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NEWS of the Day - April 17, 2012
on some NAACC / LACP issues of interest

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NEWS of the Day - April 17, 2012
on some issues of interest to the community policing and neighborhood activist across the country

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following group of articles from local newspapers and other sources constitutes but a small percentage of the information available to the community policing and neighborhood activist public. It is by no means meant to cover every possible issue of interest, nor is it meant to convey any particular point of view ...

We present this simply as a convenience to our readership ...

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From the Washington Times

Norway killer: ‘I would have done it again'

by Karl Ritter

OSLO, Norway (AP) — Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik defended his massacre of 77 people, insisting Tuesday he would do it all again and calling his rampage the most “spectacular” attack by a nationalist militant since World War II.

Reading a prepared statement in court, the anti-Muslim extremist lashed out at Norwegian and European governments for embracing immigration and multiculturalism.

He claimed to be speaking as a commander of an “anti-communist” resistance movement and an anti-Islam militant group he called the Knights Templar. Prosecutors have said the group does not exist.

Maintaining he acted out of “goodness, not evil” to prevent a wider civil war, Breivik vowed, “I would have done it again.”

Pressed by prosecutors later to explain what he meant, he compared his attacks to the U.S. atom bombs on Japan during World War II.

“They did it for something good. To prevent further war,” Breivik said.

Breivik has five days to explain why he set off a bomb in Oslo's government district on July 22, killing eight people, and then gunned down 69 others at a Labor Party youth camp outside the Norwegian capital. He denies criminal guilt, saying he was acting in self-defense, and claims the targets were part of a conspiracy to “deconstruct” Norway 's cultural identity.

“The attacks on July 22 were a preventive strike. I acted in self-defense on behalf of my people, my city, my country,” he said as he finished his statement, in essence a summary of the 1,500-page manifesto he posted online before the attacks. “I therefore demand to be found innocent of the present charges.”

He didn't express regret, but told prosecutors he would have preferred attacking a conference of Norwegian journalists instead of the Utoya youth camp, where most of the victims were teenagers.

“Unfortunately I wasn't able to carry out” an attack against that conference, he added.

Breivik's testimony was delayed after one of the five judges hearing the case was dismissed for his comments online the day after the attack that said Breivik deserves the death penalty. Lawyers on all sides had requested that lay judge Thomas Indreboe be taken off the trial, saying the comments violated his impartiality. He was replaced by backup lay judge Elisabeth Wisloeff.

Norway doesn't have the death penalty. If found mentally sane — the key issue to be decided in the trial — Breivik could face a maximum 21-year prison sentence or an alternate custody arrangement that would keep him locked up as long as he is considered a menace to society.

Breivik is being tried by a panel of two professional judges and three lay judges — citizens appointed for four-year terms who participate on an equal basis in deciding guilt and sentencing. The system is designed to let ordinary people have a role in the Norwegian justice system, though the lead judge still runs the trial.

Again on Tuesday — just like the start of his trial on Monday — Breivik entered the court smirking before flashing a clenched-fist salute.

Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen repeatedly interrupted Breivik on Tuesday, asking him to keep his statement short.

“It is critically important that I can explain the reason and the motive” for the massacre, Breivik replied.

According to Breivik, Western Europe was gradually taken over by “Marxists and multiculturalists” after World War II because it didn't have “anti-communist” leaders like U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The senator dominated the early 1950s with his sensational but unproven charges of Communist subversion in high government circles in the U.S. His probes gave rise to the term McCarthyism, which describes the persecution of innocent people on the charge of being Communists.

“But even McCarthy was too moderate,” Breivik said.

Mette Yvonne Larsen, a lawyer representing victim's families, also interrupted Breivik, saying she was getting complaints from victims who were concerned that the defendant was turning the trial into a platform to profess his extremist views. Her remarks prompted the judge to again urge Breivik to wrap it up.

Breivik replied if he wasn't allowed to continue he might not speak at all.

He warned that Europe was heading toward a civil war between “nationalists and internationalists” and praised others suspected of right-wing extremist attacks in Europe. They included Peter Mangs, a Swede suspected of a string of shootings against immigrants in 2010 and three Germans — Uwe Boehnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Beate Zschaepe — suspected in the killings of eight people of Turkish origin, a Greek man, and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.

Asked why he started crying on Monday, when prosecutors showed an anti-Muslim film that Breivik posted on YouTube before the attacks, he said: “I was thinking about Norway and Europe, which are ruled by politicians and journalists killing our country. I was thinking that my country is dying.”

On Monday, Breivik rejected the authority of the court, calling it a vehicle of the “multiculturalist” political parties in power in Norway. He confessed to the “acts” that caused the 77 deaths but pleaded not guilty.

Even his lawyers concede his defense is unlikely to succeed, and said the main thing for them was to convince the court that Breivik is not insane.

One official psychiatric examination found him legally insane while another reached the opposite conclusion. It is up to the panel to decide whether to send him to prison or compulsory psychiatric care.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/17/norway-killer-i-would-have-done-it-again/?page=all#pagebreak

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School bus drivers take turns for the worse

Rash of reports of reckless behavior

by Ben Wolfgang

School bus drivers across the nation have made headlines recently for all the wrong reasons, including spectacular crashes and charges of drunken driving and theft of the iconic yellow vehicle.

While the vast majority of bus drivers get their students to and from school each day with no problems, safety advocates say the rash of incidents, with reports of some operators acting less like responsible public servants and more like irresponsible Otto from “The Simpsons,” is troubling.

“The real problem comes down to economics. We pay these people barely above the minimum wage in some states. You sometimes get what you pay for,” said Alan Ross, president of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety.

Over the past two months, accusations of booze and cigarettes have brought trouble to some drivers. In Sumter, S.C., police say Lauritha McGhaney crashed her school bus into another vehicle, injuring its two occupants, while reaching for a lit cigarette she had dropped onto the floor. No students were on board at the time, but Ms. McGhaney has been charged with reckless driving, driving without a seat belt and smoking on a school bus, the Associated Press reported.

Miguel Rivera, a 49-year-old bus driver from Washington, Pa., has been accused of driving 142 students on a field trip while drunk. After being charged with driving under the influence, Mr. Rivera was stopped 17 hours later while driving drunk in his own vehicle, authorities say. In Grand Junction, Colo., a student texted his mother to say his bus driver smelled of alcohol. The driver, Gary Williams, 54, was later charged with impaired driving.

Shortly after being fired for refusing to adjust his morning route, Farmington, N.H., bus driver Scott Leathe, 52, drove the vehicle home and wouldn't give it back, police said. He was later charged with receiving stolen property but now wants his job back, claiming he was “wrongfully terminated,” the Union Leader reported.

Industry leaders concede that the number of highly publicized negative incidents is alarming, but say they are the exceptions, not the rule.

“I see something every week or so. Sometimes they seem to happen two or three in a row and it looks really bad,” said Bob Riley , executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services. “But the reality is that the school bus is the safest way for children to get to and from school. When you have about 500,000 drivers, you're going to have a problem every now and then. And that's what we've seen.”

The problems extend beyond alcohol and cigarettes; the health of drivers and the safety of the buses also have been questioned. In a Phoenix suburb Monday, five people, including three students, were injured after the brakes of a school bus apparently failed before it rammed into two vehicles in front of it.

Last week, a 13-year-old student in Milton, Wash., safely took over control of his school bus after the driver suffered an apparent heart attack and later died.

Despite those and other events, Mr. Riley said, school bus safety standards - both for the physical conditions of drivers and the mechanics of the vehicles - remain as high as ever. No state or district, he said, has weakened its rules, even as budget cuts have left most school administrators with less money to spend on student transportation.

The quality of bus drivers has actually increased in recent years, Mr. Riley said.

“With the economy the way it is, we have more access to quality employees than we do under a thriving economy. Now, if people have a job, they don't leave,” he said.

Mr. Riley also pointed to statistics showing safety records of school bus drivers. From 2000 to March 2011, only 0.34 percent of all fatal motor vehicle crashes involved school buses or vans, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an arm of the federal Transportation Department.

Even if a bus is involved in an accident, its occupants are less likely to be injured, NHTSA figures show.

Since 2000, a total of 1,386 people have died in school transportation crashes. Of those, 8 percent were school bus occupants. About 20 percent were pedestrians or bicyclists, and the vast majority - about 72 percent - were occupants in another vehicle involved in the crash.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/16/school-bus-drivers-take-turns-for-the-worse/?page=all#pagebreak

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Other targets eyed in NYC plot

Subway allegedly not only location contemplated

by Tom Hays

NEW YORK — Three former high school classmates, after getting terror training at an al Qaeda outpost, discussed bombing New York movie theaters, Grand Central Terminal, Times Square and the New York Stock Exchange before targeting the city's subways, a prosecutor said Monday at the trial for one of them.

Once back home, Adis Medunjanin and the others formed a sleeper cell of would-be suicide bombers that in 2009 nearly pulled off one of the most chilling terror plots since the Sept. 11 attacks, said Assistant U.S. Attorney James Loonam . The terror network valued them for their U.S. passports, which let them slip back into the U.S. and “blend in” until it was time to strike, he said.

The men “were prepared to kill themselves and everyone else around them - men, women and children,” Mr. Loonam said during opening statements in federal court in Brooklyn. “These men came so close - within days of carrying out this attack.”

Defense attorney Robert Gottlieb countered by accusing the government of using “inflammatory rhetoric” about al Qaeda and terrorism to prevent jurors “from seeing the truth about this case.”

The lawyer conceded his client - a Muslim born in Bosnia - had sought to support the Taliban's struggle against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but denied he ever agreed to kill American civilians for al Qaeda.

“The truth is that Adis Medunjanin is not a terrorist,” he said. “ Mr. Medunjanin never planned to bomb the New York City subways.”

Mr. Medunjanin, 27, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, providing material support to a terrorist organization and other charges. The college graduate and naturalized U.S. citizen wore a dark suit in court Monday and had a long, dark beard.

The defendant's childhood friends from Queens, Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay, have previously admitted in guilty pleas that they wanted to avenge U.S. military action in the Arab world by becoming martyrs.

In his first public account, Ahmedzay testified for the government Monday that Mr. Medunjanin encouraged him to follow a more radical form of Islam by giving him recordings of sermons of U.S.-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

While sitting in a car outside a Queens mosque, the three men “made a covenant to go to Afghanistan and fight with the mujahedeen against American forces,” he said.

Ahmedzay testified the three men traveled in 2008 to Pakistan, where they met al Qaeda recruiters who told them they would be better suited for a suicide mission in the U.S. They were driven 10 hours away to a training facility protected by 20-foot mud walls. After morning prayers, English-speaking terrorists taught them how to use grenades, AK-47s and other weapons, he said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/16/us-other-targets-eyed-in-nyc-plot/

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From Google News

Panetta Calls for New Steps to Stop Assaults

by DONNA CASSATA

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday announced new steps to combat sexual assaults in the military, with serious offenses such as rape and forcible sodomy subject to a court-martial review at the authority level of Army colonel or Navy captain.

"Sexual assault has no place in the military. It is a violation of everything that the U.S. military stands for," Panetta told a Capitol Hill news conference after a closed-door meeting with members of the House Armed Services Committee who have pushed for the Pentagon to take aggressive steps to stop sexual assaults.

The Pentagon said Friday that the number of reported sexual assaults had increased slightly last year, with 3,192 cases involving service members as either victims or perpetrators. But the Defense Department also has estimated that 86 percent of sexual assaults go unreported, a reflection of the fear some have for the prosecutorial system or their own standing in the service.

Panetta said that as Pentagon chief he would issue a directive changing the way cases are handled. A higher authority within the military now will review the most serious cases, ensuring that cases remain within the chain of the command and leaders are held responsible.

He said he would work with Congress on legislation implementing several other initiatives, including creation of special victims units within the services, allowing National Guard and reserve members to remain on active duty after they file a complaint and an explanation of sexual assault policies to all service members within 14 days of their entry in the military.

These initiatives are likely to be included in the sweeping defense bill that the House Armed Services panel will be crafting beginning next week.

"This is a strong package. It is essential, we believe, to being able to prevent and respond to the crime of sexual assault," Panetta said. "There's no silver bullet when it comes to this issue. But what is required is that everyone, from the secretary to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs all the way down, every command level, be sensitive to this issue, be aware that they bear the responsibility to take action on these cases. The most important thing we can do is prosecute the offenders."

Panetta, who was joined by Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned the steps the Pentagon has taken previously, including the creation of a 24/7 hotline and the selection of a two-star general to head the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.

"Our men and women in uniform should not fear their fellow service members," Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, told reporters at the news conference. Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Mass., talked of a "renewed commitment to address this grievous issue." Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., focused on treating victims with respect.

In its annual report to Congress, the Defense Department said there were 3,192 reports of sexual assault involving service members as either victims or perpetrators at the end of September 2011, a 1 percent increase over the previous year. The number of reported cases in 2010 was 3,158 assaults, in the previous year it was 3,230.

The report also found that courts martial were used more frequently now in disciplining offenders. Of the 791 military sexual offenders punished last year, 62 percent faced a court martial. That compares with 52 percent in 2010 and 30 percent in 2007. The proportion of cases in which less severe forms of discipline are pursued, such as administrative actions and discharges, has declined in that same period.

"Sexual assault is a crime that has no place in the Department of Defense, and the department's leadership has a zero-tolerance policy against it," the report said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/panetta-calls-steps-stop-assaults-16151778

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Duluth citizen patrols, police stress safety first

You could call it a walk with purpose.

by Mike Creger

You could call it a walk with purpose.

Debbie Isabell-Nelson and her Morgan Park citizen patrol group were out in the brisk weather late Monday afternoon, as they are every day, walking the street grid in the tightly knit community.

Citizen patrols are alive and well in Duluth, where there are six groups.

The Morgan Park walkers, along with patrols in other communities along the St. Louis River — Riverside, Gary-New Duluth, Fond du Lac — will hold a recruitment and training session tonight at the community center in Morgan Park, where they also will celebrate their partnership with Duluth Police Officer Jim Rodman. He is moving to the Life Safety Office within the Duluth Fire Department.

The recruitment is key as patrols have been in a harsh spotlight since the Feb. 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida by an armed citizen patrol member, George Zimmerman.

It's something that could never happen in Duluth, Isabell-Nelson said.

“No one carries any weapons,” she said. “The first thing we do is call.”

Patrol members are screened and background checks are done.

There is extensive training that is ongoing for those who want to remain on patrol. Police keep in close contact with the patrols to get a feel for what people are seeing and to ask about any areas of concern.

Duluth Police Information Officer Jim Hansen said you can't predict what any one individual might do, but he is confident that the patrol members in Duluth know what is expected of them.

“We just call if we see something and stay out of it,” Morgan Park's Timothy Olson said. Patrollers take their own personal safety seriously and let police do what they are equipped for, he said.

Officers working with citizen patrols are able to better gauge how communities work and provide an extended police eye on problem areas. It's part of the concept of community policing that Duluth has taken on the past two decades.

Lincoln Park has the largest group with more than 60 members.

That hasn't always been the case.

Duluth Police Information Officer Jim Hansen worked with the Lincoln Park patrol for 13 years when he was the community officer there. He left for his current position just more than a year ago.

Lincoln Park residents were looking for a better relationship with police in 2006 as the patrol there dwindled and a series of crimes had people on alert.

“I took it personally,” Hansen said of the dissatisfaction with the job he and his co-officers were doing.

A beefed up police-public collaboration has healed some wounds, he said.

Hansen said patrols are proving more vital every year as police learn to trust civilian observations about their neighborhoods.

“After a while, they earn their credibility,” he said.

The Lincoln Park group has office hours at the police station in West Duluth, another novel approach to policing, Hansen said.

“It was a leap,” he said. “This is stuff that's just never happened before.”

The patrols are working, Hansen said, as the platform of community policing has taken hold the past 15 years.

Now, seeing an uptick in crimes downtown, police are asking for a patrol there to extend its presence.

“After time, we saw the value in it,” Hansen said of patrols.

He said the patrol in Lincoln Park was key to easing tensions there after a large fight rattled residents.

“People were walking for weeks, day and night,” Hanson said. “That had an impact and the neighbors were thankful. It's a small thing that was huge for us.”

Isabell-Nelson said Morgan Park is lucky to not have a whole lot of crime problems, but the patrol is welcomed nonetheless.

“We're in the community, they see the shirts,” she said. “People feel they have someone to talk to and we will notice if something is not quite right.”

She admits that she has approached people she knows are up to some illegal activity. She makes it non-confrontational, saying her grandmother side kicks in as she lets people know that their activity affects the whole neighborhood.

“I talk to them,” she said, and explains how much the health of the community means to her.

It's why she's out on patrol every day.

“I'm proud to be a part of this.”

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/228803/

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How Safe Do You Feel in Your Neighborhood

FAITH LAPIDUS: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Faith Lapidus.

BOB DOUGHTY: And I'm Bob Doughty. Political and social scientist James Q. Wilson was interested in a great many subjects. But he was best known for his research into the behavior of criminals and police. He helped change the way policing is done is America.

FAITH LAPIDUS: James Q. Wilson died last month at the age of eighty. This week on our program we look back at his influence on modern policing. We also look at some of the ways technology is leading law enforcement into the future.

James Q. Wilson in 1972 BOB DOUGHTY: In March nineteen eighty-two, the Atlantic magazine published an article that described a theory of community policing. That theory would come to influence a new direction in American law enforcement.

James Q. Wilson wrote the article with criminologist George Kelling. Crime and disorder in a community are usually linked, they said, and they used an example. "Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones," they wrote.

The idea was that keeping order in a community and fighting low-level crime can lead to a reduction in more serious crimes. The article was called "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety." The theory came to be known as the "broken windows" theory.

FAITH LAPIDUS: The ideas the authors presented were largely based on psychology and how people form opinions about the safety of a neighborhood. Their research showed that people base their opinions less on the actual crime rate and more on whether the area appears safe and orderly.

They said "one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares." If a window is broken and then quickly fixed, it sends a message that people care enough to keep order in the neighborhood.

The link that the two researchers made between disorder and crime is indirect. Disorder leads to citizen fear, which leads to weakened social controls. And those weakened controls create conditions where crimes are more likely to occur.

The solution, the authors said, was a kind of community policing centered on preventing crimes rather than just reacting to them.

BOB DOUGHTY: The broken windows theory represented a very different way to look at policing methods at a time when, in many cities, crime seemed out of control.

John DeCarlo is a professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. He says crime rates in the United States rose sharply from the nineteen sixties to the middle of the nineteen nineties.

JOHN DeCARLO: "We had seen crime rates during the eighties that the country had literally never seen before. The violent crime rate and the property crime rate were exceptionally high. Criminologists across the United States had pretty much given up hope that police could have any effect on crime."

That crime wave included the so-called crack wars, the violent competition between drug dealers in the rise of crack cocaine.

FAITH LAPIDUS: In the nineteen nineties, the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, began a crime reduction program in the city. His first police commissioner, William Bratton, used ideas similar to what James Q. Wilson had been writing about. These included putting more police officers on foot instead of in cars. More attention went into targeting low-level criminals and keeping order in neighborhoods.

Professor DeCarlo says this was the beginning of a new way of operating within a police force.

JOHN DeCARLO: "When Bratton came into New York he concentrated on low-level criminals rather than higher-level criminals, thinking that taking care of the low level criminals would automatically take care of the higher-level criminals because, indeed, they were the same people."

BOB DOUGHTY: In nineteen ninety, New York had more than two thousand killings. That same year, William Bratton arrived as chief of the city's transit police. One of the things he did, says Professor DeCarlo, was to send more police officers into the subway system to arrest people for turnstile jumping. That is jumping over the fare gates without paying for a train ride.

JOHN DECARLO: "What happened was they started arresting people for the low-level crime of turnstile jumping, and what happened is they diminished the number of violent criminals because indeed they were the same people. As they started arresting that segment of the population, crime started coming down."

Turnstile jumpers were sometimes found carrying guns or knives. So arresting them prevented more serious crimes, Mr. Bratton would say. He served as transit police chief from nineteen ninety to ninety-one. He left to lead the Boston police. But he returned three years later to become commissioner of the New York Police Department.

By nineteen ninety-eight -- two years after he left that job -- America's largest city had just six hundred twenty-nine homicides. Mr. Bratton has credited his success in reducing crime rates to the methods he based on James Q. Wilson's ideas of community policing.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton ceremonially hands in his badge as he prepares to leave the job in October 2009 William Bratton went on to serve as police chief in Los Angeles, where crime also fell sharply. Today, he is the chairman of Kroll, an investigations and risk consulting company.

FAITH LAPIDUS: The idea of community policing -- of trying to work with the community being policed -- has spread throughout the country.

Finding a balance is not always easy. If policing is seen as overly aggressive, it can deepen mistrust. Police may find more weapons by searching more people on the street. But they need a legal reason to stop someone. If not, they could be accused of violating a person's rights, or racial profiling -- targeting people just because of their race.

Criminal justice professor John DeCarlo says paying attention to low-level crimes can mean different things in different communities. For example, police may focus on traffic violations like speeding. This may not only reduce accidents and improve the quality of life in a community. It also gives the police a chance to check the records and see if a speeder is wanted for more serious crimes.

BOB DOUGHTY: Another change in policing that began in New York in the nineteen nineties is greater use of information technology. CompStat is a name for the idea of using computers to map daily reports of crime and disorder in individual neighborhoods. Professor DeCarlo says this CompStat information can help police know where to target enforcement efforts and resources.

JOHN DeCARLO: “It's a policing management strategy. CompStat is about holding policemen accountable for the areas they work in."

CompStat has critics. They say officers and supervisors who feel pressure to show improvements may be tempted to think of dishonest ways to do it. There have been some cases like this. But experts say the use of CompStat is widely accepted as having revolutionized crime fighting.

FAITH LAPIDUS: James Q. Wilson was born in Denver, Colorado, in nineteen thirty-one. He earned advanced degrees in political science at the University of Chicago. Over his long career, he was a professor at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pepperdine University.

His books ranged from "Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership," published in nineteen sixty, to "The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families." That book came out in two thousand two. He served on a number of national and presidential commissions. And in two thousand three President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

James Q. Wilson died on March second at a Boston hospital. He had been receiving treatment for leukemia.

BOB DOUGHTY: Policing methods continue to evolve and change. New technology continues to be one of the biggest trends in law enforcement.

Tod Burke is a professor of criminal justice at Radford University in Virginia. He says improved crime mapping is a big help for police.

TOD BURKE: "This is taking police officers and placing them in the area where they're really needed. This becomes critical particularly as resources and finances are problematic in many law enforcement departments across the United States, and probably throughout the world."

There are thousands of law enforcement agencies at the local, state and national level in the United States. Today improved CompStat systems are helping to connect departments across the country to share information.

FAITH LAPIDUS: Surveillance cameras are a method of policing widely used in Britain. Cameras are also increasingly used by police in the United States. The trend has spread, especially in busy areas and areas with large populations, like New York.

Computer programs can recognize faces, watch for signs of trouble and attempt to locate gunshots.

In some law enforcement agencies, officers even wear small video cameras. The recordings may help settle any questions about the behavior of officers or the people they deal with.

The use of video cameras can raise privacy concerns, but Professor Burke points out that these days almost everyone has one.

TOD BURKE: "Let's face it, many people have video cameras themselves, many attached to their phones. And that is also aiding in law enforcement efforts -- what I call video vigilantes. Everything is being videotaped, and much of it is going onto social networks such as YouTube and Facebook."

But officers worry that some people are just looking for a chance to try to make the police look bad while doing a dangerous job.

Officials are concerned about an increase in the killing of law enforcement officers in the United States, even as crime rates have dropped.

(MUSIC)

BOB DOUGHTY: Our program was written and produced by Brianna Blake. I'm Bob Doughty.

FAITH LAPIDUS:

And I'm Faith Lapidus. You can find transcripts and MP3s of our programs at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also find a link to that "Broken Windows" article by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson that appeared in the Atlantic magazine. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.

http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/Do-You-Feel-Safe-in-Your-Community-147609525.html

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