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From the Los Angeles Times

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Chemical weapon stockpile destroyed at Oregon's Umatilla site

For nearly 50 years, it was the deathtrap next door: 3.7 tons of nerve gas and blister agent, a big part of America's chemical weapons arsenal, stored at a depot near the little town of Hermiston, Ore.

On the last Tuesday of every month, 76 large sirens mounted on 50-foot poles across three counties would emit a blast of sweet-sounding Westminster chimes, followed by a reassurance that this was only a drill -- if not, a loud blare would have sounded instead and residents would have known that a plume of some of the deadliest poison on Earth was headed their way.

On Tuesday, the sirens sounded for the last time -- only hours after the final chemical agents there were destroyed. The end of the three-year disposal effort marked one of the closing chapters for the United States' once-massive buildup of weapons of mass destruction.

The last ton of mustard agent at Umatilla was successfully torched at 9:17 a.m., leaving the U.S. with just three of nine original chemical weapons storage sites, the last of which is scheduled for full disposal by 2023. Even deadlier caches of VX and sarin nerve agent were destroyed earlier at the northern Oregon facility.

“It's a great thing for a community to have that hazard gone, and we can have one less thing to worry about,” Jodi Florence of the Umatilla County Emergency Management Agency, part of the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness program, said in an interview.

“Today, the employees of the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility made their mark on history by completing agent destruction operations,” Gary Anderson, site project manager, said in a statement. “More than 1,000 dedicated Army and contractor employees have made Oregon safer for its citizens.”

Umatilla had sheltered 12% of the nation's original chemical arsenal since 1962. But with the end of the Cold War and a 1993 international convention outlawing the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, work to destroy the deadly agents began in 2004.

An inherently difficult job

It was a formidable task. With liquid poisons loaded into rockets, bombs, warheads, artillery shells and mines, designed to vaporize when exploded, engineers had to design an incineration facility that wouldn't be as dangerous as the weapons themselves.

Even a drop or two of some deadly nerve agents on the skin can produce a quick, miserable death.

Disaster scenarios suggested that a major earthquake at the facility, followed by fire, could send a plume of poisonous residue as far as Portland, Seattle or Spokane. Most of the deaths in any accident, though, were forecast to occur in the small towns of northern Oregon and southern Washington that surround the facility and have depended on it for about 1,300 well-paying jobs.

The deadline under the international convention for destroying stockpiles is 2012, but the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks propelled the Army into a different kind of urgency, with the storage depots around the country potentially inviting targets for attack or plunder.

Various technologies were studied, with the Army settling on a controversial process of incineration in furnaces capable of reaching 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to rapidly destroy the poisons, with slightly less intense furnaces to melt their metal containers with little danger of release.

A number of organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Chemical Weapons Working Group, tried mightily through the courts to halt the incineration program, conducted at sites in Alabama, Arkansas, Utah and Oregon (some other depots used a less controversial water-neutralization disposal method).

Efforts to halt destruction

They argued that tiny amounts of hazardous dioxin, furan, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons could be released through the smokestacks during incineration, leading possibly to low-level exposures hazardous to those nearby who ate from their gardens or fed children with breast milk.

Bob Palzer, chemical weapons coordinator for the Sierra Club in Oregon, said very little monitoring for emissions other than chemical agents was conducted.

“The kinds of monitoring they did at the site wouldn't detect releases [of other materials] in a timely manner. They were looking specifically for agent, but in fact there would be other compounds that were virtually as hazardous, and there was not monitoring done for that,” Palzer said in an interview.

Army officials countered that extensive studies had shown the operations would pose “no significant human health impacts.”

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in its own risk assessment pointed out that the likelihood of cancer-causing exposures would be limited to an area immediately next to the incinerator site, where no one lived. Outside the depot fence, “there should not be any adverse health effects,” the assessment concluded.

A federal judge in 2009 concurred.

The project did have problems as it unfolded. A worker was exposed to a small amount of mustard blister agent in 2010 and developed a blister on his hip, even though he was wearing protective rubber gear. That incident prompted retraining of workers at the facility.

In September 1999, about 30 construction workers building the incineration plant were overcome by apparent exposure to an unknown substance. They argued unsuccessfully in a subsequent lawsuit that the substance was one of the chemical weapons agents.

Mostly, though, people lived with the ever-present, though very unlikely, possibility of a doomsday scenario -- a plume of nerve gas wafting toward town.

Facing the risk

The warning sirens were designed for that possibility. Nearby residents were also equipped with tone-alert radios to provide warning and updates in the event of a release. Many homes had large plastic sheets and duct tape to seal their homes if the day came.

“Sheltering in place simply means going into your home, shutting doors and windows, shutting off fans and any kind of air system that would bring outside air into your home, and just staying put until the emergency has passed,” Florence said.

Nobody ever needed them.

In the end, the warning sirens never got beyond the soothing Big Ben test chimes and the subsequent reassurance.

“Chemical weapons have been safely and successfully stored here for right at 49 years. It's been a long history, and for a number of the folks in the community, several generations of their families have been employed here at the depot,” Michael Fletcher, spokesman for Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, said in an interview.

“So we're talking about satisfaction at a job well done, and they're realizing that in making the nation safer, they've worked themselves out of a job.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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Loaded guns in checked bags aren't on TSA's radar

A handgun that fell out of a duffel at LAX exposes a potential loophole in safety precautions

by Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times

October 26, 2011

For all the security improvements at airports after 9/11 — full-body scans, bans on liquids, pat downs — there is one check that airports aren't doing.

Bags checked at airline counters are scanned for possible explosives but not for loaded guns.

The potential loophole became apparent over the weekend at Los Angeles International Airport, when an undeclared, loaded .38-caliber handgun went undetected from the airport and almost onto an Alaska Airlines flight to Portland. It was discovered by ramp workers, who said the gun fell out of a duffel bag as they were about to load it on the plane.

At first, the incident appeared to a be a breakdown of LAX's extensive weapons detection system.

But Transportation Security Administration officials said they are not required to screen for loaded weapons in checked luggage, only in carry-on luggage. TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said the duffel bag in question went through an explosives scanner, as do all checked bags. It did not generate an alert.

"It may be an issue for some agency or the airline, but it's not a TSA issue. Our mandate is to screen baggage for explosives," he said.

Another TSA official, Kristin Lee, said weapons stored in checked luggage don't pose the same threat as weapons in carry-on luggage because they are not within reach of passengers in flight.

"Checked bags are stored in the cargo hold of a plane, where passengers can't access them," Lee said in an email message. "When Congress created TSA, it mandated that the agency screen checked bags for explosives that could take down a plane, not for items that do not pose a security threat to the flight."

No other organization claimed responsibility for catching loaded guns in checked bags.

It's illegal to pack a loaded gun in checked luggage and illegal to pack even an unloaded gun without declaring its presence. Violations of the regulations can carry a federal civil fine of up to $11,000 as well as possible criminal penalties.

Airlines ask customers to declare guns when they check in but do not screen the baggage for weapons.

Steve Lott, a spokesman for the Air Transport Assn. of America, a trade group for airlines, said that since creation of the TSA after the attacks of 9/11, airlines ceded baggage-screening authority to the agency.

Policies implemented to make screening more efficient may have meant that some non-explosive prohibited items, including guns, are more likely to get through.

When TSA instituted an explosives detection system to scan all checked bags, machine operators had to look at a screen image of the contents of each bag, said Quinten Johnson, a Florida-based aviation security consultant and former TSA federal security director at four airports in the Southeast. When they did so, they would frequently catch guns and other unauthorized items.

But in the interest of improving efficiency, the agency switched to a system in which the machine alerts the operator to bags containing potential explosives and operators are not required to look at the screen image for each bag.

"When it comes down to improving efficiency over looking for guns in checked bags, efficiency won over," he said.

Although Johnson and other experts said loaded weapons in the cargo hulls of planes pose little threat because passengers don't have access to them while in flight, others say they do present concerns.

"If the gun goes off — and it was a loaded gun — you have potential for damage to the hydraulic, the electrical and the fuel system of the plane," said Glen Winn, another aviation security consultant and a former director of security at United Airlines.

There have also been some incidents in which people have been injured by guns in checked bags that discharged accidentally.

In 2000, a loaded gun went off in an Alaska Airlines flight bound from Portland to Anchorage. The bullet passed through the floor of the cabin and lodged in a diaper bag. Most recently, a United Airlines employee in Louisiana was shot in the leg in July by a rifle that was accidentally fired at the check-in counter while a customer was trying to declare it.

It was unclear whether the owner of the gun found at LAX, who was questioned and released, would face sanctions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gun-luggage-20111026,0,5644060.story

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The death penalty: valid yet targeted

No serious constitutional argument can be made against the death penalty. The endless campaigns to ban it cost taxpayers millions to defend.

by David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew Grossman

October 26, 2011

On the September night that the state of Georgia put Troy Davis to death, a crowd of several hundred gathered at the Supreme Court in Washington to protest America's continued practice of capital punishment. But they were in the wrong place. The protesters should have assembled 600 miles southeast, in Atlanta. The Constitution does not empower the Supreme Court to proscribe capital punishment or to regulate it out of existence, and those who ignore that point have made it increasingly expensive and less effective.

Every legal argument against the death penalty begins with the 8th or 5th Amendment. The 8th bars "cruel and unusual punishments," and the 5th guarantees "due process of law" before a person can be "deprived of life, liberty or property." But there is no serious constitutional argument against the death penalty. The 5th Amendment itself recognizes the existence of "capital" crimes, and executions were common before and after the Constitution's framing. No framer ever suggested that the Constitution divested states of this part of their historical punishment power, nor has there been a constitutional amendment that does so.

Matters not addressed by the Constitution are left to the democratic process and, in the main, to the states. As in Europe and Canada, a solid majority of American citizens supports the death penalty, believing it to serve both as a deterrent and an appropriate societal response to particularly heinous crimes. Unlike in Europe and Canada, however, U.S. courts and political leaders have not overridden public opinion to end the practice.

But they have tried. At the tail end of the criminal rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court put a halt to all executions. While the public acquiesced or supported other innovations in criminal law, such as Miranda warnings, the death penalty moratorium was less well received. Pushed by their citizens, states passed new laws requiring juries to find specific "aggravating factors" justifying the death penalty, and in 1976, the court allowed executions to resume on that basis.

Those laws were early additions to the elaborate legal superstructure that has been erected around capital punishment. Since then, the courts have gradually "discovered" additional capital-punishment-related constitutional requirements. These include exhaustive prescriptions for trials involving capital cases, performance standards for defense attorneys representing those facing the death penalty, and limits on who may face execution — not rapists, not minors, not those with low IQs. Every single one is now the subject of endless litigation.

The result has been to narrow the death penalty's availability while enormously extending the burden of imposing the sentence. Appeals and post-conviction reviews regularly take a decade or more and can cost millions in legal expenses. States seek the death penalty more rarely than in the past, and the number of executions is also in decline.

And that, say those pushing today to end the death penalty, actually renders it unconstitutional. Because it is so rarely carried out, they argue, its application is inevitably arbitrary and fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of due process. But it's an absurd leap of logic to say that because many of those eligible for and deserving of the death penalty aren't executed, those who are actually put to death — after all the elaborate safeguards and procedures — have been subjected to unlawful punishment or denied due process.

The dry term "due process" does not even begin to describe the path to execution. First there is a trial, with a separate "penalty phase" after conviction. Then there are appeals in state courts, and perhaps a request that the Supreme Court take the case. Then state post-conviction proceedings, followed by appeals, followed by habeas review in a federal court, appeals, then another request to the Supreme Court. In all, the average case is likely to be reviewed by various courts 10 times — and that's not even counting the inevitable last-minute habeas filings that keep judges up late at night or requests for executive clemency, which has fallen into unfortunate disuse as courts usurped the right of reprieve.

Troy Davis even received a rare extra round of review after he petitioned the Supreme Court directly for relief. The result was a 174-page decision that concluded flatly, "Mr. Davis is not innocent."

Unable to convince the public on the merits of abolition, death-penalty opponents have a new strategy, attacking capital punishment on fiscal grounds. That is the basis for a ballot initiative to stop executions in California that backers of a capital punishment ban hope to qualify for the November 2012 ballot. They do have half a point: Litigation has driven up the cost of executions, and delays and expense mean that states don't always seek death for the worst of the worst.

But this argument is beyond hypocritical, coming from the same groups that have thrown up every possible roadblock to timely and efficient administration of capital punishment.

If these groups took their fiscal rhetoric seriously, they would do better to acknowledge the Constitution's text and history and drop their endless campaigns to litigate the death penalty out of existence, which cost taxpayers millions to defend. The public should not be denied the choice that the Constitution allows: an affordable and effective ultimate punishment.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew Grossman are lawyers in Washington, D.C. Rivkin served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rivkin-death-penalty-20111026,0,7425149.story

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From Google News

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New York

Albany Police Department holds Community Policing Forum

Albany residents met with members of the Albany Community Police Advisory Committee Tuesday at the La Salle School. The forum allowed residents to share their concerns about their neighborhoods.

The Albany Police Department hopes to fix these problems through community policing, which encourages the police to have an active role in issues that go on in the neighborhoods. Their goal is to eliminate crime and the fear of crime by inspiring and empowering the community to work together to improve the quality of life and to make Albany the safest community in America.

Members of the Advisory Committee, which was formed in September 2009, were appointed by the Common Council. The committee holds forums throughout the city so that voices can be heard from different neighborhoods. They hope this approach gets the public more involved and builds a relationship between the police and the community.

The Neighborhood Engagement Unit works with the committee to monitor problems. Their job is to patrol different areas and interact with the community. The unit is made up of some 27 beat officers who are part of this unit and they work daily as a team. Lieutenant Michael Tremblay of the Neighborhood Engagement Unit helps with these efforts.

“We work to engage the community, to play a more active and interactive role in problem identification and resolution, using a problem oriented policing philosophy. The goal is to come up with more permanent solution sets to neighborhood specific problems,” he said.
Tremblay has seen improvements made through community policing.

“Participation and feedback has been extremely high and has helped shape the course that the Albany Police Department has taken in the pursuit of true Community Policing,” he said.

Pine Hills Neighborhood Association member, Mary Dugan, has seen improvements in the Pine Hills. She manages properties on Hudson, Hamilton, and Quail street and is optimistic about Albany Police.

“I didn't want to report any problems because of the lack of interest, but the police have improved by 200%,” Dugan said. “The police are interested in knowing what's going on and they are responding to complaints.” Students know that they are no longer able to get away with certain behaviors because of the presence of beat officers, she said.

Albany Police Chief Steven Krokoff, wants to get people to understand that their voices are being heard.

“We have met with people who represent groups that are difficult to reach. We have groups that have never coexisted,” he said.
Feedback from the community will only help to build relationships and improve the city.
“There were trust issues between the community and the police department, but we are moving forward quicker than we anticipated” he said.

http://blog.timesunion.com/pinehills/albany-police-department-holds-community-policing-forum/4824/

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Community Policing: Branson Police's New Chief Wants Department More Involved With Residents, Businesses

Changes coming include officers on beats, more detective work and potentially longer shifts

by Jonah Kaplan,

BRANSON, Mo

Branson's new police chief has only been on the job since August, but he's already working to change the way his department enforces the law.

Chief Kent Crutcher wants to practice Community Policing, connecting officers with a specific neighborhood or beat.

Crutcher says it brings a personalized approach to problem solving: if a police officer is more familiar with the area where a crime happened, it helps the investigation.

That means more detective work for those officers and maybe more time on the job. Branson PD is currently studying the expanding the workday to a 12 hour shift instead of a 10 hour shift.

Chief Krutcher thinks, though, this philosophy fits for Branson.

"Anytime you have a community that wants to be a part of that process, it'll work," said Krutcher. "That's what we have here. In the first couple of months I've met many people in the community and they appear to be a community that wants to be engaged, wants to know what's going on with the Police Department and crime in the community."

The chief reminded us though that things don't change overnight, or even in a few days - he says this move may not happen for over a year.

http://www.kspr.com/news/local/kspr-bransons-new-police-chief-introduces-community-policing-to-department-20111026,0,3221037,print.story

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Maryland

Sheriff rekindles neighborhood watches

SNOW HILL -- Sheriff Reggie Mason is fulfilling a campaign promise by reviving Worcester County's Neighborhood Crime Watch program.

The sheriff and his deputies, along with Worcester County State's Attorney Beau Oglesby, have met with residents of Stockton, Girdletree, Bishopville and Newark about the initiative. Next, the Sheriff's Office will meet with neighbors in Oyster Harbor, Friendship, Germantown, South Point and Whaleyville, according to Detective Dale Trotter, who heads up the crime watch under the department's Community Policing Division.

Mason said he's "tickled" the program will return under his tenure as sheriff.

"I'm very happy. I always liked this program, and I wanted to get it back," he said. "It's all about neighbor looking after neighbor. Hopefully, we'll get some of these smaller parts of the county covered before the year is out. This is one thing I wanted to get back in the communities."

He hopes Crime Watch can help build stronger relationships between the community and the deputies on patrol.

Trotter said people sometimes are afraid to call police and report unusual activity at a neighbor's home or to report a crime in progress, based on a fear of retaliation or having to go to court. It's a mindset he's trying to turn around.

"We're trying to get people to look out, keep their eyes open for suspicious activity, for anything that's out of the ordinary," he said. "Don't be afraid to call the police -- you can call and be anonymous. Breathe life into your community so you know your neighbor, and you take care of each other."

One of the problems, according to Trotter, is people sometimes believe if nothing is happening in their neighborhood, they don't think they need a Crime Watch.

"However, I think that's when you need a Crime Watch the most," he said. "Generally speaking, if nothing's going on, it's out of your mind. You don't think about it."

The concept of a neighborhood watch emerged in the late 1970s, Mason said. Worcester had an active Neighborhood Crime Watch program that was developed in the early 1990s under Sheriff Chuck Martin. But the deputy sheriff in charge at that time retired, Trotter said, and the department shifted its manpower to other projects.

Pocomoke City, Berlin and Snow Hill already have their own version of a neighborhood watch, Trotter said. The Ocean City police have established eight individual neighborhood watch groups throughout the resort, from Boardwalk business owners downtown to the north Ocean City residents of the Caine Woods development, according to spokesman Pfc. Mike Levy.

Now that Sheriff Mason is pushing to revitalize the department's community policing efforts, there are other duties deputies will take on. Trotter said he'll personally come out to a person's home for a security evaluation, to see if a person's property is unkempt and a target for thieves.

For kids, he also dresses up as the police mascot character Safety Pup.

"That's been like a big joke, between my friends," Trotter said. "They laugh at me when I dress up like a dog. It's a cartoon character that goes out, talks to the kids, talks about safety. It's a big hit, really."

Ultimately, Trotter said the top priority of the Community Policing Division is to get the word out that "the Sheriff's Office is available for your organization, for your meeting," he said. "We'd like to come out and introduce ourselves, let people know that we put our pants on the same way you do, and we really care about the community."

So far, police efforts already have worked to address one nuisance issue in Stockton.

In meeting with residents, law enforcement found there was a residence that had been vacant for more than a year. Neighbors were reporting the lights were on, and they suspected squatters.

An investigation found that while the home was still empty, and in some disrepair, the owners had left the electricity on because the basement would often flood in a rainstorm and they needed to maintain power to the sump pump. The home has since been cleaned up "and it's not an eyesore anymore to the community," Trotter said.

Reggie Hancock, 81, of Stockton attended the first meeting between neighbors and law enforcement. He said there were about eight people at the meeting, and blamed the low turnout on Hurricane Irene, which passed Delmarva that week.

"They showed real interest in helping our community," said Hancock, a retired state trooper and former Worcester County Commissioner. "As time goes on, perhaps interest (from residents) will grow... Overall, I really think the Sheriff's Office is trying to make an effort to help small communities. We're just encouraged they're paying some attention to us and trying to correct some of these problems."

Hancock said his Crime Watch group will meet quarterly, and suspects the next meeting will fall around the holiday season. He remembers how the last version of the neighborhood watch died out.

"This time, there appears to be more determination and concern, so I trust this one will be more successful," he said.

http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20111026/NEWS01/110260368/Sheriff-rekindles-neighborhood-watches

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