Sunday, May 26, 2013

‘Bad bust’ cop defense (The New York Post) and Other Sunday, May 26th, 2013 NYC Police Related News Articles

 

Sunday, May 26th, 2013 — Good Morning, Stay Safe

 

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Retired Bklyn. North Homi Det. Louis Scarcella   (Alleged Cowboy and Flaker)

 

'Bad bust' cop defense
'I'm standing up for myself because it's the truthful thing to do.'

By BRAD HAMILTON — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The New York Post'

 

 

He allegedly browbeat witnesses and railroaded suspects, but the retired Brooklyn homicide detective with 50 cases now under review insists he did nothing wrong — and that a killer has been freed.

 

"I'm standing up for myself because it's the truthful thing to do," said Louis Scarcella, 61, a decorated cop involved in more than 300 murder probes during the blood-soaked 1980s and 1990s.

 

In an exclusive interview, he offered a detailed defense of his record, which came under attack in The New York Times and is the focus of an internal probe by Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes.

 

The case that triggered this scrutiny — the recently overturned conviction of David Ranta — started with Alan Bloom, the wheel man in a plot to rip off $250,000 in gems from a Williamsburg courier in 1990, and ended with a rabbi's murder.

 

Bloom knew Ranta only as "David from Kensington," a fellow thief who had asked Bloom to steal a car and drive with him to the jeweler's home, Scarcella said.

 

"He didn't know his last name, so we drove around looking for [Ranta]," the detective said of the first stages of his probe. "Bloom was telling us about Alison, a prostitute. She and Ranta were doing it. All of a sudden, he yells, 'There she is!' "

 

"I jumped out and said, 'I'm looking for a guy named David,' and I gave her my card. She said, 'You mean David who killed that rabbi?' "

 

Bloom picked out his cohort from among thousands of mug shots, passed a lie-detector test and described the killing in detail, Scarcella said.

 

"He dropped off Ranta and was supposed to double park down the block. But instead, he parked the car. Ranta followed the courier, but he was feisty and he gets away and takes off. Ranta panicked.

 

"He couldn't find the getaway car — he was looking both ways — so he ran across the street where this rabbi was idling. Bloom said Ranta pulled him out of the car and shot him twice."

 

The detective found Ranta and hauled him down to Central Booking, where the suspect came clean, Scarcella says.

 

"I said, 'You come from 66th Street. I come from 66th Street. We're both Italian. Why don't you tell me the truth?'

 

"So he says, 'Yeah, you're right. I was there. I was involved in the robbery. Things went bad. I left when the shots were fired. I didn't shoot the guy.' "

 

Scarcella hastily scribbled this down on a manila folder with all the case paperwork.

 

"I didn't have my pad, so that's what I wrote on."

 

His partner, Steve Chmil, was thrilled. "Louie was trying to get down as much as he can. I said, `This is great. At least we know he was there.' "

 

The two felt the full weight of Ranta's admission. The chief suspect in the most notorious slaying in the city "had just implicated himself in felony murder," all but assuring a conviction and lengthy sentence, Scarcella said.

 

"I believe he signed it in three places. [Prosecutor] Barry Schreiber was ecstatic. He said it was a very compelling statement."

 

Later, Ranta denied making the confession, but the statement was used at trial, and he spent 23 years in prison.

 

He was freed two months ago after another witness claimed to have been coached, saying an unknown cop directed him to "pick the guy with the big nose" in a police lineup.

 

"I did not say this detective," Max Lieberman, the witness, told The Post.

 

Scarcella's reliance on Teresa Gomez, a drug-addicted hooker, has also raised concerns. She testified in five murder cases, Scarcella said, including two involving drug dealer Robert Hill.

 

How could one person see so much death?

 

"It's weird, but it's the truth," Scarcella said. "She roamed the streets."

 

"The notion that a crackhead could witness more than one murder might seem ridiculous," said Joel Cohen, a prosecutor who worked with Scarcella. "But she was polygraphed three times, and passed every time."

 

In the first Hill case, a medical examiner said evidence didn't back Gomez's claim that the victim was shot through a pillow. He was acquitted.

 

Months later, Medical Examiner Bev Leffers came forward and admitted she'd made a mistake, Scarcella said.

 

"She felt bad — she redid her tests. Teresa proved the ME wrong. Hill did shoot through a pillow."

 

Many who worked with Scarcella described him as dogged, reliable and charismatic and said his work was aggressively vetted by prosecutors and by Joe Ponzi, the DA's respected head of investigations.

 

"We had a lot of checks and balances," said one ex-prosecutor.

 

They pointed out that in Brooklyn cops could not arrest a murder suspect without the OK from a supervising DA.

 

"They wouldn't allow it," Scarcella said. "We worked as a team."

 

Regarding Ranta, Scarcella has no doubts.

 

"David is guilty of felony murder," he said. "He is not this innocent guy. He confessed. And he knows he gave me that statement."

 

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Former 17 Pct. Anti-Crime P.O. Brian McNamee

 

Almost a year after Roger Clemens' acquittal, Brian McNamee wins legal battle in long road to get his day in court 
U.S. Magistrate Judge Cheryl Pollak ordered Clemens' defense team to provide thousands of pages of documents generated during the government's investigation of the former Yankee to McNamee's lawyers, an important win for Clemens' former trainer.

By Teri Thompson , Christian Red AND Michael O'Keeffe — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The New York Daily News'

 

 

It's been almost a year since a beaming Roger Clemens, accompanied by his family and his lawyers, walked out of the federal courthouse in Washington and thanked the fans and friends who had stood by him after he had been charged with lying to Congress when he denied he used performance-enhancing drugs at a 2008 Capitol Hill hearing.

 

Clemens' defense team, led by attorneys Rusty Hardin and Michael Attanasio, had handed the Justice Department a stinging defeat by convincing the jurors that the case wasn't about the former Yankee ace, but about the government's chief witness, Brian McNamee.

 

Hardin and Attanasio persuaded the jury to clear Clemens of six perjury- and obstruction-related felony charges by painting the trainer as a drug-dealing schemer who lied about Clemens' steroid use to former Sen. George Mitchell, congressional investigators and even his friends and family to avoid prosecution and make a buck off Clemens, his former employer. A long string of witnesses — including Yankee general manager Brian Cashman and McNamee's estranged wife, Eileen — attacked the trainer's integrity and credibility on the witness stand.

 

But McNamee's long legal war with Clemens is far from over, and he says he is too busy preparing for the lawsuit he filed in Brooklyn federal court in 2009 — which claims that Clemens defamed him when he accused the trainer of lying and manufacturing evidence regarding the Rocket's alleged doping — to dwell on the past.

 

McNamee quietly won an important legal skirmish in the defamation case last week when U.S. Magistrate Judge Cheryl Pollak ordered Clemens' defense team to provide thousands of pages of documents generated during the government's investigation of the former Yankee to McNamee's lawyers. The documents Pollak ordered Clemens' attorneys to produce include 22 FBI reports and voluminous IRS notes regarding the disgraced baseball star's alleged extramarital affairs.

 

"The criminal trial was all about me," McNamee says, "but the defamation suit will be all about him."

 

Clemens' attorneys had argued that grand jury rules and the Privacy Act barred them from sharing many of the documents with McNamee; other documents, they claimed, were simply not relevant to the case. McNamee's legal team argued that the grand jury documents, investigative records and redacted documents Clemens was trying to exclude from the trial should be admitted because they could lead to depositions and admissible evidence.

 

"The order provides us with a lot of material the government gathered in its prosecution of Clemens — grand jury material and FBI investigative material," says Richard Emery, McNamee's lead attorney. "This will help us show that Clemens has a long history of not telling the truth and that his credibility is deeply in doubt."

 

Clemens had long held himself out as a family man, happily married to his wife, Debbie, and devoted to his four sons. His longtime friend and teammate, Jose Canseco, even wrote in his book "Juiced" that Clemens was the only ballplayer he knew who didn't cheat on his wife. But shortly after Clemens filed his own ill-fated defamation lawsuit against McNamee in 2008 — that case was ultimately dismissed by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2011 — the Daily News reported on affairs that Clemens had with several women, including Mindy McCready, the country music and reality television star who committed suicide in February.

 

In her ruling, Pollak wrote that while adultery does not automatically prove a witness is dishonest, McNamee's lawyers might be able to cross-examine Clemens about instances when he allegedly lied about his extramarital relationships. Emery said some of the women Clemens allegedly had affairs with may also be deposed if McNamee's legal team can show that Clemens lied about his relationships with them. McNamee's lawyers, Pollak said, could use Clemens' alleged false statements about his fidelity to his wife to raise questions about the pitcher's honesty.

 

"The affairs in themselves are not evidence of a lack of credibility," Emery adds, "but lying about or deceiving others about affairs should be. We should be able to get that."

 

Canseco — who testified before the grand jury that indicted Clemens but was not called by prosecutors or defense lawyers as a witness in the criminal trial — will be among those described by Emery as "the usual suspects," or those he intends to depose who have been associated with the case since Clemens appeared repeatedly in Sen. Mitchell's report on drugs in baseball in late 2007.

 

Those names include many of the witnesses who testified or were interviewed or deposed in the criminal trial — Andy Pettitte, former steroid dealer Kirk Radomski, Debbie Clemens and others. McNamee's legal team is also thinking about attempting to depose a longtime Miami-area friend of Canseco's named Geno Gutierrez, who told the Daily News last year that he had supplied performance-enhancing drugs to several well-known baseball players.

 

Gutierrez said he attended the now-infamous 1998 barbecue at Canseco's South Florida home, where McNamee has said under oath that he saw Canseco discuss banned drugs with Clemens and another man he didn't know and believed he arranged to procure drugs there. Gutierrez told the Daily News that drugs were not exchanged at the party; transactions like that would have been handled in a more discreet location, such as a hotel room, he said.

 

"The '90s was the best period of Major League Baseball. The McGwire-Sosa thing was amazing," he added, referring to 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled for the single-season home run record.

 

Hardin did not return calls requesting comment on Pollak's ruling.

 

For Emery, the key is to show a Brooklyn jury a very different picture of Clemens than the jurors in his criminal trial saw. "The amount of information the jury will get will be far more probative of Clemens' character than in the criminal case, where he could sit there and act like an icon," Emery said. "He won't be an icon after this trial."

 

The witnesses Emery and his team expect to depose will be less limited in the civil setting than they were in the criminal courtroom, Emery says. Radomski, the former Mets clubhouse attendant who pleaded guilty to steroid distribution in 2007 and was the primary source for Mitchell's explosive report, for instance, has corroborated many of McNamee's claims about Clemens' steroid use, saying he supplied the trainer with the drugs he believed were intended for Clemens.

 

Debbie Clemens will also be subpoenaed, and is sure to be asked to further explain her claim that her husband wasn't present when she says McNamee injected her with human growth hormone at the couple's palatial Houston home. Pettitte, who damaged the government's criminal prosecution against Clemens last year when he claimed there was a "50-50" chance he misunderstood a conversation he had with the Rocket about human growth hormone during the 1999-2000 offseason, contradicting his previous sworn testimony, is sure to be called.

 

McNamee, meanwhile, says he was not surprised that baseball writers rejected Clemens' bid to become a first-ballot Hall of Famer this past winter. A Washington jury may not have believed Clemens lied to Congress when he denied using steroids in 2008, but baseball fans and Cooperstown voters, he says, are far more skeptical.

 

"The guy says he never took steroids, so why spend all that money on public relations firms and lawyers?" McNamee asks. "Why not say you didn't do it and go away. The Hall of Fame voters saw the damage he did to Major League Baseball and kids."

 

"Once a pathological liar, always a pathological liar," McNamee says of Clemens. "Maybe it's not a lie if you believe it, maybe that is how he justifies what he did to me. But he won't pass a lie-detector test. I challenge him on that."

 

McNamee, who now works primarily as a trainer and baseball instructor with young athletes, says he makes a point to talk to kids about the risks of performance-enhancing drugs. He says Clemens should be doing the same.

 

"Steroid abuse was rampant in Major League Baseball and he was the father figure for it," McNamee says. "He could have done something about it and instead he chose to be a coward."

 

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NYPD Stop, Question and Frisk   Search

 

NYC stop-and-frisk program critics seek changes

By COLLEEN LONG  (The Associated Press)  —  Saturday, May 25th, 2013; 11:46 a.m. EDT

 

 

It once was an accepted tactic as old as policing itself and, according to the New York Police Department, a key to the city's dramatic drop in crime: patrol officers stopping young men on the street to see if they're up to no good.

 

But thanks to rising concerns about racial profiling, a lawsuit and a 10-week trial with testimony ending May 20, the tool the NYPD calls stop, question and frisk has been scrutinized like never before. A judge could rule to change the way the department makes the stops to better protect civil rights. But skeptics warn the changes could come with a price.

 

"It's hard to see how a cop will be able to leave the station house without some potential adverse impact on his personnel folder if it all goes into effect," said Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "The public may suffer, too — what officer would want to engage someone on the street if he's looking over his shoulder all the time?"

 

The men who sued the NYPD because they believe they were stopped solely for being minorities want across-the-board reforms that include more supervision from department superiors, more comprehensive training and stricter discipline for officers who make illegal stops. They also want a court-appointed monitor to oversee the reforms.

 

Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminology professor and expert in police policy working pro bono for the plaintiffs, proposed a database where information on an officer — complaints, days on patrol, stop and frisks, and arrests made — would be collected and analyzed to catch potential problem officers. Right now there is no centralized database.

 

He said sergeants and other supervisors must review officer conduct, not solely their enforcement numbers, and they should be reviewing officers quarterly, not annually. He suggested more training for officers on racial profiling and stop and frisk at the police academy and on the job.

 

Community input on how to implement the changes through phone surveys, mailings and calls to people who have reported incidents with police should be included.

 

"A comprehensive approach is absolutely essential because if any one of the components is absent or weak and ineffective, the entire accountability system begins to collapse," Walker said.

 

The reforms are necessary, lawyers say, because they believe the policy has created a culture of fear in minority communities. The tactic has existed in some form for decades, but the volume of stops increased dramatically under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and about 5 million stop and frisks have been made during the past decade.

 

U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin is not being asked to ban the tactic, which has already been found to be legal. Her options are to leave it as is or order reforms, which appear likely since she's ruled previously on related cases that changes are needed.

 

Mid-trial, city lawmakers said they'd reached broad agreement on a proposal to create an inspector general to oversee the department in part because of stop and frisk and a series of stories by The Associated Press on the monitoring of Muslims. The inspector general would function on a macro level weighing in on policy, while the court monitor would enforce nuts-and-bolts changes related to the stop-and-frisk policy.

 

But morale is already low among the rank-and-file and such changes might make it worse for them, O'Donnell said.

 

"This will all rain down on the cops," he said. "The mayor is bullet proof. All the policy makers who formulate or acquiesce to this strategy will be held harmless."

 

But O'Donnell, and other experts not related to the case, say some reforms are necessary.

 

"A court has recognized that while stops and frisk are a legal tactic, what we have going on here is way too much of a good thing," said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who is an expert on street stops.

 

"Crime has gone down, down, down and especially in minority communities. And still there is a fair degree of alienation and anger. What is happening is that they're glad there's less crime than there used to be, but does it have to be done like this? Is there another way?"

 

The city's expert witness, James Stewart, the director for the Law Enforcement and Justice Policy at the Center for Naval Analysis, said the department already does much of what the lawsuit seeks. Officers receive extensive training at the academy, a training officer is assigned to police precincts and the department has beefed up safeguards to the stop-and-frisk policy.

 

To add unnecessary oversight would create additional work and heap more stress on officers who perform an already difficult, dangerous job, the city experts said. Stewart referred to cameras worn by officers in another city, and the judge seized on it, wondering whether it should be used in the NYPD on an experimental basis.

 

"I'm intrigued by it," Scheindlin said. "It seems to me it would solve a lot of problems."

 

Police and city officials question why — in a city that has seen a precipitous drop in crime — they're under fire.

 

"The attacks most often come from those who play no constructive role in keeping our city safe, but rather view their jobs as pointing fingers from the steps of City Hall," Bloomberg said in a recent speech to police. "Some of them scream that they know better than you how to run the department."

 

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The great stop-and-frisk fraud
How the class action lawsuit's top expert lies with statistics

By Heather Mac Donald — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The New York Daily News'

(Op-Ed / Commentary)

 

 

If U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin rules against the New York Police Department in the racial profiling trial that concluded last week, she will rely heavily on the arcane statistical models of Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan, the anti-cop advocates' favorite expert witness.

 

Let us take a careful look at Fagan's role in the trial, the actual numbers behind his scholarship and the methods he used to reach his conclusions.

 

The plaintiffs in Floyd vs. New York charge that the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking suspicious individuals is driven by race, not crime. Scheindlin cannot reach that verdict based on the case's 12 individual complainants alone.

 

Even if she were to conclude that the named plaintiffs were all stopped because of their race — a finding that would require ignoring the considerable evidence supporting their stops — that judgment still would leave her far from the requisite inference that their police encounters were emblematic of the 4.4 million stops that the NYPD has conducted since 2004.

 

That's where Fagan comes in. The academic was tasked with showing en masse that those 4.4 million stops were made not because the officers suspected that the individuals stopped were engaged in criminal activity, but because most of those individuals were black and Hispanic.

 

The models he constructed to prove such bias were an apt symbol of the lawsuit itself: wholly detached from the realities of crime and policing in New York.

 

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the elite law firm of Covington & Burling, the attorneys in Floyd, faced an inconvenient truth: The stop rate for blacks is actually lower than their violent crime rate would predict.

 

Blacks, who constitute 23% of the city's population, committed 66% of all violent crimes and 73% of all shootings in 2011, according to victims and witnesses, but they were only 53% of all stop subjects.

 

Whites, who constitute 35% of the city's population, made up 9% of all stops in 2011, though they committed only 5.5% of all violent crimes and 2.5% of all shootings.

 

Fagan, however, needed to show that race, not crime, predicts police activity. Given the facts arrayed against such a proposition, it was no surprise that for days Scheindlin's courtroom was filled with debates over "exponentiated coefficients," "P values," "Z scores," "zero-inflated models" and "Vuong tests," as Fagan tried to explain and defend his computer formulas.

 

The judge candidly admitted to being lost at times, as anyone would be who was not steeped in advanced statistics.

 

But you don't have to have a Ph.D. in econometrics to spot the flaws in Fagan's techniques. For starters, he fed into his statistical black box all of the 4.4 million stops from the last eight years, even though his own extremely superficial analysis of the forms that officers fill out after a stop had concluded that nearly nine-tenths of those stops appeared to be lawful, and only 6% unlawful.

 

Those lawful stops should have been excluded from his regression analysis, since they cannot form the basis for concluding that the officers making the stop substituted race for reasonable suspicion.

 

The errors in Fagan's models get worse from there. He refused to consider the race of New York's criminal suspects in evaluating whether the police were making stops based on skin color rather than behavior.

 

Such information, however, is an essential component of any racial profiling analysis. Males are 91% of all stop subjects, but no one accuses the police of sex discrimination, because it is acceptable to acknowledge that males commit the lion's share of crime.

 

Fagan justified his refusal to take criminal suspect data into account on the ground that the data are incomplete, but the race of suspects is known for 98% of the city's shootings, 98% of drug crimes, and 85% of all violent crimes — precisely the offenses that overwhelmingly drive the NYPD's deployment decisions. Only in property crimes is the race of a majority of suspects unknown, but there is no reason to think that the racial makeup of unknown property offenders differs from the makeup of known property offenders.

 

Fagan's treatment of the relationship between crime and police response was even farther from reality. His model used crime data from the previous calendar month to predict stops in the current month: if a stop was made on May 31, for example, he assumed that April crime data — not May's — should explain it.

 

Such a huge time lag ignores the essence of the NYPD's data-driven policing revolution, in which the most up-to-the-minute crime information determines tactics. Officers on one tour will be working off information gathered on the previous tour, not just off of crime data from six weeks ago. A gang shooting will immediately trigger a local influx of officers, who will make an elevated number of stops to try to apprehend the shooter and avert a retaliatory shooting.

 

In Fagan's model, however, if there were no shootings in the previous month, the spike in stops from this month's shooting will appear unmotivated by crime and thus likely to be a function of race.

 

Fagan made no distinction between domestic and gang homicides, even though the former, unlike the latter, have no impact on street patrols. His model does not properly represent Commissioner Ray Kelly's biggest policing innovation: so-called Impact Zones, where a high concentration of rookie officers walk the beat in the city's most dangerous neighborhoods and make stops if they witness suspicious behavior. Impact Zones are located virtually exclusively in minority neighborhoods; the higher number of officers available to observe criminal activity will result in more stops. Fagan's model, however, will see only the stops without accounting for the strategy behind them.

 

With these and other important details of the NYPD's operations stripped away, resulting in a set of mathematical equations that are blind to the ways that gang culture influences communities and law enforcement, Fagan's "negative binomial regression analysis" purported to show that the number of stops in a neighborhood is a function of the race of the residents, not of local crime conditions.

 

No wonder when, at the end of the trial, he finally estimated the exact number of stops that would result from an increase in an area's black population, he reached a result wildly out of sync with the real world. His model predicted that a census tract with an 85% or higher black population would experience 120 stops a month; the actual average in such tracts is 19 stops. The plaintiffs offered no examples of tracts with 120 stops.

 

The city's attorneys and expert witnesses did a superb job of discrediting Fagan's methods, but Scheindlin has previously expressed support for his findings and it is unlikely that she will reject them. Like the rest of the trial, the time and energy spent on Fagan's analyses were a sad diversion from the real problem facing the city's black and Latino residents: the persistence of senseless victimization, despite New York's record-breaking crime drop.

 

During closing arguments last Monday, no one referred to the fatal shooting just two days earlier of an innocent 14-year-old girl returning from a friend's birthday party in Queens. A gunman had sprayed the bus on which the girl was riding with bullets; one of the shots entered her right temple. The judge did her best to keep such incidents far from the courtroom, but they occasionally seeped in anyway, when officers described the mob violence or the reports of a gunman at large that had preceded a stop.

 

The NYPD's response to last weekend's bus murder in South Jamaica will generate more stop data that can be used against the department in the next racial profiling lawsuit, but it is precisely such high-intensity policing that has brought the city's murder rate down nearly 80% since 1993. The vast majority of lives saved thanks to that falling homicide rate have been black and Hispanic.

 

The last two decades of racial profiling discourse have been a massive exercise in changing the subject: It is a lot more comfortable to talk about the allegedly racist police than about black-on-black crime. Until society is willing to address the family breakdown that generates such mindless violence as last weekend's bus shooting, however, it will continue to fall to the NYPD to provide the social control in neighborhoods where fathers no longer do so. If the Floyd plaintiffs are successful in their suit, they will strip the city's most vulnerable residents of their essential lifeline from fear and predation.

 

That's a wrenching reality ignored by the abstruse statistical models of the plaintiff's star number-cruncher.

 

Mac Donald is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and the author of "Are Cops Racist?"

 

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E.S.U.:  Det. Robert Mirfield Drives REP and P.O. Paul Braver Makes Rescue

 

Brave NYPD cops' East River rescue

By REBECCA HARSHBARGER — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The New York Post'

 

 

The NYPD rescued an unhinged man from the East River yesterday.

 

Detective Robert Mirfield drove to the scene near 81st Street at 9:50 a.m. after hearing that a man had been spotted in the water, while his partner, Officer Paul Braver, changed into a dry suit.

 

Braver jumped in and reached the man, and Harbor Patrol cops pulled them onto their boat, police said.

 

Cops took the 32-year-old man to New York Cornell Hospital, and he was identified after he gave them his mother's phone number, sources said.

 

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Convicted Drunk Adam Clayton Powell Pushes 'Arrive Alive' Breathalyzers to the NYPD

 

Adam's low 'blow'

Drink-and-drive pol pushing breath test

By MICHAEL GARTLAND — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The New York Post'

 

 

He not only lobbies for Breathalyzers — he could be a client!

 

Adam Clayton Powell IV — the former assemblyman who was convicted of impaired driving three years ago — is now targeting the mayor and the NYPD for a New Jersey company that makes disposable breath-alcohol tests.

 

Powell is getting at least $12,000 to shill for Arrive Alive LLC, which boasts on its Web site that its "breath alcohol self-tester" is "clean, hygienic and disposable," records revealed.

 

"It's ironic," said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., chairman of the Public Safety Committee. "On the other hand, the best salespeople are the ones who have experience with their product."

 

Records show that Powell is specifically lobbying for "procurement," which means he's most likely seeking contracts to sell Arrive Alive's products to the city.

 

Powell, 51, and Arrive Alive did not return calls for comment.

 

Arrive Alive breath tests, which go for $5.50 each or $148.50 for 30, appear to be intended for drivers who fear they may be over the limit. The company's Web site instructs drinkers to use the "easy self-test before you drive" and "offer Arrive Alive Breathalyzers to your friends after a party."

 

Arrive Alive does acknowledge that its product is not a substitute for "law enforcement breath alcohol screenings, medical screenings or common sense."

 

The company boasts of such clients as BMW, Canard Duchene Champagne and the liquor purveyor Pernod Ricard.

 

Powell has served on the City Council and unsuccessfully ran for Congress and Manhattan borough president.

 

He's also had his own checkered past when it comes to drinking and driving. He was asked to take a breath test in March 2008 when cops stopped him on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

 

Powell submitted to one test at the scene — blowing a 0.07 percent blood-alcohol level, just within the legal limit for drunk driving. But police discounted the test because they said Powell didn't fully blow into the mouthpiece. Later, at the station house, he refused to take a second test, so he was charged, authorities said.

 

Powell was eventually found guilty of driving while impaired and fined $1,000.

 

He left the Assembly in January 2011 after running unsuccessfully against Rep. Charles Rangel for the US House.

 

After two years, ex-officials are permitted to work as lobbyists, and Powell announced earlier this year on Facebook that that's what he would be doing.

 

"I am now a full-time city/state lobbyist in addition to my business development consultancy," he wrote. "I can open doors to help you access government or help your business grow and gain more customers. Please inbox me if you have a need for my services."

 

His account with Arrive Alive has former colleagues and other elected officials scratching their heads.

 

Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a member of the council's Transportation Committee, described Powell's new job as "pathetic."

 

"You've got to be kidding me. You can't make this stuff up," she said. "That the company hired him — that's a challenge for them in itself."

 

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New Jersey

 

State pays N.J. State Police trooper $325,000 to settle whistleblower lawsuit over gun tracking

By Christopher Baxter  — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The Newark Star-Ledger' / Newark, NJ

 

 

TRENTON — The state Attorney General's Office has agreed to pay $325,000 to a former State Police trooper to settle claims he was mistreated after warning that the division was failing to properly keep track of its thousands of weapons.

 

The settlement, reached in February and recently obtained by The Star-Ledger, was the second in as many years to include a significant payout to a trooper who claimed retaliation after raising concerns about weapons management.

 

Between the two cases, the Attorney General's Office has paid out $675,000 to settle claims related to the State Police's weapons tracking since 2011.

 

In the most recent case, Lt. Robert Betten in 2008 filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in state Superior Court claiming that, while assigned to the firearms training unit in 2006, he was harassed, threatened, denied assignments and passed over for promotion after he complained of deficient and inconsistent weapon tracking.

 

Betten, who retired in 2008 after 25 years on the force, said he gave a subordinate, Trooper Neil Talijan, a negative evaluation after determining "the accounting of firearms was severely mismanaged … whereby many firearms were unaccounted for in the system."

 

Betten said he was later told by his supervisor, Lt. Tom Waldron, that the troopers union and superintendent's office were unhappy with the evaluation. He said Waldron attempted to "coerce him into covering up Trooper Talijan's unaccounted-for firearms."

 

Betten also claimed he was retaliated against for reporting that Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes and the president of one of the troopers unions had not attended firearms qualification sessions as required by division rules.

 

An attorney for Betten, Robert Anderson, said his client filed the suit "with the best interest of the citizens in mind."

 

"We hope the State Police have taken the proper steps to fix the problems identified by Lt. Betten," Anderson said. "There are policies and procedures in place; they just weren't followed."

 

A spokesman for the State Police, Lt. Stephen Jones, declined comment on the lawsuits or the settlement, but said "there's always a review and an effort to improve all of our systems for tracking weapons." He said no changes were made as a result of the lawsuit.

 

"There are at least six or more physical inventories of our weapons each year, and they are reviewed by different department levels," Jones said. "That would include inventories of guns issued to troopers and non-issued guns."

 

He added, "I'm confident we have an excellent system for tracking weapons."

 

The Attorney General's Office declined to comment on the case.

 

In addition to the Betten case, the office in 2011 agreed to pay Sgt. 1st Class James Meyers $350,000 to settle claims he was threatened with transfer and discipline, relieved of supervisory duties and told to "back off" after raising concerns about weapons.

 

Meyers, an 18-year veteran, said in a lawsuit filed in 2007 in state Superior Court that he reported a "significant lack of documentation and other irregularities associated with the overall organization and tracking of weapons" in 2006.

 

In return for the payments in both cases, the troopers agreed to drop their claims and the state admitted no liability.

 

The whistle-blower lawsuits were among more than a dozen filed by troopers against the State Police since 2005. A Star-Ledger review of the suits last year found allegations of infighting and retaliation persist despite a history of claims by troopers that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

 

The report illustrated the personal, sometimes-nasty internal disputes between troopers, and the hardships that whistle-blowers claim after breaching the so-called "blue wall of silence" in a culture where those who keep their mouths shut climb the ranks.

 

The lawsuits also allege managers in the State Police use transfers as punishment, sometimes relocating outspoken troopers to dead-end assignments or barracks far from their homes.

 

The Attorney General's Office has disputed claims that retaliation within the ranks of the State Police is prevalent and said such lawsuits are filed in any workplace.

 

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After indictment, some question decision not to suspend Newark Police Director's brother-in-law

By James Queally  — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The Newark Star-Ledger' / Newark, NJ

 

 

NEWARK — Seven months ago, Newark Detective Ugo Bellomo allegedly pointed his police-issued weapon at another man after an argument on a Millburn highway. The other driver called 911, and state troopers intervened, but no arrest was made, according to officials and court records. Seven weeks ago, Bellomo was indicted by a grand jury on a charge of aggravated assault with a firearm, a fourth-degree felony, according to court records.

Now, Bellomo is back on the job.

 

He was never suspended, according to police officials, and the lack of action has reignited old arguments about disparate punishment of officers within the state's largest police department.

 

It also has some wondering if Bellomo benefited by having friends in high places.

 

The 43-year-old Bellomo, a 17-year veteran of the department, is the brother-in-law of Police Director Samuel DeMaio and worked with Police Chief Sheilah Coley's ex-husband for years, officials said.

 

Some city officials have said they're concerned by DeMaio's relationship to Bellomo, and were surprised to see one officer face little punishment after being indicted for a felony when others have been suspended for lesser infractions.

 

DeMaio has shot down any suggestion his relationship to Bellomo affected the decision not to suspend him. Attorney general's guidelines do not require an officer to be suspended when indicted for a fourth-degree off-duty crime.

 

"Anyone who thinks that there was influence, I resent that," DeMaio said. "I handled this matter professionally, recused myself from the investigation, and it was handled the same way any other officer's situation would have been handled."

 

The department will await the outcome of the criminal case against Bellomo before pursuing any internal action, according to DeMaio, who said the detective was stripped of his service weapon and placed on administrative duty.

 

Bellomo has declined to comment about the matter.

 

Other officers have been punished for lesser offenses.

 

Detective Samad Washington was suspended for three weeks last month after he was found guilty at a police trial of insubordination, according to an internal affairs document obtained by The Star-Ledger.

 

In another case, Detective Jason West was suspended for one day after failing to properly receive an internal affairs complaint against another officer, according to two sources with knowledge of personnel decisions who requested anonymity because they're not permitted to discuss internal affairs publicly.

 

According to the document, Washington was suspended after he walked toward a lieutenant while making "threatening remarks." DeMaio said Washington's case is different because Washington has a history of violence against other officers.

 

"If you charge and attempt to physically assault a supervisor and have a history of that … then you're gonna get suspended," he said.

 

The document does not say Washington attempted to attack the lieutenant.

 

South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka said Bellomo's connection to DeMaio is "definitely worth looking into."

 

"There are a lot of officers I know who have been suspended for a lot less, for raising their voice at superior officers," Baraka said. "Pulling your service revolver out because you have an argument warrants some serious investigation, and at least a suspension."

 

Bellomo was driving on Route 24 in Millburn about 4:30 p.m. Nov. 3 when he began arguing with another motorist, acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn Murray said. Bellomo allegedly rolled down his window and pointed his service weapon at the other driver, who called 911, Murray said.

 

State police stopped both vehicles and questioned both drivers, but no arrests were made, she said.

 

Bellomo made his first appearance in Superior Court in Essex County on May 3, and pleaded not guilty to the aggravated assault charge.

 

Bellomo's situation gave rise to old complaints about the department's internal affairs unit. When the American Civil Liberties Union filed its petition calling for federal reform in 2009, it found the department sustained just one out of 261 allegations of serious misconduct against officers in 2008 and 2009.

 

West Ward Councilman Ronald Rice Jr. called the decision not to suspend Bellomo "odd," and said it illustrates the need for a civilian review board and a federal monitor to oversee the department.

 

Rice also said he was troubled by what DeMaio's connection to Bellomo might imply.

"I could see all of us raising questions because of the perception of it," Rice said.

 

The Department of Justice is expected to make a final decision about reform in Newark later this year.

 

Eugene O'Donnell, a former Manhattan district attorney who now teaches at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, said while it is not uncommon for police departments to delay internal investigations while a criminal case is pending, a suspension does not require a full investigation.

 

The important thing, O'Donnell said, is for the department to adhere to a consistent standard of discipline.

 

In a case like this, O'Donnell said, perception can also trump reality.

"They have to be extra cautious when there's a relational situation," he said. "Not only to be doing the right thing, but to be appearing to be doing the right thing."

 

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U.S.A.

Homeland Security Sends Out Bulletin on 3D-printer Guns

By Jane McEntegart — Saturday, May 25th, 2013 'Fox News'

 

 

DHS has apparently sent out an intelligence bulletin regarding guns manufactured using 3D printers.

 

The last couple of weeks has seen discussion on 3D printing and guns skyrocket. While we've always known that you could potentially make anything with a 3D-printer, the arrival of two working models of 3D-printed guns has garnered interest from the State Department and now Homeland Security.

 

Fox News claims to have obtained a recent Homeland Security bulletin addressing the issue of guns produced using 3D printers. Fox news cites the Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin as saying it would be "impossible" to stop 3D-printed guns from being produced or getting past security check points.

 

Significant advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing capabilities, availability of free digital 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns," Fox quotes the bulletin as saying. It eventually concludes: "Limiting access may be impossible," concludes the three-page bulletin.

 

The bulletin stems from a 3D-printed gun developed by non-profit Defense Distributed. The company's 'Liberator' gun is made of sixteen components, each printed using ABS plastic. In fact, the only parts of the gun that aren't plastic are the firing pin (a single nail), and a six ounce chunk of steel that Defense Distributed added to ensure the gun was detectable by metal detectors and so in compliance of the Undetectable Firearms Act. The bulletin says that if people choose to omit this part of the weapon, the guns could become increasingly hard to detect.

 

Defense Distributed made the CAD files for the Liberator available for download online but, after just a few days, the files were pulled at the behest of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. The letter from the State Department cited potential violation of gun export laws (specifically, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations or ITARs) and said Defense Distributed should treat the data as ITAR-controlled until it receives final determinations from the Department. Unfortunately, the State Department can't do much about copies of the files downloaded before they were removed from Defense Distributed's site. In fact, earlier this week, an engineer showed off his own version of the Liberator that he printed at home using a consumer-level 3D printer.

 

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U.S. Park Police furloughs to end June 1

By Lisa Rein — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The Washington Post'  / Washington, DC

 

 

Furloughs for the U.S. Park Police forced by the budget cuts known as sequestration will end June 1, the National Park Service announced Friday, because the agency was able to find other savings.

 

"We're ending the furloughs," Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said in an interview, a month after the force of 747 sworn officers and support staff members in three cities began staying home one day per pay period in order to take 12 to 14 unpaid days off by Sept. 30. "We have resolved this within the Park Police budget."

 

The decision does not stave off staffing shortages through the Memorial Day holiday weekend, when tourists will flood into Washington and the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally is expected to bring 400,000 bikers to the city. But Park Service officials said that security would not be compromised on the holiday.

 

The U.S. Park Police force was the only federal law enforcement agency furloughed under the $85 billion in budget cuts.

 

The police union had brought public attention to the furloughs for months, saying staffing shortages were compromising safety.

 

"While this is encouraging news . . . the agency is still understaffed, poorly funded and lacks financial control of its own operations," Ian Glick, president of the U.S. Park Police Fraternal Order of Police, said in a statement.

 

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), after meeting with the union and making other inquiries, wrote a letter to Senate and House appropriators this week asking them to consider allowing the Park Service to shift money from less-vital accounts to the Park ­Police to stop the furloughs.

 

"The question is why the Park Service has no furloughs, while this unit that has essential employees does," Norton said.

 

The small force patrols national parkland in the urban areas of the Washington region, New York and San Francisco. About 350 officers are based in the capital region, with enforcement responsibility for 27,000 acres in the District, Maryland and Virginia — including the Mall and the monuments — and 144 miles of roadway.

 

Like thousands of federal employees, from the Defense Department to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Park Police force was told that the cuts that kicked in across the federal government March 1 had to be rigidly applied. Five percent had to be shaved from every agency's budget by the end of the fiscal year in September.

 

There was little flexibility to shift money from less-vital services to others, and since the police budget is mostly salaries, the $5 million had to come from there.

 

But Jarvis said his budget experts "took a really deep dive into the line budget" of the police force, "scrubbing every dollar."

 

The savings came from $1 million in furlough days that the police began taking in late April and other cuts to overtime pay, training, planned equipment purchases and travel, Jarvis said.

 

"It was incredibly unfortunate that we had to furlough the Park Police," Jarvis said. "We were stuck with the budget that was given to us."

 

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Course uses art to sharpen cop's observation

By MIKE NEWALL [The Philadelphia Inquirer] (The Associated Press)  —  Saturday, May 25th, 2013; 10:00 a.m. EDT

 

 

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — This time the painting was Monet's The Japanese Footbridge, an impressionist masterpiece depicting lush gardens and a lily pond.

 

Ronald Sirianni of the Philadelphia Police Crime Scene Unit closed his eyes as instructed and concentrated as other officers fired off details: "Rust-colored water, falling foliage, a weeping willow-type tree . . ."

 

With that, Sirianni opened his eyes and, though he had never seen the painting, selected it from among two similar Monets.

 

"The rust-color water was the giveaway," the veteran investigator said proudly.

 

This curious scene took place not at an art gallery but at the Philadelphia Police Academy as part of "The Art of Perception," a seminar designed to improve police officers' observation and communication skills by teaching them how to analyze works of art.

 

For six hours ... about 40 veteran officers and new detectives sat in a darkened training room in the Northeast, reviewing slide after slide of artworks ranging from Monets to modernists.

 

Despite Sirianni's good eye, one thing became exceedingly clear: No two people see the same thing the same way.

 

Or, as Lt. John Bradley put it, "What you see is not always what is."

 

A danger, of course, in a job all about details small and large, and exactly the point of the seminar, said Amy Herman, the New York art historian who teaches it.

 

"I am using art as a vehicle for them to step away from their police duties and rethink how we see and perceive and communicate," she said. "I am trying to get them to clean the lenses through which they see their jobs."

 

In one exercise, Herman showed the class a photograph of a young woman walking along a river near Columbia University. Through the trees in the photo, the letter C was written on a towering rock - which many students missed.

 

In trying to capture the small details, an observer can miss the bigger picture, she said.

 

Herman, also a lawyer, started teaching the class 12 years ago while working as the head of education for the Frick Collection in New York City.

 

At first, she geared the course toward medical students, working to help them become better observers of their patients.

 

In 2004, she adapted the course to law enforcement and reached out to the New York City Police Department.

 

"I called them up and said, I have this really great idea," she said. Her call was transferred to a deputy commissioner who agreed, and soon the NYPD adopted Herman's course as part of officer training.

 

Her inbox exploded, she said, after a 2005 Wall Street Journal article profiled her work with the New York police. She soon quit her museum job and began focusing full-time on the seminar. She now teaches the course to the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and Navy SEALs.

 

Most law enforcement officers have good perception skills, Herman said. The problem, she said, comes in effectively communicating their perceptions.

 

Capt. Benjamin Naish arranged for Herman to come Philadelphia after attending her seminar at an FBI National Academy training session in Gettysburg last month.

 

"I felt like I had my eyes opened wider," he said.

 

After Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey quickly green-lighted the idea, Naish squeezed the seminar into the last day of training for the new detectives, who had just completed five weeks of procedural and computer training.

 

"This is the most unusual training they're ever going to have a chance to see," Naish said.

 

The new detectives seemed engaged in the training.

 

Matt Carey, a six-year veteran newly assigned to Southwest Detectives, was one of many students who missed a mahogany table that blended into the foreground of another painting.

 

"You have to have soft eyes," said Carey, a former Army Ranger who did three tours overseas.

 

In another exercise, Herman showed a slide of the surrealist Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed, a painting of an empty fireplace with a locomotive puffing through the middle of it, and complimented those students who described the painting by what it lacked: a fire, candlesticks, tracks for the train.

 

"When you say what isn't there, you give a more accurate picture of what is there," Herman said.

 

In another slide, Herman showed a picture of a fat man in tiny shorts sleeping next to his suitcases. Students tossed out scenarios: The man had been evicted, or was sleeping off a drunk in the hallway. In reality, the sleeping man was not a man at all but a lifelike sculpture installed in an Orlando airport.

 

"You can have the best observation and perception skills in the world, and sometimes you're just going to be dead wrong," Herman said as the students nodded in agreement. "You need to accept it, learn from it, and move on."

 

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Boston, Massachusetts

 

Police tally cost of terror support
Forces to submit overtime to FEMA

By Deirdre Fernandes and Kathy McCabe — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The Boston Globe' / Boston, MA

 

 

The Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt for the suspects cost communities across Greater Boston tens of thousands of dollars in police overtime.

 

Area cities and towns are calculating their expenses and submitting them for federal reimbursement. In Watertown — where one of the suspected bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died after a shootout with police, and the other suspect, his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar, was found hiding — the overtime and equipment costs for the Police Department are expected to exceed $250,000.

 

The overtime bills reported by neighboring police agencies that sent officers to help in Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown range from $48,197 in Waltham to $20,051 in Newton. Arlington's Police Department has not tallied up its costs, after sending officers to assist Boston and Watertown, and deploying additional officers in its own neighborhoods, said Chief Frederick Ryan.

 

Belmont police did not return calls last week seeking information on its expenditures.

 

A federal disaster declaration for Norfolk, Middlesex, and Suffolk counties will provide 75 percent reimbursement of eligible expenditures, according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

 

But officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency have not determined what will be covered under the reimbursement, including overtime pay and the use of department equipment, according to an official with the state agency.

 

"This is a whole new world for FEMA," said Peter Judge, a spokesman for MEMA, which is assisting police departments in filing for the federal aid. "FEMA still is trying to figure out what actions will, or will not, qualify."

 

Departments have until late June to notify FEMA of their intent to apply for reimbursement for costs incurred from April 15 to April 22, Judge said.

 

Unlike in a natural disaster, communities will not apply directly to FEMA for reimbursement. Instead, police departments will send their bills to the three communities that requested mutual aid for the week after the bombings.

 

"Ultimately, Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown will submit for reimbursement to us," Judge said.

 

Newton's force planned to send its reimbursement request to Boston last week. Sixty-two officers and supervisors and two dispatchers worked a combined total of nearly 500 hours on the days following the bombings, according to Hugh Downing, the Police Department's executive officer.

 

Most of the work was in Watertown, where Newton's officers handled routine calls while the local force handled the emergency situation related to the shootout and manhunt, Downing said.

 

Some Newton officers also responded to suspicious-activity calls, and stood guard around the neighborhood where authorities eventually found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in a boat parked in a backyard.

 

Waltham deployed 37 officers to Watertown. Earlier in the week, about 12 officers and a civilian dispatcher assisted in Boston as part of the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council's response to the April 15 attack, said Police Chief Keith MacPherson.

 

In all, his officers worked a total of 911 hours from April 15 to 19, MacPherson said.

 

Watertown is in the early stages of calculating how much overtime its officers logged, said Lieutenant ­Michael Lawn, a department spokesman.

 

But early last week, Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau gave an initial estimate of more than $250,000.

 

"Based on our involvement in the Boston bombings and then with everything coming out to Watertown, we've created a credible amount of increased monies in overtime and equipment," he said. "We're working with FEMA and ­MEMA to try to get those costs covered."

 

While waiting for their reimbursements, which could take months, some departments are asking municipal officials for additional overtime money to help balance their budgets.

 

Police overtime budgets were already stretched this year by snowstorms, special elections, and additional investigations before the bombings occurred, said officials in Newton and Waltham.

 

Newton police will ask city officials to inject an additional $100,000 into the overtime budget to help the department get through the end of the fiscal year, June 30, Downing said.

 

In Waltham, MacPherson said he asked the City Council for $110,000 to cover overtime costs through next month.

 

The department's overtime account for the fiscal year already was reaching its limit, due to the February blizzard, Hurricane Sandy, and four elections, he said.

 

"Rather than make two separate filings, I bumped up my original request."

 

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Los Angeles, California

FBI probes alleged LAPD pistol resales

By Joel Rubin — Sunday, May 26th, 2013 'The Los Angeles Times' / Los Angeles, CA

 

 

LOS ANGELES — The FBI is investigating whether members of the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT and special-investigations units violated the law by purchasing large numbers of custom-made handguns and reselling them for profit, according to interviews.

 

Federal authorities opened the inquiry into the alleged gun sales in recent weeks after police officials alerted them to possible gun violations, multiple sources told the Los Angeles Times.

 

The move comes after an earlier police investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of officers. But on Friday, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck acknowledged that the probe was "clearly lacking" and said the department has opened a second investigation of the weapons transactions that is still ongoing.

 

Suspicion over the guns arose in May 2010, when a lieutenant in the department's metropolitan division, which includes the SWAT unit, attempted to inventory the division's weapons, according to a whistleblower lawsuit filed by the lieutenant and a report last year by the department's inspector general, Alex Bustamante.

 

While accounting for the weapons, Lt. Armando Perez discovered that SWAT members had purchased an unknown number of pistols from the gunmaker Kimber Manufacturing and were "possibly reselling these Kimber firearms for large profits to people outside of Metro SWAT," according to the lawsuit and Bustamante's report.

 

There are some indications the guns were sold to other officers outside the units and others outside law enforcement. The FBI is expected to look as well into the possibility that officers from the department's special-investigations section, which conducts surveillance in major, high-risk cases, were also improperly reselling Kimber guns, the sources said.

 

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.

 

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Homeland Security                    (Obama in La-La Land)

 

Community outreach key to Obama counterterror plan

By EILEEN SULLIVAN   (The Associated Press)  —  Saturday, May 25th, 2013; 11:00 a.m. EDT

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Within hours of the Boston Marathon blasts, government officials and Boston Muslims called each other to offer assistance, calls that were the fruits of years of cultivating such relationships in an effort to ultimately prevent the very type of attack Boston experienced April 15.

 

But the calls following the explosions were not about the unfolding investigation. Representatives from the departments of Justice and Homeland Security offered support to Muslim communities in case they suffered backlash or threats, even days before law enforcement connected the suspected bombers to a violent interpretation of Islam.

 

This type of outreach has been a cornerstone of the Obama administration's counterterrorism strategy. The goal is to prevent homegrown terrorist attacks by forming trusting relationships among law enforcement, government agencies and Muslim Americans.

 

"The best way to prevent violent extremism inspired by violent jihadists is to work with the Muslim American community - which has consistently rejected terrorism - to identify signs of radicalization and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting toward violence," President Barack Obama said Thursday in his counterterrorism speech at National Defense University.

 

In Boston, the Muslim community handled the situation just as the Obama administration has asked them to. Yet the city suffered a terror attack from two of its own that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

 

The Obama administration has asked communities to notify law enforcement if it suspects someone is becoming radicalized toward terrorist activity. And the administration has asked religious leaders to talk to members of their communities about views that may be outside the mainstream or raise red flags.

 

In the case of Boston, an imam and other members of the mosque where one of the bombing suspects had outbursts during services spoke with him after each incident.

 

In one instance, the lecturing imam spoke to suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev after the service about his views on Muslims celebrating American holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Tsnarnaev believed that celebrating these holidays was not allowed in the Muslim faith. In the other instance, Tsarnaev disagreed with comparing the Prophet Muhammad to Martin Luther King Jr.

 

None of that suggested Tsarnaev would go out and kill people, said Yusufi Vali, spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Cambridge, Mass., where Tsarnaev worshipped. Tsarnaev was killed in a police shootout four days after the bombings, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, has been charged with carrying out the attack.

 

"Just because people have views out of the mainstream, in our country, where we have freedom of religion, we don't call law enforcement for that," Vali said.

 

And if someone from the mosque had called the police after the outbursts, it's not likely it would have led to further inquiries about terrorism, said Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas. The outbursts most likely would have been treated as disturbances, Haas said.

 

But as the intelligence community goes back over every thread of detail the government possessed about the Tsarnaev brothers before the deadly April 15 attack, these outbursts continue to raise questions about what else could have been done to prevent it.

 

"Are there more things that we can do, whether it's engaging with communities where there's a potential for self-radicalization of this sort," Obama said on April 30.

 

Through outreach and relationship building, the administration's hope is that members of the nation's Islamic communities should know to call the government when they suffer civil rights violations like hate crimes or bullying. And if they trust the government to protect their constitutional rights, they will trust the government enough to call when they see suspicious activity that could be an indication of terrorism.

 

"If communities are assured that the government will protect their rights, it is likely that those communities will come to trust government institutions and will cooperate with government actions," according to an April 18 federal task force document on the best practices for community engagement.

 

Some cities have stronger outreach programs than others. In Boston, the U.S. attorney and local FBI office have regular meetings with Muslim communities. FBI agents there have helped young Somali-Americans write resumes and provided self-defense lessons to Somali-American women. Since 2008, the Homeland Security Department's office of civil rights and civil liberties has had regular meetings with Boston Muslims, including meetings on violent radicalization. State and local law enforcement also participate in this outreach.

 

Within hours of the bombings, representatives from the Justice Department's community relations service reached out to local mosques in the Boston area, said Lou Ruffino, a Justice Department spokesman. The representatives, known as conciliation specialists, spoke with imams they knew and offered support in case the Muslim communities experienced any backlash, Ruffino said.

 

This is an improvement over the outreach 15 years ago, said former FBI agent Michael Rolince. Rolince said when he worked as an agent in Boston, he couldn't even get a phone call returned from someone in the Arab American and Muslim communities.

 

There is no question that the way the Cambridge mosque handled Tsarnaev's outbursts followed the Obama administration's guidance, said Humera Khan, executive director of Muflehun, a Muslim American think tank that focuses on preventing radicalization.

 

But this outreach was not enough to stop the Boston Marathon attack.

 

"I think all of us, in the aftermath, wish that there was something that could have been done about this situation," Vali said. "If there had been some way of getting to know this guy better, if the Cambridge mosque had had the institutional capacity to have gotten to know this guy better, maybe we would have recognized something."

 

But that type of interaction goes beyond the basic engagement outlined in the Obama administration's strategy on countering violent extremism, Khan said.

 

"There's without a doubt, the need for intervention," said Khan, who works regularly with the government on outreach programs and received the FBI's 2012 community leadership award.

 

"If you leave it up to the community to do, there will be places where it will slip. People will fall through the cracks," she said. But the question is, what the government can do in this role, she said. "Does it involve religion? Can they talk religion?"

 

The answer, currently, is no - the government cannot advocate one interpretation of Islam over another. And that places the responsibility on the communities.

 

Tsnarnaev's first outburst at the Cambridge mosque was in November 2012, just before Thanksgiving, the mosque said. At a weekly prayer, a preacher gave a sermon saying it was appropriate for Muslims to celebrate American holidays. Tsarnaev stood up and argued that "celebration of any holiday was not allowed in the faith." The preacher met with Tsarnaev and discussed the issue after the service. In January, the mosque said Tsarnaev had a similar outburst. This time, the sermon included praise for Martin Luther King Jr., and this time Tsarnaev shouted, calling the preacher a "nonbeliever" and "hypocrite" who was "contaminating people's minds." Congregants shouted back at him, telling him to leave, and he did.

 

While leaders at the Cambridge mosque say Tsnaraev's outbursts didn't inspire them to call law enforcement, some are questioning whether that threshold should be lowered.

 

"I think the events that happened in Boston have lowered the bar," said police strategist Bob Wasserman, head of the Boston-based Strategic Policy Partnership, who has consulted many of the nation's biggest cities on policing. Wasserman said reaching out to law enforcement should not always be a notification of a possible threat.

 

"It should be in a discussion saying, `We had this incident,'" Wasserman said. "You have to do it in a manner in which you can express concern with the person in the police department you had the relationship with."

 

And this is where trust comes in, Wasserman said. The community member needs to trust that sharing this concern with law enforcement is taken in the context of a concern and not a report of potential terror activity.

 

"We are right now tasked very seriously with working together within our communities to really figure that out," said Paul Goldenberg, the vice chair of the Homeland Security secretary's advisory community on faith-based organizations and communications. "At the end of the day it's about building capacity and trust between the community and the police that are responsible for their safety. We still have challenges, and we've really got to address those challenges."

 

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                                                          Mike Bosak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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