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From Los Angeles Times

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ATF's gun surveillance program showed early signs of failure

Just a few months into Operation Fast and Furious, an agency official called for a strategy to shut down the program aimed at following guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

by Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

August 11, 2011

Reporting from Washington

In March 2010, the No. 2 man at the ATF was deeply worried. His agents had lost track of hundreds of firearms. Some of the guns, supposed to have been tracked to Mexican drug cartels, were lost right after they cleared the gun stores.

Five months into the surveillance effort — dubbed Operation Fast and Furious — no indictments had been announced and no charges were immediately expected. Worse, the weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the ATF official was worried that someone in the United States could be hurt next.

Acting Deputy Director William Hoover called an emergency meeting and said he wanted an "exit strategy" to shut down the program. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for decades had dedicated itself to stopping illegal gun-trafficking of any kind. Now it was allowing illegal gun purchases on the Southwest border and letting weapons "walk" unchecked into Mexico.

But those at the meeting, which included a Justice Department official, did not want to stop the illegal gun sales until they had something to show for their efforts. Hoover suggested a "30-day, 60-day or 90-day" exit plan that would shut Fast and Furious down for good — just as soon as there were some indictments.

But indictments did not come for another 10 months. By then, two semiautomatics had been recovered after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed south of Tucson, and nearly 200 had been found at crime scenes in Mexico.

"I probably should have been a lot more strident with that, there's no question," Hoover has since acknowledged. "I probably should have jumped on a plane and flown to Phoenix and gotten the field division team and the U.S. attorney's team together and had a discussion."

Fast and Furious was a highly secret undercover program begun with great ambition. The border was out of control, and the new Obama administration wanted to stop U.S. guns from crossing into Mexico and arming drug cartels.

The Justice Department, which oversees the ATF, was pushing for agents to stop arresting small-time gun smugglers and concentrate instead on the big-name cartels.

Today, the program is the subject of two investigations into why it was approved, why no one put a speedy end to it, and who among top ATF and Justice Department officials should be held responsible. No one in hindsight believes it was a good idea.

"This is not a technique that should ever be used," said Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who ordered an inspector general investigation into Fast and Furious.

House and Senate Republicans are also investigating, with their sights set on Holder and other political appointees. "The Justice Department is not our partner in this effort," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "They are the subject of this investigation."

Indeed, according to memos, emails and other material obtained by The Times, along with transcripts of sworn depositions and Capitol Hill testimony, the Justice Department provided the initial impetus for what became Fast and Furious.

In October 2009, officials in the office of then-Deputy Atty. Gen. David W. Ogden, the No. 2 slot under Holder, sent a nine-page memo to supervisors on the border. Called the "Department of Justice Strategy for Combating the Mexican Cartels," it specifically instructed the ATF to broaden its scope to "identify, investigate and eliminate" the cartels. This approach, the memo added, "ensures that scarce ATF resources are directed at the most important targets."

The memo did not suggest agents purposely allow illegal purchasers to walk away with guns, and Justice Department officials insist they never approved the "operational" concept for Fast and Furious. Nevertheless, the ATF viewed the memo as marching orders.

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF acting director, told investigators that his subordinates took the memo and came up with "tactical strategies" that created Fast and Furious. "We have to go after the cartels to stop the flow of guns," he said.

William D. Newell, then the special agent in charge of the ATF field office for Arizona and New Mexico, said "the memo fitted into how we were going to address this" problem. Fast and Furious was launched the following month, November 2009, and was run out of Newell's field office.

Under the program, agents were to watch — in some cases record on video — illegal sales and then use surveillance teams and electronic eavesdropping to follow the guns and learn how the weapons were moved. The goal was to arrest cartel leaders overseeing gun smuggling on the U.S. side of the border.

By January 2010, agents with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force run by the Justice Department were brought in to help. The manpower included investigators from the Homeland Security Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

An assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix was charged with handling future prosecutions. Soon the operation was christened Fast and Furious after the popular Hollywood action film series on street racing.

But the chase for guns and cartel leaders soon hit a dead end. The ATF was attempting to follow each of the weapons as they were moved from the straw men who bought them illegally at gun shops to what they expected would be cartel higher-ups in the U.S. who would move them to Mexico.

But the ATF, which didn't have the resources to follow so many weapons, soon lost track of many of them. And when they did follow them to the next level, the buyers of the guns often turned out to be Mexicans living legally in the U.S. and not cartel honchos.

By March 2010, Hoover convened his ATF meeting. He described it as a "pretty detailed briefing," with participants fearful that some of the lost guns were going to turn up at crimes scenes not only in Mexico, but also in the United States.

Lorren D. Leadmon, an ATF intelligence specialist, and Joseph Cooley, a trial attorney in the Justice Department's gang unit, sat in. They were apprised that guns had been lost and most likely were circulating in Mexico. At that early stage of the program, Acting Director Melson said he warned top officials at the Justice Department that weapons had gotten away. "I wanted to alert my staff as well as the [deputy attorney general's] office that there were instances in which guns were not stopped," he said.

Months passed and the guns kept running. ATF officials said they pressured prosecutors for indictments. But the U.S. attorney's office was waiting for more evidence. At one time, ATF officials thought they would have charges filed by October.

That was the month when the brother of a state attorney general in Mexico was killed and the ATF learned that Fast and Furious weapons were found at the scene. Still, nothing changed. Then came the night of Dec. 14 when U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed.

The FBI had jurisdiction over the investigation of his killing. But the next morning, Newell, the ATF field supervisor, ordered ATF agents and supervisors to go to the scene to determine whether any Fast and Furious weapons had been used. "Send every available body and provide as much assistance as possible," he emailed his staff.

Three guns were recovered. Two of them came from Fast and Furious. And still the operation went on another six weeks.

Finally, near the end of January officials announced with some fanfare that 20 individuals had been indicted for illegal gun-trafficking. What they did not say was that two of the smuggled weapons had ended up at the scene of Terry's slaying.

That was left to a small group of unhappy former ATF agents. They called Congress.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-atf-guns-20110811,0,5316659,print.story

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From Google News

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New Jersey

Amid Summer Crime Spike, Police in Newark Reach Out to Its Residents

by Mirela Iverac

More than 40 Newark police officers swarmed Avon Avenue between South 11th and 12th streets on a recent sweltering evening in the Brick City as they awaited marching orders on which part of the neighborhood they would be deployed to that night.

This summer the police have been coming to high-crime areas such as Avon Avenue in what is known as community roll call, part of the city's Safe Summer initiative – Newark's answer to crime rates that skyrocketed last summer.

“It forced us to do two different sides to this: No. 1 really reevaluate and change the way law enforcement was operating and push us a lot more out into the community,” Mayor Cory Booker said.

The city trended downward significantly in the number of crimes in Booker's first term. In January 2010, shootings were down 46 percent from 2006. And last March was the first month in 44 years with no homicides.

But last year the pendulum swung back. There were 35 homicides from June 1 to September 1, making it the worst summer the city had experienced in 20 years.

To ensure this would not happen this year and mitigate the loss of 163 officers, laid off in December due to budget cuts, the city launched the summer initiative at the beginning of June. Next to community roll calls it includes stricter enforcement of the curfew for minors, bringing mounted horse units on patrols, officers going on bus rides with neighborhood leaders who point out problems.

Getting Out into the Community

“What I wanted to push this summer was officers out there not pushing enforcement but walking into a neighborhood, stopping and talking to the community members and asking them what the problems are in the neighborhood,” Police Director Samuel DeMaio said. (Photo left)

If residents get to know police officers better, there is a greater chance they will cooperate in solving crimes, or offer tips on things they know are happening in their area, DeMaio added.

Detective Hubert Henderson, spokesman for the Department, said residents of areas like Avon Avenue can be “leery” of the police, and community roll calls facilitate interaction.

“This is tantamount to the old community policing,” Henderson said. “When we would walk our post, know everyone in the neighborhood; know everything that was going on. This is what this boils down to.”

But that Wednesday Daryl Spivey, owner of Newark Tire, observed the roll call and said he wasn't impressed.

“They're here,” Spivey said of police. “Giving the well a tick tack. It's something they're doing, but it's not enough.

He gestured toward a grocery store next to his shop that had been shuttered with a metal roll-down gate after six robberies in one week.

Homicides Down, Shootings Up

The results of the Safe Summer initiative so far have been mixed. There were fewer homicides in June and July – 17 compared to 22 last year. But the overall number of shootings for the first seven months is up by 43 percent compared to the same period last year.

But DeMaio remains convinced that the summer initiative will turn that trend around as well.

“We're confident as we move through the summer we're gonna start fighting it back and pushing back downward again,” he said.

Newark council members are backing him. Last week DeMaio was unanimously confirmed by the Municipal Council as the police director. He took over the position from his predecessor, Garry McCarthy, who left in May to become the Chicago Police Department's superintendent.

Council member Ronald Rice said his residents in the West Ward have been “overwhelmingly appreciative” of DeMaio's way of doing business.

“While the statistics don't bear it out I do believe that his way of policing is eventually going to work,” Rice said. “It's a greater reliance on deploying people from outside the offices and getting them into the streets and doing kind of door-to-door policing to get the trust back.”

Changes Afoot, but Concerns Linger

Changes in Newark are clearly visible. Real estate investment projects worth more than $700 million have poured into the city in the last five years. Ten new companies have moved in or will do so this year, and the population has grown for the first time in three decades. Since 2000, around 3,600 people moved in, and the city now has 277,140 residents.

But progress, in the eyes of the city's residents and the nation, seems to halt after an incident like the one in July when 13 people were shot – including a teenager who was killed – over the course of just a few hours.

Booker said that case was a targeted shooting in a spot “that was a known open air drug market where residents had literally complained that week about the drug dealing.”

The mayor and the police director said the majority of shootings have been caused by three drug sects, operating in three specific areas of the city and retaliating against each other.

The most significant advancements in dealing with those sects so far have come in the seizure of weapons – five AK-47s, machine guns and hand guns. Arrests are yet to follow.

Booker said he is aware the change in crime reduction is not happening quickly enough for Newark's residents. Still, he points out, it's important to keep things in perspective.

“In 2006, the year I got in office, we had 435 shootings that year,” Booker said. “Now we're in the 200s last year. Last year, the year when crime was up, our shootings were in the 200s. So, that's still a dramatic reduction in crime from where we started.”

Despite reductions in crime, safety concerns echo around the city, including the bustling downtown area, where Rafi Britt runs a food stand on Market Street.

“It's murders, robbery,” Britt said. “It's just a whole lot of stuff, bad stuff, going on here. People don't feel secure in their neighborhood, and this is not a good thing.”

Britt says he sees layoffs in the police department as significant contributors to increased crime levels. But Booker rejects that so often-heard explanation.

“Correlation is not causation,” Booker said. “The spike in our crime started before the police were laid off. So, you had the worst summer in 20 years last year, and we had all the police officers.”

This summer, the mayor said, the negative trends will be reversed. He expects shootings and homicides to be down come September 1, and for the progress to continue beyond that.

“I have faith in my community, I have faith in law enforcement, I have faith in my clergy, I have faith in Newark,” Booker said. “We will as a city push that pendulum back again, and we will start 2012 with the story going back to where it was in 2009.”

http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2011/aug/11/newark/

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The Bahamas

Eight-point plan to assist Police Force in curbing crime and violence

NASSAU, The Bahamas -- The Royal Bahamas Police Force has developed and implemented an eight-point plan in order to reduce crime and criminality in The Bahamas.

The plan is tied to the Force's Neighbourhood Community Policing Program and includes the continued deployment of civilian support staff to departments and sections of the Force “where they are best suited” in order to release trained officers from administrative duty to operational duties, among other measures.

Addressing the opening session of the first Regional Community-based Policing Conference Tuesday, Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade said enhancing police visibility in communities by deploying more officers to the front lines will better serve the public.

“Divisional Commanders and Department Heads will be assessed on their willingness and commitment to this fundamental improvement in their areas of responsibility,” Mr Greenslade said.

“Efforts must be made to keep offices in the communities and on the streets as opposed to confinement in police stations,” he added.

Mr Greenslade said the continued deployment of police officers to the front lines will also provide “real evidence” that the police are available to interdict crimes and protect citizens.

He said the Force is working more closely with the various communities to encourage community involvement in the prevention and detection of crime.

“This involves continued support of (existing) Neighbourhood Watch Groups and the formation of new groups,” Mr Greenslade added.

The Police Commissioner said greater focus has also been placed on crime prevention and the launching of crime prevention initiatives that will prevent crimes from happening in the first place, and on further enhancing the Force's National Crime Prevention Office (NCPO) in recognition of the vital role it plays in crime prevention.

He said the Force will also continue to work “to close the demand gap” by embracing a “citizen focused” approach. This approach involves dialogue with members of the community, taking into account the views of the community.

“Police Forces cannot solve the crime problems of The Bahamas alone,” Mr Greenslade. “All citizens and residents of The Bahamas must play an active role in helping to make The Bahamas a safer place to live, work, visit and play.”

Mr Greenslade told participants from 19 regional and CARICOM countries that the Royal Bahamas Police Force recognized “many years ago” that Community-based Policing would be of invaluable service in the fight against crime.

He said the key to its success is having every Police Officer embrace the concept of neighbourhood policing.

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