Breaking news: Santa's sleigh gets clearance from FAA

Santa One -- Santa's reindeer-powered sleigh -- has passed all safety inspections and is ready to fly higher, faster and more efficiently to deliver toys to good little girls and boys this Christmas, the Federal Aviation Administration reported Thursday.

The news was announced at the North Pole, after what the agency describes as a "thorough" safety inspection. The FAA says it was especially impressed with the aircraft's NextGen system.

"The satellite-based technology the elves have installed on Santa One will ensure that Santa stays safe and reaches all of his rooftops on time," U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in the announcement. "As a result of this improved technology, Santa will be able to deliver more presents to more children around the world."

(Unless, of course, they've been naughty.)

Santa One is scheduled to make its way around the globe at 50,000 feet -- much higher than commercial aircraft are allowed to fly -- making for a more efficient trip, the FAA said. Moreover, the FAA noted, "gumdrop-enhanced avionics installed in Rudolph's red nose will make it 10 times brighter, allowing the elves to track Santa One even during the type of heavy snowfall expected this Christmas."

The FAA noted that the NextGen technology, which, not so coincidentally, is also the name of the agency's new air-traffic control system for improving air travel, will have a positive ripple effect on the economy and the environment.

See if you can keep up with the FDA's logic: Faster travel means more gifts. The need for more gifts means more jobs for elves -- with hiring up a reported 50% at the North Pole. Moreover, the faster routes are said to be better for the environment (the reindeer don't need to eat as much because they don't have to expend as much energy).

"The improved efficiency means reindeer will consume 1,080 fewer pounds of carrots this year. The trickle-down effect is expected to benefit the Easter Bunny," the FAA says.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's department in yet more trouble

Arpaio responded to those allegations by calling them isolated incidents, as opposed to evidence of systemic problems.

But this week brought even more negative headlines for the self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America:

-- Monday: Miriam Mendiola-Martinez, who was jailed in Maricopa County in 2009, filed a lawsuit alleging that she was shackled on and off during her pregnancy -- including immediately after her son's C-section birth, according to the Phoenix New Times. Shackling pregnant women runs afoul of Arizona and federal corrections policies, the paper said.

-- Tuesday: The family of Maricopa County inmate Ernest Atencio took him off life support, the Associated Press reported. Atencio, who was found unresponsive after fighting with sheriff's deputies, had been booked on an assault charge earlier this month. His family is reportedly considering filing a lawsuit.

-- Wednesday: Maricopa County detention officers turned in their federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement credentials in a staged-for-the-media event, the Arizona Republic reported. The Department of Homeland Security, in response to the Justice Department report, had stripped them of their authority to detain people on immigration charges.

-- Thursday: A judge is scheduled to hear arguments in a lawsuit that accuses the sheriff's department of racial profiling during its high-profile “sweeps,” the AP said. Since January 2008, undocumented immigrants accounted for 57% of the 1,500 people arrested in the sweeps, the sheriff's office said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/12/sheriff-joe-arpaio-arizona-illegal-immigration-maricopa-county-jail.html

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Through charitable giving, Americans spread the wealth

Despite the tough economy, or perhaps because of it, Americans are giving more to charity and volunteering more than ever — and more than the rest of the world.

December 21, 2011

In the midst of hard times, Americans are volunteering more and giving more to charity compared with last year and with the rest of the world. According to an annual poll conducted by the international Charities Aid Foundation, with results announced Monday, the people of the United States ranked as the most generous in the world in terms of time and money in 2011, up from fifth place in 2010.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans said they had donated money to charity, more than 40% volunteered their time, and close to three-fourths said they had helped a stranger. The country improved in all three measurements over the past year.

For a country this well off — and yes, in comparable terms, it still is — the number of Americans dipping into their wallets is still a little on the low side. The most generous with their money are the people of Thailand, where 85% said they had donated to charity. In the United Kingdom, 79% of people gave money, but the British — and the rest of the world — are about half as likely to do volunteer work as Americans.

The poll didn't measure how much people donated, only whether they did. But according to another poll released Monday, this one by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans are indeed growing more generous. More than half of the U.S. charities surveyed said they were receiving more money than last year; a fifth of them expected donations to be up 20% or more. That happy turn of events was dampened, though, by the news that the demand for aid was rising faster than donations.

These are trends worth pondering as the nation debates whether to keep the charitable tax deduction, and in what form. President Obama has proposed reducing it, and in the past there has been discussion of getting rid of it. It's unclear to what extent the deduction spurs charitable giving, or how it interacts with other factors including the state of the economy.

Obviously — and thankfully — there's more to the giving equation than how much people get back when they file their taxes. We like to think that the higher giving this year occurred at least in part because of, not despite, the difficult employment situation. At some markets here in Southern California, you can see shoppers emerging from the stores not with a can or two to donate to the food banks outside, but a bag or two. The spreading phenomenon of this holiday season is the "layaway angel" with people showing up at Kmart stores to pay off the shopping balances of needy strangers. As the Charities Aid Foundation poll found, Americans are particularly likely to help strangers, and these acts of kindness belie the country's "every man for himself" reputation.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-charity-20111221,0,4246250,print.story

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From Google News

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NYPD's spying programs produced mixed results

NEW YORK— When New York undercover officers and informants were infiltrating a mosque in Queens in 2006, they failed to notice the increasingly radical sentiments of a young man who prayed there. Police also kept tabs on a Muslim student group at Queens College, but missed a member's growing anti-Americanism.

Those two men, Najibullah Zazi at the mosque and Adis Medunjanin at the school, would go on to be accused of plotting a subway bombing that officials have called the most serious terrorist threat to the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

Ever since The Associated Press began revealing New York Police Department spying programs on mosques, student groups, Muslim businesses and communities, those activities have been stoutly defended by police and supporters as having foiled a list of planned attacks.

Recently, for instance, when three members of Congress suggested an inquiry into those programs, Republican Rep. Peter King of New York rallied to the NYPD's defense.

"Under Commissioner Ray Kelly's leadership, at least 14 attacks by Islamic terrorists have been prevented by the NYPD," King said.

But a closer review of the cases reveals a more complicated story.

The list cited by King includes plans that may never have existed as well as plots the NYPD had little or no hand in disrupting. According to a review of public documents, materials obtained by the AP and interviews with dozens of city and federal officials, the most controversial NYPD spying programs produced mixed results. The officials interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly.

There indeed have been successes, such as the 2004 plot uncovered by the NYPD to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan.

And there have been failures, like Zazi and Medunjanin, who were exactly the kind of people police intended to spot when they developed the spying programs.

And there were other efforts that compiled data on innocent people but produced no meaningful results at all.

Kelly has spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming the department into one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. In a city that still hurts from 9/11 and still sees a hole in the ground near where the World Trade Center stood, people have had little interest in questioning whether that effort has been effective. City lawmakers, for instance, learned about many of the department's secretive programs from the AP.

For New Yorkers, the result is that fear of another terrorist attack is used to justify spying on entire neighborhoods. And the absence of another attack is held up as evidence that it works.

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Some of the NYPD intelligence programs were born out of fear and desperation. After 9/11, police reached for whatever might work.

One idea was to use informants to trawl local mosques and monitor imams to watch for signs of radicalization. Though the NYPD denies the term exists, several former officials said the informants were known as "mosque crawlers." They would listen in mosques and report back to their handlers.

It was the CIA that first developed that idea overseas and came up with the name. The NYPD program was a version of that effort, according to former CIA officials who were familiar with it. Like many interviewed about the NYPD, they insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss intelligence programs.

Former senior CIA officials said the mosque crawlers were ineffective.

In New York, however, the program persisted. With help from the mosque crawlers and secret NYPD squads, documents show, police intelligence analysts scrutinized every mosque in and around the city and infiltrated dozens. The monitoring of imams included even those who worked closely with police and preached against violence.

These days, however, fewer imams are under investigation, an official said.

The NYPD has pledged to do all it can to prevent terrorism. So when a new intelligence program is conceived, several current and former officials said, there is little discussion of its prospects for success.

NYPD intelligence chief David Cohen, a former top CIA official, was asked about that in September 2005 during a deposition in a lawsuit over the department's policy of randomly searching the bags of subway riders. Civil rights lawyers asked how police knew whether a program deterred terrorism.

"If it works against them, then it works for us," Cohen replied. "That is deterrent to one degree or other."

Cohen was asked, How do you know it works? Is there some police methodology?

"I never bothered to look," Cohen said. "It doesn't exist, as far as I could tell."

At times, police officials themselves have raised concerns about intelligence-gathering programs. In about 2008, for instance, police began monitoring everyone in the city who legally changed names. Anyone who might be a Muslim convert or appeared to be Americanizing his or her name was investigated and personal information was put into police databases.

Current and former officials say it produced no results. Police still receive the list of names of people who change their names, court officials said. But one official said the program is on hold while its effectiveness is evaluated.

Kelly has said the NYPD does not trawl neighborhoods and instead only pursues leads. But those leads can be ambiguous, officials say, and can be used to justify widespread surveillance programs.

For example, the NYPD began the "Moroccan Initiative," a secret program that chronicled Moroccan neighborhoods, after suicide bombings killed 45 people in the Moroccan city of Casablanca in 2003, and after Moroccan terrorists were linked to the 2005 train bombing in Madrid. New York police put people, including U.S. citizens, under surveillance and catalogued where they ate, worked and prayed.

"What we were doing is following leads," Kelly told City Council members during an October hearing when asked about that program. "The Moroccan issue that was mentioned had to do with a specific investigation."

But officials involved in the program said there was no specific threat to New York from Moroccans. The Moroccan Initiative thwarted no plots and led to no arrests, officials said.

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Much of the information in the Moroccan Initiative was gathered by a secretive squad known as the Demographics Unit. Using plainclothes officers known as "rakers," the squad infiltrated local businesses and community organizations looking for trouble or "hot spots." Their daily reports helped create searchable databases of life in New York's Muslim neighborhoods.

One NYPD official said that unit identified a Brooklyn bookstore as a hot spot. That led police to open an investigation and send in an informant and undercover detective, ultimately leading to the arrests of two men in the Herald Square case.

The work of that secret unit, the official said, helped the NYPD arrest a Pakistani immigrant named Shahawar Matin Siraj and foiled an attack.

For years, police have said publicly that the Herald Square case began with a tip but have not elaborated. Siraj's lawyer, Martin Stolar, said prosecutors provided no documents related to the Demographics Unit at trial.

Siraj was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2007. But defense attorneys, and even some inside the NYPD intelligence unit, said police had coaxed the men into making incriminating statements and there was no proof Siraj ever obtained explosives.

The case is arguably the NYPD's greatest counterterrorism success. But there are others.

The NYPD played an important role in the case against Carlos Amonte and Mohammed Alessa, two New Jersey men who pleaded guilty to charges they tried to leave the country in 2010 to join the al-Qaida-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab. The FBI long had been aware of the two men but had been unable to win their trust with an informant or undercover agent, federal officials said. The NYPD, with its deep roster of Muslim officers, provided the undercover officer who ultimately succeeded in winning their confidence.

When the NYPD's effectiveness is questioned, the department's most ardent supporters frequently point to a long list of terrorist plots said to have targeted New York since 9/11. The list often is described as plots thwarted by the NYPD.

"One can't argue with results," said Peter Vallone, the New York city councilman who heads the Public Safety Committee. "The results of this gargantuan effort have been that at least 13 planned attacks on New York City have been prevented."

In reality, however, the NYPD played little or no role in preventing many of those attacks.

Some, like a cyanide plot against the subway system, were discovered among evidence obtained overseas but were never set into motion. Others, like the 2006 plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners using liquid explosives, were thwarted by U.S. and international authorities, and plans never got off the ground.

And some, like the 2008 subway plot, went unnoticed by the NYPD despite the money and manpower devoted to monitoring Muslim communities, according to the NYPD files obtained by the AP. The files along with interviews show the NYPD was monitoring Zazi's mosque, and also the Muslim student organization Medunjanin attended. Zazi and Medunjanin were friends and had been praying together regularly since 9th grade. As the years passed, Zazi grew increasingly upset about civilians killed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan; Medunjanin was outraged by the way Muslims were treated at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and he promoted jihad at the mosque and after basketball games with friends, according to court documents. He said his friends didn't have the "balls" to do anything.

The plot was discovered after U.S. intelligence intercepted an email revealing that Zazi was trying to make a bomb.

Those programs, meanwhile, have widened the chasm between the police and the city's Muslims, a community the Obama administration says is a crucial partner in the effort to prevent another terrorist attack. Fed up with a decade of being under scrutiny, some Muslim groups now urge against going directly to police when someone hears radical, anti-American talk.

They reason that the person is probably a police informant.

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Each morning at the NYPD, Cohen meets his senior officers to discuss the latest intelligence before he briefs Kelly. There is no bigger target for terrorists than New York, the nation's largest city and the heart of the financial and media world. Cohen repeatedly reminds his officers that, on any given day, they might be the only thing standing in the way of disaster. It's a mentality that officials say underscores the seriousness of the threat and the NYPD's commitment to the effort.

Several current and former officials point to that pressure to explain why programs rarely get scrapped, even when there are doubts about their effectiveness. Nobody wants to be the one to abandon a program, only to witness a successful attack that it might have prevented.

At the federal level, intelligence programs are reviewed by Congress, inspectors general and other watchdogs. The NYPD faces no such scrutiny from the City Council or city auditors. Federal officials, too, have been reluctant to question the effectiveness of the NYPD, despite spending more than $1.6 billion in federal money on the department since 9/11.

After House Democrats circulated a letter signed by 34 members of Congress recently asking for a federal review of the NYPD's intelligence programs, King, the New York Republican, accused them of smearing the police department.

The Justice Department under Eric Holder repeatedly has sidestepped questions about what it thinks about the NYPD programs revealed by the AP. Some Democrats in Congress have asked prosecutors to investigate. Since August, the department has said only that it is reviewing those requests.

During the Bush administration, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and senior Justice Department officials received a briefing in New York about the NYPD's capabilities, according to a former federal official who attended.

Gonzales left convinced, the official said, that the federal government could not replicate those programs. The NYPD had more manpower and operated under different rules than the federal government, the Justice Department concluded. And the mayor had accepted the political risk that came with the programs.

It was a policy briefing only, the former official said, meaning the federal government did not review the NYPD programs to determine whether they were lawful.

The NYPD's terrorist cases include ones the federal government has declined to prosecute. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh on the most serious charge initially brought against them, a high-level terror conspiracy count that carried the potential for life in prison without parole. They were indicted on lesser state terrorism and hate crime charges, including one punishable by up to 32 years behind bars.

Last month, NYPD detectives arrested Jose Pimentel on terrorism-related charges. A state grand jury has yet to indict him on those charges. Federal and city law enforcement officials who reviewed the case told the AP there were concerns that Pimentel lacked the mental capacity to act on his own. The NYPD informant's drug use in the case also created serious issues, the officials said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has tried to mute criticisms of the NYPD. On a visit to the Newark, N.J., FBI office a few years ago, current and former officials recall, agents asked Mueller how the NYPD was allowed to operate undercover in the state, with no FBI coordination. Mueller replied that it was a reality the bureau would have to live with, the officials said.

There will always be some debate over the effectiveness of intelligence-gathering programs, particularly ones that butt up against civil liberties. Nearly a decade after the last terrorist suspect was waterboarded in a secret CIA prison in 2003, for instance, politicians and experts still debate whether the tactic gleaned valuable information and whether it could have been obtained without such harsh methods.

During the Bush administration, officials repeatedly pointed to the years without a successful terrorist attack to justify the most contentious programs from the war on terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney used the years without an attack to defend the secret National Security Agency wiretapping program. Gonzales credited the USA Patriot Act and military actions abroad. And President George W. Bush said the years without an attack validated his polices.

"While there's room for honest and healthy debate about the decisions I've made -- and there's plenty of debate," Bush said in the final days of his presidency, "there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe."

When questioned about its own programs, the NYPD has made the same arguments.

During the 2005 deposition over the subway searches, lawyers pressed Cohen to explain how the NYPD could be so sure its programs really worked.

"They haven't attacked us," he said.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2011/12/23/nypds_spying_programs_produced_mixed_results/

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Where's Santa Claus? OnStar, NORAD tracker goes live Christmas Eve

(CBS) - The in-vehicle information provider OnStar joins the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in their effort to track Santa Clause this Christmas.

On Dec. 24 at 7 a.m. EST OnStar users will be able to press the blue OnStar button and get an update on Santa's whereabouts. This is the third year the company will provide this service.

NORAD kicks off countdown to track Santa, with help from Google

Google has also partnered with NORAD to bring us closer to Santa. Their Santa tracker is available online and via mobile phones, starting at 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve.

Tracking Santa Claus has been a long-time tradition for NORAD. It all began over 50 years, as the website recounts:

NORAD says tracking will also be available on apps at the Apple App Store, Android Market, Facebook , Google+ , YouTube and Twitter .

We certainly hope Santa doesn't lose our GPS coordinates. Cookies await!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57347749-501465/wheres-santa-claus-onstar-norad-tracker-goes-live-christmas-eve/

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The Difference in Police Leadership on Immigration and Civil Rights

The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division just released the long-awaited results of its investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his department. Sheriff Joe's tactics may have been headline-grabbing, but they have caused serious harm to his community and the people he swore an oath to protect and serve.

What citizens and community-policing advocates have known for years was officially confirmed by the Justice Department's investigative findings. Arpaio, far from being a role model for local or federal law enforcement, has destroyed the trust of his community, especially when it comes to immigrants and Latinos in Arizona.

The report confirms that tactics like Arpaio's are rooted in racial profiling: "Since roughly 2007, in the course of establishing its immigration enforcement program, MCSO has implemented practices that treat Latinos as if they are all undocumented, regardless of whether a legitimate factual basis exists to suspect that a person is undocumented" (page 6); that his policing practices damage law enforcement's relationship with all Latinos in the community: a "wall of distrust between MCSO officers and Maricopa County Latino residents" (page 2); and that he has made it harder for law enforcement officers to fight crime, as expressed by the MCSO deputy who "bemoaned the impact of MCSO's immigration-related operations, stressing that they 'affect our ability to work in a community that hates you'" (page 16).

Every day that Arpaio has focused on terrorizing immigrant and Latino communities, while serious criminals roam the streets of Maricopa County, it has made other law enforcement officials' jobs harder across the nation. Law enforcement, and especially those of us who value the Constitution of the United States, should thank the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice for finally taking steps to hold Arpaio accountable for his actions.

The sheriff's obsession with rounding up immigrants was at the cost of more than 400 sex crimes, including dozens of child molestation cases which were ignored or botched. He pursued his extreme immigration enforcement agenda at the expense of criminal activity of every sort. Worse still, his practices have spread to other sheriffs and have even become enshrined in several state laws.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security took unprecedented steps in limiting its cooperation with Arpaio, but until the racial profiling and aggressive tactics he championed are no longer encouraged through state laws like Arizona's and Alabama's, or tacitly condoned by federal programs like Secure Communities, we have not yet eradicated his legacy of fear.

Now let me tell you about another law enforcement leader, one who might be the precise opposite of Sheriff Arpaio. Patrick Vincent Murphy grew up with the New York Police Department, the son of a cop who also became a cop. In 1970 he became Commissioner of NYPD, named to the position by Mayor John Lindsay. Commissioner Murphy, a reformer, battled corruption and championed professionalism through better education, race relations and less physical force by cops. He led the police departments of Washington, D.C., Detroit and Syracuse in addition to NYPD. He was also the first director of the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, an agency responsible for making law enforcement more professional and accountable.

Murphy went on to become President of the Police Foundation, advocating new and better practices that promoted sound and just policing in a democratic society. Aware that there was a need to develop an organization to research critical issues with which the law enforcement profession was struggling, Commissioner Murphy was one of ten visionary leaders who created the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).

Both the Police Foundation and PERF have recently concluded studies and produced reports that recommended the need to have local law enforcement removed from the enforcement of immigration law - just the opposite of what Sheriff Arpaio and his department have been doing. Both concluded that the impact of such enforcement would lead to negative impacts on community policing and they cautioned about the possibility that racial profiling could be a by-product. In fact, these tactics and their result was exactly what the U.S. Department of Justice uncovered in their investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.

I had the honor of knowing and talking to Commissioner Murphy during my career. Pat was a wise man who shared his knowledge and wisdom to the benefit of our profession. Our leaders, communities and nation are the better for his work.

At another point in my career, I also had the opportunity to attend a class with Sheriff Arpaio. At the conclusion of the class, he asked us to wait because he had a gift for us. He went to his vehicle and returned with a box full of the book he had written. It was the book that detailed his infamous practices of putting prisoners in tents, feeding them bologna sandwiches, and clothing them in pink undergarments.

During a week where a true leader in our profession passed away, and another "leader" was castigated by the Department of Justice, I can't help but draw a parallel and wonder what the future of our profession beholds. One can only hope that the legacy of Patrick Murphy will live on and his vision and wisdom will eclipse the grandstanding tactics that have stained our profession in Maricopa County, Arizona.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arturo-venegas-jr/the-difference-in-police-_b_1163607.html

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Living with Murder: Safer Detroit begins with knowing your neighbors

Do you know your neighbors? Have you had conversations with them? Do you watch out for their children when they play in the neighborhood?

Simply opening your mouth and saying hello is the easiest way to begin improving safety in your neighborhood. It creates a sense of community and ownership of the property around you.

Detroit has dozens of successful block clubs, but often there is little chance for their members to share information and resources across a city that stretches 139 square miles. City officials are working with groups such as Detroit 300 -- which is hosting a citywide block club meeting Feb. 9 -- to bolster community policing and patrols.

Annie Ellington, chief service officer for Mayor Dave Bing, said it's important to engage young people in neighborhoods and encourage them to take leadership positions. She said younger residents can embrace technology and keep their neighborhoods informed through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Most important, however, is to recruit residents who can dedicate even a slice of their time for safety patrols.

"Many residents have the desire and passion to volunteer to become the eyes and ears of their community, but they struggle with the balance," Ellington said. "There is a great need for patrols, and a huge need for the city to unite because it does make a difference. It creates a level of awareness."

Challenging cynicism

Neighborhood associations are where you trade intelligence, said Dennis Nordmoe, executive director of Urban Neighborhood Initiatives.

"That's where you develop your strategies," he said.

Urban Neighborhood Initiatives has adopted Springwells Village in southwest Detroit to develop a template for building healthy neighborhoods. For 14 years, it has been working with the block club and other organizations on projects such as tree planting and park revitalization.

"It takes a few people being willing to give a lot of time in a very thankless way for the common good," Nordmoe said. "If it's all about power and glory, it's not going to work."

A major challenge, Nordmoe said, is recruiting residents. He said he has encountered a cynical apathy -- an attitude that nothing will ever be accomplished. He said the best way to combat that is to complete small but visible projects.

"It's important to build a rolling momentum of one project after another," he said.

Patricia Dockery, executive director for North End Central Woodward Alliance, which is funded through the Skillman Foundation's Good Neighborhoods Initiative, said every block club needs to be clear about its goals. The alliance works with community groups, including churches, block clubs and community development corporations.

"People have to understand the mutual benefit," she said. "If you're asking people to buy into something, you should be clear as to what it is you want them to buy into."

Dockery stresses it's important to hold events that bring neighbors together. Earlier this year, her community held a resource fair that also included live jazz, a carnival, bounce houses and a petting zoo.

"We had a real fair, right in the heart of the community," Dockery said. "It created a sense of pride in the community, a sense of hope, like it's not so desolate here."

New law could help

A bill in the state House would allow Detroiters to funnel tax money toward additional security in neighborhoods.

Detroit neighborhoods such as Grandmont and Rosedale on the west side have lobbied the Legislature to change parameters of the Home Rule City Act so that cities with populations of more than 600,000 could let residents vote to create special assessment districts, where tax money could be used for services, such as security.

The changes have passed both chambers of the Legislature and await Gov. Rick Snyder's signature. After that, residents would need the Detroit City Council to pass an ordinance to implement the legislation.

Residents in a proposed district would vote on whether they want to adopt a tax, and residents would decide how that money would be used to increase security.

"Neighborhood patrols are good, but they only get you so far," said Tom Goddeeris, executive director of the Grandmont Rosedale Development Corp. "The real advantage of this idea is that it would be a recurring source of money."

Building a strong crime prevention program

How to build a thriving block club

Murder's toll -- and solutions

Last month, the Free Press presented a three-day series of reports and a documentary titled "Living with Murder." The series examined the toll homicides have had on Detroit, its neighborhoods, law enforcement officials and victims' families during the last decade.

The newspaper hosted a community forum and is committed to exploring additional solutions.

Today's report is intended to help residents establish and strengthen community groups and overall interaction to help combat crime.

See the Free Press series "Living with Murder" at freep.com /livingwithmurder

http://www.freep.com/article/20111223/NEWS01/112230362/Living-Murder-Safer-Detroit-begins-knowing-your-neighbors

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