Joseph Valentine presided for just shy of 11, from 1934 to 1945,
during monstrous times, when organized-crime groups sanctioned hundreds of
murders.
Mr. Kelly has many fans. His public approval numbers after years of low crime
remain high: two-thirds of the city’s voters were pleased with his job
performance in a December poll by Quinnipiac University.
Mr. Bloomberg continues to affirm his unbending faith. Asked if he had
considered replacing Mr. Kelly, he said, “With God as my witness, never once.”
While waving off interest, Mr. Kelly has been promoted as a 2013 mayoral
candidate; political soothsayers are dubious he will run, however, and the
suggestion is heard less often these days.
But even some of those who admire Mr. Kelly wonder if his prolonged tenure has
changed him. And they wonder something else more ominous: Has it begun to damage
the department?
“In many, many ways he’s been an outstanding commissioner,” said Eugene J.
O’Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former
police officer. “There’s a danger in that job in staying too long. I think there
should be a six-year term limit to the job.” He added, “I think a lot of what
you do after six years is a rerun.”
A Remote Presence
Those who go back far enough generally agree that Mr. Kelly in his elongated
encore is different from his first stint: less jocular, more controlling, less
transparent.
He used to cook spaghetti for staff members in his office kitchen. He would let
the police press corps inspect unloaded guns in his conference room, and brought
doughnuts and coffee, but no longer. “He is not a regular guy anymore,” one
commander said. “He doesn’t talk to the guys.”
The commander mentioned an officer, retiring after 30 years, and his final
request: to meet the commissioner and shake his hand. It was done, but the
commander wondered why it had not happened before.
Mr. Kelly’s autonomy is striking. A former senior member of the Bloomberg
administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to disturb his
relationship with the mayor, said he had never known an agency head with such
sweeping, unchecked power, and who so intimidated other city officials. He said
in budget meetings, when police cuts were suggested, Mr. Kelly would nod, but
everyone knew the requests would be ignored or minimized. (The mayor disputed
that.)
All police commissioners are remote to some extent. Ray Kelly these days seems
to exude remoteness.
Some believe 9/11 is part of it — before and after the attack he has lived in
Battery Park City, in the shadow of the towers. Others wonder about the perils
of power in a cauldron-like job.
There are reasons he has lasted so long. Under his command, serious crime has
dropped and remained remarkably low, even as austerity has reduced resources.
When he returned in 2002, there were 587 murders. In each of the last two years,
the count was in the low 500s.
He has made taking advantage of cutting-edge technology a top objective. He
added thousands of black and Hispanic officers and, despite recent scuffles, has
generally strengthened relations with minority communities, in part by regularly
visiting black churches.
He has built a counterterrorism machine with tentacles in 11 foreign cities,
irritating federal agencies. There has been no successful terrorist attack on
his city while he has been commissioner. He has instead been engulfed in the
past year largely by familiar police corruption story lines, of human beings
succumbing to greed or audacity.
Over the past year, two officers charged with raping a woman were fired after
being acquitted of rape but found guilty of official misconduct. A broad
ticket-fixing scandal flared in the Bronx; when the accused officers were
arraigned, hundreds of officers massed in protest, some denouncing Mr. Kelly.
Eight current and former officers were charged with smuggling illegal guns.
Narcotics detectives were accused of planting drugs on innocent civilians. An
inspector needlessly pepper-sprayed four Occupy Wall Street protesters, invoking
memories of the scrutiny and mass arrests of protesters during the 2004
Republican National Convention, and giving the nascent movement its first real
prime-time moment.
Civil rights advocates have assailed the department’s expanded stops of
minorities on the streets. Several officers denigrated West Indians on Facebook.
Muslims have denounced the monitoring of their lives, as Mr. Kelly has
dispatched undercover officers and informants to find radicalized youth.
This year began with the revelation that a film offensive to Muslims, which
included an interview with Mr. Kelly, had been shown to many officers.
The other afternoon, Mr. Kelly was in the back seat of his car, traveling to an
appearance. At turns defiant or preoccupied, he brushed aside the combustible
year. He said the state of the department was “very good.” He said unsavory
things happened in a big department that had always had dark corners. He said
they were isolated.
“No, I don’t feel guilt, I don’t feel pain,” he said. “This is a business. It is
a business like other businesses.”
He said: “We’re not going to make everybody happy because of what we do. We
arrest people; we give summonses; we’re the bearers of bad news; we sometimes
use deadly force.”
He added: “You do a good job, you do the best you can. The chips fall where they
may.”
Has he held the job too long? “You don’t leave just to leave,” he said. “The
question is, are you effective?”
A Victim
of Success
Crime will never stop. Still, many officers feel Mr. Kelly acts as if it can.
They find him intolerant of not just crime but also of mere suspicious behavior,
to a degree unusual even for a police commissioner, who, after all, is judged on
the safety of his city.
The mayor recently declared 2011 the 21st straight year in which major felonies
fell. Yet these declines are verging on microscopic. In fact, some Kelly allies,
like Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., believe that crime is inching up and that
the numbers are being massaged.
Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley,
who has studied New York’s crime record, said, “In a funny sense, the department
is and has been for some time a victim of its own success.” He added: “Anybody
in that job has got to play a constant game of, ‘Can you top this?’ And that has
been a hard game to play.”
An article of faith among the police is that minor arrests thwart more serious
crimes. Yet as the city becomes safer, officers say they often feel pressured to
do pointless arrests and ticket-writing, purely to please superiors.
There has been a stunning rise in so-called stop-and-frisks — 601,055 in 2010,
compared with 97,296 in 2002 — and they occur overwhelmingly in minority
neighborhoods. The police say they select crime-ridden areas, regardless of
racial composition. Public concern has not caused Mr. Kelly to relent.
Mr. Bloomberg said that he had discussed the practice “ad nauseam” with Mr.
Kelly and that it was “one of the key ways to get guns off the street.”
State Senator Eric L. Adams, a former police officer, expressed alarm at this
surge. He said his own teenage son was asked for ID at a movie theater. During
Mr. Kelly’s first tenure, Mr. Adams said, “he believed in the beat cop. Joe
Friendly Officer. Now not.”
The force has noticeably expanded what it deems valid grounds for arrest.
Officers have snapped cuffs on people for small-scale marijuana possession, a
ticketable offense (a Kelly directive a few months ago cut back such arrests
after consistent increases), and transgressions that are not much more than
antisocial behavior or code violations, like putting your feet on a subway seat.
In 2002, when the police made 338,789 arrests, 16,714 were for infractions or
violations. In 2010, when there were 422,982 total arrests, 32,033 were
infractions or violations.
A Bronx patrol officer, who like other officers and commanders spoke on the
condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or of offending Mr. Kelly, echoed
what many colleagues say: “Every month you’re expected to bring in a certain
amount. If you don’t, they deny your days off, refuse annual vacation time. They
do stuff to you.”
Top department officials have repeatedly denied the existence of quotas but have
said managers are expected to establish minimum productivity goals.
Edward Conlon, a recently retired detective who has written tellingly of police
work, said of Mr. Kelly: “I do think he tries to do what’s right, and what’s
right by cops whenever he can. I’m not sure the rank-and-file always appreciates
that, and may not till he goes.”
No Time
for Vacations
Even friends find Mr. Kelly inscrutable. He is rarely expansive or publicly
introspective. With his stubbled crew cut and muscled look, he is the picture of
the prototypical police officer. Beneath his piercing eyes, a grimace appears to
have been ironed onto his face.
His own ascent was always a good story. A city kid, he grew up on the Upper West
Side. His father worked as a milkman, then on the docks, before landing a job
with the Internal Revenue Service. His mother checked the dressing rooms at
Macy’s. As a Marine, Mr. Kelly saw combat in Vietnam, then held every rank in
the Police Department.
He is not much for joking around though his humor occasionally surfaces. When a
retired detective casually inquired recently why he kept working, he told him it
was for the dental plan.
Though Mr. Kelly’s encounters with officers are rare, Lowell Stahl, a chief who
retired in 2008 after running the commissioner’s office for 18 years, said Mr.
Kelly had his driver pull over when he saw an officer doing a good job and he
would hand him one of the N.Y.P.D. hats and shirts he kept piled in the car.
He is attentive to the visual impact he has, favoring custom-made suits and
Charvet ties. Yet he has relaxed the dress code for officers so they can wear
cargo pants. Along with his wife, Veronica, he likes to crawl through the city’s
social night life, his name often cracking the gossip columns.
In his 14th-floor conference room in One Police Plaza, screens on the wall pipe
in street scenes captured by surveillance cameras. Each morning, he spends an
hour talking with two aides about terrorist threats. Those who deal with him say
he fully trusts only a few very close to him, like Paul J. Browne, the
department’s chief spokesman.
Though Mr. Kelly has had his share, he rarely swaps war stories the way officers
like to do. Except for a few long weekends, he has not had a vacation in years.
He goes to bed knowing his security detail is under orders to wake him if an
officer fires his weapon or is shot.
Mr. Kelly said, “You can’t micromanage an organization of 50,000 people.” Yet
many feel he comes awfully close.
He has flattened the department so almost everything reports to him. All
transfers go through his office, and he revived a promotion board to do away
with “the hook,” slang for getting plum assignments based on whom you know. “If
a chief says, this is how we always do it, he’d come right back to you and say:
Why? Defend it!” Mr. Stahl said.
At news conferences in Mr. Kelly’s earlier days, detectives and chiefs often
spoke, but now it is almost exclusively him, conversing in his growling, clipped
manner. Incoming rounds in Vietnam damaged his hearing and caused him to wear
hearing aids. At news media appearances, he sometimes leans in, cups a hand
behind his ear and says: “I’m a disabled war vet. Can you repeat that?”
Government agencies, academics and reporters, however, complain that the
department is unwilling to provide insight into its workings — even statistics
on lower-level crime or Mr. Kelly’s daily schedule. Several years ago, the
commissioner ceased regular background briefings with the press corps embedded
at Police Headquarters.
Commanders say they feel less empowered. One mentioned, for instance, how Mr.
Kelly had taken over from high-ranking chiefs the right to allocate “take home”
cars — unmarked vehicles that officers sometimes get to drive home as rewards
for hard work.
New commissioners typically appoint new chiefs, but Mr. Kelly’s long tenure has
produced a paralyzed structure. One Police Plaza has become a crucible of
frustrated senior officials, where veterans say the only safe elevator
conversation returns to lunch and retirement plans.
While he says Mr. Kelly has done a superb job, particularly in counterterrorism,
Edward Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, faulted
him for no longer offering a vision. “There is no message going to the bottom,”
he said. “Everyone is afraid.” He added, “Among the rank-and-file, and even
among the brass when I have talked to them, they are dying for a change.”
With long incumbencies, said Professor Zimring of the University of California,
Berkeley, “innovation is very difficult, and new blood may need new veins and
organizational arteries.”
David W.
Chen contributed reporting.
After 11 Years, a Police Leader Hits Turbulence, NYT, 3.2.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/nyregion/raymond-w-kelly-nypd-commissioner-runs-into-turbulence.html
In a Gang-Ridden City,
New
Efforts to Fight Crime While Cutting Costs
January
30, 2012
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE
SALINAS,
Calif. — People in California generally know two things about this agricultural
city nestled among lettuce fields east of Monterey’s beaches and hotels: John
Steinbeck was born here, and it has a big problem with gangs.
Three years ago, the violence between warring Northern and Southern California
gang members had become so bad that police and city officials decided to mount
an all-out drive to tame it.
They poured money and personnel into a strategy that combined tough law
enforcement with job training and a plethora of social services. They developed
a countywide violence-reduction plan and sought help from state and federal
agencies and the nearby Naval Postgraduate School. A special team of police
officers worked overtime making home visits in gang-infested neighborhoods.
The efforts seemed to be paying off. In 2010, this city of 150,000 — with an
estimated 3,500 gang members — registered 131 shootings and 15 homicides, down
from a record of 151 shootings and 29 homicides in 2009, virtually all of them
gang-related. Last year the numbers dropped further, to 50 shootings and 12
homicides.
But the economic malaise that has engulfed California has not spared the city.
The Salinas Police Department has shrunk to 144 sworn officers from 184 in the
last two years. Financing for nonprofits has dried up, making the promises of
job training and other services harder to fulfill. The special police team was
disbanded — the officers were too exhausted from filling staffing gaps to put in
the overtime. Staffing for the Police Department’s violence-suppression unit, a
central part of the program’s enforcement arm, was cut back.
“It felt like, overnight, budgets were cut, our grants expired, our service
providers lost funding and we were scrambling,” said Sgt. Sheldon Bryan, who
managed the Police Department’s Cease-fire program, an important component of
the antigang effort. In small cities forced into drastic belt-tightening,
ambitious social or law enforcement programs are often the first to go. But city
leaders in Salinas worried that they could not afford to abandon what they had
started.
Gangs were the city’s biggest and most stubborn problem, a safety and
public-relations nightmare. Mayor Dennis Donohue says that when he gives Rotary
Club talks in Monterey or Carmel, he tells the audience that he knows some of
them think stepping into Salinas — crossing the “lettuce curtain,” as it is
disparagingly called — means being shot on sight. “That’s a bit of a problem
from an economic development standpoint,” he said.
In fact, gang shootouts do sometimes take place in broad daylight, gang members
hiding sawed-off shotguns in parks where children play. Members of Southern
California gangs who once rarely strayed north of Bakersfield have moved north
and planted firm roots in the city.
East Salinas is sprinkled with bloody landmarks, not least the house where
6-year-old Azahel Cruz, at home and dressed for bedtime in his Spider-Man
pajamas, was killed by a stray bullet on a March evening in 2010. But the
violence also stretches into the affluent streets of South Salinas, where in
2008, gang members knocked on the door of a tidy house with white trim and shot
the father of one of their rivals in the head.
“The gang problems go away, and this town is paradise,” said Kelly McMillin, a
deputy police chief. “If we throw up our hands because we’ve run out of money,
that’s just irresponsible.”
Money, of course, was the issue: how to build on the gains that had been made
without additional funds? The answer, city leaders decided, was to keep many
programs in place but modify them to fit a shrinking budget, deploy police
officers more strategically, consolidate the efforts of government and nonprofit
agencies under a single organizational structure so as not to duplicate
resources and shift more responsibility onto the shoulders of community
residents.
“It’s a new way of doing business,” said Georgina Mendoza, a senior deputy city
attorney and the program director for the Community Alliance for Safety and
Peace, which devised the countywide violence reduction plan. “Before, we felt
more restricted in our own silos, our own lanes. Now, we realize we can’t do
that.”
The Cease-fire program — modeled on a highly successful violence-prevention
approach pioneered in Boston that uses “carrots” in the form of jobs and other
services combined with the “stick” of intensified law enforcement to persuade
hardened gang members to give up violence — is continuing, albeit in a far more
modest form. “We need to talk about an altered message because I can’t promise
them jobs I don’t have,” Sergeant Bryan said.
The department has also embarked on some new projects, partnering with the
community safety alliance in an ambitious prevention program that focuses on a
roughly 20-block neighborhood in East Salinas known as Hebbron Heights, where
violence is routine. Last Sunday, a 21-year-old man was shot and killed there,
the city’s second homicide victim of the year.
As part of the project, the county’s mental health agency has held “charlas” —
“chats,” in Spanish — to encourage residents to organize and address problems in
the neighborhood. Neighborhood leaders and representatives from a variety of
government agencies and nonprofits meet regularly in a recreation center at the
corner of Hebbron and Freemont Streets, where northern and southern gangs
intersect.
The Police Department has opened an office in the recreation center, staffed by
two officers, Rich Lopez and Jeffrey Lofton, who spend their days doing whatever
is needed, like mediating disputes between sixth-grade girls and helping people
in the neighborhood write petitions to have streetlights repaired.
On a recent afternoon, Officer Lopez and Officer Lofton were knocking on doors,
chatting with residents and handing out fliers with information about social
services. A 90-year-old woman with two Chihuahuas in her yard said there were
occasional shots fired on the street, but otherwise things were peaceful. A man
complained about his neighbor, who parked too many cars in the driveway and did
not like his dogs.
The hope is that through such efforts, the police will come to be viewed as
allies and gain valuable intelligence about the structure of gangs in the area.
But Officer Lopez and Officer Lofton have 1,000 doors to knock on; two other
officers originally assigned to the project were needed elsewhere and pulled
off.
Brian Contreras, executive director of 2nd Chance Family and Youth Services, a
gang diversion program in town, said that he applauded what the alliance and the
police were doing, but he noted that a number of senior gang members were due to
be released from prison soon and worried that a resurgence of gang violence
would follow.
“We’re a little paranoid in the sense of what’s going to happen this year and
next year, especially when the resources are being cut left and right,” he said.
Deputy Chief McMillin agreed that the city was now embarked on an experiment in
doing more with less, and that the outcome was uncertain.
But, he said, “We’re going to fight this fight whether we’re fully funded or
half funded or not funded at all.”
In a Gang-Ridden City, New Efforts to Fight Crime While Cutting Costs, NYT,
30.1.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/us/in-salinas-fighting-gang-violence-on-a-shoestring.html
Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights
January 23, 2012
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled unanimously
that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning
System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28
days.
A set of overlapping opinions in the case collectively suggested that a majority
of the justices are prepared to apply broad privacy principles to bring the
Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches into the digital age, when law
enforcement officials can gather extensive information without ever entering an
individual’s home or vehicle.
Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting
United States solicitor general, said the decision was “a signal event in Fourth
Amendment history.”
“Law enforcement is now on notice,” Mr. Dellinger said, “that almost any use of
GPS electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable
unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”
An overlapping array of justices were divided on the rationale for the decision,
with the majority saying the problem was the placement of the device on private
property.
But five justices also discussed their discomfort with the government’s use of
or access to various modern technologies, including video surveillance in public
places, automatic toll collection systems on highways, devices that allow
motorists to signal for roadside assistance, location data from cellphone towers
and records kept by online merchants.
The case concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub
when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling
operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a
valid warrant, tracked his movements for a month and used the evidence they
gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life
in prison.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
overturned his conviction, saying the sheer amount of information that had been
collected violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches.
“Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar or a bookie tell a story not told by
any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of those places in the course
of a month,” Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg wrote for the appeals court panel.
The Supreme Court affirmed that decision, but on a different ground. “We hold
that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and
its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a
‘search,’ ” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. Chief Justice John G.
Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor
joined the majority opinion.
“It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case,” Justice Scalia
went on. “The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of
obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would
have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when
it was adopted.”
When the case was argued in November, a lawyer for the federal government said
the number of times the federal authorities used GPS devices to track suspects
was “in the low thousands annually.”
Vernon Herron, a former Maryland state trooper now on the staff of the
University of Maryland’s Center for Health and Homeland Security, said state and
local law enforcement officials used GPS and similar devices “all the time,”
adding that “this type of technology is very useful for narcotics and terrorism
investigations.”
Monday’s decision thus places a significant burden on widely used law
enforcement surveillance techniques, though the authorities remain free to seek
warrants from judges authorizing the surveillance.
In a concurrence for four justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. faulted the
majority for trying to apply 18th-century legal concepts to 21st-century
technologies. What should matter, he said, is the contemporary reasonable
expectation of privacy.
“The use of longer-term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses,”
Justice Alito wrote, “impinges on expectations of privacy.” Justices Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the concurrence.
“We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this
vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the four-week
mark,” Justice Alito wrote. “Other cases may present more difficult questions.”
Justice Scalia said the majority did not mean to suggest that its
property-rights theory of the Fourth Amendment displaced the one focused on
expectations of privacy.
“It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an
accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the
present case does not require us to answer that question,” he wrote.
Justice Sotomayor joined the majority opinion, agreeing that many questions
could be left for another day “because the government’s physical intrusion on
Jones’s Jeep supplies a narrower basis for decision.”
But she left little doubt that she would have joined Justice Alito’s analysis
had the issue he addressed been the exclusive one presented in the case.
“Physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance,” Justice
Sotomayor wrote.
She added that “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual
has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to
third parties.”
“People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular
providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they
correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries and
medications they purchase to online retailers,” she wrote. “I, for one, doubt
that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the
government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or
month, or year.”
Justice Alito listed other “new devices that permit the monitoring of a person’s
movements” that fit uneasily with traditional Fourth Amendment privacy analysis.
“In some locales,” he wrote, “closed-circuit television video monitoring is
becoming ubiquitous. On toll roads, automatic toll collection systems create a
precise record of the movements of motorists who choose to make use of that
convenience. Many motorists purchase cars that are equipped with devices that
permit a central station to ascertain the car’s location at any time so that
roadside assistance may be provided if needed and the car may be found if it is
stolen.”
Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy
Rights, NT, 23.1.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/us/police-use-of-gps-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html
Arrest in California Homeless Killings
January
14, 2012
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT
ANAHEIM,
Calif. — The man thought to have killed four homeless men in Orange County over
the last month is in custody, law enforcement officials said.
The suspect, Itzcoatl Ocampo, 23, of Yorba Linda, Calif., was arrested Friday
night after a homeless man was fatally stabbed behind a Carl’s Jr. restaurant in
Anaheim. “We are extremely confident that we have the man who is responsible for
the murder of all four homeless men in Orange County,” Chief John Welter of the
Anaheim Police said.
Officials would not say how Mr. Ocampo had been linked to all four murders. But
Friday’s slaying fit the pattern they had already established: a lone,
middle-aged homeless man stabbed to death in the same area of inland Orange
County.
Investigators, which included local agencies as well as the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, were left with few leads besides a few grainy security videos,
including one that showed a man walking toward the first victim.
Dozens of people, however, witnessed Friday night’s attack at a busy shopping
center. A police spokesman said they began receiving calls around 8:17 p.m.,
reporting an assault in progress.
When the police arrived, the victim was dead. The suspect had fled on foot,
chased by two civilians, and officers caught him about a quarter-mile away.
The first of the four victims, James McGillivray, 53, was found on Dec. 20
outside a shopping center in Placentia. The second, Lloyd Middaugh, 42, was
found eight days later on the Santa Ana River Trail in Anaheim, and the third,
Paulus Cornelius Smit, 57, was found behind the Yorba Linda library on Dec. 30.
As of Saturday night, the police had not confirmed the identity of the fourth
victim, but residents said he was John Berry, a Vietnam War veteran who had
stayed in the area for years, sometimes sleeping on a bench beside a river bed
or, on rainy nights, in the shopping center where he was killed. A photograph of
Mr. Berry appeared in a Los Angeles Times article.
A memorial took shape at the spot where he was attacked. The posters of
remembrances did not cover all of the blood on the concrete wall. Dozens of
residents stopped to place flowers or to recall a man they said never asked for
anything. A vigil was planned for Saturday night.
“John was a fixture here, a neighbor,” said Maria Veruasa, 52, who lives in
Yorba Linda. “He never asked anyone for money. When you passed by, he would just
say, ‘Hi’ and ‘God bless.’ Sometimes he wouldn’t even accept money, so I would
leave it discrete on his bicycle seat.”
Jim Palmer, president of the Orange County Mission, said word of the arrest was
just beginning to spread among the homeless here. They were hoping the police
had the right man, but remained wary.
“We’re thankful, obviously, but everyone wants to be real confident that they’ve
caught the right person,” Mr. Palmer said.
Arrest in California Homeless Killings, NYT, 14.1.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/anaheim-calif-police-hold-man-in-killing-of-homeless-man.html
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