Monday, May 6th, 2013 — Good Morning, Stay Safe
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‘One Police Plaza’
Mayor Mike: Messing With The Times at His Peril
By: Leonard Levitt – Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘NYPD Confidential.Com’
(Op-Ed / Commentary)
Years ago, an old Jewish defense attorney offered a cynical lesson in criminal procedure. “When you got nothing,” he said, “cry anti-Semitism.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently tried out his own version of this.
With the NYPD’s signature Stop and Frisk policy crumbling before his eyes, Bloomberg appeared last week before the department’s top brass at Police Plaza and cried, “The New York Times.”
Mayor Mike was obviously feeling bereft. As a class-action lawsuit plays out in federal court, former allies are questioning the effectiveness — to say nothing of the constitutionality — of Stop and Frisk, which Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly maintain has reduced the number of guns on the streets and led to the city’s record-low crime rates.
So Bloomberg took a drastic step.
Unlike his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, who micromanaged the NYPD from City Hall, Bloomberg, for perhaps the first time in his 12-year mayoralty, took center stage from Kelly, and personally made a major police pronouncement.
Sounding just like Rudy, he spoke in apocalyptic terms, playing on New Yorkers’ two primal fears: street crime and terrorism.
"The NYPD is under attack," said the mayor. "Stop playing politics with public safety. Look at what's happened in Boston. Remember what happened here on 9/11.”
Then he lit into The Times.
Specifically, he accused the paper of publishing an editorial attacking Stop and Frisk — which, since Kelly’s return as police commissioner in 2002, has resulted in five million stops of mostly black and Hispanic young men, most of whom committed no crime — while pointing out that The Times had ignored the murder of a black teenager four days earlier.
“There was not a mention of his murder in … our paper of record, The New York Times. 'All the news that's fit to print' did not include the murder of 17-year-old Alphonzo Bryant,” said Bloomberg, misstating the teenager’s first name, which is Alphonza . “Do you think that, if a white 17-year-old prep student from Manhattan had been murdered, the Times would have ignored it? Me neither."
Although Bloomberg owns a media empire, he’s not very media savvy.
If he were, he’d know better than to mess like this with The Times. You do that at your peril.
Especially since, after years of pastry-puff coverage of Kelly, The Times has taken a hard corrective turn.
So how did the Times react to Bloomberg’s Police Plaza cry?
Two days later, it published a letter from Norman Siegel and Ira Glasser, former heads of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which Bloomberg had also attacked at Police Plaza.
“During Mr. Bloomberg’s 11-plus years in office,” the letter began, “the New York Police Department has engaged in millions of frisks but has turned up a tiny number of guns. In 2011, of the 380,000 frisks conducted, the police found 780 guns, a hit rate of less than one-quarter of 1 percent. And this same, vanishingly small rate of success has been true for many years.”
The letter concluded:“The mayor undermines his other work to reduce gun violence when he engages in such demagogy and pretends against all the evidence that his stop-and-frisk program has something to do with reducing such violence.“
The next day, The Times did run a story on Alphonza Bryant.
But it only mentioned his murder in passing. Rather, the story was about Stop and Frisk. It cited an essay by Bryant’s mother, published in the Daily News the day before, which described how earlier this year her son had been stopped, frisked and cursed at by police.
The Times headlined the story: “Grieving Mother Tells of Her Son’s Unpleasant Police Stop.”
Then, last Saturday, The Times let loose on Bloomberg in an editorial.
“Mayor Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited arguments this week while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained and questioned on the streets every year,” it began.
“Mr. Bloomberg’s suggestion that the program has been responsible for historic drops in crime is also implausible. Crime has declined all over the country, including in places that have not used New York’s aggressively invasive techniques. Besides, if crime rates and street stops had a strong correlation, the murder rate would have gone up in 2012, when stops declined by about 20 percent. In fact, the murder rate fell in 2012 to an all-time low. “
Pretty harsh stuff. But then, The Times has only itself to blame for Bloomberg’s still being mayor.
Remember back in 2008 when Bloomberg was casting about for something to do with the rest of his life after just about everyone rejected him as a possible presidential and vice presidential candidate?
Instead, he decided his best option might be to continue as mayor for a third term.
To gather support for overturning the city’s recently passed two-term limit law — which, when he first ran for mayor in 2001, he had supported as someone who stood above politics — Bloomberg shopped himself around to the owners of city’s three daily newspapers.
The News’s Mortimer Zuckerman and the Post’s Mr. Rupert Murdoch — who continue to support Stop and Frisk as well as the NYPD’s pervasive spying on Muslims to prevent terrorism — were only too happy to oblige him.
To the surprise of many, so was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher whose family owns The Times.
With their backing, Bloomberg accomplished something not even Giuliani, at the height of his popularity after 9/11, was able to when he sought to extend his term as mayor for three months. Bloomberg pulled off another full term.
Just think. What might have happened if The Times had not gone along with Bloomberg in 2008?
Just think how happy everyone could have been.
Bloomberg could have left office as a man above politics.
Kelly could have left office as perhaps the greatest police commissioner the history of New York City.
Under a new administration, Stop and Frisk would have probably been cut back to constitutional levels.
And Bloomberg would not be sounding like Rudy Giuliani.
Edited by Donald Forst
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg blasted the two City Council bills that he said would undermine public safety, including one measure that would prevent the NYPD from using information such as race, gender and age in its description of subjects.
By Ken Paulsen — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The Staten Island Advance’ / Staten Island
He mocked the legislation in his weekly radio address Sunday as something that would have a direct impact on public safety: "So think about this: If an officer is told by a witness that a twenty-something white man wearing a blue windbreaker was seen shooting a gun, the officer can only use the color of the windbreaker as a lead," he said. "And the officer would have to stop 80-year old black women if they are wearing blue windbreakers. Even more absurd: if they stop someone who perfectly fits the description provided -- a twenty-something white man wearing a blue windbreaker -- and that person turns out not to be the shooter, that person can sue the NYPD. "
If the legislation, intended to stop racial profiling, passes, police offers would face the constant threat of going to trial for doing their jobs, he said.
Among Staten Island's council members, only the North Shore's Debi Rose supports it. Mid-Island Councilman James Oddo and South Shore Councilman Vincent Ignizio have decried the measure and strongly oppose it.
The mayor also again asserted his strong opposition to the push for an NYPD inspector general -- an independent monitor. His opposition to that one is already well-known. Bloomberg says it would add another layer of bureaucracy to a system that already has enough checks and balances, including the police commissioner, mayor, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and five district attorneys.
If this bill passes, all officers will be under threat of going to trial for doing their jobs - and that would make all of us less safe.
The mayor touted the city's dropping crime rate and gave his unqualified endorsement of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly: "Under Commissioner Kelly's leadership, the NYPD has redefined modern policing - they've not simply responded to crimes, they've prevented crimes from happening in the first place," he said. So far in 2013, murders are down 34 percent and shootings are down 22 percent.
The most prominent target of the Bloomberg's jabs is City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, who supports the legislation. She has cooperated with Bloomberg throughout her tenure, but is under pressure to distinguish herself from him, especially as the mayor's popularity has dropped during his 12th and final year in office.
Ms. Quinn defended her press for an inspector general earlier this week: "I believe that we can - that we must - have both safe streets and stronger police-community relations," Ms. Quinn said. "An IG will provide feedback and recommendations to our commissioner and mayor on how to balance these two goals and ensure one doesn't impede on the other."
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Thugs accused of killing NYPD officer Peter Figoski are set to go on trial this week
Gunman Lamont Pride, 28, was convicted in February and sentenced to 45 years to life, but alleged getaway driver Michael Velez was cleared — raising the stakes for prosecutors in the upcoming trial.
By Oren Yaniv — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Two hoodlums accused of taking part in a robbery that ended with the shooting death of NYPD Officer Peter Figoski are set to go on trial this week — and they’re expected to blame everyone but themselves.
Nelson (Nels) Morales, 28, and Kevin (Luck) Santos, 32, are on the hook for the murder that took place when the 22-year veteran cop responded to a Brooklyn stickup of a small-time drug dealer in December 2011.
Gunman Lamont Pride, 28, was convicted in February and sentenced to 45 years to life, but alleged getaway driver Michael Velez was cleared — raising the stakes for prosecutors in the upcoming trial.
They will claim the five-member crew hatched the robbery plan. The gang also included Ariel Tejada, who will testify for the prosecution.
When police arrived, Pride was confronted by Figoski, 47, and fired one bullet before running away, authorities said. Surveillance video captured both Pride and Santos fleeing.
Morales and Tejada, found inside the apartment, claimed to be victims. But their story fizzled after Pride saw Morales at the precinct and muttered “There goes Nels,” court papers show.
In videotaped statements, Morales claimed that Pride put a gun to his head and forced him to search the dealer’s dingy East New York basement. Santos contended the robbery was Morales’ idea.
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Mayoral Race and the NYPD
Liu: NYPD surveillance of Muslims is unconstitutional
Other Democratic mayoral hopefuls condemn practice. But controller goes further.
By Erin Durkin — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
City Controller John Liu called the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims unconstitutional at a forum dedicated to Muslim and Arab American issues Sunday.
“No offense to you guys here - how can anybody think that it’s OK to surveil or spy on people just because they’re Muslim?” said Liu, who was the only major candidate to go that far.
The NYPD’s program has involved monitoring mosques, cafes and bookstores in Muslim neighborhoods, and Muslim student associations.
Former Controller Bill Thompson stopped short of calling the surveillance unconstitutional, but strongly condemned it.
“Is it right? Absolutely not. Should it be done? Positively not. Would I allow it? Definitely not,” he said. “To single any group out because of what they believe in, the religion that they worship, and who they are, that isn’t New York City, that isn’t this country, that isn’t what we believe in.”’
Little-known candidate Erick Salgado also raised his hand to call it unconstitutional.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who have defended the program in the past, did not directly address it in their responses.
The six Democratic candidates, plus Independence Party favorite Adolfo Carrion, all said that as mayor they would add two Muslim holidays as days off on the public school calendar.
The City Council passed a resolution in favor of adding the days, Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha, but Mayor Bloomberg balked saying there was no room for more time off.
Meanwhile, de Blasio ramped up his attacks on NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and his top spokesman Paul Browne. De Blasio last week used a clip of Kelly defending stop and frisk by saying the proportion of African Americans is lower than their percentage of suspects in an ad attacking Quinn. That prompted Browne to accuse him of “race baiting” by a candidate “behind in the polls.”
At a campaign stop in Brooklyn, de Blasio said Browne was improperly using his government position to wade into the mayor’s race.
“It was outrageous,” he said. “Deputy Commissioner Browne — he is a public employee he is supposed to speak on behalf of the NYPD. That role is a very particular role in our city and it’s supposed to be one where you stay above the political fray.”
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Spy’s the limit: Liu calls NYPD Muslim watch unconstitutional
By SALLY GOLDENBERG — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
City Comptroller John Liu yesterday ripped the NYPD’s program that monitors the Muslim community in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, calling the effort unconstitutional.
The Democratic candidates at a forum on Islamic issues at NYU’s Kimmel Center were asked to raise their hands if they thought the surveillance program was unconstitutional
Liu and Staten Island minister Erick Salgado were the only candidates to say it was.
“My reading of history says that, you know, America is a place of religious freedom, and in fact many people came here, to America, in the first place, from the very early days of this country, to escape religious persecution. And so — no offense to you guys here — how can anybody think that it’s OK to surveil or spy on people just because they’re Muslim?” Liu said.
Under the surveillance program, the NYPD has monitored Muslim groups and shops and crossed into New Jersey to conduct some operations.
Former Comptroller Bill Thompson wouldn’t describe it as unconstitutional but insisted that a policing strategy that focuses on a religion is “disgraceful.”
“To single a group out, to follow people, to infiltrate mosques and bookstores, to be able to do all of those things — is it right? Absolutely not. Should it be done? Positively not,” Thompson said.
“Would I allow it? Definitely not.”
Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who wants to keep Ray Kelly as NYPD commissioner if she’s elected, stayed fairly quiet during the discussion, and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said he wants to improve police-community relations.
Each of the Democratic candidates endorsed a proposal to close schools for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, two of the holiest days on the Muslim calendar.
“When you hear the mayor tell people, ‘Sorry, the calendar’s full, and we can’t find room for two holidays to reflect the religious needs of your community, but we can for other communities,’ well, that’s not American. That doesn’t represent our values,” de Blasio said.
Thompson chimed in, “I think it’s a question of having a mayor who realizes what our city is and how our city has changed.”
Quinn, who led the City Council in passing a resolution in 2009 calling on Mayor Bloomberg to add the holidays to the school calendar, said it would be a top priority for her.
After the forum, Liu, whose campaign was dogged on Thursday by guilty verdicts against a campaign aide and a fund-raiser, contended he knew nothing of the campaign finance violations.
After the verdict was read, one juror told The Post that the jury believed Liu was aware of the illegal fund-raising tactics.
Liu insisted the idea was planted by prosecutors.
“The prosecutor said in his summation, without offering a shred of evidence, that I must have known something about it. That is downright scurrilous for anybody to say that without offering any evidence!” he snapped.
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Which NYC Mayoral Candidates Think Spying on American Muslims is Unconstitutional?
By Sydney Brownstone — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The Villiage Voice’ / Manhattan
On Sunday afternoon, seven mayoral hopefuls gathered for a forum co-hosted by the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY) and the Islamic Center at New York University. Community organizers hailed it as an historic moment. Nearly three weeks after the Boston bombings--and in the heat of the debate on civil liberties that ensued--moderator Errol Louis posed the question to the candidates: By a show of hands, which of you think the current NYPD surveillance program is unconstitutional?
John C. Liu and Reverend Erick Salgado, both Democrats, raised their palms in front of a room of roughly 400 members of the Muslim, South Asian, and Arab American communities. "How could you think it's okay to surveil or spy on someone just because they're Muslim?" Liu asked.
"It is counterproductive to alienate communities, because if you do that, it means a less-safe city," Salgado added.
Not every mayoral candidate was present--many, Louis pointed out, turned down the invitation. Noticeably absent were Republican candidates, with the near-exception of Adolfo Carrión, a former Democrat turned Independent hoping to run on the GOP ticket.
Still, all candidates present--including Sal Albanese, Bill de Blasio, Christine Quinn, and John Liu--stressed the need for a new and different kind of relationship between the NYPD and the Muslim community, emphasizing zero tolerance for racial profiling. After the AP discovered in 2011 that the NYPD had been sending "rakers" and "crawlers" into New York cafes and mosques to monitor activity of the American Muslim community over the past decade, community organizations and civil liberties groups raised hell--hosting rallies, boycotts, FOIL requests, and "Know Your Rights" workshops across the city. Several NYPD-monitored Muslims in New Jersey also filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging that the surveillance program infringed on their civil liberties. That case, however, is still pending.
A report put out by CUNY's CLEAR project in March qualitatively highlighted the Muslim community's fear and mistrust of the administration and NYPD as a result of the program.
"Everybody I see in the mosque, if they act a little abnormal, I always wonder whether they're an informant, or just a regular person," a Muslim Sunday school teacher told CUNY researchers. "This is really sad: sometimes when we get converts, and they are finding all this interest in Islam, I start wondering if they're an informant."
Bill de Blasio laid out a three-point plan to address these concerns. "Just in this week, the mayor of this city gave a speech which I can only describe as fear-mongering, trying to resent the notion that if we respect people's civil liberties, if we change the overuse of stop and frisk, that somehow it's going to be a less-safe city," he said. De Blasio went on to propose that the city implement a bill to prevent racial profiling, hire an inspector general for the NYPD, and find a replacement for current police commissioner Ray Kelly. De Blasio also criticized Christine Quinn for saying she would keep Kelly on board.
"I believe we can keep this the safest big city in the America and put policies in place that are going to bring the police and the communities back together," Quinn replied, adding that she was for the inspector general bill. "But I do have concerns about giving the state court the potential to rule on issues of racial profiling. The federal court is involved in the Floyd case, as they should be. And I have concerns adding more courts into this will create confusing rulings where we already have court jurisdiction."
In 2011, the White House released a paper outlining how the federal government might better community policing practices and partner with local organizations to prevent violent extremism. "Countering radicalization to violence is frequently best achieved by engaging and empowering individuals and groups at the local level to build resilience against violent extremism," it read. "Rather than blame particular communities, it is essential that we find ways to help them protect themselves."
"I think passing the banning of racial profiling is an important step for the community," AAANY's executive director Linda Sarsour told the Voice. "Right now, relations with the NYPD are not good. And if the NYPD tells you that they're good, they're only good with a few select members of our community."
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NYPD's Stop, Question and Frisk Trial Judge Shira A. Scheindlin
A Court Rule Directs Cases Over Friskings to One Judge
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
After an attempted police stop in 1999 led to the shooting of an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo, a civil rights group sued the New York Police Department over the stop-and-frisk practices of its elite Street Crime Unit. From one of the wooden wheels used to assign cases in Federal District Court in Manhattan, a judge’s name was drawn: Shira A. Scheindlin.
More than a decade later the effects of that random assignment are still felt, as new stop-and-frisk lawsuits are routed directly to Judge Scheindlin in courtroom 15C.
Indeed, long after the unit had been disbanded, Judge Scheindlin has come to exercise near exclusive jurisdiction in deciding whether the Police Department’s policies adhere to Fourth Amendment restrictions for officers conducting street stops.
In January she ruled that the police were unconstitutionally stopping tenants and guests outside Bronx apartment buildings on suspicion of trespassing. She is now in the midst of hearing a broader nonjury trial over the police’s street-stop practices. Next up is a case examining stops in public housing projects.
In a city with dozens of federal district court judges, it is striking that a single judge has so many opportunities to judge on one of the Police Department’s signature crime-fighting tactics — a development that has frustrated city officials.
The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, groused that the city faced an uphill battle before Judge Scheindlin, whom he accused of favoring the civil rights lawyers. “In my view, the judge is very much in their corner and has been all along throughout her career,” he told The Wall Street Journal last month.
The reason the stop-and-frisk issues continue to land in Judge Scheindlin’s courtroom is that civil rights groups, sometimes at the judge’s suggestion, have designated the subsequent cases as “related” to similar cases harking back to the long-closed 1999 lawsuit. That designation instructs a court clerk to automatically forward the case to a specific judge.
At one point, a top city lawyer tried to convince Judge Scheindlin to relinquish a new stop-and-frisk case against the city. “The Court should return this case to the wheel for random assignment,” the lawyer, Celeste L. Koeleveld, said. The judge did not.
The “related-case rule,” as it is known, calls for some cases to be steered toward the same judge. The language of the court rule leaves it to the discretion to individual judges to accept the case as related or not. It instructs judges to consider whether placing the cases in the same courtroom would result in conserving judicial resources, more efficient litigation or the convenience of the various parties.
The rule calls for related cases to have a “similarity of facts and legal issues” or to stem from the “same transactions or events.” But cases are not related merely because they involve identical legal issues or litigants.
Asked about the possibility of judge shopping, plaintiffs’ lawyers in these cases note that the court rules require lawyers to alert judges to the possibility of a related case.
“It would make no sense to have different judges handle the three stop-and-frisk cases,” one of the lawyers, Christopher T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said. “They involve a common police tactic, nearly identical legal issues, overlapping evidence and closely related remedies.”
Mr. Dunn added, “These are precisely the types of cases to have before a single judge.”
In a brief interview, Judge Scheindlin, who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton, declined to discuss the related-case rule in the context of the various stop-and-frisk cases. But speaking generally, she observed that “some judges are less inclined to accept a case as related, some judges are more inclined to accept it as related.”
In open court, the matter has rarely been discussed. But it did arise in late 2007. Although the 1999 lawsuit had been settled, the plaintiffs returned to court in that case to accuse the department of a surge in racially motivated street stops under the policing practices of a new mayoral administration.
In court, Judge Scheindlin suggested a route other than trying to reopen the long-ago case.
“If you got proof of inappropriate racial profiling in a good constitutional case, why don’t you bring a lawsuit?” she asked. “You can certainly mark it as related.”
At another point, she said, “For $350, you can bring that lawsuit,” a reference to the filing fee.
About a month later, the lawyers filed Floyd v. City of New York, now at trial in her courtroom.
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Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Sun’ Editorial:
Frisking the Bill of Rights
(Editorial In Support of the U.S. Constitution - All of It! / Specifically the 2nd and 4th Amendments)
The thing that gets us about the stop and frisk debate in New York is the selectivity in respect of the Bill of Rights. On the one hand, the New York Times calls for a strict construction of the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from searches and seizures that are unreasonable. On the other hand, the Times shrinks from any strict construction of the Second Amendment, which vouchsafes the right of the people not only to keep but also to bear arms. It doesn’t want New Yorkers to be permitted to bear arms but neither does it want to permit the police to frisk them for illegal guns.
Go figure. The Times outlines all this in an editorial issued Friday under the headline “The Mayor on Stop-and-Frisk.” It labels as “shopworn” and “discredited” arguments His Honor used, in a speech at Police Plaza, to defend the program known as “stop and frisk.” The Times has bought into the complaints against the city being levied in the lawsuit known as Floyd v. City of New York. The mayor, the Times notes, denies that the NYPD stops suspects based on race and adds that, as the Times put it, “members of minority groups were more likely to be stopped because minorities committed most of the crimes.”
The Times reckons that various court documents in the federal lawsuits tell “another story entirely,” though a more nuanced view of the evidence adduced in Floyd v. New York has been recounted by the Times’ own reporter on the case, Joseph Goldstein, who formerly covered the courts for the Sun and whom we know to be an almost obsessively fair and thoughtful reporter. He has reported that some of the testimony elicited from witnesses “seemed to veer away from the straightforward narrative of racial profiling.” There’ll be a lot of testimony for Judge Scheindlin to sort out, and we don’t seek to distill that here.
What we do seek is a consistency in respect of the Bill of Rights. Our instinct is for its aggressive enforcement of all its articles. Certainly this includes the Fourth Amendment, which vouchsafes the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. It is huge. If the Bill of Rights were the Himalayas, the editor of the Sun has written elsewhere, the Fourth Amendment would be K2 or Annapurna; the freshets coming off its slopes have produced a vast cataract of liberty. Justices arguing for its strict enforcement have included some of the most conservative and liberal ever to be seated on the high bench.
The Fourth Amendment was enacted to ensure that America would not be plagued with the evil of what in Britain was known as a general warrant. Of this racial profiling can be seen as a variety — the danger of abuse arises from the generality. This is why the Fourth Amendment not only requires warrants but also commands that no warrants shall issue but on probable cause and supported by oath and describing the persons or things to be seized. The amendment does not ban all searches, only ones that are “unreasonable.” Commissioner Kelly is a lot of things, but unreasonable is not one of them.
So if one is going to enforce a strict reading of the Fourth Amendment, why not the Second? The Supreme Court has ruled that the palladium of our liberty, as the Second has been called, does not prohibit any regulation of guns. But in New York the right to keep and bear arms is governed by state law that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment. It is not an argument being made in Floyd v. New York. But it is the other real civil rights issue at the heart of the case. What good is the right to be protected unreasonable searches and seizures if the government can turn around and, in violation of the plain language of the Bill of Rights, ban outright the handguns for which the government is ostensibly searching?
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New York's 911 emergency call center suffering major shortage of operators
Mandatory overtime has been imposed to make up for the shortfall. After calls ring six times, they are bounced to NYPD operators untrained in giving lifesaving advice.
By Ginger Adams Otis — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
The city's 911 emergency call center needs an infusion of operators — stat!
Staffing is critically low among dispatchers handling emergency medical calls — forcing the FDNY to impose mandatory overtime and pull operators from one shift to cover others.
Refusing the mandatory overtime comes with a stiff penalty — loss of one to four days’ pay — which is legal because EMS workers are considered emergency personnel.
The code red doesn’t bode well for the summer, when EMS call volume usually surges to more than 4,000 calls per day from the usual 3,000 to 3,500 calls per day.
A Daily News review shows dozens of unfilled operator slots across all three eight-hour shifts — with some shifts dropping into the single digits despite FDNY regulations requiring 23 operators per shift.
The result: hundreds of calls, unanswered after six rings, bounce to NYPD operators untrained in giving lifesaving instructions.
The NYPD worker takes down the information and tells the caller help is on the way — and then disconnects the call. The details are plugged into the 911 system by an EMS operator known as the relay and an ambulance is sent — but the caller never speaks to a trained dispatcher.
That’s what happened to Ray Perez, 51, who dialed 911 on April 22 when his neighbor keeled over as they talked on the street near his Brooklyn home. An NYPD operator answered and told him to stand by.
“They told me I was going to be transferred, and then nothing,” Perez recounted. “They came back and said somebody would be right there.”
He says he waited 20 agonizing minutes for an ambulance as his friend lay twitching on the ground.
“I felt like she was going out, so with what little CPR I know, I tried to help her,” said Perez.
The neighbor, who was suffering a stroke, survived, despite the long wait for help.
But she might turn out to be one of the lucky ones.
“We are under head count,” FDNY spokesman Frank Dwyer told The News. “We have had to bring people in on overtime.”
But the understaffing hasn’t affected service, with the average response time — six minutes, 30 seconds — the quickest ever, Dwyer said.
The agency intends to hire more operators to pick up the slack, Dwyer added.
“We are currently training 16 hours a day with two groups,” he said.
But records show Perez’s experience was hardly unique. Between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on April 22, The News traced four high-priority calls that went unanswered by EMS — just a small sample from among dozens.
None of the four callers — a 25-year-old woman in the Bronx having an asthma attack, someone reporting a baby in the Bronx with difficulty breathing, a female stab victim in Manhattan, and a man in Queens with chest pains — spoke to a medically trained operator, records show.
On average, EMS 911 gets about 180 calls an hour — and approximately a third wind up in relay, records show.
FDNY officials say the bottleneck began when the agency’s training center was shuttered a year ago so it could be brought up to Occupational Safety and Health Administration code.
It takes 12 weeks for workers to complete a training class — and then they must shadow more experienced dispatchers before they’re cleared to take live calls. So the loss of the training center was a critical factor in the current shortfall.
But whatever the cause, existing staff is stretched to the breaking point. Records show that on March 30, 15 workers did involuntary overtime on the afternoon tour — some for the full eight hours.
They were covering for 15 co-workers out sick — a dangerous practice on a job so stressful that operators are required to take a 30-minute break for every two hours on the phones.
The shortages were also acute during March and April, records show.
EMS’ long-standing mandatory overtime policy requires 911 operators to do three extra shifts a month — or be available for two extra shifts a week, if the need arises.
But over the past six months, just about every eligible operator has been forced into extra shifts, multiple sources told The News.
The problem’s so acute that a top FDNY commander called for “volunteers” from the overnight tour to plug holes in the busier afternoon.
“Otherwise, I will be forced to use inverse seniority to . . . correct the imbalance on the schedule,” Capt. Mark Lobel wrote in an April 24 memo.
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How the city’s emergency medical calls are routed through the 911 system:
1 An NYPD operator answers, gets name, address, nature of call.
2 Medical calls are transferred to EMS operator.
3 After six rings, if no EMS operator answers, the NYPD operator tells the caller help is on the way. Call ends.
4 Information is sent via computer to EMS relay position, and entered into dispatch system.
5 An ambulance is assigned based on the seriousness of the medical situation. Life-threatening calls take priority.
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49; 73; 113; 114 and 83 Precincts: All See Big Crime Drops
Safe at last: Crime way down in danger zones
By REBECCA HARSHBARGER — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
Some of the city’s meanest streets have seen the largest drops in crime this year.
The city’s biggest plunge comes in The Bronx’s rough (??? L.O.L.) 49th Precinct — which includes Morris Park and Pelham Parkway — where total major crime fell 28.5 percent through the end of April when compared to the same period in 2012.
The second-largest drop came in the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which saw a 24-percent decrease in the seven major crime categories. The third top reduction came in the 113th in normally crime-wracked St. Albans, Queens, with a 20-percent drop.
Residents of the hard-hit areas said they already feel safer walking the streets.
“There used to be a time when you would stand on the corner and hear gunshots,” said retired nurse Sarah Hall, who has lived in Brownsville for over 60 years.
“I’m 78 years old, and I feel free to walk in my community now.”
Cops in The Bronx’s 49th Precinct credit a large part of the crime plunge there to the use of a smartphone app, Dropbox, which helps them to share intelligence about troublemaking youth.
Capt. Lorenzo Johnson said the precinct began using Dropbox a few months ago to share “wanted” photos, warrants and other information among detectives, specialized units and patrol cops.
Police recently used intelligence they shared through the app to nab a robbery suspect accused of ripping chains from the necks of two women.
“It’s one of the key tools we’ve used,” said Johnson. He added that it helps by “getting the people that we’re looking for off the streets before they can commit murder.”
As part of the drop in the 49th, murders alone are down from four in the first four months last year to one so far this year. Robberies are also down.
Johnson also said the allocation of resources to target hot spots helped create this year’s crime drop in his area.
In addition to The Bronx, Brownsville and St. Albans precincts, the top five precincts for crime reduction were the 114th in Astoria, which saw an 18.1-percent drop, and the 83rd in Bushwick, which saw a 17-percent drop.
Deputy Inspector Joseph Gulatto, of the 73rd in Brownsville, credited the drop in violence to Operation Crew Cut, which dismantles teen gangs and crews by closely monitoring social-media sites.
“The results are paying off tremendously,” said Gulatto, who took over the command in January.
“The area is definitely getting safer. People hear less gunshots.”
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Biking Through the Security
Amid heavy security Sunday, a popular annual bike race—one of the first large-scale public events since the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon—rolled through New York City without major incident.
By Joe Jackson and Pervaiz Shallwani — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The Wall Street Journal’ / New York, NY
Amid heavy security Sunday, a popular annual bike race—one of the first large-scale public events since the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon—rolled through New York City without major incident.
The “Five Boro Bike Tour,” which brought up to 32,000 cyclists out onto the city’s streets, posed a significant security challenge for authorities on heightened alert after last month’s attack.
The biking event began in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood early Sunday and ended in Staten Island. The New York Police Department confirmed Sunday evening there were no alerts or arrests in connection with the event, which dates back to 1977.
The grueling 40-mile cycle did claim one victim; a 51-year-old Michigan man died from a heart attack while pedaling across the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, officials said.
Security was noticeably increased for this year’s tour, with police officers posted along the route and a helicopter flying overhead. Authorities also set up manned checkpoints at the circuit’s five bridge crossings, and cyclists reported police checking their jerseys for entry numbers.
Meanwhile, officers from the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau and others from the canine unit were visible at the Staten Island ferry terminal in downtown Manhattan as cyclists returned there through the afternoon.
“It’s a challenge, no question about it,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
He added that his department deployed a helicopter, a “significant number of police officers” and the latest technology, such as several mobile cameras, to ensure increased vigilance.
“The police presence was very noticeable; they had police cyclists riding along with us,” said Michael Johnson, 40, who traveled from Washington, D.C., for the event. “Everyone was very nice and helpful, though.”
Cycling partner Corinne Carpenter, 34, added: “They did a really good job of checking everybody’s bags.”
But not everybody was so welcoming of the additional security measures.
“It was slowing us down,” said Valerie Klein, 59, of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “When you’re biking, you need a little speed and then you had to stop at every bridge checkpoint. It was a little different.”
The tour, which led to road detours and closures, snarled traffic on some of the city’s busiest arteries, like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “The traffic’s been very bad today, especially this morning,” said yellow cab driver Alex Mario, 45, of Brooklyn.
Officials identified the heart attack victim as Michael Boren of Almont, Mich. He was riding on the upper level of the bridge at around 10:50 a.m. when he went into cardiac arrest. He was transported to New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later.
“He was just lying there, the paramedics were pumping him and an ambulance had blocked off that area of the bridge,” said a passing cyclist who would only give his name as Max. “You felt really bad.”
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NYPD Intel Div.
Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’ Editorial:
The riot that never was
An unfortunate truth of good police work is that success doesn’t get headlines.
Take note of what didn’t happen here last Wednesday, May 1. For decades, May Day has been celebrated by unions worldwide to draw focus on various employment issues — including immigration — usually in a peaceful manner.
In recent years, however, self-professed anarchists have taken the opportunity to disrupt May Day protests by engaging in so-called “black bloc tactics.” The aim is clear: to provoke protesters into violence against the cops, and to damage property.
That’s exactly what happened in Seattle last week. On May Day, marchers broke windows and hurled rocks, bottles and fireworks at cops. All told, 17 protesters were arrested with eight police officers injured during the street uprisings.
In sharp contrast, almost nothing happened here on May Day. Just eight protesters were arrested and, thankfully, no cops were harmed.
That’s not by accident.
The NYPD’s Intelligence Division was proactive, tracking some May Day inciters. These included several who flew in from the West Coast hoping to cause mayhem.
But New York cops learned much from their experiences with the Occupy movement, which was partially infiltrated by many of the same “black bloc” anarchists. As a result of that knowledge and the actions taken, we had minimal disturbances here — unlike our friends in Seattle.
It’s a similar dynamic with stop-question-and-frisk. When the cops are successful, bad guys have much less opportunity to carry illegal guns, much less use them.
But few stories are written about murders and riots that don’t happen.
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Ret. Deputy Chief Steven Bonano
Bone marrow drive to benefit 9/11 hero cop battling blood cancer possibly tied to Ground Zero work
The retired NYPD policeman's new employer, Forest City Ratner, is hosting the bone marrow registry drive in downtown Brooklyn at 345 Jay St. on Tuesday and Wednesday.
By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
The clock is ticking for a hero in distress.
Retired NYPD cop and 9/11 first responder Steven Bonano is battling a rare form of blood cancer believed to be tied to his time working at Ground Zero.
Now his new employer is racing to save his life.
Forest City Ratner, which last year enlisted Bonano to head security at the Barclays Center, will host a bone-marrow registry drive in downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Friends of the former deputy chief and one-time Navy officer are praying they find a match. “He loved to help people in distress,” said Douglas Zeigler, former chief of the NYPD’s Community Affairs Bureau. “That was his passion.”
The Bronx-born Bonano, 50, raced to the scene of the terror attacks and worked there for weeks afterward.
Later, he became the commander of the department’s Emergency Service Unit, overseeing the elite officers trained in search and rescue.
Throughout his 30-year tenure with the NYPD, Bonano somehow found the time to earn a pilot’s license, as well as a master’s degree from Harvard University. He also received the Police Combat Cross, the second-highest award in the NYPD.
“Chief Steve Bonano served this city with the NYPD for many years,” said Forest City Ratner Executive Chairman Bruce Ratner. “Now it’s our turn to serve him.”
The company will conduct its bone-marrow registry drive from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday at 345 Jay St.
Cancer among 9/11 responders is 15% higher than among people not exposed to the Ground Zero toxins, a recent study by Mount Sinai Medical Center’s World Trade Center Health Program found.
The increase was seen primarily in three types of the disease, including blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.
More than 900 first responders have died of ailments blamed on their service at Ground Zero, officials say.
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Bronx Criminal Court
Let's make a plea deal! Bronx ‘thugs’ slide in bid to clear backlog
By JOSH SAUL and DOUGLAS MONTERO — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
It’s not hard to reduce the crippling backlog in the Bronx court system — just dole out generous plea deals or outright dismiss charges against violent-crime defendants.
Prosecutors have offered deals that allow some suspects accused of even attempted murder to plead guilty to misdemeanor assault or weapons possession, according to court documents obtained by The Post.
Some defendants even had attempted-murder raps dropped, including one man accused in a shootout that wounded eight people, three of them kids.
The Post analyzed the 254 cases handled by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Patricia DiMango since January. She’s the most high-profile of the “SWAT team” of 10 state judges temporarily assigned to Bronx Supreme Court at the beginning of the year to cut down on the felony backlog.
Prosecutors have moved to dismiss 26 cases in DiMango’s court, including three attempted-murder raps last month alone.
“[Bronx DA Robert] Johnson felt pressure that something had to be done to reduce this backlog, so he started making offers that led to these plea deals,” a court source said. “To get a misdemeanor offer when you were charged with attempted murder is unheard of.”
Robert Dreher, the executive assistant to the DA in charge of trials, said prosecutors were asked by the Office of Court Administration to examine the strengths and weaknesses of their pending cases.
But he insisted that prosecutors are not offering more generous deals to decrease the backlog. He and other officials said older cases weaken as they age.
“Witnesses disappear, folks retire, memories fade, and the result is the prosecutor being unable to prosecute the case at the original charge,” said OCA rep David Bookstaver.
For example, Leon Ross, charged with attempted murder in 2010, was allowed to plead guilty to criminal possession of a weapon in March because a key witness got into legal trouble of his own, Dreher said.
Edmanuel Chacon’s 2012 attempted-murder rap was pleaded down to misdemeanor assault because the victim was shady, officials said.
And O’Neil DaSilva, charged with attempted murder in 2011 for allegedly shooting eight people — including three children — saw his case completely dismissed last month because “we were unable to find a witness,” Dreher said.
Bronx DA rep Steven Reed said, “If any previous recommendation is to be revised, that must be based on changed circumstances, such as new mitigating information or a change in the available proof.”
DiMango said she has a well-established reputation as a tough, no-nonsense jurist. “This is no different than what occurs throughout the state,” she said. “[Plea deals are] a necessary function of the bench to move cases, or the criminal-justice system would collapse.”
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Bronx D.A.O. / Bob Johnson to N.Y. Post: ‘Up Yours’
Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’ Letters to the Editor:
DA is no Tebow
The Post’s editorial “Tebow Time for The Bronx” repeats the rumor of a plan by unnamed “political leaders” to “nudge” me from office, and compares me to the Jet’s Tim Tebow, who made very few offensive plays last year.
Since January we announced a political corruption investigation which we began and which led to an indictment against one New York assemblyman and a federal indictment against another.
We indicted 14 people for selling 140 illegal firearms, including assault weapons, from four other states. We announced the murder indictment of the killer of a 2-year-old. We announced the identity-theft indictment of 17 people for stealing more than $1.5 million from numerous victims.
While indictments are merely allegations, these qualify as “offensive plays” against crime.
The Post claims that our “felony conviction rate” was 46 percent in 2011. This is a jury record based on less than 3 percent of the indictments we disposed of in 2011. In that year, 88 percent of all defendants were convicted.
Furthermore, since 1990, Bronx violent crime decreased 73 percent, homicide decreased percent and auto theft fell 93 percent.
I love doing this job, and can only be “nudged” from it through the electoral process.
Robert Johnson
District Attorney
The Bronx
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Bloomberg Nightmare
In Texas, Armed Citizens Project will give you a gun— and they’re coming to NYC
Group hands out free shotguns to homeowners in high-crime areas
By Daniel Beekman — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
You know about gun buybacks. Well, Texas has gun giveaways.
A new organization based in Houston - the site of the National Rifle Association convention that ended Sunday - is handing out free pump-action shotguns to homeowners in high-crime neighborhoods.
It's an initiative that may sound crazy to some New Yorkers. But the man behind the nonprofit has the Big Apple squarely in his sights.
"New York and Chicago are on our high-priority list," said Kyle Coplen, 29. "We are going to be there by the end of the year."
The Armed Citizens Project, which Coplen founded in January, provides people who sign up for the service with firearms training and a $200 weapon.
Coplen was on hand Sunday as nine women and one man from the Oak Forest neighborhood took aim for the first time at an indoor gun range just outside Houston.
They sat through a classroom safety lesson, timidly pulled on safety glasses and took turns blasting away at paper targets.
"I live alone," said Teresa Schroeder, 47, who completed the training and will pick up her shotgun this week.
"The neighborhood I live in, I don't live there because I want to live there. But I refuse to be a victim," she said.
Coplen picked a 400-home section of Oak Forest and mailed information about his organization to every household. The Indiana-bred graduate student said he chose the neighborhood because it had more than 100 burglaries last year.
He believes guns owned by responsible people deter crime.
"I hate to admit that yeah, I want a gun in my house," said Sara Dimitt, 32, who took part Sunday. "But I do. The crime rate in our neighborhood has been escalating. It makes me nervous. I want to defend myself."
Coplen said his privately funded organization requires all gun recipients to pick up their weapons at an above-board store, complete gun transfer paperwork and pass the federal NICS background check.
The Armed Citizens Project, registered with the state of Texas and in the process of registering with the feds, will comply with New York law when it arrives in the Big Apple, he said. The city requires shotgun owners to obtain a permit from the NYPD.
Coplen may receive a rough reception in Gotham, where the NYPD has held gun buyback events to take weapons off the street and where anti-gun leader Mayor Bloomberg holds sway. The organization is not affiliated with the NRA.
"The folks that criticize us, I don't really pay attention to them," Coplen said. "We are training folks, doing background checks, holding training. The people against us are against firearms ownership of any kind, the extreme fringe of the anti-gun movement."
Tiffany Braggs was part of the first group of Houstonians to receive a shotgun. The 44-year-old lives in Greenpoint, a rough neighborhood that she calls "Gunspoint."
Before that, "I never fired a weapon, never touched one, never had the interest," she said.
Now Braggs owns two firearms. She said single mothers in New York should take heed.
"I feel much safer now," said Braggs. "There is a need out there. You don't know when you can come and go. You feel scared to step out with your kids. You don't have to live in fear. This gave me a different perspective on crime. I'm ready."
With Barry Paddock and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
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NYPD Lt. John Byron Raising Money for Shot Boston Officer
NYC cops raising $ for T officer
By: Dave Wedge — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The Boston Herald’ / Boston, MA
After the 9/11 attacks, an army of Boston cops arrived to help at Ground Zero. Now, some New York City cops originally from Boston are planning a fundraiser for MBTA police officer Richard Donohue, who was injured in the shootout after the marathon bombings.
“The Boston guys in particular, we want to make sure we show support up there,” said NYPD Lt. Conor Wynne, a Winthrop native.
He and NYPD officer John Byron, a Lynn native, and other Boston-bred New York cops are throwing the fundraiser May 24 at Manhattan’s Legends Sports Bar.
Donations for an auction include signed Micky Ward boxing gloves and New York Rangers items, and a NASCAR car door. Byron, whose partner died during Hurricane Sandy, said he wants to pay back Boston cops for their support then.
“When this happened back home, it scared us,” Byron said. “It was an absolute feeling of helplessness. We figured the only way we could do anything was to try raise money.”
Wynne, whose family is close with the injured T cop, said, “We want to make sure they don’t have any financial worries over the next couple years.”
For more information, go to: WWW.OfficerRichardDonohue.com .
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Long Island
Hundreds of DNA cases backlogged at LI crime labs
By KEVIN DEUTSCH — Sunday, May 5th, 2013 ‘New York Newsday’ / Melville, L.I.
Almost 500 untested DNA samples -- crucial evidence in homicides, sexual assaults and other criminal cases -- are backlogged in the Suffolk County crime lab.
The latest records available show that, as of April 1, there were 492 pieces of DNA evidence in the Suffolk lab that went untested for longer than 30 days, the point at which the U.S. Justice Department considers a case backlogged. Since 2007, the lab has ended each year with a backlog of at least 300 cases.
In Nassau County, there were 47 backlogged cases as of April 1, compared with 180 at the end of 2012, records show.
- - -
A Newsday review of data provided by Suffolk and Nassau counties, as well as U.S. Department of Justice grant documents, found that local delays coincide with a soaring national DNA backlog estimated by experts to be as high as 400,000 cases.
Lengthy delays in DNA testing raise crucial questions about speedy trials, fairness to victims of crimes, and even whether some criminals could be caught sooner if testing procedures were faster.
The backlogs persist despite more than $400 million in grant funds doled out nationwide since 2004 by the National Institute of Justice, an agency within the Justice Department that provides funding to crime labs that aren't able to keep up.
The NIJ awarded more than $1.6 million in grant money to Suffolk and $1.7 million to Nassau as part of its DNA Backlog Reduction Program from 2006 to 2012, records show. Officials say the funds have prevented far worse delays but have not eliminated them. In Nassau, the purchase of new testing equipment has helped speed up testing and reduce the county's backlog, officials said.
DNA cases typically include homicides, sexual assaults, property crimes and robberies. Genetic samples are usually taken from crime scenes, victims and suspects, and they have helped solve crimes in both counties over the years, officials said. But that reliance on DNA has contributed to the backlog.
"There's no question that backlogs are delaying justice for victims and defendants on Long Island and across the country," said Garden City defense attorney Brian Griffin, a former Nassau County assistant district attorney. "Very often you continually wait for results from a forensic lab because of high demand. Everyone involved in the system suffers because of this issue."
And lengthy delays in prosecutions are only one possible fallout. "The most serious impact is that there are criminals out there who are free to continue what they're doing," said Lawrence Kobilinsky, a DNA expert and chairman of the Department of Sciences at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. "It's a terrible loss to the criminal justice system."
Intricate, lengthy process
DNA testing is complex. Evidence must first be screened to determine if it is biological material and, if so, what kind. Some samples can be degraded and difficult to analyze, or contain DNA from multiple suspects and victims, which also complicates testing.
"While analysis of DNA evidence is much more complex and time-consuming than is portrayed on television, the main reason for our backlog is an increase in evidence submissions," said Daniel Burhans, assistant chief of the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory.
Prompt DNA testing is crucial because "delays in submitting evidence to a forensic laboratory, as well as delays in analyzing the evidence, results in delays in justice," said an NIJ statement on its website. "In worst-case situations, delays can result in additional victimization by serial offenders or in the incarceration of individuals who have not committed the crime they are accused of or charged with."
In Suffolk alone, officials said, DNA submissions by police have increased 150 percent in the past 12 years. Delays can leave police agencies reluctant to request DNA analysis in all but the most essential cases. And in some instances, the analysis isn't being done at all, officials say.
Advances in DNA testing technology -- and the successful use of such evidence in prosecutions -- have resulted in more reliance on it and a dramatic increase in submissions, said Robert Clifford, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office.
"The inevitable result is delay as laboratory staffing has not kept up with the pace of laboratory submissions by investigative agencies," Clifford said.
Natasha Alexenko of Bay Shore, a sexual assault victim and a victims advocate who asked that her name be used in this story, said it took 16 years to see the man who raped her in Manhattan convicted. At that time, New York City had an estimated 17,000 kits of backlogged sexual assault evidence. Her attacker was sentenced to 44 to 107 years in prison.
The city's backlog has since been erased due to a four-year, $12 million lab overhaul, the hiring of more DNA analysts, and the outsourcing of backlogged rape kits to private labs, officials said.
"The backlog numbers on Long Island are significant, because each of these backlogged cases represents a human being," said Alexenko, founder of Natasha's Justice Project, a West Sayville-based organization that focuses on the issue of backlogged DNA evidence.
One woman whose rapist was convicted in Suffolk in 2006 said the county's crime lab waited four months to test her rape kit -- evidence collected by police -- because of backlogs.
"I don't blame the crime lab or the police, because they have so many cases to handle, but it did exacerbate the pain I felt," said the woman, whose name is being withheld because of the nature of the crime. "In a perfect world, these samples get analyzed right away. Four months can feel like a lifetime."
Beyond slowing the process, the backlog means law enforcement agencies -- while submitting more requests than ever -- still submit fewer than they would like to avoid making the situation even worse.
"There are many cases that are not submitted . . . because they are aware that we are unable to analyze the evidence," Burhans said.
Turnaround time differs
In Suffolk this year, it has taken 54 days on average to complete testing on a DNA case, records show. That's an improvement from 2012, when the average turnaround time was 92 days. In Nassau, the average turnaround time for a DNA case this year is 96 days, records show, compared with the average 90-day turnaround in 2012.
Suffolk has been analyzing DNA with state-of-the-art technology since 1999, and Nassau began advanced testing in 2003, county officials said.
Suffolk first tests so-called "rush" cases -- ones authorities ask be expedited, including some murders and rapes -- before analyzing additional homicide and sexual assault cases, Burhans said.
"All other cases, including property crimes, [nonsexual] assaults, and home invasions, are either backlogged or returned to the submitting agency without analysis" because of the large caseload, he said.
Nassau officials referred questions about DNA testing to the medical examiner's office. Pasquale Buffolino, director at that office's Department of Forensic Genetics, said his staff tries not to turn away any cases. Records show that in 2011 it took an average of 139 days for the medical examiner's office to complete forensic analysis in homicide cases, the last year for which complete data are available. Sexual assault cases took an average of 125 days to complete, according to records, while robbery cases took an average of 87 days. Comparable data were not available for Suffolk.
Faulty evidence testing prompted Nassau to close the police crime lab in February 2011. Since then, the medical examiner's office has tested other criminal evidence in addition to performing DNA analysis.
Suffolk adopted a $10.7 million budget for 2013 for its medical examiner's office, which includes the crime laboratory, records show, about the same as its 2012 budget. Nassau increased funding for its medical examiner's office this year to $7.3 million, up from $6.4 million in 2012, records show.
The New York State court system supports backlog reduction in the interest of speedy justice, spokesman David Bookstaver said.
"Anything that can either aid in a prosecution or in an exoneration serves a critical function in the judicial system," Bookstaver said.
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Nassau disallows condoms as prostitution evidence because of health concerns
By ANN GIVENS — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘New York Newsday’ / Melville, L.I.
Condoms are no longer being used as evidence in Nassau County prostitution cases -- a move intended to help prevent the spread of disease among sex workers.
The policy change was quietly put into effect last fall by District Attorney Kathleen Rice and has since drawn praise from public health groups.
Rice's office, which says its ability to prosecute the cases isn't compromised, is believed to be the first in New York to make the change.
Madeline Singas, Rice's chief assistant, outlined the change in tactics in a one-page memo to prosecutors in October. Since then, word has trickled out to police, defense lawyers, and legal and justice officials statewide."We're trying to increase the probability that sex workers will engage in protected sex," Rice said, noting that many sex workers are themselves victims of sex trafficking and violence. "The public health issue outweighs the public safety issue."
"If this is going to take away fear of sex workers using condoms, then we totally support her," said Catherine Hart, chief operating officer at the Long Island Association for AIDS Care.
The number of prostitution arrests annually has fluctuated widely in Nassau and Suffolk counties over the last decade. It was relatively low last year in both counties, with 26 cases resolved in Nassau and 51 in Suffolk, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
Still, Long Island law enforcement officials have made several high-profile busts in recent months, with police arresting individuals on prostitution charges and also groups of women accused of prostituting themselves out of illegal massage parlors.
In those cases, police have traditionally used condoms as evidence to support their arrests and have often seized condoms when they find suspected prostitutes with them.
Rice said she rethought her office's policy last year after reading a Human Rights Watch report that found that many prostitutes do not carry or use condoms because police often search for them and use them to make their cases.
A separate report by the Manhattan-based Urban Justice Center's Sex Workers Project relied in part on a 2010 survey of sex workers by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The report found that 57 percent of sex workers interviewed had condoms taken from them by a police officer, and 50 percent of those engaged in sex work afterward without a condom.
Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project, said Rice's directive is a good start, but that more sweeping change is needed.
Her organization backs a bill that has been introduced in the State Legislature that would prohibit the use of condoms as evidence at trial and other legal proceedings.
The bill has been introduced twice in previous years, but Baskin, who traveled to Albany with dozens of others to lobby for it last week, said she hopes the new research on the subject will sway lawmakers this time.
Insp. Kenneth Lack, a Nassau police spokesman, declined to comment on Rice's policy.
In Suffolk, Deputy Police Chief Kevin Fallon said police seize condoms in some cases, such as illegal massage parlors. Condoms, along with the testimony of undercover officers and surveillance, are evidence of prostitution.
"If and when condoms are recovered by the police, their use at trial will be analyzed on a case-by-case basis," said Robert Clifford, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota.
Lawyers and law enforcement officials in both Nassau and Suffolk point out that prostitution cases seldom go to trial, and even when they do, condoms are seldom central to making a case.
Kent Moston, who heads Nassau's Legal Aid Society, called Rice's policy change "intelligent and progressive," and likened it to a law passed in 2000 that aimed to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS by making it legal to possess and sell hypodermic needles without a prescription.
Rice, who becomes president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York in July, hopes to convince counterparts elsewhere to follow her lead. "I'm confident that it won't be too long until our view is the standard, best practice in New York," she said.
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New Jersey
Jersey City police overtime shoots up 15 percent in four months leading to election
By Terrence T. McDonald — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The Jersey Journal’ / Jersey City, NJ
In a four-month period leading up to Jersey City’s May 14 municipal election, city officials spent 15 percent more in police overtime than they did in the same time period last year, shelling out $350,928 more to police employees, city payroll records show.
The records show that 532 Police Department workers received more in overtime between December 2012 and March 2013 than they did in the same months one year prior, compared to 300 employees who made the same amount of overtime or less. Of the officers who received more in overtime, 21 are Healy donors.
The extra amounts, given mostly to officers and sergeants, range from $1.08 more for Officer Candice Maschucci, who boosted her overtime to $959.66 in the later four-month time period, to $15,898 extra for Sgt. Joseph Olszewiski, who earned $18,847 in overtime in that four months, the records show.
The Jersey Journal last month filed a request for a list of all Police Department employees, their base salaries and the overtime they received from December 2011 through March 2012 and from December 2012 through March 2013.
In total, Jersey City spent $2,680,894 in police overtime in the most recent four -month span, compared to $2,329,966 in the equivalent four months one year prior.
Mayor Jerramiah Healy is in the middle of a heated re-election campaign, fending off an aggressive challenge from City Councilman Steve Fulop.
On the campaign trail, Healy argues that crime is on the decrease in Jersey City, pointing to FBI figures that show the city in 2012 had the lowest homicide rate on record. But Fulop, as well as mayoral hopefuls Abdul Malik and Jerry Walker, have argued that the city is not safer under Healy’s leadership.
City crime stats show no significant increase or decrease in the total number of crimes between December 2011 and March 2012 compared to the same four-month period one year later. But there were 31 fewer aggravated assaults, 73 fewer robberies and 245 fewer thefts in the most-recent four-month stretch, while there were about 50 additional burglaries, the stats show.
Healy this week said he’s not in charge of the Police Department and does not “micromanage” it. He suggested the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy may have led to a boost in overtime payments in the months after the Oct 29. storm.
Assistant Business Administrator Robert J. Kakoleski, who is the city’s acting police director, said there are numerous reasons police overtime increased over last year. Some officers have seen salary increases, while others have been appearing more frequently as witnesses in Hudson County Superior Court, for which each officer is paid a minimum of four hours, Kakoleski said.
The city has been awarded grant money that will reimburse the city for some of the overtime payments, and there will be “no impact on the taxpayer,” he added.
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U.S.A.
Gun is lock & ‘upload’: print-your-own pistol would beat metal detectors
By AARON FEIS and LEONARD GREENE — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
Making a fully functional gun has gotten as easy as 1-2-3.
A libertarian group says it has manufactured the first working plastic gun made entirely with a 3-D printer — and the weapon would elude metal detection.
The Texas-based group, Defense Distributed, said it soon plans to publish the digital blueprint for anyone, including terrorists, to download anywhere in the world.
“Everyone’s seen the movie ‘In the Line of Fire,’ where one of the great bad guys, [played by] John Malkovich, labored at making a gun out of plastic and wood so it could get through metal detectors and he could assassinate the president,” Sen. Charles Schumer said yesterday.
“But that was only a movie, and just [last] week, it has become reality,” he added, as he proposed legislation to make such guns illegal.
“We’re facing a situation where anyone — a felon, a terrorist — can open a gun factory in their garage and the weapons they make will be undetectable. It’s stomach-churning.”
The proposed legislation is designed to amend a ban on “undetectable weapons” to refer to any gun, magazine or firearm component that would not be picked up by walk-through metal detectors.
The move follows the announcement by the nonprofit Defense Distributed that it had created a fully functional plastic firearm and that it would release its blueprint after it runs a few more tests.
The group said it had manufactured the hard-plastic handgun — which it dubbed “The Liberator” — using a Dimension SST printer from the company Stratasys.
Using pliable materials, 3-D printers can create solid objects by following digital blueprints.
Although the Dimension is one of the more expensive models, Schumer said a person can achieve similar results with printers that cost as little as $1,500, including one by 3D Systems that costs $1,299 and will be available at Staples.
The Liberator fires standard .380-caliber handgun rounds. The gun made last week got off six rounds before becoming unusable.
It was made of 16 pieces of plastic and designed to use interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.
Defense Distributed did use metal for one of the components to make sure that the gun complied with laws banning the possession of undetectable firearms.
3D Systems rep Alyssa Reichental said, “We are not a law-enforcement agency and cannot prevent someone from shooting a 3-D-printed gun any more than an automaker can prevent a drunk driver from taking the wheel.’’
But the firm is “committed to doing everything that is creative, innovative and responsible, even if it means some restrictions.”
Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson used a secondhand Dimension printer he had paid $8,000 for, Forbes magazine said.
Wilson could not be reached for comment.
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New NRA leader says Obama seeks 'revenge' on gun owners
By Gregory Korte — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘USA Today’
HOUSTON — The board of the National Rifle Association will elect as its president Monday a hard-line culture warrior who has worked for decades to make the NRA a more aggressive political force.
The election of James Porter — ensured after the endorsement of outgoing President David Keene last week — is one of many defiant signals to come out of the NRA's annual meeting in Houston over the weekend. The organization vowed to continue to fight any compromise on gun-control legislation in Congress.
"Revenge is what's motivating the president's unrelenting attacks on gun owners today," Porter told the group's meeting Saturday amid news that the NRA's membership had grown to a record 5 million.
"Millions of Americans are becoming first-time gun owners," Porter said. "The media calls it fear. That's not it. It's a sense of natural outrage that's been building for quite some time."
Porter, 64, a lawyer from Birmingham, Ala., who defends gun manufacturers, has been building that outrage his whole life. His father, Irvine C. Porter, was president of the NRA in 1959 — when the son says the NRA was "a glorified shooting society." At a breakfast Friday, Porter told grass-roots organizers that they are on the front line of a "culture war."
"He seems to come out of a mold that's much closer to the base than David Keene," said Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Whereas Keene was a "steady hand" for the NRA amid controversy, Porter is "a complete wild card," Horwitz said. "The world's changing around them, and they're hunkering down."
The weekend also featured speeches from politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — who challenged Vice President Biden to a debate on gun violence — and the NRA's crowd-pleasing executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre.
"We will never surrender our guns. Never," LaPierre said. "The media and the political elites can lie about us and demonize us all they want, but that won't stop us."
Observers said the tone of the convention wasn't surprising, given the debate over universal background checks in Congress, which the NRA has fought bitterly. "The rhetoric has been ramped up," said Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center. "They've doubled down on their absolutism."
As more than 70,000 people visited the weekend event — primarily for the gun trade exhibits on the floor of the Houston convention center — about 70 protesters held vigil across the street, reading the names of 3,863 victims of gun violence since the shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. The last name on the list: Carlos Serrano, 48, shot in a robbery while going to work Friday 6 miles from the convention.
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The NRA's no-compromise strategy
By: James Hohmann — Saturday, May 4th, 2013; 5:54 p.m. ‘Politico’ / Arlington, VA
HOUSTON — The National Rifle Association has become, more than ever, part and parcel of the Republican Party.
The officially nonpartisan group’s no-compromise strategy helped defeat the background check bill in the Senate last month and grow its membership ranks to 5 million.
But it has also repelled many old Democratic allies and raised the hackles of liberal activists, which will make it harder for moderates to work with the NRA in the future and pave the way for new gun control laws in blue states.
Fueling the shift is a Democratic Party that has become more liberal on guns. President Barack Obama, emboldened by his reelection, is less afraid to tackle the issue than a generation chastened by losing the House after the assault weapons ban in 1994. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending money against Democrats in primaries who oppose gun control. And the party has fewer members from southern states and rural districts.
The result is on display at this weekend’s NRA annual meeting here, where Democrats are glaringly absent from the roster of speakers.
It wasn’t always this way. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) received a standing ovation two years ago at the NRA convention in Pittsburgh. Former Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) attended in 2010. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) spoke in 2009.
This year, a host of potential 2016 Republican candidates pledged their fealty to the NRA. The keynote speaker at a Saturday night rally is Glenn Beck.
The trend began long before December’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Last cycle, the NRA spent $18.6 million on independent expenditures – $13.3 million against Democrats (including Obama) and $6.2 million for Republicans. Only $41,506 went to boosting friendly Democrats, according to a tally from the Center for Responsive Politics.
In the 2012 cycle, the NRA cut checks to 26 House Democrats – down from 63 in the 2010 cycle. Twenty years earlier, in 1992, the NRA gave money to 91 House Democrats.
One of the NRA’s 75 board members is former Democratic Rep. Dan Boren from Oklahoma. But the board slants strongly to the right, from musician Ted Nugent to anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho).
Several former Democratic allies of the NRA complained that the group has marginalized itself.
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was endorsed by the NRA in each of his six statewide runs for governor of Vermont, something he touted when he ran for president in 2004. As a kid, he won NRA medals for marksmanship. But he said the group lurched right in search of money and members, even as national Republicans realized after their losses last November that they need to work with Obama.
“The NRA has essentially decided, whether consciously or not, to vacuum up the detritus left from the tendency of the Republican leadership to move to the middle,” he said. “It almost sort of completes a journey for them from being a mainstream organization to sort of being the equivalent of the John Birch Society.”
Former Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello is one of the Democrats who received an NRA endorsement in 2010.
“They used to represent gun owners. Now they represent gun makers. They used to represent sportsmen. Now they represent survivalists,” said the former Virginia congressman, who lost that fall in the tea party tidal wave and is now president and CEO of the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) said the NRA has changed since he worked with them as governor of a red state. He said that they used to be more supportive of finding ways to keep guns from the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.
“It’s just too bad the goal posts have been moved so far,” he said. “Their position is now in the end zone, not at the 40-yard line.”
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre rejects the notion that his group has taken a turn to the extreme. On Saturday, he described the NRA as “the middle of the river of America’s mainstream” and “at the heart of America’s heartland.”
The NRA is viewed favorably by a 34 percent plurality of Americans, down from 38 percent in January, according to a CBS/New York Times poll released Wednesday. Only 26 percent view the group unfavorably. The rest are undecided or don’t know enough to answer.
LaPierre pledged to continue supporting Democrats who support the group’s positions.
“To those senators and congressmen who have stood with the Second Amendment, we say thank you and ask you to keep defending our rights,” he told thousands of activists. “Let there be no doubt we stand firmly with you.”
There has been significant backlash from liberals against the four Democratic senators who opposed the background check measure last month, even though three are up for reelection next year in states carried by Mitt Romney. “Heidi Heitkamp betrayed me on gun control” was the headline of a Washington Post op-ed by former White House chief of staff Bill Daley.
Multiple NRA leaders blamed Obama for making the Democratic Party hostile to gun owners.
“He’s now threatening Democratic senators who are friends of NRA,” said incoming NRA President Jim Porter. “He will destroy them if he can. We must support friends who support our cause.”
There is an increasingly prevalent feeling among Democrats that the NRA doesn’t speak for the majority of gun owners on issues like background checks.
Bloomberg has promised to keep using his fortune to aggressively target Democrats in primaries with high ratings from the NRA. His super PAC spent $2.2 million to defeat former Rep. Debbie Halvorson this February in the Democratic primary to fill Jesse Jackson Jr.’s seat. She had earned an “A” rating from the NRA.
The objective is to make it toxic for any Democrat with national ambitions to cozy up to the NRA. A Democratic operative who has worked for a pro-gun member said a wedge must be driven between the NRA’s leadership and its members.
“The NRA leadership is radicalized and out-of-touch, but Democrats don’t want to alienate the rank-and-file,” said the operative. “Appearing to embrace the NRA leadership with gun politics changing is a mistake that no Democrat wants to make.”
Surveys released this week by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, showed that two red-state Senate Democrats who supported the Manchin-Toomey bill have benefitted from it. In Louisiana, 72 percent of voters say they favor background checks and 45 percent said they’re now more likely to support Landrieu for reelection next year because she voted for them. In North Carolina, 52 percent said they’re more inclined to reelect Sen. Kay Hagan next year because she voted for background checks.
Citing these polls, Perriello guessed that the NRA will have a harder time working with Democrats in the future.
“Right now it looks like they won the battle but lost the war,” he said. “Ironically I think it will end up hurting Second Amendment rights over time.”
A watershed moment in the relationship between Democratic politicians and the NRA came when the group announced last year that they would “score” the vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his handling of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal in deciding whether to offer support.
The vote was seen as a purely political maneuver, and many Democrats felt that it would look craven and disrespect their president to go along. So NRA stalwarts defied them, including Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). The dean of the House was once a member of the NRA board of directors, but he resigned to vote for the 1994 assault-weapons ban. This January he co-wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for consideration of new gun control.
Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid almost received the NRA endorsement in 2010. He once took money from the group and has been called “a true champion of the Second Amendment” by LaPierre. But he became plainly exasperated with its maneuvering the last few months.
Third Way’s Matt Bennett, who has made a career of advising centrist Democrats, said it is one thing to not vote for sensible steps to reduce gun violence but it is another to be seen as a shill for the NRA.
“The reaction to Sandy Hook struck people as not strategic and principled but totally unhinged, and at that moment there was a view on the Hill that the NRA had lost their bearings entirely,” he said. “The NRA brand has become so toxic and so polarized that, while it is popular with a very tiny segment of the electorate, it is absolutely poisonous, it is kryptonite, for another segment of the electorate.”
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California
Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’ Editorial:
Real Gun Control From Sacramento
A continent removed from Washington’s shameful resistance to new gun controls, California has just enacted a law that will speed up the confiscation of firearms from an estimated 20,000 people who bought them legally but were later disqualified because of a conviction for a violent crime, a finding of mental illness or a restraining order for domestic violence. The law, signed Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown after passage by the Democrat-controlled Legislature, is a sign that enlightened lawmaking unhindered by gun lobby scare tactics and Capitol Hill filibustering is possible in American politics.
The law allocates $24 million to hire 36 state agents specifically assigned to confiscating, over the next three years, an estimated 39,000 handguns and 1,670 assault weapons now in the hands of potentially dangerous Californians. A confiscation law has been on the books in Sacramento for six years, but enforcement has languished because of budget shortages, with the list of disqualified gun owners growing at the rate of 15 to 20 a day. The allocation of revenue required a two-thirds vote of approval, which the Legislature’s supermajority of Democrats delivered.
The gun lobby was smart enough not to oppose a law to take guns from convicted criminals and the mentally ill. It did, however, unsuccessfully challenge the financing mechanism, which will tap gun owners’ registration fees to pay for the program. In another burst of common sense, pro-gun Republicans were rebuffed in their simplistic proposal to authorize the arming of schoolteachers as a response to the shooting rampage in Connecticut in December that killed 20 children and six school staff members.
Instead, the Democrats on the Senate Public Safety Committee used 5-to-2 party-line votes to advance a series of proposals to strengthen the state’s already respectable gun controls, including a requirement for background checks and licenses for ammunition buyers, and a proposal that would deny gun ownership to people who abuse alcohol and drugs. Final enactment of these proposals would be a further sign of California’s leadership on gun safety measures that most of the nation can only envy.
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Immigration Enforcement / Illegal Aliens
ICE agents’ lawsuit on deportation deferrals awaits judge’s ruling
By Jerry Seper — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The Washington Times’ / Washington, DC
A federal judge in Texas is expected to hear final arguments this week in a lawsuit brought by rank-and-file U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for an injunction to block President Obama’s deferred-deportation initiative for illegal immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, who questioned the deportation order in a preliminary ruling, put off a decision in the matter on April 24, giving the ICE agents who brought the lawsuit against the Obama administration and lawyers for the government no later than Monday to file additional arguments.
“The court finds that [the Department of Homeland Security] does not have discretion to refuse to initiate removals proceedings” when the requirements for deportation under a federal statute are met, the judge wrote in a 38-page opinion. But he said he could not make a final ruling based on the arguments he already had heard and ordered lawyers on both sides to submit additional arguments.
Ten ICE agents, including Christopher L. Crane, a deportation agent in the agency’s Salt Lake City field office who also serves as president of the ICE Agents and Officers Union, are seeking an injunction to overturn Mr. Obama’s nondeportation policy.
They said the policy forces them to choose between enforcing the law and being reprimanded by superiors, or listening to their superiors and violating their own oaths of office.
The agents said Congress sought in 1996 to significantly reduce executive discretion in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, saying in a House resolution that “immigration law enforcement is as high a priority as other aspects of federal law enforcement, and illegal aliens do not have the right to remain in the United States undetected and unapprehended.”
The lawsuit specifically challenges a directive issued by Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano and ICE Director John Morton ordering the exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” in the deportation of illegal immigrants. The lawsuit said the Obama administration lacked the legal authority to arbitrarily halt deportations. It said the June 2012 directive instructs ICE agents to refrain from placing certain aliens now unlawfully in the United States into removal proceedings, and to take action to facilitate the granting of deferred deportation to those unlawfully in this country.
According to the lawsuit, the requirements illegal immigrants must meet to avoid deportation are that they came to the U.S. before turning 16; that they have continuously lived in this country for a least five years; that they are currently in school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a General Education Development certificate or have been honorably discharged from the U.S. military; that they have not have been convicted of a felony or pose a threat to national security or public safety; and that are not older than 30.
The lawsuit said the directive “commands ICE officers to violate federal law to violate their oaths to uphold and support federal law unconstitutionally usurps and encroaches upon the legislative powers of Congress and violates the obligation of the executive branch to faithfully execute the law,” as required by the Constitution.
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Homeland Security
A Homemade Style of Terror
By SCOTT SHANE — Monday, May 6th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
WASHINGTON — Aware that intensified American counterterrorism efforts have made an ambitious Sept. 11-style plot a long shot, Al Qaeda propagandists for several years have called on their devotees in the United States to carry out smaller-scale solo attacks and provided the online education to teach them how.
“I strongly recommend all of the brothers and sisters coming from the West to consider attacking America in its own backyard,” wrote Samir Khan, an American who joined Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch and emerged as a fervent advocate of homegrown, do-it-yourself terrorism before he was killed in an American drone strike in September 2011.
“The effect is much greater, it always embarrasses the enemy, and these types of individual decision-making attacks are nearly impossible for them to contain,” Mr. Khan wrote in a Web publication.
The Boston Marathon bombing — which the authorities believe was carried out according to instructions that Mr. Khan posted online — offers an unsettling example of just how devastating such an attack can be, even when the death toll is low. It shows how plotters can construct powerful bombs without attracting official attention. It offers a case study in the complex mix of personality and ideology at work in extremist violence. And it raises a pressing question: Is there any way to detect such plotters before they can act?
The bombing killed three people, compared with 3,000 in the 2001 attacks. But it achieved the spectacular media impact that terrorists covet, marring an American institution with television footage of gruesome injuries and panicked crowds. Officials are worried about its copycat appeal.
The Boston case remains under investigation, and some facts set it apart from other domestic plots. F.B.I. agents are still studying whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who investigators believe carried out the attack with his younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, received any training during a six-month visit last year to turbulent Dagestan in southern Russia. Intelligence agencies are reviewing whether two Russian warnings about the older brother in 2011 were handled properly.
At a news conference on Tuesday, President Obama suggested that the bombers had acted on their own, saying that “one of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States.” Mr. Obama said such plots “are in some ways more difficult to prevent.”
So far, the Tsarnaev brothers appear to have been radicalized and instructed in explosives not at a training camp but at home on the Internet. Their bombs were concocted from inexpensive everyday items whose purchase set off no alarms: pressure cookers, nails and ball bearings, gunpowder from fireworks and remote controls for toys. Their choice of an open-air event meant no gate, metal detector or security inspection to pass through with their bombs.
In other words, as Dzhokhar told investigators, they followed the script from Inspire magazine, which Mr. Khan published in Yemen along with his mentor, the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in the same drone strike on Sept. 30, 2011. Mr. Awlaki’s incendiary sermons and Mr. Khan’s training articles survived them on the Web, where the brothers found them.
Just a month before the Boston attack, the Qaeda branch in Yemen posted on the Web the “Lone Mujahid Pocketbook,” a compilation of all the do-it-yourself articles with jaunty English text, high-quality graphics and teen-friendly shorthand.
“R U dreamin’ of wagin’ jihadi attacks against kuffar?” the 64-page manual asks, using a pejorative term for unbeliever. “Have u been lookin’ 4 a way to join the mujahideen in frontlines, but you haven’t found any? Well, there’s no need to travel abroad, because the frontline has come to you.”
Some of the manual’s ideas seem harebrained — spilling oil on the road to cause car wrecks or welding blades to a pickup truck and driving into a crowd. But specialists say its bomb-making instructions are quite accurate. The Boston attack seems to have followed Inspire’s tips: gunpowder emptied from fireworks, shrapnel glued inside the pressure cooker, a commercial remote control as detonator.
“The pressurized cooker should be placed in crowded areas and left to blow up,” the manual says. “More than one of these could be planted to explode at the same time.”
Philip Mudd, a former top C.I.A. and F.B.I. counterterrorism official, said the news from Boston came as no shock to those who reviewed the daily compilation of intelligence reports on terrorism. “Like everyone who looked at the threat matrix every day, I was surprised that this didn’t happen sooner,” he said.
He said he was struck by the lack of sophistication of the brothers, who made no attempt to hide or disguise their faces.
“They’re angry kids with a veneer of ideology that’s about skin-deep,” Mr. Mudd said. He said the brothers might have as much in common with self-radicalized terrorists of completely different ideologies — say, white supremacism or antigovernment extremism — as with the committed Qaeda operatives who organized the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the reports on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dr. Ronald Schouten, a Harvard psychiatrist who studies terrorism, sees what might be a classic portrait of a man vulnerable to extremist recruitment. He had failed at his dream of becoming an Olympic boxer and dropped out of college, disappointing his family and himself.
“People who fail,” Dr. Schouten said, “sometimes latch onto a cause that makes their anger legitimate.”
In recent years, Qaeda propagandists have “made a particular effort to recruit lonely people who are looking for a cause,” said Jerrold Post, a former C.I.A. psychiatrist now at George Washington University and the author of “The Mind of the Terrorist.”
He points to, among others, Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of shooting 13 people to death at Fort Hood, Tex., in 2009. Major Hasan was held up as an example for others in a two-part video released by Al Qaeda’s core group in Pakistan in June 2011 titled “You Are Only Responsible for Yourself,” urging Muslims in the West to stage attacks without waiting for orders from abroad.
There is no consensus on how best to detect such homegrown attacks. Some law enforcement officials say that the Boston case vindicates their aggressive strategy of dispatching informants posing as Qaeda operatives to meet young men who are flirting with violent jihad. Such sting operations often end when the aspiring terrorist attempts to detonate an ersatz bomb provided by the F.B.I.
But some Muslim activists say that identifying potentially violent people requires close, trusting relations between law enforcement and the Muslim community, which are undermined when informants invade the mosque and draw impressionable young men into talk of terrorism.
Had such trust prevailed in Boston, they say, perhaps Tamerlan Tsarnaev would have gotten more attention after two outbursts at a Boston mosque, where he denounced clerics’ references to Thanksgiving and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as contrary to Islam. The outburst, they say, might have led community leaders to go to the police.
John D. Cohen, a top counterterrorism adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, said the department was studying the common elements in the psychological profiles and behavior of people planning an attack — whatever their ideology or motivation. Working with religious and community groups and local law enforcement, officials want to identify signs of impending trouble and find ways to intervene.
But Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now at the A.C.L.U., said the problem with focusing on extremist views was that the vast majority of people who express them never turn to violence. Instead, the bureau should focus on illegal acts, he said.
In the 2011 Russian warning about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Mr. German said, the key point was not that he had embraced radical Islam but that he planned to travel to Russia to join underground groups — potentially an illegal act of support for a terrorist organization. But while a Customs official got word of Mr. Tsarnaev’s plan to fly to Russia, no follow-up took place.
Finally, some specialists wonder whether it might have been possible to detect the brothers’ bomb building. In 2011, Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo of the Army set out to build the pressure-cooker bombs described in Inspire magazine. He was arrested because of a blunder: He tried to buy explosive powder at the same gun shop near Fort Hood that Major Hasan had patronized in 2009. A clerk got suspicious.
The Tsarnaevs, by contrast, collected their powder from fireworks, including some bought at a Phantom Fireworks outlet in New Hampshire. William Weimer, Phantom’s vice president, said the episode had prompted his company to seek training for sales personnel from the New York Police Department.
“Obviously the industry is abuzz about this,” Mr. Weimer said. But he said there was nothing about Mr. Tsarnaev that flagged him as dangerous.
“He came in and asked, ‘What’s the most powerful thing you have?’ ” Mr. Weimer said. “That might sound suspicious. But 90 percent of the men, especially, who come in say, ‘What’s the loudest thing you sell? What’s the most powerful?’ ”
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Mike Bosak
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