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From the Los Angeles Times

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For Boy Scouts, trails can lead to danger

In the last five years, 32 Scouts and Scout leaders have died in various outdoor activities. Adult leaders, often inexperienced, can miscalculate risks and difficulties.

By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times

December 5, 2010

The Yosemite Falls Trail leads dramatically to the top of North America's highest waterfall. Park rangers and veteran hikers know it as strenuous and a potentially dangerous hike in the winter.

Its steep switchbacks rising 2,700 vertical feet were a big challenge for Luis Alberto Ramirez Jr., a 12-year-old from Modesto who had joined the Boy Scouts months earlier and was on his first big outing with his troop.

Until that day, Feb. 16, 2008, Luis had never set foot in the mountains.

The 11 boys and four adults started at 8:30 a.m. Just one mile from the trail head, most of the troop was already exhausted and decided to turn back.

The scoutmaster pressed ahead with five boys, including Luis. Three hours later the troop was waist-deep in snow. The boys were cold and their feet soaked. Luis was tired, his seventh-grade hiking partner said later.

The group turned back, and soon spread out along the trail, leaving some boys on their own. They began taking dangerous shortcuts between switchbacks. After stepping off the trail, Luis lost his footing and slid out of control over an edge. He plunged 300 feet to his death.

The account of the accident comes from a park investigation, which took statements from the scoutmaster and the other boys.

"They told me they were going to the forest," Marta Anguiano, Luis' mother, recalled in an interview.

"They never told me what they were doing was dangerous," said Anguiano, a field laborer in Modesto.

In an examination of law enforcement reports, lawsuits and news accounts, The Times identified 32 Scouts and Scout leaders who have died in the last five years in various outdoor activities. Investigations by rangers and sheriffs have documented deaths resulting from heatstroke, falls, lightning, drowning, electrocution and burns, among other causes.

In many cases, adult leaders appear to have miscalculated the abilities of individual boys to handle the risks and difficulties of outdoor activities, and failed to follow Scout rules and recommendations on adult supervision, safety equipment and trip planning.

Andrea Lankford, who was a district ranger in Yosemite in the mid-1990s and has worked at national parks across the country, said many adult Scout leaders "are not that physically fit themselves. They are not that knowledgeable. They are complacent. They are naive about the hazards. They bite off more than they can chew. As rangers, we would be extremely concerned. I have seen it time and time again with a gamut of consequences."

The Boy Scouts of America, the parent organization based in Irving, Texas, would not release its own records of the incidents, say how many fatal accidents it knows about or discuss the causes of specific accidents. But the group defended its general practices, saying safety is emphasized. After a rash of deaths in 2005, the Boy Scouts ratcheted up its safety program, including hiring a new safety director and imposing new fitness guidelines.

In the five years prior to 2005, The Times identified 16 fatalities in outdoor Scouting activity, based on news accounts and public records. Boy Scout spokesman Deron Smith said "the overall number of incidents has not increased and does not reflect a trend."

"Thousands of Scouts across the United States safely explore the outdoors every day," Smith said in a statement. "There are just too many variables to be able to predict how an accident might occur."

Paul Moore, the Scouting executive for the Los Angeles Boy Scouts council, said he believed the fatality rate during organized activities for the 1 million boys in Scouting is below the national average for boys going about their daily lives. But Moore also acknowledged that parents have an expectation that the organization knows what it is doing, and that fatal accidents are unacceptable.

No agency tracks outdoor deaths in all the state and federal mountains, forests, lakes and rivers, let alone the fatality rate for Boy Scouts compared with other visitors. The U.S. Interior Department reported 151 fatal accidents in national parks in 2008, including 49 boating and swimming deaths and 33 hiking deaths. There were about 275 million visitors to the parks that year.

Since its founding 100 years ago, the Boy Scouts of America has introduced millions of boys to the wilderness, giving them a unique opportunity to learn outdoor skills. In the process, the organization has promoted an agenda of honesty and good civic conduct. Currently, there are 1 million Boy Scouts, led by thousands of volunteer scoutmasters and assistants.

What concerns outdoor experts is the experience level of many of those volunteers. Local Scout leaders said the only requirement set by the national office for escorting a day hike, for example, is that volunteers take the youth protection program to prevent sexual abuse, and that they file proper tour permits, health forms and other documents.

"I wonder if these adults are qualified, if they are prepared," said Matt Sharper, the statewide search and rescue coordinator for the California Emergency Services Management Agency. "If you don't have the skills, you have a recipe for disaster. Your group is only as strong as your weakest member. You should never let the group separate. You should have a leader at the front and a leader at the back."

The national organization has issued ironclad orders in some cases, such as a ban on paintball play and extensive rules on water safety. But the organization's manual "The Guide to Safe Scouting" contains many nonbinding recommendations that give local councils wide discretion on safety issues. Adding even more rigid rules would increase bureaucracy and make activities even harder to organize, some parents say.

Some councils take the initiative to increase safety. In Orange County, Boy Scouts executive Jeffrie A. Hermann said his organization would "hound volunteers" until they took a number of optional courses that help prepare them to lead hiking and other outdoor activities. He credits Orange County's training program for a safety record untouched by a fatal accident for many years. In other cases, individual troops have created strict rules on physical fitness, equipment and training that exceed national guidelines.

Under Boy Scout rules, two adults are supposed to be present with boys. In the accident involving Luis Ramirez, Yosemite National Park investigators found the scoutmaster was alone in leading the five boys, including his own son, after the other parents turned back. The scoutmaster, who has been involved in Scouting for 36 years, said later that he did not regard the hike as risky or inappropriate for a beginning hiker, noting that he had taken his family on it in the past.

Lankford said even rangers would turn around before getting into waist-deep snow, unless they were carrying snowshoes.

The Scouting safety manual warns leaders to "conservatively" estimate the stamina of a hiking group and match outings to "fitness of unit members." Exhaustion can demoralize hikers and be the first step to a tragic consequence, rescue experts say.

Corey Buxton, a 17-year-old Scout from Las Vegas, disappeared while backpacking last July at Zion National Park. Corey was having a tough time and told an adult leader to leave him alone, according to a National Park Service incident report. The leader hiked 100 yards ahead, the report said; when he turned around, Corey was gone. His body was recovered a day later in thick brush about 225 feet from the trail. His death was blamed on hyperthermia, or unusually high body temperature.

Such mishaps frequently trigger costly public safety responses.

One of the biggest search-and-rescue operations in Southern California history occurred in 1991, when Boy Scout Jared Negrete, 12, became separated at the back of his troop on the strenuous Mt. San Gorgonio trail in the San Bernardino Mountains. Negrete's body was never found after a search that included 2,000 people and went on for 16 days. Forty-four people suffered injuries in the search.

News of the tragedy led Mike Leum to seek a career in mountain rescue, and today he is the reserve chief for mountain rescue at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, where he preaches outdoor safety to Boy Scout troops. A search and rescue is conducted for lost Scouts at least once a year in the Angeles National Forest, Leum said. The Riverside County Sheriff's Department rescues lost Scouts two or three times each year, officials said.

"Just because you are in Scouting or are a Scout leader doesn't mean you know what you are doing," said Leum, a former Boy Scout. "If somebody calls themselves a leader, I hold them to a high standard."

Some parents think the organization should not depend on local councils and troops to comply with voluntary national safety recommendations.

One such recommendation is that Scouts wear helmets while sledding. But earlier this year on an outing with his troop, Ian Joshua Miller, 12, was allowed to slide down a Pennsylvania ski slope on a plastic dish without a helmet, recalled his father, Ron Miller. Ian flew backward head-first into a ski lift tower and was killed.

Miller is not suing the Scouts, but recently met with Richard Bourlon, a senior safety advisor at the Boy Scouts, to urge that the organization require helmets and ban nonsteerable sleds, such as plastic saucers. In an interview, Bourlon declined to discuss individual accidents but said the organization was always working to improve safety.

The federal government is active with Scouting groups, advising them on outdoor safety.

While the Boy Scout training program is good, it is no substitute for years and decades of experience by adult leaders, said Dean Ross, deputy chief for emergency operations at the National Park Service.

"Training doesn't develop competency," Ross said. "I am not saying they are incompetent, but to reach a level of competency requires not only training but experience."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scouts-20101205,0,7018329,print.story

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Man at center of Ronni Chasen investigation had long criminal record

The man who killed himself when Beverly Hills detectives investigating the Ronni Chasen case confronted him on Wednesday has a long criminal record, according to court documents.

Harold Martin Smith, 43, had been arrested seven times for crimes ranging from misdemeanor drug possession to felony robbery. The records suggest that 13 years ago Smith had some animus toward police. A note in the minutes of a 1997 proceeding stemming from an arrest for misdemeanor disturbing the peace and possession of drug paraphernalia reads: "Public safety hold. Threaten to kill police officer."

Smith's most serious crime, according to the records, was a 1998 robbery in Beverly Hills in which he was accused of stealing a Sony Walkman and other items from two women. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 11 years in state prison. He was released in 2007. In August 2009, Manhattan Beach police found him loitering outside a woman's home and charged him with misdemeanor prowling and marijuana possession.

He was sentenced to three years' probation and a month in County Jail, but in September, after he failed to pay a $100 court fine, a judge in the Torrance courthouse revoked his probation and issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

Parole records obtained by The Times indicate that Smith had worked for a short time as a laborer after his release from prison but was unemployed earlier this year. He had recently been evicted from the Harvey Apartments. However, he spoke about an upcoming $10,000 windfall, one neighbor recalled.

Chasen was shot to death in her Mercedes-Benz on Nov. 16 as she drove home from a premiere party for the movie "Burlesque." Investigators initially described the case as wide open. They have served multiple search warrants in the case but have refused to discuss the status of their investigation.

On Friday the Beverly Hills Police Department, whose officers were seeking to question Smith when he shot himself, said it was possible there was no connection at all.

"At this time, it is unknown if this individual was involved in the Chasen homicide," department spokesman Lt. Tony Lee said in a statement.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/12/man-at-center-of-ronni-chasen-investigation-had-long-criminal-record.html

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Knocking down the kingpins

Recent high-profile arrests of drug cartel leaders in Mexico give reason for optimism. But drugs continue to flow across the border into the U.S.

December 5, 2010

Mexico's law enforcement agencies have been on a roll, rounding up formerly invincible leaders of vicious drug cartels in a series of high-profile arrests. In August, federal police arrested U.S.-born kingpin Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as "La Barbie," who headed a gang battling for control of a drug cartel in a region south of Mexico City. Late last month, the police also arrested Valdez' successor, who happened to be his father-in-law. Then, in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, they captured Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, the leader of the Aztecas, a gang of thugs and assassins affiliated with the Juarez cartel.

Gallegos, according to the police, confessed to taking part in 80% of the city's 6,500 drug-related homicides, as well as atrocities that included the massacre of 15 teenagers at a party in July and the fatal shooting in March of U.S. consular staffer Lesley A. Enriquez, her husband and another man. Each arrest weakens the culture of impunity, and authorities say they hope Gallegos' capture will cripple the Aztecas and return some measure of calm to Ciudad Juarez, now one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in President Felipe Calderon's drug war.

The arrests are certainly a positive development, and could lead to a reduction of violence. But fluctuations in the homicide rate alone are not a reliable metric for progress. When violence rises, the Calderon administration attributes the increase to its unprecedented challenge to drug traffickers. When it falls, the administration attributes the reduction to stepped-up law enforcement efforts.

If the long-term goal is to halt the movement of narcotics from Mexico to the United States, then a better measure of progress is just that: the drug flow. So far, four years and 30,000 deaths after Calderon began cracking down on the cartels, Mexico still supplies most of the foreign marijuana distributed in the U.S., much of the methamphetamine and a substantial percentage of heroin. Also, the State Department estimates that 90% of the cocaine entering the country passes through Mexico. The cartels' wholesale drug earnings range from $13.6 billion to $48.4 billion annually.

That's not to say the recent captures haven't helped Mexican and U.S. authorities gain information about the cartels' trafficking, money-laundering and other illicit operations, as well as the whereabouts of other kingpins. And to be fair, four years may not be enough time to uproot decades of entrenched corruption and violence.

Is Gallegos' arrest a turning point? Possibly. The Aztecas gang has been an obstacle to peace, analysts say, battling for control with the powerful Sinaloa cartel. So, with its head cut off, the group could fall to police efforts, or it could become amenable to negotiating a peace — with the Sinaloa cartel. Either way, it's likely that drugs will continue to flow across the border.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mexico-20101205,0,7920860,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Mounting State Debts Stoke Fears of a Looming Crisis

The State of Illinois is still paying off billions in bills that it got from schools and social service providers last year. Arizona recently stopped paying for certain organ transplants for people in its Medicaid program. States are releasing prisoners early, more to cut expenses than to reward good behavior. And in Newark, the city laid off 13 percent of its police officers last week.

While next year could be even worse, there are bigger, longer-term risks, financial analysts say. Their fear is that even when the economy recovers, the shortfalls will not disappear, because many state and local governments have so much debt — several trillion dollars' worth, with much of it off the books and largely hidden from view — that it could overwhelm them in the next few years.

“It seems to me that crying wolf is probably a good thing to do at this point,” said Felix Rohatyn, the financier who helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s.

Some of the same people who warned of the looming subprime crisis two years ago are ringing alarm bells again. Their message: Not just small towns or dying Rust Belt cities, but also large states like Illinois and California are increasingly at risk.

Municipal bankruptcies or defaults have been extremely rare — no state has defaulted since the Great Depression, and only a handful of cities have declared bankruptcy or are considering doing so.

But the finances of some state and local governments are so distressed that some analysts say they are reminded of the run-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown or of the debt crisis hitting nations in Europe.

Analysts fear that at some point — no one knows when — investors could balk at lending to the weakest states, setting off a crisis that could spread to the stronger ones, much as the turmoil in Europe has spread from country to country.

Mr. Rohatyn warned that while municipal bankruptcies were rare, they appeared increasingly possible. And the imbalances are so large in some places that the federal government will probably have to step in at some point, he said, even if that seems unlikely in the current political climate.

“I don't like to play the scared rabbit, but I just don't see where the end of this is,” he added.

Resorting to Fiscal Tricks

As the downturn has ground on, some of the worst-hit cities and states have resorted to fiscal sleight of hand to stay afloat, helping them close yawning budget gaps each year, but often at great future cost.

Few workers with neglected 401(k) retirement accounts would risk taking out second mortgages to invest in stocks, gambling that the investment gains would be enough to build bigger nest eggs and repay the loans.

But that is just what Illinois, which has been failing to make the required annual payments to its pension funds for years, is doing. It borrowed $10 billion in 2003 and used the money to invest in its pension funds. The recession sent their investment returns below their target, but the state must repay the bonds, with interest. The solution? Illinois sold an additional $3.5 billion worth of pension bonds this year and is planning to borrow $3.7 billion more for its pension funds.

It is the long-term problems of a handful of states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, that financial analysts worry about most, fearing that their problems might precipitate a crisis that could hurt other states by driving up their borrowing costs.

But it is the short-term budget woes that nearly all states are facing that are preoccupying elected officials.

Illinois is not the only state behind on its bills. Many states, including New York, have delayed payments to vendors and local governments because they had too little cash on hand to make them. California paid vendors with i.o.u.'s last year. A handful of other states, worried about their cash flow, delayed paying tax refunds last spring.

Now, just as the downturn has driven up demand for state assistance, many states are cutting back.

The demand for food stamps has been rising significantly in Idaho, but tight budgets led the state to close nearly a third of the field offices of the state's Department of Health and Welfare, which take applications for them. As states have cut aid to cities, many have resorted to previously unthinkable cuts, laying off police officers and closing firehouses.

Those cuts in aid to cities and counties, which are expected to continue, are one reason some analysts say cities are at greater risk of bankruptcy or are being placed under outside oversight.

Next year is unlikely to bring better news. States and cities typically face their biggest deficits after recessions officially end, as rainy-day funds are depleted and easy measures are exhausted.

This time is expected to be no different. The federal stimulus money increased the federal share of state budgets to over a third last year, from just over a quarter in 2008, according to a report issued last week by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. That money is set to run out next summer. Tax collections, meanwhile, are not expected to return to their pre-recession levels for another year or two, given that the housing market and broader economy remain weak and that unemployment remains high.

Scott D. Pattison, the budget association's director, said that for states, next year could be “the worst year of this four- or five-year downturn period.”

And few expect the federal government to offer more direct aid to states, at least in the short term. Many members of the new Republican majority in the House campaigned against the stimulus, and Washington is debating the recommendations of a debt-reduction commission.

So some states are essentially borrowing to pay their operating costs, adding new debts that are not always clearly disclosed.

Arizona, hobbled by the bursting housing bubble, turned to a real estate deal for relief, essentially selling off several state buildings — including the tower where the governor has her office — for a $735 million upfront payment. But leasing back the buildings over the next 20 years will ultimately cost taxpayers an extra $400 million in interest.

Many governments are delaying payments to their pension funds, which will eventually need to be made, along with the high interest — usually around 8 percent — that the funds are expected to earn each year.

New York balanced its budget this year by shortchanging its pension fund. And in New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie deferred paying the $3.1 billion that was due to the pension funds this year.

It is these growing hidden debts that make many analysts nervous. States and municipalities currently have around $2.8 trillion worth of outstanding bonds, but that number is dwarfed by the debts that many are carrying off their books.

State and local pensions — another form of promised debt, guaranteed in some states by their constitutions — face hidden shortfalls of as much as $3.5 trillion by some calculations. And the health benefits that state and large local governments have promised their retirees going forward could cost more than $530 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Most financial crises happen in unpredictable ways, and they hit you when you're not looking,” said Jerome H. Powell, a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center who was an under secretary of the Treasury for finance during the bailout of the savings and loan industry in the early 1990s. “This one isn't like that. You can see it coming. It would be sinful not to do something about this while there's a chance.”

So far, investors have bought states' bonds eagerly, on the widespread understanding that states and cities almost never default. But in recent weeks the demand has diminished sharply. Last month, mutual funds that invest in municipal bonds reported a big sell-off — a bigger one-week sell-off, in fact, than they had when the financial markets melted down in 2008. And hedge funds are already seeking out ways to place bets against the debts of some states, with the help of their investment banks.

Of course, not all states are in as dire straits as Illinois or California. And the credit-rating agencies say that the risk of default is small. States and cities typically make a priority of repaying their bond holders, even before paying for essential services. Standard & Poor's issued a report this month saying that the crises that states and municipalities were facing were “more about tough decisions than potential defaults.”

Change in Ratings

The credit ratings of a number of local governments have improved this year, not because their finances have strengthened somewhat, but because the ratings agencies have changed the way they analyze governments.

The new higher ratings, which lower the cost of borrowing, emphasize the fact that municipal defaults have been much rarer than corporate defaults.

This October, Moody's issued a report explaining why it now rates all 50 states, even Illinois, as better credit risks than a vast majority of American non-financial companies.

One reason: the belief that the federal government is more likely to bail out a teetering state than a bankrupt company.

“The federal government has broadly channeled cash to all state governments during recent recessions and provided support to individual states following natural disasters,” Moody's explained, adding that there was no way of being sure how Washington would respond to a bond default by a state, since it had not happened since the 1930s.

But some analysts fear the ratings are too sanguine, recalling that the ratings agencies also dismissed the possibility that a subprime crisis was brewing. While most agree that defaults are unlikely, they fear that as states struggle with their growing debts, investors could decide not to buy the debt of the weakest state or local governments.

That would force a crisis, since states cannot operate if they cannot borrow. Such a crisis could then spread to healthier states, making it more expensive for them to borrow, if Europe is an example.

Meredith Whitney, a bank analyst who was among the first to warn of the impact the subprime mortgage meltdown would have on banks, is warning that she sees similar problems with state and local government finances.

“The state situation reminded me so much of the banks, pre-crisis,” she said this fall on CNBC.

There are eerie similarities between the subprime debt crisis and the looming municipal debt woes. Among them:

Now states are bracing for more painful cuts, more layoffs, more tax increases, more battles with public employee unions, more requests to bail out cities. And in the long term, as cities and states try to keep up on their debts, the very nature of government could change as they have less money left over to pay for the services they have long provided.

Richard Ravitch, the lieutenant governor of New York, is among those warning that states are on an unsustainable path, and that their disclosures of pension and health care obligations are often misleading. And he worries how long it can last.

“They didn't do it with bad motives,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of them didn't understand what they were doing. They did it because it was easier than taxing people or cutting benefits. We're getting closer and closer to the point where we can't do that anymore. I don't know where that is, but I know we're close.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/politics/05states.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch-Up

Ninth grade was supposed to be a fresh start for Marie's son: new school, new children. Yet by last October, he had become withdrawn. Marie prodded. And prodded again. Finally, he told her.

“The kids say I'm saying all these nasty things about them on Facebook,” he said. “They don't believe me when I tell them I'm not on Facebook.”

But apparently, he was.

Marie, a medical technologist and single mother who lives in Newburyport, Mass., searched Facebook. There she found what seemed to be her son's page: his name, a photo of him grinning while running — and, on his public wall, sneering comments about teenagers he scarcely knew.

Someone had forged his identity online and was bullying others in his name.

Students began to shun him. Furious and frightened, Marie contacted school officials. After expressing their concern, they told her they could do nothing. It was an off-campus matter.

But Marie was determined to find out who was making her son miserable and to get them to stop. In choosing that course, she would become a target herself. When she and her son learned who was behind the scheme, they would both feel the sharp sting of betrayal. Undeterred, she would insist that the culprits be punished.

It is difficult enough to support one's child through a siege of schoolyard bullying. But the lawlessness of the Internet, its potential for casual, breathtaking cruelty, and its capacity to cloak a bully's identity all present slippery new challenges to this transitional generation of analog parents.

Desperate to protect their children, parents are floundering even as they scramble to catch up with the technological sophistication of the next generation.

Like Marie, many parents turn to schools, only to be rebuffed because officials think they do not have the authority to intercede. Others may call the police, who set high bars to investigate. Contacting Web site administrators or Internet service providers can be a daunting, protracted process.

When parents know the aggressor, some may contact that child's parent, stumbling through an evolving etiquette in the landscape of social awkwardness. Going forward, they struggle with when and how to supervise their adolescents' forays on the Internet.

Marie, who asked that her middle name and her own nickname for her son, D.C., be used to protect his identity, finally went to the police. The force's cybercrimes specialist, Inspector Brian Brunault, asked if she really wanted to pursue the matter.

“He said that once it was in the court system,” Marie said, “they would have to prosecute. It could probably be someone we knew, like a friend of D.C.'s or a neighbor. Was I prepared for that?”

Marie's son urged her not to go ahead. But Marie was adamant. “I said yes.”

Parental Fears

One afternoon last spring, Parry Aftab, a lawyer and expert on cyberbullying, addressed seventh graders at George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J.

“How many of you have ever been cyberbullied?” she asked.

The hands crept up, first a scattering, then a thicket. Of 150 students, 68 raised their hands. They came forward to offer rough tales from social networking sites, instant messaging and texting. Ms. Aftab stopped them at the 20th example.

Then she asked: How many of your parents know how to help you?

A scant three or four hands went up.

Cyberbullying is often legally defined as repeated harassment online, although in popular use, it can describe even a sharp-elbowed, gratuitous swipe. Cyberbullies themselves resist easy categorization: the anonymity of the Internet gives cover not only to schoolyard-bully types but to victims themselves, who feel they can retaliate without getting caught.

But online bullying can be more psychologically savage than schoolyard bullying. The Internet erases inhibitions, with adolescents often going further with slights online than in person.

“It's not the swear words,” Inspector Brunault said. “They all swear. It's how they gang up on one individual at a time. ‘Go cut yourself.' Or ‘you are sooo ugly' — but with 10 u's, 10 g's, 10 l's, like they're all screaming it at someone.”

The cavalier meanness can be chilling. On a California teenage boy's Facebook wall, someone writes that his 9-year-old sister is “a fat bitch.” About the proud Facebook photos posted by a 13-year-old New York girl, another girl comments: “hideous” and “this pic makes me throwup a lil.” If she had to choose between the life of an animal and that of the girl in the photos, she continues, she would choose the animal's, because “yeah, at least they're worth something.”

This is a dark, vicious side of adolescence, enabled and magnified by technology. Yet because so many horrified parents are bewildered by the technology, they think they are helpless to address the problems it engenders.

“I'm not seeing signs that parents are getting more savvy with technology,” said Russell A. Sabella, former president of the American School Counselor Association. “They're not taking the time and effort to educate themselves, and as a result, they've made it another responsibility for schools. But schools didn't give the kids their cellphones.”

As bullying, or at least conflict, becomes more prevalent in the digital world, parents are beginning to turn out for community lectures, offered by psychologists, technology experts and the police. One weekday night this fall, Meghan Quigley, a mother from Duxbury, Mass., was among the 100 or so parents who attended a panel featuring Elizabeth Englander, a psychologist who consulted on the new Massachusetts bullying law.

“I absolutely have to be much more techno savvy than I want to be,” said Mrs. Quigley, who does not know how to text, although two of her children use cellphones just to text their friends. “But it is overwhelming to me.”

These lectures typically combine technology primers so elementary that elementary-school children might snicker, with advanced course work in 21st-century child-rearing.

Dr. Englander reminded parents that while children may be nimble with technology, they lack the maturity to understand its consequences.

Then she demonstrated how to adjust Facebook privacy settings. Many parents peered at her slides, taking notes.

Don't set too much stock in those settings, she said: “ ‘Privacy' is just a marketing term.” A child's Facebook friend, she noted, could easily forward the “private” information.

In a study last year of 312 freshmen at Bridgewater State University, Dr. Englander found that 75 percent reported that during a typical high school day they had used their cellphones for voice communication 30 percent of the time or less, preferring to use them for texting, sending photos and videos, and surfing the Internet.

This is not a “phone,” Dr. Englander told the parents who looked, collectively, shellshocked. What you've given your child “is a mobile computer.”

If their children get caught in a crisis, she said, parents should preserve the evidence, by taking a screenshot of the offending material.

A mother timidly raised her hand. “How do I make a screenshot?”

The Bully Next Door

Throughout the fall, the Facebook profile set up in D.C.'s name taunted students: “At least I don't take pics of myself in the mirror like a homosexual midget,” wrote “D.C.” Also, “you smell weird.” And “ur such a petaphile.” At school, students would belligerently ask D.C. why he was picking fights on Facebook. He would eat lunch alone, and skipped some school, insisting that he was ill.

“I would always ask him, ‘Are you having a good day?' ” Marie said. “So he stopped talking to me about anything at school. He was afraid I would make more trouble for him. But the real victim was being ostracized more than the kids who were being bullied on his Facebook page.”

She would call Inspector Brunault weekly. Last fall, the detective had to subpoena Facebook for the address of the computer linked to the forged profile. Then he had to subpoena Comcast , the Internet service provider, for the home address of the computer's owner.

Facebook has since made it simpler to report malicious activity. Although Facebook declined to make its head of security available for an interview, a spokesman replied by e-mail that if Facebook determines that a report of an impostor profile is legitimate, “We will provide a limited amount of data that helps the person take steps to repair his or her identity.”

Finally, in January, Inspector Brunault told Marie he was getting close. He visited the home address supplied by Comcast. When he left, he had two more names and addresses.

A few weeks later, he called Marie.

Just before dinner, Marie broke the news to D.C. Two culprits were 14; one was 13. After learning the first two names, D.C. said: “Those guys have never liked me. I don't know why.”

But the third boy had been a friend since preschool. His father was a sports coach of D.C.'s.

D.C. was silent. Then he teared up.

Finally, he said, “Do you mean to tell me, Mom, that they hate me so much that they would take the time to do this?”

Inspector Brunault asked the boys why they had done it. That summer, they replied, they had been reading Facebook profiles of people's dogs, which they found hilarious. They decided to make up a profile. They picked D.C. “because he was a loner and a follower.”

Although the police did not release the boys' names because they are juveniles, word seeped through town. In the middle of the night, Marie received anonymous calls. “They told me my son should just suck it up,” she recalled. “They said he would be a mama's boy. They would rant and then they would hang up.”

Contacting the Other Parent

After Marie learned the identities of her son's cyberbullies, she did not call their parents. She was so incensed that she communicated only through official go-betweens, like the police and prosecutors.

But some parents prefer to resolve the issue privately, by contacting the bully's family. Psychologists do not recommend that approach with schoolyard bullying, because it can devolve into conflicting narratives. With cyberbullying, a parent's proof of baldly searing digital exchanges can reframe that difficult conversation.

Parents who present the other parents with a printout of their child's most repugnant moments should be prepared for minimization, even denial.

Maj. Glenn Woodson's daughter, Sierra, has a shortened leg because of a congenital condition. One night, when she was in sixth grade, she received a text message showing a stick figure of her lying prostrate, eyes crossed out, another girl holding a bloody blade over the body. It had been sent by three girls in Sierra's grade.

Major Woodson, who lives on an Army base in Monterey, Calif., contacted the military police. They had a stern sit-down with the families of the three girls. Teachers held a workshop on cyberbullying. Two families apologized to the Woodsons.

Finally, the mother of the third girl, the instigator, called. “ ‘It isn't her fault,' she said to my wife,” Major Woodson said. “The mom said: ‘I think this is way overblown. My daughter is being punished and she's not the only one who did it.' ”

The mother did not apologize.

What may be offensive in one household may be just a shoulder shrug in another.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Christine, who, like many parents interviewed for this article asked that her last name not be used to protect her child's identity, selected a school for her daughter largely because it eschewed technology. But when her daughter was in sixth grade, a classmate e-mailed her links to pornography sites.

Christine called the boy's mother. “I asked her to get her son to stop,” Christine said. “She apologized, and her son wrote us a letter of apology. ”

But the boy's father disagreed. “He refused to put limits on the kid,” said Christine, who works in marketing. “ ‘Oh, no, he needs total freedom and he can use his best judgment.' ”

When well-intentioned observers intervene, they can find themselves scorned.

Jill Brown, a Westfield, N.J., mother who lectures on cyberbullying through her company, Generation Text, saw something online that disturbed her: a Facebook group sniping at a young girl titled “I Stalk (name deleted) And Her Junior Boyfriend.” The group had some 500 “friends.”

The mother of a group founder was a friend of Ms. Brown's.

Ms. Brown suggested her friend look at the site. She asked her not to let her daughter know who blew the whistle. Her friend was polite but distant.

By the next day, “The girl had defriended me on Facebook,” Ms. Brown said. “I texted her mother seven times. She ignored me.”

Three weeks later, the friend stopped by Ms. Brown's house for a trunk show. When Ms. Brown asked what had happened to the Facebook group, the woman airily dismissed it as an adolescent joke.

Parent-to-parent confrontations can also backfire against the child.

In a small Western resort town, Gerrie's daughter, Michaela, 14, received an obscene, threatening text from a boy who was the star of her ski team. He accused Michaela of having told his girlfriend that he was secretly dating someone else and vowed to ruin Michaela's life.

Michaela stared at the cellphone, tears rolling down her face. She had not informed on him.

Gerrie's husband called the boy's mother. After seeing the corrosive text, the mother took away her son's cellphone for a week.

The boy made good on his threat. He spread a false rumor that his mother wouldn't allow him to race, and that Michaela's snitching was to blame. The news erupted on Facebook.

Ski team members ostracized Michaela. She rode the lifts by herself. Before team practices, she would quake and vomit.

“I did what I thought was right to help my daughter,” said Gerrie, an art teacher, “and I only ended up making it worse. But when your kid gets a text like that, what are you supposed to do?”

Dr. Sabella, the former president of the American School Counselor Association, says that parents should meet in public places, like the library or a guidance counselor's office, rather than addressing the conflict by e-mail. And the reporting parents should be willing to acknowledge that their child may have played a role in the dispute. To ease tension, suggests Dr. Englander, an expert on aggression reduction, offer the cyberbully's parent a face-saving explanation.

Her model script?

“I need to show you what your son typed to my daughter online. He may have meant it as a joke. But my daughter was really devastated. A lot of kids type things online that they would never dream of saying in person. And it can all be easily misinterpreted.”

When that conversation is handled deftly, parents can achieve a reasonable outcome. The 14-year-old daughter of Rolin, a Nashville musician, began a relationship with a boy in her church group. But soon his texts and Facebook comments turned sexually graphic and coercive. When she backed away, he tried to isolate her. At a church retreat, he surreptitiously sent texts from her phone to three of her friends, all boys, saying she didn't want to see them again.

She had no idea what he had done: he had deleted the text messages.

Those texts stunned her friends. Rolin pieced together what happened and blocked the boy's number on his daughter's phone. The boy simply borrowed his friends' phones. Rolin called the boy's parents, who agreed to sit down with both teenagers. “It would have been easier to send an e-mail,” Rolin said. “And yes, it was sure awkward to be talking to this 14-year-old kid in front of his parents about what he wrote to my daughter. But we had the proof.

“My goal wasn't to polish my shotgun. It's not about a show of force but a show of presence. I said, ‘If you want to be friends with her, you can't text her and you can't use another boy's phone.' ”

The boy's father said Rolin had been easier on his son than the father would have been, had the roles been reversed.

Eventually, the relationship cooled on its own. “But I still have his number blocked on her phone,” Rolin said.

When the Bully Is Your Child

After the police arrested the boys who usurped D.C.'s identity, the parents wrote Marie awkward apology letters. Only one mother phoned, in tears.

No matter how parents see their children, learning of the cruelties they may perpetrate is jarring and can feel like an indictment of their child-rearing.

One afternoon two years ago, Judy, a recent widow in Palm Beach County, Fla., who had been finishing her college degree, helping a professor research cyberbullying, and working in an office, got a call from the middle school.

“Your daughter is involved in a cyberbullying incident,” the assistant principal said. “Come down immediately.”

Her daughter and two others had made a MySpace page about another middle-schooler, saying she was a “whore,” with a finger pointing to her private parts. The young teenagers printed out copies and flung them at students.

Judy rushed to school. Her daughter, a sweet, straight-A student, was waiting in the guidance counselor's office, her arms crossed defiantly.

“I said to her, ‘This is a human being,' ” Judy recalled. “ ‘This girl will be destroyed for the rest of her life!' And my daughter just said: ‘I don't care. It's all true.' And I bawled while she just sat there.”

The school suspended Judy's daughter for three days.

“I did not call the target, I'm ashamed to say,” Judy recalled. “I didn't know how to get hold of her. The school wouldn't give me her name, and my daughter wouldn't talk to me.”

Once Judy got over her shock, she said, “I had to accept that my daughter had really done this and it was so ugly.”

Judy took away her daughter's computer, television and cellphone for months. She tried talking with her. Nothing. There were weeks of screaming and slammed doors.

Meanwhile, the girl's grades dropped. She was caught with marijuana. Judy realized that her daughter had long been bottling up many family stressors: illness and death, financial worries, her mother's exhausting schedule. In reaction, the girl had been misbehaving, including doing the very thing her mother found so abhorrent: cyberbullying.

In time, as Judy took long walks with her daughter, the girl began to resemble the child Judy thought she had known.

When her daughter's grades improved, Judy bought her a puppy. “A lot of people will disagree with me,” Judy said, “but I thought, this is a way for her to be responsible for something other than herself, something that would be dependent on her for all its needs.”

The girl doted on the puppy. One day, Judy asked: “ ‘Would you want anyone to be mean to your dog? Throw rocks at Foxy?' ”

Her daughter recoiled. Judy continued: “ ‘How do you think other parents feel when something mean happens to their children?' Then she broke down crying. That's when I think she finally understood what she had done.”

Supervisor or Spy?

Should teenagers have the same expectation of privacy from parents in their online accounts that an earlier generation had with their little red diaries and keys?

Software programs that speak to parental fears are manifold. Parents can block Web sites, getting alerts when the child searches for them. They can also monitor cellphones: a program called Mobile Spy promises to let parents see all text messages, track G.P.S. locations and record phone activity without the child knowing.

Parents who never believed they would resort to such tactics find themselves doing so.

Christine, the Bay Area mother whose daughter was sent links to pornography, struggled with how to supervise her daughter online. The challenge was compounded because students in the girl's grade were playing sexualized Truth or Dare games. Her daughter had a leading role.

Christine cut off her daughter's Internet access for months, mandating that she write schoolwork by hand. Over time, the girl earned back computer privileges. Christine also moved her to a parochial school. Then her daughter went on Facebook.

“We didn't know much about Facebook,” said Christine, “but we set up serious monitoring.” One program limited computer time; another blocked certain sites. Christine even had her daughter's Facebook password, so she could read the girl's private messages.

That was how Christine discovered 82 exchanges between her daughter, a freshman, and a popular senior boy at the school. Her daughter offered him oral sex if he promised not to tell friends. The boy wrote back, “Would it be O.K. if I tell friends but not the ones at school?”

Christine's daughter now sees a therapist. Christine herself uses a keystroke logger, software that records everything her two daughters write and see on their home computer. “It's uncomfortable,” Christine said. “But my older daughter has demonstrated less than zero common sense. The level of trust between us is much lower than I'd like it to be. But I also think she was relieved that we caught her.

“My younger daughter calls me a stalker. She says we mistrust her because of what her sister did. That's true. But my eyes are open, and I won't go back.”

Studies show that children tend to side with Christine's younger daughter. Last April in an omnibus review of studies addressing youth, privacy and reputation, a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard noted that parents who checked their children's online communications were seen as “controlling, invasive and ‘clueless.' ” Young people, one study noted, had a notion of an online public viewership “that excludes the family.”

Conversely, studies show that more parents are heading in Christine's direction. A recent study of teenagers and phones by the Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project said that parents regard their children's phones as a “parenting tool.” About two-thirds said they checked the content of their children's phones (whether teenagers pre-emptively delete texts is a different matter). Two-thirds of the parents said they took away phones as punishment. Almost half said they used phones to check on their child's whereabouts.

Anne Collier, editor of NetFamilyNews.org, a parenting and technology news blog, noted that stealth monitoring may be warranted in rare cases, when a parent suspects a child is at serious risk, such as being contacted by an unknown adult.

But generally, she said, spying can have terrible repercussions:

“If you're monitoring your child secretly,” Ms. Collier said, “what do you say to the kid when you find something untoward? Then the conversation turns into ‘you invaded my privacy,' which is not what you intended to talk about.”

Experts do not agree on guidelines about monitoring. But most concur on one principle:

“There is no one technology that will keep your kids safe,” said Dr. Larry D. Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who writes about raising a tech savvy generation. “The kids are smart enough to get around any technology you might use.”

Dr. Englander installed keystroke logger software on her family computer. She uses it less as a monitoring device than as a means to teach her sons about digital safety. The Post-it on the family's computer reads: “Don't Forget That Mom Sees Everything You Do Online.” She does not, in fact, check frequently. She just wants her boys to think before they hit the “send” button, so they understand that there is no privacy online, from her, or anyone.

Last spring, the Essex County, Mass., district attorney's office sent the three boys who forged D.C.'s Facebook identity to a juvenile diversion program for first-time nonviolent offenders.

If the boys adhere to conditions for a year, they will not be prosecuted. According to a spokesman, those conditions include: a five-page paper on cyberbullying; letters of apology to D.C. and everyone they insulted in his name on Facebook; attending two Internet safety presentations; community service; no access to the Internet except to complete schoolwork. Their computers must be in a public family space, not the bedroom.

Marie, who reports that D.C. has a new circle of friends and good grades, is reasonably satisfied with the sentencing conditions.

But compliance is another matter. She believes that at least one boy is already back on Facebook.

Overburdened school administrators and, increasingly, police officers who unravel juvenile cybercrimes, say it is almost impossible for them to monitor regulations imposed on teenagers.

As with the boys who impersonated D.C. online, a district attorney's spokeswoman said, “That monitoring is up to the parents.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/05bully.html?ref=us

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Pushing a Right to Bear Arms, the Sharp Kind

PHOENIX — Arizona used to be a knife carrier's nightmare, with a patchwork of local laws that forced those inclined to strap Buck knives or other sharp objects to their belts to tread carefully as they moved from Phoenix (no knives except pocketknives) to Tempe (no knives at all) to Tucson (no knives on library grounds).

But that changed earlier this year when Arizona made its Legislature the sole arbiter of knife regulations. And because of loose restrictions on weapons here, Arizona is now considered a knife carrier's dream, a place where everything from a samurai sword to a switchblade can be carried without a quibble.

Arizona's transformation, and the recent lifting of a ban on switchblades, stilettos, dirks and daggers in New Hampshire, has given new life to the knife rights lobby, the little-known cousin of the more politically potent gun rights movement. Its vision is a knife-friendly America, where blades are viewed not as ominous but as tools — the equivalent of sharp-edged screw drivers or hammers — that serve useful purposes and can save lives as well as take them.

Sure, knife fights and knife attacks are a concern. No knife-lover would ever deny that. In fact, Todd Rathner, the lobbyist for Knife Rights Inc., an advocacy group based in Arizona that is now in its third year, was mugged twice in New York City before moving to Tucson, once — “ironically,” he said — at knifepoint.

But the problem is with the knife wielder, not the knife itself, the knife lobby says, sounding very much like those who advocate for gun rights.

In fact, knife advocates contend that the Second Amendment applies to knives as well as guns. They focus their argument elsewhere, though, emphasizing that knives fill so many beneficial roles, from carving Thanksgiving turkeys to whittling, that they do not deserve the bad name they often get.

“People talk about how knives are dangerous, and then they go in the kitchen and they have 50 of them,” said D'Alton Holder, a veteran knife maker who lives in Wickenberg, Ariz. “It's ridiculous to talk about the size of the knife as if that makes a difference. If you carry a machete that's three feet long, it's no more dangerous than any knife. You can do just as much damage with an inch-long blade, even a box cutter.”

As for the pocketknife he carries with him every day, Mr. Holder said: “I use it for everything — to clean my fingernails, to prune a tree or carve, even to eat dinner with. I never think about the knives that I carry or the knives that I make as weapons.”

Jennifer Coffey, the New Hampshire state representative who led the effort to overturn the state's switchblade ban, is also an emergency medical technician who uses knives to extract people from vehicles after accidents. Even when switchblades were outlawed, there were exceptions for emergency workers and others who might use them on the job, but Ms. Coffey still considered the law outrageous.

“We had certain knives that were illegal, but I could walk down the street with a kitchen knife that I used to carve a turkey and that would be legal,” Ms. Coffey said. “I'd be more scared of a kitchen knife than a switchblade.”

She said switchblade bans were passed in the 1950s because of the menacing use of the knives in movies like “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.” Her legislation drew the support of an array of knife-related entities: Knife Rights, a young upstart in knife advocacy; the American Knife and Tool Institute, a group based in Wyoming that represents knife manufacturers, sellers and owners; and publications like Blade, Cutlery News Journal and Knife World.

The effort to lift the ban on switchblades in New Hampshire even won the support of the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police.

In Arizona, however, police groups were more circumspect about lifting all of the local knife laws. The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the move, saying local jurisdictions ought to set their own knife restrictions. The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association remained neutral.

In much of the country, especially in urban areas, knives are still viewed as weapons in need of tight control.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. of Manhattan announced in June that his office had pressured retail stores that were selling illegal knives to remove them from their shelves, forfeit profits from the knives made over the last four years and help finance a campaign to educate people against illegal knives.

“What makes these knives so dangerous is the ease with which they can be concealed and brandished,” Mr. Vance said of the illegal switchblades and gravity knives, which require a wrist flip to open instead of a switchblade's spring, that were bought by undercover agents.

Mr. Vance's offensive drew the ire of the American Knife and Tool Institute, which issued an “action alert” and offered to assist New York retailers and individuals charged with knife violations with their legal defenses.

The knife lobby similarly rose up in 2009 when the federal Customs and Border Protection agency issued a proposal that would have reclassified many pocketknives and pocket tools as switchblades and thus made them illegal for import or sale across state lines under the 1958 federal Switchblade Act. In the end, Congress intervened and blocked the change.

A case now unfolding in Seattle shows how volatile knives continue to be. A police officer there fatally shot a man in August after, the officer said, he ordered the man several times to drop a knife that he was carrying. But the legitimacy of the shooting has been questioned by the Police Department, partly because the knife, which had a three-inch blade, was found in a closed position near the body of the dead man, who had been using it to carve a piece of wood.

Knife advocates are hoping that, just as Arizona's immigration law has led to a national debate on that topic, its move to end knife restrictions will lead more states to take up the cause.

“Arizona is now the model when it comes to knives,” said Mr. Rathner, who was a National Rifle Association lobbyist before he switched to knives. “We're now going to be moving to other states, probably in the Rocky Mountains and the Southeast. There's probably half a dozen or more places that are ripe for this.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/05knives.html?ref=us

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State Cuts Put Officers on Front Lines of Mental Care

PORTLAND, Me. — As community mental health systems fray under the strain of state budget cuts and a weak economy, law enforcement officers across the nation are increasingly having to step in to provide the emergency services that clinics have typically offered the mentally ill.

Police and sheriff's departments that are already grappling with budget and manpower cuts say the situation is further straining their resources and forcing them to divert officers from their regular duties. It has also stoked fears among law enforcement officers of dangerous encounters between the police and people with severe mental illness.

“I worry that there's going to be a tragedy,” said James Craig, chief of the Police Department here, where calls involving the mentally ill increased to 1,645 in 2009 from 1,424 in 2007. “I'm worried that an officer might lose his life dealing with a dangerous person, a person who really needs treatment.”

Improving the department's handling of the mentally ill became one of Chief Craig's biggest priorities last year after an officer was forced to dangle off the Casco Bay Bridge as he pulled a woman to safety during a suicide attempt. She was released from a hospital hours later and tried to jump off the bridge again.

The Portland department hired a full-time mental health coordinator in October.

In many ways, officers are better equipped than ever to handle calls involving the mentally ill. Hundreds of departments across the country, including in Portland, now offer Crisis Intervention Team training, which teaches officers to look for signs of mental illness and to work with doctors, nurses and therapists.

Despite increased awareness, many officers, mental health workers and advocates for the mentally ill say that with fewer hospital beds and reduced outpatient services — especially at centers that treat the uninsured — many patients' family members and friends, and even bystanders, are turning to the police as the first choice for help when a crisis occurs. Many states are feeling the brunt of cuts that started years ago but have gotten worse because of the economy.

“A lot of people view calling the police as the only way to get loved ones any kind of treatment, because when the police come they have to do something,” said Laura Usher, the national Crisis Intervention Team coordinator for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “But unfortunately that doesn't necessarily always lead to appropriate treatment.”

“States across the country are cutting their mental health budgets, and people who are serviced by state mental health programs are the poorest, and they're unable to get services any other way,” she added. “The community mental health system is broken.”

In Illinois, where mental health services were cut by $35 million this year — a $90 million cut was proposed — the state's police departments are “essentially a 24-hour free service,” said Chief Robert T. Finney of the Champaign Police Department.

“We're the people who get taxed with dealing with these people,” said Chief Finney, who is also vice president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police. “Even if you arrest them and they're released from your jail within hours, they're back on your street doing the same thing.”

In Oklahoma, calls to the police involving mental illness have increased by 50 percent in the past year, said Stacey Puckett, executive director of the Oklahoma Association of Chiefs of Police. The state has cut about $17 million in mental health financing this year.

Ms. Puckett said officers were “traveling from one end of the state to the other and are out of their departments for 6, 8, 10 hours at a time.”

“It's the bed shortage,” she said. “We just do not have enough beds for the numbers.”

Danny Ray of Ardmore, Okla., had to call the police in August after his 30-year-old son, who had been unable to get treatment, threatened him with a loaded gun.

“The police, if I had a problem right now, they are my only source of help,” said Mr. Ray, 57, whose son's psychiatrist comes to town only once a month. Mr. Ray says he also finds it difficult to secure a bed for his son at the local hospital.

Rural areas are especially affected when mental health services are cut because officers must drive so far to admit mentally ill patients to hospitals.

Amanda Bittle, chief of the Police Department in Forest Park, Okla., an Oklahoma City suburb, started her career in a rural part of the state, and says it is often easier and less expensive for far-flung departments to encourage a mentally ill person to leave town than to drive the person to a hospital.

“It was cheaper for your department to buy a $59 bus ticket and send them as far away as you could,” Chief Bittle said. “I know that's disturbing, but that's the reality of what's happening.”

The alternative, she said, is for a department to go “15 hours of no officer on the street, or an officer that's paid overtime.”

“It's sad,” she added, “but it comes down to those budgetary things.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/05mental.html?ref=us

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Killing Shows Truths of Life Spent at Edge of Limelight

LOS ANGELES — Ronni Chasen could be loud. And she pushed.

At an event like the Governors Awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, one of the last show business soirées she attended before her murder on Nov. 16, Ms. Chasen sent reporters skittering for shelter as she scanned the room for targets of opportunity — people to introduce to clients like the film composer Hans Zimmer and the soundtrack expert Diane Warren.

At 64, Ms. Chasen was fighting to keep her place in a Hollywood public relations game that had mostly gone to firms bigger than her boutique Chasen and Company, or to players who were younger.

Assumptions of a pampered Hollywood life have shifted since she was killed last month, shot repeatedly while driving home from a movie premiere. The unsolved killing is pulling back the veil on a person who, like many in the show business capital, focused on holding onto a steadily eroding modicum of glamour.

Dismissing impressions of privilege, her longtime friend Martha Smilgis said: “Ronni was not a Jewish princess. She was a Jewish businesswoman.”

The distinction was Ms. Smilgis's way of sorting through a bewildering thicket of facts that have begun to surface as both friends and investigators come to terms with the shooting of a woman who was hardly the most important in Hollywood but had become one of its best-known stock characters.

Ms. Chasen operated a modest public relations firm with the sort of clients who might be expected to pay fees of only a few thousand dollars a month — not much when measured against the need to pay salaries for her staff of four and the demands of a Hollywood life.

Yet she had become surprisingly wealthy. Documents posted Thursday on the celebrity news service TMZ.com show her to have been worth about $6 million when she wrote a will in 1994.

Ms. Chasen had become even richer since then, said Ms. Smilgis, an executor in her 2006 will. She inherited money from her mother, who for years had invested in high-dividend stocks, and increased its value through her own astute investments. As recently as September, according to Ms. Smilgis, Ms. Chasen said she was writing yet another will, but whether she did so remained unclear.

Ms. Chasen collected art. In the 1994 version of her will, she invited a few close friends — including the publicity baron Warren Cowan and the publisher Michael Viner, both now dead — to choose a painting from her collection.

Still, the art on the walls of her Westwood condominium was often on loan from one or another of her friends who owned galleries, including Jonathan Novak. Mr. Novak, a pallbearer at Ms. Chasen's funeral last month, owns Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, a well-regarded gallery in Century City, not far from Ms. Chasen's home in a “condo canyon” that lines Wilshire Boulevard.

If not exactly in a fashionable neighborhood, her condominium had one perk that Ms. Chasen said was a must: a doorman. It made her feel safer as a single woman, she once told a reporter, but a doorman was a symbol of a certain social class — a belief that was a holdover from her childhood in the Washington Heights and Riverdale sections of New York.

On Wednesday evening, the puzzlement around Ms. Chasen's death deepened. Police officers investigating her murder tried to speak with a man in a Hollywood transient hotel who had told acquaintances he had shot Ms. Chasen for pay, but he committed suicide first.

The dead man, who is reported to have spent time in prison, has been identified as Harold Martin Smith. The episode instantly fueled a new round of speculation that Ms. Chasen had been killed in connection with a business deal gone bad, or perhaps for refusing to pay a debt for a friend or family member.

Ms. Smilgis, who spoke Thursday from her home in Santa Barbara, Calif., said Ms. Chasen had mentioned no such deal or debt. If pressed, “I could see her being tough about the money,” Ms. Smilgis said.

Ms. Chasen's brother, Larry Cohen, a well-known director and writer of B movies like “Captivity” and “Maniac Cop,” said he did not believe that the dead man had anything to do with his sister's murder.

“This guy was a deranged person who just made that up; no way he was involved,” Mr. Cohen said. “I still think this was most likely a case of road rage.”

Toughness had long been one of Ms. Chasen's trademarks. She was not married, had no children and lived almost wholly within the confines of a Hollywood circle that included other publicists of her era and old-line producers like Richard D. Zanuck, who won an Oscar for “Driving Miss Daisy.”

In March 1982, the real Ronni Chasen was hidden, just barely, behind a publicist called Trixi in an account by P. J. Corkery for Harper's Magazine of his stint at an unnamed publicity firm. “Trixi's life is her job,” Mr. Corkery wrote. “She is about 35 and has wrapped her entire existence in her work.”

He went on to describe Trixi's ferocity in pressing the phone company to give her a number she could “love” — it had to begin with the “27” that indicated a Beverly Hills number then, and be unlisted. At some length, he went on to describe how Trixi set herself up for a day around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel by persuading a client that a press interview could be done only in a client-paid bungalow there.

Ms. Smilgis said, “She loved the portrait of herself,” noting that Ms. Chasen — a model and a soap opera actress when she was young — had been romantically involved with a number of well-heeled Hollywood men through the years.

Ms. Chasen was married briefly in her 20s, but she changed her last name while trying to land a soap opera role in New York in the 1970s, her brother said.

“Ronni Sue Cohen isn't exactly a stage name,” he said, adding that he did not know whether her adopted last name came from Chasen's, an entertainment industry hot spot in the early days of Hollywood.

In a publicity career that flourished during a stint at the agency Rogers & Cowan in the 1980s, Ms. Chasen became deeply embedded in the film industry. But she was never quite at the center of it. A member of the film academy, she did not join its inner councils.

While she worked her way through each awards season with undiminished grit, the real star power clustered around rising firms like 42 West and Slate.

The march of time bothered Ms. Chasen, who favored cream-colored Armani suits and drove a black Mercedes sedan. Sixteen years ago, she asked in her will that, in announcing her death, “Warren Cowan write the release to the trades, and that no mention be made of my age.”

She also asked that John Williams, famous for his “Star Wars” music and other movie themes, “write a piece of music” for her funeral service, if possible. The request was not honored, although it was unknown whether Mr. Williams was aware of it.

At the same time, Ms. Chasen could be remarkably old-fashioned. While pushing to get a reporter interested in a story pitch, she would often mail stacks of research instead of relying on e-mail attachments. She was perhaps the last person in Hollywood to send e-mails via an assistant, with “dbnr” — dictated but not read — appearing at the bottom of missives.

Ms. Chasen's 1994 will gave much of her estate to one niece while specifically shorting another. “I have intentionally and with full knowledge of the consequences omitted to provide for my niece,” the will reads, “except for the gift of ten dollars.”

Ms. Smilgis offered no theory for her friend's killing. But she talked freely about someone who had figured out how to live well, without really spending.

“If you looked at her, you'd say, ‘Wow, this is a tony babe,' ” Ms. Smilgis said. “But I'm sure she cut a deal with her hairdresser.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/05publicist.html?ref=us

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EDITORIAL

Protecting Online Privacy

The Federal Trade Commission has come up with timely recommendations to protect privacy online.

For years, data trackers have collected information about people's activities as they surf the Web, packaging it into profiles to sell to advertisers. The practice itself is not what is at issue, but rather the way it is done. Many trackers don't disclose it. Others put complex, pro forma disclosures in obscure places on Web sites. Few consumers read them. Most don't understand how much information they are sharing about their online lives.

Internet companies and advertisers insist that industry self-regulation is enough to protect consumers. But companies' many lapses — one site that allowed parents to monitor their children online, for example, sold information about the kids' activities to marketers — suggest it is time for regulators to set minimum standards that every company must follow.

The F.T.C. sets three recommendations to improve the protection of consumer privacy, starting with more transparency, including standard, simple and clear privacy disclosures to let people know who is doing what with the data about their online activities.

It recommends that companies include privacy protection in their operational goals. And most important, the F.T.C. insists that consumers be given a clear, simple option to opt out of online data tracking altogether — along the lines of the do-not-call registry — perhaps through a “do not track” button on Web browsers.

Advertisers argue that allowing surfers to opt out of tracking en masse would hobble the ad revenues that support most Web sites. This argument is overblown.

Giving Americans the choice to opt out of data tracking does not mean everybody will. Moreover, even if regulation limits advertisers' ability to precisely target their ads according to consumers' tastes, they will still need to advertise. They will just do it differently. Advertising spending in the United States amounted to 1.8 percent of G.D.P. last year. In 1990, before Yahoo even existed, it amounted to 2.2 percent of G.D.P. It has remained within that range over nearly two decades.

The F.T.C.'s report, which it calls preliminary, is only a first step toward better privacy protection. It is calling for public comment over the next two months, after which it will issue definitive recommendations. Yet while the commission has said it will police privacy abuses more aggressively, its proposal for a “do not track” button will probably require an act of Congress.

Fortunately, privacy protection has bipartisan support. So this is a great opportunity for Congress to prove that it can pass some meaningful legislation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/opinion/05sun2.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Terrorism makes New York more wary, gradually

NEW YORK (AP) — Not far from the New York Stock Exchange, a small crowd of tourists stopped to watch as a bomb-sniffing dog checked out a delivery van. The cobblestoned street was blocked by a line of brass cubes with holes that glowed red like the inside of a toaster.

Suddenly an entire section of the street rotated, cobblestones and all. The cubes moved out of the van's way and their holes turned green. The crowd "ahhed" with surprise.

Welcome to New York, a city where every year since 9/11, tighter security has changed the landscape a little bit at a time, more noticeable to the tourists crowding the streets for the holidays than the residents who have been here all along.

"There are so many police," said Jackie Carey, 71, of Wilmington, Del., as she looked over Rockefeller Plaza crowds from the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. "There's like about five policemen on the corner. How many policemen does it take for you to get across the street?"

At Radio City Music Hall, guards check holiday tourists' purses for weapons before the Rockettes' Christmas Spectacular. In Herald Square, new cameras stare down at shoppers.

In rail stations, travelers are bombarded with messages warning them to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. There are poison-gas sensors and radiation detectors, automatic license plate readers and random bag searches in the subways.

The Woolworth Building, a 1913 skyscraper that used to attract hundreds of tourists a day to its ornate lobby, now has a sign at the door saying "Tourists Are Not Permitted Beyond This Point."

Visitors to the Statue of Liberty must go through two separate, airport-style security checkpoints. Taking pictures of the PATH trains that run under the Hudson is illegal. Even the city's architecture is changing: closed "sky lobbies" are replacing ground-level public spaces; vehicle barriers are de rigueur.

At Rockefeller Plaza, concrete barriers emblazoned with "NYPD" blocked part of the streets running through the promenade, which draws thousands of visitors to see its Christmas tree and ice skating rink.

In the subways, train conductors tell passengers, "If you see something, say something." So do posters and ticket machines. Police conduct occasional spot checks, setting up a table in stations and searching travelers' bags at random.

Times Square — now partly transformed into a pedestrian mall — sports wider sidewalks aimed at creating buffer zones around high-profile buildings. Nearly every lamppost now has at least two domed cameras and an antenna for beaming live images to police.

"Cameras, cameras and more cameras," said Robert Jacobs, 30, a visitor from Chicago. "Makes you wonder who's got time to watch it all."

Computers, that's who. In a command center that opened in 2008, software searches constantly for suspicious activity, such as an object that does not move for a long time. The computers can also search for specific shapes and colors, such as a suspect wearing a green jacket. In September, police added 500 more cameras to the system.

Farther south, parts of lower Manhattan are now thickets of vehicle barriers and police checkpoints. Steel plates secured to the ground with thick black chains jut out of the ground in the alleys near Wall Street. Yellow barriers rise and drop silently from the ground at an inspection point near the World Financial Center.

A once-bustling four-lane road that runs past a federal courthouse and the federal jail has been closed to most traffic since 9/11.

At the New York Stock Exchange, a metal fence keeps tourists 30 feet from the building.

Security concerns have also begun to change the look of New York's buildings.

New skycrapers place office workers higher, beyond the reach of a bomb explosion. In One World Trade Center, the 102-story tower under construction at ground zero, the first office floors will be built 200 feet above the ground.

"Now architects are more concerned about the vulnerability of their buildings to say, a truck bomb," said Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Most New Yorkers appreciate the security. But some say they miss the days before terrorist plots became a constant worry.

Ilene Zatal, 62, says she used to look forward to buying her monthly Metrocard because of the poetry the city printed on the back of them. She pulled out a stack of her favorites.

"Within five miles of where you live, there are enough strange things to keep you wondering all your life," she said, reading a verse from E.W. Howe. "Wonderful. Before, they used to all say things like that."

Then she pulled out her current card.

"If you see something, say something," it said in Spanish.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i2__T8xrFO0LjbxD7FYJ9JjV-IWw?docId=3a51107dc65540ef83ca46a817542ccc

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