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May, 2014 - Week 4

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Documents uncover death threats made against Mandela in US

by The Associated Press

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated multiple death threats against former South Africa president Nelson Mandela during his 1990 visit to the United States and also used an informant to learn details about his trip, according to newly released documents.

The FBI released hundreds of pages of records tied to Mandela's visit, which came months after the anti-apartheid leader was released from a 27-year prison sentence.

Many of the documents have portions blacked out , but they do show that the FBI investigated multiple threats to assassinate Mandela during his trip, including a handwritten note that says, "Remember John F. Kennedy in Dallas???" One threat was phoned into a university in Georgia where Mandela was scheduled to address a rally.

Mandela, who became South Africa's first black president after the end of apartheid in 1994, died in December at the age of 95. Jailed under racist rule, he played a critical role after his release from prison in moving the country out of the apartheid era to an all-race democracy.

The documents were posted on the FBI website in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/documents-uncover-death-threats-made-against-mandela-in-us/article1-1224624.aspx

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New Mexico

Mayor Berry announces Community Policing Councils

by Katherine Mozzone

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) – Better policing and stronger community-police relationships. Mayor R.J. Berry believes it begins with Community Policing Councils. It's why he's set up six throughout the city, in the six APD area commands.

The goal is to have meaningful conversations about the department and the communities they serve, identifying concerns and opportunities along the way.

Mayor Berry says he's been talking to community leaders, families of police shooting victims and officers who have been wounded in the line of duty. He says success for APD and the city begins with a good relationship with the community.

Berry says he will choose neighborhood leaders in each area who will then select community members to participate in the councils. Each council deals with questions, concerns and challenges specific to their area. Berry says these people are expected to be the voice of their communities, talking to neighbors and bringing their concerns to the table.

Mayor Berry says APD officers will also be a part of the councils. The councils, he says, will have voting members so ideas and recommendations will go directly to the chief of police who will take them into account when setting policy.

“This is not an event, going through this process of community policing, this is a process and it's going to take months and years to get where we want to get but what we're trying to do is get these foundations in place,” explains Mayor Berry.

Community leaders on hand for the mayor's announcement say it's everyone's responsibility to participate in the conversation. They say, it's a two-way street, the community has to improve communications with officers and have more respect for APD.

“It just tears me apart when you hear parents telling their kids, don't call 911, you need to fear the cops. That is not the way to go. We need to make some significant improvements to get rid of that attitude,” says Academy Hills Park Neighborhood Association President Donald Couchman.

So, how do you become a member of one of these councils? You can apply online.

Berry says he hopes to have these councils up and running by July. He says he wants to take information gathered by the members and use it in the city's meetings with the Department of Justice. Berry says he plans to announce a second phase about a broad-based community input process in June.

http://krqe.com/2014/05/30/mayor-berry-announces-community-policing-councils/

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Want to prevent Isla Vista-style attacks? Hint: It's not about the guns

Legislators continue to focus on guns, but we also cannot allow the dangerously mentally ill to have access to the myriad other killing tools readily at their disposal in the kitchen drawer, tool shed, or sporting goods store

by Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Editor in Chief

It's been a week since the deadly rampage in Isla Vista that claimed the lives of six innocent people near UC Santa Barbara. Another left dead was the assailant.

While mourning the loss of those young lives, I've also been contemplating the incident from a strategic and tactical perspective.

Not the tactics of fighting a running gunbattle as a deranged gunman performs drive-by shooting after drive-by shooting in a bucolic coastal town. I'm talking about tactics for keeping such a thing from happening in the first place — protecting potential victims by quarantining potential violators.

Missing the Point (and the Blunt Instrument)

Let me make one thing completely clear right up front: This analysis is not to second-guess Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Deputies. I'd like to believe they did everything they legally could during that welfare check, finding “a shy but polite and kind” individual, and moving on to their next call.

Those Deputies did that welfare check several weeks before the chilling ‘Day of Retribution' YouTube video was posted, so they obviously couldn't know about that one, but a report by the Associated Press indicates that the agency — and perhaps also the Deputies themselves — knew of the existence of at least “some disturbing videos” but apparently did not view them.

If those assertions are true, there may be some costly litigation in the future for Santa Barbra County. Regardless, this is NOT about them. I don't know what they saw and/or didn't see because I wasn't there — I'm not going to armchair quaterback from 350 miles away.

Okay, having stated that caveat, let's move along to the issue at hand.

Two days ago, an article was published that stated that “Lawmakers reacted to the Santa Barbara shooting by announcing plans Tuesday for a bill to create a ‘gun violence restraining order.'

“The bill would establish a system in which concerned relatives, intimate partners or friends can notify police about someone showing a propensity toward violence, so police can investigate and seek a judge's order to seize that person's firearms and prevent any purchases.”

As a “reaction” to the massacre in Isla Vista, such a law misses the mark completely.

The first three victims last week were killed with edged weapons and/or blunt instruments. Many of the 18 injured were struck by the violator's car as he drove frantically about the town.

The proposed ‘gun violence restraining order' addresses those struck by gunfire, but not those slaughtered by the blade and/or blunt instrument. Had such a law existed last week, officers could take the guns of the dangerously mentally ill, but leave him or her in place to use any other available weapon — be it purpose-built or improvised — to kill people.

Lawmakers are essentially saying, “Let's lock up the guns, not the person whose brain is so severly distorted that they'd use a hammer, a machete, or an automobile to kill for fun, or for revenge, or for no reason at all.”

That's absolutely preposterous.

Tackling the Heart of the Issue, Head On

The real problem is that the ability and authority of police officers across the country to effect involuntary commitment and/or involuntary treatment is a convoluted mess. Laws vary from state to state and policies vary from agency to agency. To call it a patchwork of incomprehensible inconsistency is way, way too kind.

For example, the legislation governing involuntary civil commitment for psychiatric treatment in California — the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act — was signed into law in 1967. It has been amended on a piecemeal basis many times since its passage five decades ago.

“The California involuntary treatment law is archaic and complex to understand and implement,” Carla Jacobs — a Board Member of the Treatment Advocacy Center — said this week. “It has not kept up to date with scientific knowledge regarding serious mental illness as a neurobiological brain disease.”

What's scary is that California's LPS is actually pretty good by comparison to some other states.

PoliceOne Contributor Rick Wall — a retired LAPD captain who created the agency's procedures for responding to mentally ill subjects — said that California has some of the best laws to assist officers in placing someone on an involuntary hold.

“Once an officer has determined that the subject meets the criteria for an involuntary hold, the law states that the admitting facility has to accept the subject. That is not to say that they will keep the person as it generally becomes a question of resources or beds and the ability to house the patients.”

Remember, under LPS, police officers do not have the power to involuntarily commit someone. They may only detain, assess probable cause, and transport to a designated treatment facility (usually a hospital) where the subject may be temporarily confined. The medical professional — typically a physician — makes the determination as to what happens next. Options range from a 72-hour hold, to simply releasing the individual back into society — essentially free on their own recognizance.

“Some 26 California counties have no psychiatric beds whatsoever for adults,” Jacobs interjected. “When there is no room at the inn, an informal ground-level gate-keeping occurs.”

Jacobs explained there is a common belief that danger has to be imminent — active and vocal threats. “It does not have to be. It never had to be.”

One amendment to LPS (WIC 5150.05, passed in 2002 under AB 1424) addresses the issue of imminent deadly threat, allowing authorized cops to assess probable cause and temporary confinement of an individual based on “the historical course of the person's mental disorder” including family input.

Wall explained, “Many suicidal subjects can maintain their composure or ‘present well' during their encounter with the police. Family members or psychologists may say that ‘they're a danger' and the officers say, ‘I don't see it.' This section [WIC 5150.05] allows the officers to use the opinions of the doctor and the past history as described by the family to establish the pattern of conduct that meets the criteria for the hold.”

This assumes, however, that such historical information is made available to those officers at the time they've got to make such a determination. That's kind of a big — and an unpredictable — “IF.”

Realizing the Realities, Rethinking Our Priorities

Should we allow individuals who are well known to be dangerously, violently, mentally ill to possess firearms? Probably not. But we also cannot allow them access to the myriad other killing tools readily at their disposal in the kitchen drawer, tool shed, or sporting goods store.

The problem is not under-regulation of things — it is insufficient treatment of people.

“The lack of mental health facilities is the true problem,” Wall said. “Recently, Vice President Biden announced $100 million to assist states with the treatment of mentally ill offenders. That comes to $2 million per state. To put it in context, the California State Mental Hospital System budget is one billion dollars.”

Of the 3,800 patients in the California State Mental Hospital System, Wall said that some 90 percent are in jail for crimes that they committed while mentally ill, or were found not guilty by reason of insanity.

“That leaves approximately 350 beds in the state system for the entire population of California. So the problem is not whether there is a system in place, but if there is a bed for the patient.”

“California fails miserably in caring for its most seriously mentally ill citizens. We've closed our hospital beds helter-skelter. Our jails are teaming with inmates whose crimes stemmed from their mental illness because they did not receive adequate treatment preventatively in the community…The entire LPS Act must be reformed,” Jacobs declared.

When asked if there is any other state she might consider an “ideal model” to follow, Jacobs' reply was as chilling as it was brief.

“No.”

http://www.policeone.com/patrol-issues/articles/7242830-Want-to-prevent-Isla-Vista-style-attacks-Hint-Its-not-about-the-guns/

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5 simple rules for staying safer during a Terry stop

The Terry stop is a versatile law enforcement tool that can be used to great effect by officers, but we must be aware of the inherent hazards in these contacts and use tactics to mitigate them

by Jeff Paynter

The investigative contact or Terry Stop is a complicated interaction between a police officer and a citizen that — by the very nature of the contact — contains inherent officer safety threats.

In a Terry Stop, the officer has developed a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is occurring and has decided to detain a citizen in order to further investigate the situation.

The detention may be a matter of informing the citizen that they are not free to leave, may involve a frisk for weapons, or could begin with a high risk handcuffing procedure. Let's examine officer safety considerations with the decision making process in this interaction.

5 Questions to Ask Yourself

There are several questions you should ask yourself when preparing to conduct a Terry stop:

1.) What is the nature of the crime I'm interdicting? If you believe you are contacting suspects in a crime of violence, the threat to you is elevated. Your justification for a weapon frisk is much greater.

2.) Do I think the suspect is armed, or do I KNOW that the suspect is armed? If you think a suspect you are detaining may be armed, then a pat-down for weapons is prudent. If you KNOW a suspect is armed, then the interaction has morphed into a high-risk contact. You should be contacting the suspect with your sidearm at low ready, and the suspect should be handcuffed before attempts to disarm are made. There is a big difference between thinking and knowing; when you know, recognize the elevated risk to your life and act accordingly.

3.) What are the objective hazards of the contact? By objective hazards, I mean hazards that are concrete (known) and measurable. Is the ratio of suspect to officers acceptable? Is there adequate illumination to see threats to your safety? Are you in a location in which there are additional people unfriendly to police? Is there a crime of violence involved in the contact? Use good tactics to counter objective hazards.

4.) What are the subjective hazards of the contact? By subjective hazards, I'm referring to more hazards brought to the situation by the individual officer. This type of hazard varies from officer to officer. Chronic injuries, poor marksmanship, poor control and defensive tactics skills, poor communications skills, damaged or inoperative equipment, lack of physical fitness, and poor geographical orientation are all examples of subjective hazards that are brought to a given incident by an officer. If you need more examples, reread the “10 Fatal Errors.”

5.) What type of behavior does the suspect exhibit upon contact? Officers should make an assessment of potential resistance upon contact. Is the suspect preparing to flee? If they begin the “hurdler stretch” while you are introducing yourself, they may be preparing to run. Are they taking a bladed stance (or some type of stance indicating hostile intent)? Is the suspect crowding your personal space? If you are seeing problematic behavior, you should confront the behavior immediately. Don't make the mistake of fatal rationalization.

Use a Control Hold

When the decision to frisk is made during a Terry stop, physical control should be established prior to the commencement of the pat-down. Both hands should be secured in some type of control hold at minimum.

I see many officers and trainees try to short-cut this part of the process by beginning the pat-down without establishing a control hold. I advocate the Modified Faulkner position (pictured, above and to the left), wherein the suspect is controlled via finger lock with their hands behind their back.

Many prefer the suspect to have his hands interlaced behind his head. Whatever your technique preference, a control hold or position should be used to place the suspect at a disadvantage prior to the start of the pat-down.

Optimally, you should have a cover officer present at the start of the contact. Depending on the realities of staffing in your jurisdiction however, this is not always possible.

In the event you are beginning the pat-down alone, it is even more important to use a control hold. You may want to handcuff the suspect at the beginning of the detention — however, you must then make decisions with the Fourth Amendment issues regarding use of force and Miranda.

In summary, the Terry stop is a versatile law enforcement tool that can be used to great effect by officers, but we must be aware of the inherent hazards in these contacts and use tactics to mitigate them.

Make a threat assessment and take steps to mitigate the objective and subjective hazards.

http://www.policeone.com/Officer-Safety/articles/7235534-5-simple-rules-for-staying-safer-during-a-Terry-stop/

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The Vital Role of Juvenile Probation Officers

by Shaddi Abusaid and Roger Newton

JONESBORO, Ga. — Juvenile probation officer Victoria Harris has an extremely demanding job. It isn't easy keeping up with 16 teenagers who have found themselves in trouble at home, at school and with the law.

But although her job is difficult, Harris doesn't show it. She's vibrant and youthful, lively, with a soft demeanor and a bright, warm smile. Harris is just one of thousands of juvenile probation officers in the United States, and like so many of the others she plays a vital role in the development of the children she comes in contact with. As the direct link between Clayton County's juvenile court system and its juvenile offenders, Harris is responsible for ensuring that her charges adhere to the court's rulings.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention estimates that more than half of all juvenile cases brought before a court system result in a child being sentenced to probation. In 2010, there were just under half a million cases that involved a child being placed on probation for some period of time.

As a P.O., Harris must make sure these children go to class and do well in school. She must see to it they come home on time, get along with their parents and stay out of trouble along the way. But Harris does much more than enforce the wishes of the court. In addition to being a probation officer to these children, Harris is a friendly confidante, and, at times, a de facto mother who is there to listen.

Youth probation varies tremendously from state to state and from county to county. Some jurisdictions tend to be more punitive; others are more reconstructive, using their resources for rehabilitation. Clayton County's Juvenile Court, where Harris works just south of Atlanta, places an emphasis on rehabilitating the children in the hopes that they don't repeat the mistakes they've made. Guidance and drug counseling is provided to youths who need it, and the end goal is to ensure the child has everything they need to get back on track.

Lock-up, Harris said, is typically used as a last resort when all other measures have been exhausted.

“We're more of a treatment-based court,” Harris said. “We offer alternatives to detention,” adding that punitive-based court systems rarely address the underlying causes of the behavior.

“You're penalizing the youth without getting to the root of the problem,” she said. Whenever possible, Clayton County's juvenile court likes to recommend treatment-based alternatives.

These alternatives include providing drug treatment and counseling to the children and families who need it, something Harris said is a far better option than lock-up.

Douglas Thomas, a senior research associate for the National Center for Juvenile Justice, says more and more juvenile courts are moving toward rehabilitative systems of justice when it comes to dealing with children. Diversionary programs are becoming more popular because studies show they have a more positive effect.

“Programs using controlled approaches on average have smaller negative effects on recidivism,” Thomas said. “If you have a program that's just about coercion and control, incarceration with no treatment component, or boot camps, or Scared Straight. ... Not only do they not work, but there are indications that they have a negative impact.”

According to Thomas, for the best results, care must be taken when choosing an appropriate program for the particular juvenile offender and factors like timing and duration of a program must be taken into account.

“You have to know what that kid's needs are,” Thomas added.

Harris says her most successful cases are the ones in which the child's parents are actively involved in their probation.

“When I have very supportive families, the kid is going to make it,” Harris said. “I have to have the parents on board.”

Harris' coworker Ronaldi Rollins said that Harris is great about getting parents on board with the terms of their child's probation, not only complying with the rules but actually encouraging them to help the children, something he says makes her a wonderful probation officer.

“She has that caring, motherly, counseling vibe to her,” Rollins said.

Thomas said with the juvenile justice system approaching more treatment-based methods, the role of the modern probation officer is an ever-evolving one.

“You used to have to have the ability to relate to kids, to be trustworthy, to be firm, to be able to have street cred and to be able to enforce the orders of the court,” Thomas said. “But nowadays it's becoming more sophisticated.”

He said these days a good probation officer must assess the needs of the child to determine what is best for him or her. Much of this, he says, has to do with the P.O.'s background.

Probation officers who have a background in social work, like Harris, tend to focus more on the rehabilitative aspects of probation rather than punitive ones. This, of course, also depends on the juvenile court and which techniques they choose to emphasize.

The more progressive juvenile courts like Clayton County's tend to use their resources for rehabilitation in hopes that it will reduce the recidivism rates.

“I think it's all about my approach with them,” she said. “I'm not someone who yells or makes threats or anything. I try to tell them they can be more than what they are right now.”

http://jjie.org/the-vital-role-of-juvenile-probation-officers/106958/

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Most States ‘Intend' to Comply with Prison Rape Elimination Act, DOJ Says

by John Lash

Some 85 percent of U.S. states and territories told the federal Department of Justice that “they intend to take steps to reduce sexual assaults in prisons” by coming into compliance with the 2003 federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Wednesday. This is the first year that states and territories are subject to the withholding of federal grants if they do not demonstrate an intention to comply with the law.

A total of 56 jurisdictions are subject to the federal law, including all states, five federal territories and the District of Columbia, according to Deputy Attorney General James Cole and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mary Lou Leary speaking at a news conference Wednesday. A DOJ news release reports that 48 of those jurisdictions indicate they are “in compliance or have submitted assurances to the [DOJ] committing to spending 5 percent of certain federal grant funds to come into compliance.”

Only two jurisdictions, New Hampshire and New Jersey, have certified full compliance, and 46 “provided assurances” that they would use funding to come into compliance. Of the eight jurisdictions that have not indicated a willingness to comply, Cole said they “will be held accountable, as we are required to do by law.” According to Leary the jurisdictions that did not submit a certificate of assurance will still receive assistance, but will “incur the 5 percent reduction this year.” The governors of Idaho, Texa, Indiana, Utah and Arizona “won't try to meet the standards,” ABC News reports .

Cole said that PREA is a signal of the “unequivocal rejection of the outdated — and morally unconscionable — acceptance of rape,” as part of a prisoner's sentence, and he highlighted the particular danger to juveniles. Some 9.5 percent of adjudicated children in custody reported sexual victimization in the last year.

http://jjie.org/most-states-intend-to-comply-with-prison-rape-elimination-act-doj-says/106943/

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New York

Bronx Workshop Underlines Troubled Relationship Between Youth of Color and NYPD

by Daryl Khan

NEW YORK — At first glance, the classroom in the Betances Community Center in the South Bronx last night appeared like a typical children's classroom. A stuffed lion with a smile sewn into his mouth sat atop an emergency aid kit. A paper cut-out of a grinning fish held a sign with a self-esteem boosting message. Finger paintings of hearts on construction paper faced out from the window.

But the lesson plan projected onto a screen revealed a different sort of education. True or False: If a cop asks you a question you have to answer.

“Answer ‘False,'” barked Divad Durant, 27, one of the volunteers from the Justice Committee who was leading the session of the Beat the Heat Know Your Rights training session. “Cops are always allowed to talk to you and ask you questions. However, you never have to answer their questions.”

“I knew that,” joked one woman in the audience. “I watch ‘Law and Order.'”

For three hours last night, a small group of men and women ranging in age from the teens to the 50s came to participate in a peculiar curriculum where the syllabus detailed how to exercise your rights during encounters with the NYPD, how to avoid escalating the situation and ultimately how to walk away safely from an encounter. Part theater, part sociology and part street smarts, the session was a crash course in the law as it plays out in real time on the chaos of a city street instead of in the calm of a courtroom.

Durant and Josephine Blount, an investigator with the Bronx Defenders Office and Durant's partner on Cop Patrols, led the session, introducing a mix of True and False quizzes, role playing and open discussions between participants and the workshop leaders about their contentious interactions with the NYPD.

One of the themes of the presentation is what Blount and Durant described as the chasm between the promise of rights and the reality of how they can play out on the street. They talked about what a resident's rights are at every step of an interaction with a police officer, everything from what qualifies as probable cause and what meets the the reasonable suspicion standard to the distinction between a “frisk” and a “search.”

One of the projections on the screen provided examples of what does and does not qualify as reasonable: “Furtive movements, walking back and forth in front of a bank, walking down the street at 3 a.m. with a TV.”

“Being black and standing on the corner or being trans and out late are not examples of reasonable suspicion.”

“We recommend you act like a statue,” Blount said, addressing the class. “Statues remain still. They don't make any quick movements. Remember, we are dealing with a person who is legally allowed to carry and use a gun. We want to get you out of this situation as quickly as possible.”

Although it had already been scheduled for months, the participants in the workshop said Javier Payne, a 14-year-old who sustained critical injuries when he was smashed through a window during a routine arrest on the night of May 17, was on their mind.

Many who attended said the need for a workshop like this underscored how troubled the relationship between black and Latino youth is, and how sessions like this give teenagers a vocabulary of rights rather than rage in their dealings with the NYPD.

Hiawatha Collins, 56, said the only thing that surprised him about the Payne incident was how young he was. He said he expects older teens of color to get that treatment.

“It's no good,” said Collins, who wanted to be an officer as a boy. “They need to rebuild the relationship between the youth and the police department because there's no trust at all. They live in fear and that's a shame.”

Willis Rattigan Cayetano said he has never been arrested, been stopped or seen the inside of a police precinct. He said he is sympathetic to the tough position the police department is in. But he said he understands the frustration black and Latino youth have in their dealing with police.

He recommended teenagers like himself attend meetings like this. He said he thinks so many teenagers feel like they are so helpless when it comes to the police that the only response is to meet aggression with aggression.

“I think if Javier had come to this workshop he wouldn't have been thrown through that window,” said Rattigan Cayetano, who hopes to join the military when he graduates from Evander Childs High School next month, and then go on to law school. “A lot of us teenagers are not aware and knowledgeable about our surrounding, and it's hard to express ourselves. Learning about your rights lets you express yourself in a different way.”

As a young person growing up in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, Durant said, he wasn't a victim of police violence, but that he regularly witnessed his friends get harassed.

“I think it's a very tension filled relationship that young persons of color from communities of color have with the police department,” he said. “They have no job opportunities, they have no space to go that is safe, they are seeing their educational budgets cut. They are cornered. When they have no opportunity they become subject to criminalization.”

Neilia McKenzie, 23, said she has has sympathy for how challenging an officer's job is. She said, still, what happened to Payne is inexcusable.

“He's a young kid, no one deserves that,” she said of Payne. “I think it was sad that it even happened.”

McKenzie, 23, attended a Citizens Police Academy where she learned how police see the world.

“I'm trying my best to be fair and look at it from both sides,” she said. “I don't think the relationship is very strong. A lot of young people who live around here see the NYPD as the bad guys. I don't. I know that there are a lot of good cops. But a lot of young people don't feel the same way.”

http://jjie.org/bronx-workshop-underlines-troubled-relationship-between-youth-of-color-and-nypd/106928/

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Homeland Security chief to review release of immigrants convicted of crimes

by Brian Bennett

Under pressure from lawmakers, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday he was reviewing the release from jail of thousands of immigrants in the country illegally who were convicted of crimes and faced deportation.

The Department of Homeland Security last year released 36,007 such immigrants who had been convicted of crimes, according to federal data. Among those, 193 had homicide convictions and 426 had sexual assault convictions. Nearly all of those released still face deportation and are required to check in with authorities as a condition of their release.

Johnson told members of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday that he asked for a "deeper understanding" of the releases. In many cases, Johnson said, the individuals were released under an order from an immigration judge that included some type of supervision and monitoring.

“I've seen some pretty serious criminal convictions on that list, including homicide,” Johnson said. “I want to ensure we are doing everything we should be doing."

The chairman of the committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) criticized the administration's policies, saying the releases “needlessly endanger Americans' lives.”

Since 2011, the Obama administration has tried to focus immigration agents on deporting recent border crossers, repeat immigration violators and people who pose a threat to public safety. In March, Obama asked Johnson to review the department's deportation policies to see if expulsions can be done in a more “humane” way.

This week, the White House asked Johnson to delay announcing the results of that review until August to avoid angering House Republicans who are considering a series of bills on immigration reform. Johnson told lawmakers on Thursday that he saw a need to clarify instructions given to immigration officers about which individuals should take priority for deportation.

“Whatever we do to revise our enforcement policies, however, is no substitute for comprehensive immigration reform passed by Congress,” Johnson said.

Johnson added that the estimated 11.4 million people living in this country illegally are “not going away.”

“As a matter of homeland security, we should encourage these people to come out of the shadows of American society, pay taxes and fines, be held accountable, and be given the opportunity to get on a path to citizenship like others,” he said.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-dhs-head-defends-immigration-policy-20140529-story.html

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Pennsylvania

Henderson assists community and police in team building

by Christian Morrow

Manchester Academic Charter School history teacher Dennis Henderson says just because he had a bad experience when he was falsely arrested by a Pittsburgh police officer last year, that doesn't mean all African-Americans should be anxious or fearful of police. So when he became aware that more of his students felt that way, he looked for a remedy. The result could be seen May 22 in West Park on Pittsburgh's North Side as Manchester students joined officers from Zone 1 for a trust-building exercise.

“I'm a teacher first, and all that other stuff has nothing to do with this,” he said. “This is about building rapport for kids that have anxiety or bias against officers. With some kids, their only interaction is seeing a family member arrested. This is about showing them something else.

It's a fun a day out for all the kids, and for the officers.”

The activities began with about 90 kids from Manchester's grades 5-8 joining 10 officers, who volunteered their time—having either just finished an overnight shift or who came in early for an afternoon shift—for a scavenger hunt.

Zone 1 Cmdr. Rashall Brackney said the kids broke up into groups and picked the officers they wanted on their teams–the bicycle officers were the first to go.
“They scattered all over the park. It was a blast,” she said. “They had to use the GPS system to find certain places, like monuments in the park, learn something and that would lead to the next clue, and so on. The first team back won—that's where the bikes came in handy.”
Brackney said it was a nice respite from her usual duties, and went very well. As a former Manchester board member, Brackney was more than happy to help out.

“When Mr. Henderson approached us, we said this would be an amazing opportunity to engage youth in a positive manner, not in a moment of crisis or negativity,” she said. “I would love to see this expanded to other parts of the city and other schools. At first the kids were hesitant, but after the hunt, when the bomb squad guys showed up with the robots, they were engaged, curious, relaxed. When you have these opportunities for growth you can see some amazing things.”

Henderson said it's a great step toward building trust. He thanked Venture Outdoors and State Rep. Jake Wheatley's office for helping cover some of the expenses.

“Hopefully we'll do more in the future to get them comfortable around law enforcement,” he said. “And maybe inspire some to go into policing, because we need more African-American officers to change the dynamic.”

http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2014/05/29/henderson-assists-community-and-police-in-team-building/

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New York

NYC's top cop defends racist policing at Israel "security" conference

by Rania Khalek

On 13 May, New York Police Department commissioner Bill Bratton delivered the keynote address at Israel's first ever National Conference on Personal Security in Jersusalem.

Accompanied by NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence John Miller (formerly a CBS senior news correspondent), Bratton also met with Yohanan Danino, the Inspector General of the Israeli police, and Yoram Cohen, director of Israel's notorious Shin Bet secret police.

In his 30-minute speech, which can be viewed in the above video, Bratton offered a uniquely revisionist history of American policing and proposed a dystopian vision for a future in which Israel is held up as a model for law enforcement worldwide.

“World's strongest democracies”

“We are fortunate in the United States and Israel to live in the world's two strongest democracies,” declared Bratton, kicking off his speech with the mythology and pandering we've come to expect from US officials visiting Israel.

Bratton went on to offer an odd interpretation of how a democracy functions.

“In a democracy,” he said, “the first obligation of government is public safety.”

This may come as a surprise to those who were under the impression that the government's most essential role in a democracy is to ensure the civil and human rights of the people it represents. While public safety is certainly important, Bratton has throughout his career advocated for and spearheaded policing practices that strip minority communities, particularly poor African Americans and Latinos, of their civil rights, all under the cover of promoting public safety.

Historical revisionism

Perhaps Bratton's disdain for civil rights explains the deceptive historical analysis provided in his speech, in which he blamed the civil rights and anti-war movements for rising crime and disorder in the 1970s.

“My country in the 1970s was just coming out of the turbulence of the 1960s in our society, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, a society that was wrestling with what we thought to be too much government control,” explained Bratton.

He then attributed growing crime rates in the 1980s to “drug culture” and society's inability to control poor people and minorities:

As my country moved into the 1980s there were several additional societal trends that began to have a significant negative impact on our ability to keep our streets safe. The growth of a drug market and a drug culture, particularly the more problematic drugs of heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine. The increasing number of young people coming out of a society that was no longer educating them, no longer controlling them, a dissolution of many of the families in our society, particularly among the poor and in the minority communities.

Bratton went on to read off New York City's horrifying crime statistics in 1990, when violent crime was at its peak.

Describing the early 1990s, Bratton conflated graffiti with rampant murder, saying, “conditions in the city had deteriorated so badly that subway cars were covered in graffiti.”

He then credited policies introduced by him and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the massive reduction in violent crime that followed.

During Bratton's first term as NYPD commissioner in 1994, he implemented what he referred to in his speech as “community policing” or “quality of life” policing, otherwise known as “broken windows.” Bratton is credited with popularizing the “broken windows theory,” a zero-tolerance approach to policing that focuses on stamping out minor nonviolent infractions before they evolve into violent crimes.

Bratton proceeded to paint a before-and-after picture of New York City:

It is a city that in the 1980s and 1990s was a very frightening experience to walk the streets — the aggressive beggars, the prostitutes, the gangs, the filth, the graffiti. It is a city today that is vibrant, it is alive, it is safe. On the subway system, the graffiti is gone, the beggars are gone, the vandalism is gone.

This is the essence of broken windows, the idea that graffiti and litter, if left unpunished, will balloon into rape and murder, and therefore must be treated like violent crimes. (Two decades later, Bratton's obsessive hatred for graffiti has only grown stronger.)

Racist policing

There is no empirical proof that “broken windows” policing was responsible for New York City's historic decline in crime in the 1990s. In fact, similar crime reductions were taking place in cities across the country where “broken windows” was not being employed.

In reality, Bratton's policies had more to do with removing poor people of color from prime gentrification real estate in an effort to create a more aesthetically appealing landscape for the mostly upper class whites the city wanted to attract.

Under Bratton's first term as New York City's top cop in 1994, the NYPD went after young people of color with a vengeance for everything from truancy and playing loud music to jumping subway turnstiles and loitering.

As the murder rate fell dramatically between 1994 and 1996, misdemeanor arrests skyrocketed 73 percent, and as Christian Parenti meticulously documents in the book Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis , the main targets were the African American and Latino communities, whose police brutality complaints increased by 50 percent.

Bratton would go on to carry out “quality of life sweeps” during his reign as police chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, resulting in the mass displacement of homeless and mentally ill residents, who Bratton's foot soldiers harassed with tickets for jaywalking and sleeping on the sidewalk. Unable to pay the fines, those targeted were often locked up, increasing the overall jail population. On top of that, he oversaw a twofold increase in stop and frisks by the LAPD.

Since being appointed head of the NYPD for the second time in two decades by the supposedly progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bratton has doubled down on broken windows with his mission to rid the subway of homeless people.

Learning from each other

From New York City to Los Angeles, Bratton's form of suppression policing — packaged as crime prevention — has aggressively facilitated gentrification, which is just a more insidious version of ethnic cleansing.

A similar (though more openly racist) dynamic has played out in Israel, where security and terrorism prevention are invoked to justify the subjugation and removal of Palestinians.

For example, Israel insists to the world that the apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank is a vital security measure designed to keep suicide bombers out. But even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admits that the purpose of the “separation fence” is to avert “demographic spillover” of Palestinians from the West Bank.

The apartheid wall, the home demolitions, the checkpoints, the more than fifty laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel — all of these have little to do with Israel's security and everything to do with maintaining Israel's demographically engineered Jewish majority to consolidate Jewish supremacy in the Holy Land.

“The police commissioner of New York City coming to meet with the police commissioner of the Israeli National Police, why?” asked Bratton. “So we can learn from each other.”

Terrorism

After praising the Israeli police for their efforts at employing “quality of life” policing, Bratton moved on to the issue of terrorism.

“[The United States] did not have the terrorism experience that you have had since your birth,” said Bratton, noting that Israel's was a “birth of necessity.” The irony of course is that Israel was built over the ashes of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages that were deliberately destroyed through terrorism.

Bratton added, “We can continue to defeat [terrorism] by the way you have been doing it in your country so successfully.”

While it's unclear which of Israel's abusive counterterrorism policies Bratton plans to adopt, he did leave some clues.

As the New York Times recently reported, there exists an NYPD squad called the Citywide Debriefing Team, which scours city jails for Muslims to coerce into spying on their communities. During his visit to Israel, Bratton defended the NYPD's recruitment of jailed Muslims as informants, calling the program “an essential element of policing.”

A future dystopia

Next, Bratton offered words of praise for predictive policing, calling it “the new revolution in American policing, indeed world policing.”

“Can we prevent all crime? No. But we need to use that as our goal,” he said.

Predictive policing uses computer algorithms to generate hotspots where crimes are likely to occur and lists of people who are likely to commit them. It is a form of pre-crime that should raise alarm bells. Given the racism permeating all levels of the American criminal justice system, predictive policing will more likely produce a system of computer-generated racial profiling than crime prevention.

Bratton ended his speech by portraying his and Israel's dystopian policing practices as necessary “in ensuring that democracy survives for our children and our children's children.”

“We are strengthened in democracies when we collaborate together, when we form partnerships,” said Bratton. “I thank the Israeli government for the opportunity to strengthen the partnership that was already strong between my city and my country and your city and your country, for the vital mission we are all engaged in and that is the preservation of our democracies.”

Before leaving the podium, Bratton was presented with a gift, an album of photos taken during his trip. Some of those pictures were posted on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Public Security.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/nycs-top-cop-defends-racist-policing-israel-security-conference

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Washington

Youth Sports Concussions Draw Obama's Attention

by DARLENE SUPERVILLE

President Barack Obama is a lover of games played on hard courts, baseball diamonds and in 10-yard increments. His two daughters are active in sports and, like many parents with children on athletic teams, he worries about their safety.

But unlike many of those parents, Obama is uniquely positioned to help address the concerns.

At the White House on Thursday, Obama was hosting a summit with representatives of professional sports leagues, coaches, parents, young athletes, researchers and others to call attention to the issue of youth sports concussions.

Not enough is known about how the injuries may affect still-developing brains, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council said in a report last fall, and the issue concerns the president.

Obama once said he'd "have to think long and hard" before allowing a son to play football because of the risk of head injury.

At the summit, Obama will also highlight millions of dollars in pledges and other support from the NFL, the National Institutes of Health and others to conduct research that could begin to provide answers and improve safety.

"He, as a parent, is concerned about the safety of his own daughters," said White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri, one of several officials who previewed the White House Healthy Kids & Safe Sports Concussion Summit for reporters.

A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury that can be caused by a blow to the head. One can also be caused by a strong body blow that jostles the brain around inside the skull. Nearly 250,000 kids and young adults visit hospital emergency rooms each year with brain injuries caused by sports or other recreational activity, the White House said.

Among the largest financial commitments Obama is expected to announce is a $30 million joint effort by the NCAA and the Defense Department to produce research on concussion risks, treatment and management. Concussions and other types of brain injuries are an issue for service members, too. Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, was to participate in the summit.

The NFL is committing $25 million over the next three years to promote youth sports safety.

The NIH is undertaking a new research effort on the chronic effects of repetitive concussions, work supported by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health through an initial investment of $16 million from the NFL.

UCLA will use $10 million from New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch to launch a program to study sports concussion prevention, outreach, research and treatment for athletes of all ages, but especially youth. The money will also support planning for a national system to determine the incidence of youth sports concussions.

The Institute of Medicine, which advises the government, called for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to establish and oversee such a system to begin to help provide answers to questions about the risk of youth sports, such as how often the youngest athletes suffer concussions and which sports have the highest rates.

After Obama opens the summit, Fox Sports reporter Pam Oliver was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion with Odierno and others. In the afternoon, Obama planned to participate in sports drills on the South Lawn with kids from local YMCA programs.

In a 2013 interview with The New Republic, Obama said football may need to change to prevent injuries.

"I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football," Obama said. "And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much."

The NFL recently agreed to pay $765 million to settle concussion claims from thousands of former players whose complaints range from headaches to Alzheimer's disease. That settlement is still awaiting a judge's approval, while a group of former professional hockey players has filed a class-action lawsuit of their own against the National Hockey League for head injuries sustained on the ice.

http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/youth-sports-concussions-draw-obamas-attention-23909399

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Massachusetts

2 juvenile lifers getting 1st parole hearings

by PAIGE SUTHERLAND

BOSTON — Two Massachusetts inmates sentenced to life without parole as juveniles will be the first to have parole hearings since the state's highest court struck down mandatory life sentencing for young offenders in December.

Joseph Donovan, 38, and Frederick Christian, 37, will have hearings on Thursday. They're among 63 inmates serving juvenile life without parole sentences in the state. Both were convicted of felony murder charges and have been behind bars since they were 17. Neither did the actual killings.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that lifelong imprisonment for juveniles is a cruel and unusual punishment, saying scientific research showed that their brains were not fully developed.

The decision followed a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that outlawed such mandatory life sentences. The Miller v. Alabama case did not abolish juvenile life sentencing but rather gives judges an opportunity to consider mitigating factors on a case-by-case basis.

Delaware, Texas and Wyoming eliminated mandatory sentences for juveniles after the federal ruling. Since January, West Virginia and Hawaii have followed suit.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that allows juvenile offenders to be sentenced to life without parole. About 2,500 inmates are serving this sentence nationally.

Joshua Dohan, an attorney in the Youth Advocacy Division of the state Committee for Public Counsel Services, said in felony murder cases like those involving Donovan and Christian the concept that a juvenile co-defendant is as guilty as the killer is flawed.

"Juveniles are impulsive, susceptible to peer influence, and poor at both assessing risk and foreseeing consequences," Dohan said. "The Supreme Court and Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court have not held that adolescence excuses murder or any other criminal act, only that their immaturity mitigates their blameworthiness and renders them more deserving of a second chance."

Victims' families and others have protested that the parole hearings will force family members to relive painful memories.

But Donovan's attorney Ingrid Miller said the 21 years her client has spent in prison is enough time. She said in his case the man who actually stabbed to death a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student in 1992 while trying to rob him has served half as much time as Donovan.

Christian was charged in connection with a 1994 premeditated robbery in which two people were killed and one was injured. He did not pull the trigger. His lawyer declined to comment on Wednesday.

If granted parole the inmates will be moved to a minimum security prison. It could take up to two years until they are eligible for release.

http://www.kansascity.com/2014/05/29/5052810/juvenile-lifers-given-parole-hearings.html

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Arizona

Community policing making a come-back, bike patrol on track

by Briana Lonas

Some community programs that fell by the roadside may be rebounding as the Prescott Valley Police Department slowly turns the corner on the recession.

The department's bike patrol unit marks one example that soon will see reinstatement and while it's not a full-time service yet, the department will deploy it as needed.

The patrol ran from 1997 to 1998 and the response by citizens was positive, according to PVPD Sgt. Brandon Bonney, who also served as one of the first bike officers in the town alongside Sgt. Scott Stebbins.

"People would ask us if they could fill our water bottles, or if we needed anything. The approachability is just unrivaled by any other position," Bonney said.

He mentioned also that some neighborhood residents didn't always like the squad cars near their homes but didn't mind the bikes.

"It has a lot of benefits to it if deployed under the right circumstances, it's an incredible tool," Bonney said.

The bikes are made for law enforcement, with specific weight ratios and braking systems equipped with a lighting system for visibility. "They have to be really sturdy, they get beaten up quite a bit, when we have to dump the bike and run," Bonney said.

One great feature about the bikes is that they enable the officers to move with stealth. Boney recalled he once rode up on a suspect that was sitting in his car smoking marijuana.

"We actually rode up and looked over his shoulder for a few seconds before he saw us," Bonney said.

"It's a great testament on how versatile we can be, even for riding up and down parade routes and places where cars can't access."

When the bike unit went away and with the economic downturn, the department saw other community-based services disappear, during which time staff struggled just to man the streets.

"The support services side had to say no to the programs we felt strongly about. We just did not have the manpower to support some of the educational commitments within the community," Bonney said, noting that one of those programs included D.A.R.E., as the school district also lost its funding for that program.

In addition, The School Resource Program saw a reduction from three to one officer at one point. Even that resource grant was eventually eliminated, Bonney said.

"Now, we're working towards getting those back. Staff also is working to revitalize the popular Block Watch program and get back to the core, community-based policing principles that we used to do," Bonney said.

History of PV Bike Team

Community-Oriented Policing took off in the summer of 1997, in Prescott Valley, when representatives from the International City Managers Association sponsored a seminar in California, inviting town officials to attend.

By the fall of 1997, an ICMA team arrived in Prescott Valley to assist police officials in implementing the new community-based policing philosophy. The town's first bicycle team began shortly thereafter with Officers Scott Stebbins and Brandon Bonney as its first bike patrol officers.

The Bike Team continued to promote positive, police/student interaction within the community. Bike officers ate lunch with elementary school students.

The Bike Team organized a neighborhood "Team Up to Clean Up" drive in tandem with the town-wide campaign and hundreds of pounds of trash was removed off of the streets and properties in the Unit Five area.

The Bike Team promoted youth safety and education by working with schools and civic groups, and by serving on the Prescott Valley Chamber of Commerce Youth and Education Committee.

The Bike Team sponsored Bicycle Safety Rodeos and taught hundreds of kids bicycle maintenance and the rules of the road. Officers handed out free helmets to youths who could not afford them.

http://pvtrib.com/main.asp?SectionID=74&SubSectionID=114&ArticleID=61031

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Oregon

Rural Oregon faces deeper peril as public safety system weakens

by Les Zaitz

Rage rose across Umatilla County as word spread of a brutal nighttime attack on a 79-year-old widow in her farmhouse.

As Joyce Key lay dying in a hospital in February 2013, 250 people gathered in the Milton-Freewater community hall demanding to know: Where were the police?

Their anger over inadequate protection had been building for a year, ever since plumber Rob Carter had been gunned down as he sat in his rural shop outside town.

"They didn't want to hear a bunch of excuses," said Doug Boedigheimer, Milton-Freewater police chief.

As evening wore on, Sheriff Terry Rowan explained he was short of deputies. District Attorney Dan Primus said drug dealers cycled in and out of jail because he was short of prosecutors. And the local legislator, Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, said to expect little help from the cash-starved state.

An investigation by The Oregonian found the criminal justice system in many areas unable to effectively chase, charge and contain criminals. Law enforcement agencies have shrunk, whittled down by lost revenue, outdated tax bases and poor political decisions.

The virtual end of federal logging is the main culprit. As loggers and mills disappeared, so did timber taxes. Congress tried to help with special payments, but those have steadily declined.

Matters worsened under a recession that proved especially crushing in rural Oregon. Thousands of jobs and their incomes were eliminated, leaving some to resort to crime as a way to survive. Rural Oregon has yet to recover, making it challenging to boost local taxes.

"The situation is perilous," said Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum. "We're at risk of crossing the tipping point into lawlessness in some of our rural areas."

The risk exists for nearly all Oregonians, whether a resident or a traveler to rural areas.

In half a dozen counties, one sheriff after another has ended around-the-clock patrols. Polk County is down to a single daytime shift to protect one of the state's most populous counties. Nighttime emergencies mean dragging a deputy out of bed.

Jail beds go unused, not because there aren't suspects to fill them but because there aren't enough guards. Convicts and parolees, who otherwise would be in custody, remain free to menace the public. Next month, Josephine County faces the loss of a special payment from the city of Grants Pass that kept 30 jail beds open the past year.

District attorneys must let certain criminals escape without prosecution because they can't take on more cases without jeopardizing justice. In 2012, Lane County prosecutors turned away 1,281 cases, including felonies.

Parole officers carrying heavy case loads instruct some offenders to report in by mail. Juvenile authorities limit their supervision of young criminals, freeing time to focus on the worst. In Josephine County, four counselors manage 415 children without a juvenile hall, shuttered two years ago for budget reasons.

Law enforcement officials are accused of using "scare tactics" when they warn about ending patrols, closing jails, or dropping criminal charges. But they fear withering blame if they are too quiet about the risks, the public remains immobilized, and a horrible crime occurs.

That fear reaches all the way to Gov. John Kitzhaber. Select staffers now meet biweekly to keep tabs on rural safety.

"Because of the lack of funding, there is likely to be a major event that is going to be catastrophic," said Heidi Moawad, the governor's public safety policy adviser. "That is the big concern. I think it's more a question of when, not if."

That possibility haunts Polk County Sheriff Bob Wolfe, in office since 1999. He often wakes at night in his Independence home, sleepless with worry. He has cut patrols three times this year.

"Polk County is going to be in the headlines one day. Something horrific is going to happen," Wolfe said. "This could cost people their lives."

In Eugene, suspects whose guilt appears certain nonetheless escape justice on a daily basis. In 2013:

* Joshua Penrod, 35, was caught in the act burglarizing post office boxes at the Florence post office in the middle of the night. He was arrested on 41 counts of mail theft, but never faced prosecution. He walked free.

* Mairely A. Favela admitted she forged her cousin's identity to steal $5,000 worth of medical care. She was arrested on felony theft charges but never faced prosecution. She walked free.

*April J. Warden admitted that she made more than $5,000 on Ebay by selling computers she stole from her employer. She was arrested on felony theft charges. She, too, walked free.

They walked because budget cuts have left Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner short staffed. Their files close because no one is available to prosecute anything but the most serious crimes.

Such erosions are emboldening criminals, law enforcement officials say. As the chances of getting caught, jailed and prosecuted are going down, criminals feel less restrained. Thefts and burglaries are rising sharply in some rural communities, reversing a decade-long trend down. Law enforcement officials put the blame squarely on the weakening public safety system.

That surge is turning more citizens into victims, but they're finding less solace than ever when they call 911. Often, they're asked to file a report. If they see an officer at all, it often takes days and then only to learn that no one will investigate.

In St. Helens, citizens angered by such responses when they call 911 are shuffled to a recording to vent. Columbia County Sheriff Jeff Dickerson and his staff retrieve the recordings, return calls, and bear the onslaught. Dickerson devised a system that eventually gets a deputy in touch with most callers, but it's more a courtesy.

Public officials say such reduced service, coupled with publicity about cuts, makes residents anxious about their safety.

"The feeling of safety has been compromised," said Stephen Campbell, Josephine County district attorney.

His county is the canary in the coal mine of Oregon public safety. Campbell himself watched his office get whittled away in 2012 when federal money didn't show up. With four of his nine prosecutors gone, Campbell warned local police what to expect. He would limit the prosecution of major property crimes, treat misdemeanors as violations, and limit drug cases.

"We will prosecute very few, if any, marijuana cases," Campbell said.

Since then, Campbell has nearly rebuilt his staff with a new round of federal money, but he's had to take young lawyers with little to no experience as prosecutors.

Jim Goodwin, director of the Josephine County Juvenile Justice Department, hasn't been so lucky.

When that federal money disappeared in 2012, Goodwin lost three of his six counselors. Worse, he lost all staff of the juvenile hall, capable of holding 26. He closed its doors two years ago, the last one out a young girl taken into protective custody from an abusive family. She moved to a foster home.

Goodwin now rents three beds in Medford, 30 miles to the south. That makes it a pain for arranging court appearances, family visits and counseling.

He's managed, he said, because the caseload dropped. Why? Because the sheriff's office doesn't have as many deputies on patrol making arrests, not because juvenile crime has ebbed.

"The general public to this day doesn't seem to get the full impact" of the reductions, Goodwin said. County voters last week rejected a tax levy that would have given Goodwin the money to staff up and open the juvenile hall .

He said his worry meantime that he could one day be presented with four juveniles charged with violent Measure 11 crimes that he ordinarily wouldn't release.

"I only have room for three," Goodwin said. "Who do I turn loose?"

Joyce Key's murder stirs that lurking fear in all of us about a stranger at the door to harm us.

She was a pillar in her community, respected for work in schools and civic groups. Since her husband died in 2009, she had lived alone in their one-story home tucked beneath towering trees on a gravel road outside Umapine.

On the evening of Jan. 29, 2013, two men forced their way in, binding her to a kitchen chair with duct tape. They taped a towel over her head because one of the men was slightly acquainted with her and didn't want her identifying him.

When they didn't find the money they expected, one of the men grabbed a rolling pin off the counter and repeatedly clubbed the helpless widow.

One of her sons found her the next morning on his usual check. As she was rushed to the hospital, word spread rapidly in the farm country via tweets, posts and emails.

McKenzie Marly, a 35-year-old mother of three, was especially jolted. She was still dealing with the death of her father, the plumber shot to death the year before.

Upset and angry, Marly helped mobilize the community. People wanted to do something, she said. They were angry. They blamed police.

She arranged the town meeting and took the lead in organizing a new Neighborhood Watch. She set up "Taking Back Our Little Town of M-F" on Facebook. It has since turned into a sort of citizen dispatch center, sizzling with citizen remarks: "Does anyone know about a shooting at the skate park? Three males chasing another male bleeding from his side?? "

Help setting up the watch group came from sheriff's Sgt. Greg Hodgen, who recognized an urgent need to channel the citizen outrage.

He was most concerned about a citizens' group that formed in Umapine, assigning itself the task of patrolling for suspects in Key's murder. Hodges took reports the citizen patrols were stopping cars as if they were sworn officers.

The group has since faded, and Marly's has grown to nearly 100 members.

Josephine County witnessed something similar after three murders in Cave Junction. Citizens there formed armed patrols, but Sheriff Gil Gilbertson has kept them at arm's length, troubled by the sense of vigilantism. He also said criminals seem to be taking advantage of the gap.

"There are armed groups out there pretending to be law enforcement," Gilbertson said.

Gilbertson channels willing citizens into Neighborhood Watch groups that he said can be effective as a "protective perimeter" of watchfulness. He's also forming a volunteer crime scene team to gather evidence, supervised by a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office veteran.

In remote Grant County, Sheriff Glenn Palmer has taken a similar tack to get more eyes in the huge national forest there. He has gone a step beyond most agencies though, in deciding to deputize the volunteers.

No one is surprised that citizens want to protect themselves in the face of real or perceived danger.

Last March, a Columbia County homeowner caught a thief in his garage, holding him at the point of a shotgun. The homeowner told a dispatcher that he would shoot the suspect's car tires or the suspect himself if he tried to leave.

But untrained citizens risk harming an innocent person, a possibility troubling to Earl Fisher, a Columbia County commissioner and president of the Association of Oregon Counties.

"More and more are getting guns. They're going to protect themselves," Fisher said. "They're going to make mistakes."

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2014/05/rural_oregon_faces_deeper_peri.html

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Caught as a hacker? Helping the FBI is your get-out-of-jail-free card

by Mark Wilson

LulzSec is an infamous, famous and notorious name in the technology world. The small collective made a name for itself by attacking high-profile websites such as Fox.com and government sites, but all of this was interrupted when founding member Sabu (or Hector Xavier Monsegur to his mother) was arrested three years ago. Originally facing a jail sentence of more than 26 years for his hacking work, Sabu is now a (relatively) free man having earned himself a get-out-of-jail-free card by working with the FBI since his arrest to help identify other hackers.

Although a judge in New York passed a sentence of seven months, Sabu had already spent this length of time incarcerated so all that is left is one year's supervision. The leniency comes thanks to the fact that Monsegur agreed to continue to work undercover in the hacking community, supplying the FBI with information about activities and individuals. Among those he helped authorities to prosecute were Jeremy Hammond -- one of the most-wanted cybercriminals in the sights of the FBI -- who was jailed for leaking emails to WikiLeaks.

Switching sides did little to improve Sabu's reputation in the hacking community where he is unpopular to say the least. He is credited with helping to hold back Anonymous, and preventing millions of dollars of losses by having "provided, in real time, information about then-ongoing computer hacks and vulnerabilities in significant computer systems".

Judge Loretta Preska praised Sabu for his "truly extraordinary cooperation". Sabu's work with the FBI was revealed some time ago, and this led to him and his family having to be relocated. The hatred leveled towards the hacker-cum-helper is obvious from the statement given to the Guardian by an Anonymous spokesperson:

Monsegur is, first and foremost, a criminal; the FBI's cyber crime task force are his co-conspirators. While operating under their supervision, Monsegur committed numerous felonies which should in no way be excused due to his protected informant status. The FBI continues to use captured informants, who commit egregious crimes in pursuit of reduced sentences, for the sole purpose of creating "examples" to frighten the public. They do this with the hope of pacifying online dissent and snuffing out journalistic investigations into the US government's misconduct.

The court documents relating to Sabu's case make for interesting reading. The presentence report makes clear that the potential sentence is 259 to 317 months in prison and explains that Sabu's role is that of a "rooter", or one who analyzed code "for vulnerabilities that could then be exploited". It goes on to describe the work he did for the FBI, explaining that prior to this case he had no criminal history.

It is interesting to see how technology related crime is treated rather differently to other varieties. The show The Blacklist may have elements of truth to it, but you don't hear of (m)any murderers managing to sidestep jail time by helping the authorities to avoid other murders or put other murderers behind bars -- I choose murder as an example largely due to the comparable jail terms that may be handed down. It's indicative of the disconnect between law enforcement and the technologically minded. It makes sense to take down criminal organizations from the inside, but a more usual technique would be to infiltrate an organization with a mole rather than turning an existing member against his own.

Does this show that the FBI is unable to nurture skilled workers of its own, or is it a canny way of using the best tools available? How much sense does it make that a crime deemed worthy of 26 years or more behind bars can be erased by less than three years of work? Perhaps it shows that the FBI et al are running sacred of the likes of LulzSec and are willing to cut just about any deal imaginable to make inroads. It certainly shows that there are very different rules in place when a threat is perceived against government organizations. It is unlikely that Anonymous will be quaking in their collective boots despite court claims that Sabu "contribut[ed] greatly to law enforcement's understanding of how Anonymous operates" as it is an outfit that is able to adapt far faster than the FBI.

http://betanews.com/2014/05/28/caught-as-a-hacker-helping-the-fbi-is-your-get-out-of-jail-free-card/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN

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California

Oakland proposal presented to solve police understaffing

by Jana Katsuyama

OAKLAND, Calif. — Police issued a "help wanted" notice Tuesday, calling for candidates to apply for jobs with the Oakland Police Department by the deadline on Friday, May 30th. The call for new recruits comes as city leaders try to address a problem with police understaffing and residents voice their opinions on what would help improve public safety.

"I think more community policing is really the solution," said Martin Quinones, who moved to Oakland from Berkeley last year.

"I'd like to see more police officers hired and on duty," said Barbara Ross a lifelong Oakland resident.

Police commanders gave an update on the staffing situation to the Public Safety Committee Tuesday night. The numbers were sobering.

Just four years ago, the Oakland Police Department had 801 officers. Now, they're budgeted for 707 officers, but city councilors say the actual number on the street is far lower because of people retiring or leaving the department.

Oakland Police commanders told the committee that it is a big challenge trying to predict how many officers will retire or leave and how many new recruits to bring in to fill any vacancies. Right now, their budget estimates are based on an attrition rate of five officers leaving the force every month.

"If we estimate too high on the attrition, then we're hiring people that potentially aren't budgeted. If we're too low, then we're not hiring enough. So it's a balance we try to look at," said Deputy Police Chief Eric Breshears.

Oakland City Council member Libby Schaaf, who is running for mayor, presented a proposal co-authored by Public Safety Committee President Noel Gallo. She addressed the police commanders and said there is a need for the city to have a better system of handling police staffing problems.

"We want you to spend every dollar that we've put into this budget for police, spent on police and so that should be your aim," Schaaf said.

The proposal from Schaaf and Gallo includes five points. First, it would require police to have an early warning system to alert the city of any staffing shortfall as soon as it becomes evident. Second, it would require a shortfall correction process with a mandate for police to develop ways of rectifying any staffing shortfall. It also would mandate more accurate budgeting, fund two police academies, and require an attrition reduction plan to decrease the number of officers leaving or retiring every year.

After discussion, the four committee members Noel Gallo, Libby Schaaf, Dan Kalb and Lynette Gibson-McElhaney voted unanimously to send the proposal to the full City Council for a vote.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/city-council-meets-discuss-oakland-police-shortage/nf8FQ/

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Louisianna

NOPD unable to properly respond to calls for service

Mayor, police supt. critical of assessment

NEW ORLEANS —A report from the New Orleans Office of Inspector General criticizes the city's police department for what it calls insufficient staffing to properly answer calls for service.
Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux believes the NOPD can better deploy its officers to place them in position to respond to citizen-generated calls.

The report claims there simply aren't enough officers on the street, and other factors are compounding the problem.

Of about 1,000 officers below the rank of sergeant, only 251 are assigned to platoons responsible for handling calls for service, the report determined. It notes that 22 percent of such calls are listed as "complaint - other," making it difficult for supervisors to make appropriate staffing responses.

Other problems are also detailed. The report claims platoon supervisors held calls for service during shift changes, resulting in a backlog of calls for the next shift, and it noted an abnormally high number of sergeants on staff.

"We are short officers on the street, and that's a bad thing," Quatrevaux said. "The first duty of any police department is to respond to calls for service."

Quatrevaux said his office hired an expert to help crunch the numbers.
Dr. Michael Cowan chairs the New Orleans Crime Coalition and said, in a statement to WDSU, the report should be taken seriously.

"New Orleans needs an adequate number of police officers," he said. "The Inspector General's report shows why that's important in one specific area of NOPD responsibility -- responding to citizen calls for service. How we find additional officers for that task, as well as other highly significant NOPD responsibilities like community policing and interdicting gang violence, is THE public safety issue facing our city today."

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Police Supt. Ronal Serpas have vowed to add to the NOPD's numbers, setting a goal of training and deploying five classes of new recruits.

That's about 150 new cops.

The first class of 2014 -- comprised of 30 men and women -- recently began training.

Landrieu took issue with the assessment of the NOPD's staffing, including the manner in which officers are put to use.

"I am not willing to abandon community policing because it works," he said. "I'm not willing to cut the homicide unit or the gang unit or the domestic violence unit because they make our city safer."

He reiterated a commitment to putting more men and women behind the badge.

"The people of this city have demanded more and better-trained officers, better response times and community-oriented policing. We can and must continue to move forward with the goal of having 1,600 officers by 2018."

Serpas called the report a "limited assessment of staffing needs" that "does not speak to the tremendous responsibility our department has to our residents beyond calls for service."

http://www.wdsu.com/news/local-news/new-orleans/report-nopd-unable-to-properly-respond-to-calls-for-service/26197076

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New York

NYPD Begins Community Outreach as 9th Murder Reported in 47th Precinct

by David Greene

The spate of gun violence in the northwest portion of the Bronx has compelled officers at one 47th Precinct to change tactics as a fresh batch of new recruits heads to the precinct. Police headquarters has honored Deputy Inspector Ruel Stephenson's request for more officers at the 47th Precinct, which covers Woodlawn, Wakefield, Eastchester and Edenwald. Roughly six-dozen new officers will be deployed to neighborhoods that fall within that precinct, as part of the Operation Impact program.

Detectives at the embattled precinct were already conducting a long-term investigation into gangs in the area. The police responded to the increase in crime shortly after the shoorting death of Lamont Smith of Yonkers, who died outside of P.S. 112 in Edenwald. Smith, 45, was shot along East 229th Street, just a half block away from PSA 8 and a black and half from the 47th Precinct.

The following day police announced the arrest of Dwayne Reid, 43, of Larchmont, N.Y., who was charged with several offences including second degree murder and manslaughter. Down the block from the crime scene one Edenwald resident fumed, “All the police do is give you a summons for drinking a beer or harass you for no reason.” The resident added, “These cops live in the suburbs and don't live here, they work here but they don't know what's going on.” According to NYPD statistics, Smith's shooting was the 21st shooting reported in the 47th Precinct in the first five months of 2014, compared with 11 in 2013.

The 47th Precinct also reported 9 murders between January and May, compared with just one during the same time period in 2013. Stephenson, who was assigned to the 47th Precinct back in April, has also begun his own pilot program asking officers to develop contacts with at least one person or family on every block in the entire command in an effort to build a database of information and learn about problems before the violence occurs.

Father Richard Gorman, the Chairman of Community 12, which borders the Four-Seven, lives across the street from where Smith died. He applauded the additional officers coming to the area. Gorman told the Norwood News that the major uptick in crime confirms the there “are not enough cops in the 47th Precinct” over the last 20 years.

He added that the 47th Precinct is one of the largest in the city with 5 square miles of terrain. Gorman noted that “the increase in crime is absolutely frightening.” “There's way too many guns out here,” he added. Councilman Andy King of the 12th City Council District believes that the uptick in violent crime could be better fought with more jobs and more educational and recreational services for the young members of his community.

In favor of the new initiative put forward by Stephenson, King recalled growing up and knowing the beat cop stationed along White Plains Road. “I knew him by name and he knew me by name… that's what community policing is supposed to be,” King recalled. “I spoke with Commissioner (Bill) Bratton about resources to help us make our communities a little more safer and to make sure we are all on the same page.” King also noted that long delayed security cameras at the Gun Hill Houses, Boston Secor, Eastchester and Edenwald Houses would be coming online in the near future.

http://www.norwoodnews.org/id=14812&story=nypd-begins-community-outreach-as-9th-murder-reported-in-47th-precinct/

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Prosecutors say hacker helped thwart hundreds of cyberattacks

by The Associated Press

A prolific computer hacker who infiltrated the servers of major corporations later switched sides and helped the government disrupt hundreds of cyberattacks on Congress, NASA and other sensitive targets, according to federal prosecutors.

New York prosecutors detailed the cooperation of Hector Xavier Monsegur for the first time in court papers while asking a judge to reward him with leniency at his sentencing Tuesday. They credited Monsegur with helping them cripple Anonymous, the notorious crew of hacktivists who stole confidential information, defaced websites and temporarily put some victims out of business.

Working around the clock with FBI agents at his side, Monsegur "provided, in real time, information about then-ongoing computer hacks and vulnerabilities in significant computer systems," prosecutors wrote. The FBI estimates he helped detect at least 300 separate hacks, preventing millions of dollars in losses, they added.

After his arrest and guilty plea in 2011, Monsegur faced more than two decades behind bars. But because of his cooperation, the sentence could be two years or less.

Court papers say Monsegur first began hacking in a Manhattan apartment in the early 2000s. His aim then was to steal credit card information, then sell it or use it to pay his own bills.

In a 2011 interview with an online magazine, Monsegur said he decided to join forces with Anonymous because he was upset over the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"I'm just doing what I know how to do, and that is counter abuse," he said.

Starting in early 2011 and using the alias Sabu, Monsegur led an Anonymous splinter group called Lulz Security, or LulzSec, which hacked computer systems of Fox television, Nintendo, PayPal and other businesses, stole private information and then bragged about it online. The group was loosely affiliated with Jeremy Hammond, the FBI's most wanted cybercriminal whose stated objective was to cause mayhem with the attacks, prosecutors said.

When FBI agents showed up at his home in the summer of 2011, Monsegur immediately agreed to cooperate, giving the FBI a tutorial on the inner-workings and participants of LulzSec and Anonymous, prosecutors said. Under their direction, he "convinced LulzSec members to provide him digital evidence of the hacking activities" and "asked seemingly innocuous questions that ... could be used to pinpoint their exact locations and identities," court papers said.

Monsegur also engaged Hammond in online chats while Hammond was in Chicago, the papers said. As a result, "physical surveillance teams deployed in Chicago, and an electronic surveillance unit in Washington," they said. Hammond was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison.

Reports that Monsegur was cooperating made him a pariah in the Anonymous movement, prosecutors said. Hackers began posting personal information about him, and he was even approached on the street and threatened, they said.

The harassment "became severe enough that the FBI relocated Monsegur and certain of his family members," they said.

Monsegur's current whereabouts aren't publicly known. One of his attorneys declined to comment Monday.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/05/27/prosecutors-say-hacker-helped-thwart-hundreds-cyberattacks/

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New York

In Expanded Program, Officers Across New York City Will Carry Antidote for Heroin Overdoses

by J. David Goodman

Police officers across New York City will soon carry medications to reverse the effects of an overdose from heroin or opioid prescription pills, officials are set to announce Tuesday, expanding from a successful program on Staten Island to all precincts citywide.

The $1.2 million effort, paid for with funds from the New York State attorney general's office, would give 19,500 kits with the anti-overdose medication naloxone to patrol officers and to other city officers most likely to come into street-level contact with overdose victims.

Those encounters are increasingly frequent in the city as well as around the country amid skyrocketing heroin use and opioid pill abuse. In Suffolk County, officers have saved more than 184 lives since a pilot program began there in 2012. On Friday, officers on Staten Island twice revived residents in the throes of an overdose by administering the drug.

Bringing the drug to officers around the city “will literally save lives,” the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said in a statement ahead of a news conference Tuesday morning with the city's police commissioner, William J. Bratton.

Mr. Schneiderman has committed $5 million, drawn from criminal and civil asset seizures, to reimburse police departments across the state for their purchases of naloxone. A single kit — two prefilled syringes of the drug, a pair of atomizers that allow it to be given through the nose, sterile gloves and instructions — costs roughly $60, his office said.

The police department in the town of Guilderland, outside Albany, was the first to have the cost of its 35 kits of naxolone paid for by the attorney general as part of the program.

More than 150 other departments around the state have applied for the money, the attorney general's office said, and payments for 25,000 kits have been approved, with the New York Police Department by far the largest single recipient.

It was not immediately clear when New York City officers would begin carrying the overdose antidote, where the department would buy the drug and at what price. Under the program, each police department is responsible for negotiating its own purchases through distributors. Stephen Davis, the department's top spokesman, said those questions had yet to be answered. “Training is going to be a big factor here,” he said.

Increased nationwide demand has led to some fluctuation in the availability of naloxone. A spokeswoman for Hospira, which makes an injectable form of the drug, said the company was ramping up production to meet additional demand after experiencing some recent back orders.

Naloxone, which has been available for decades in emergency rooms, works by effectively bumping away the opiate molecules that attach to the brain and slow breathing to fatal levels. The results are rapid and there are no harmful effects if the drug is given to someone who is not overdosing or has taken too much of a non-opiate drug, such as cocaine.

One of the men revived on Friday on Staten Island was found unconscious on the pavement in the Bulls Head neighborhood, in his hand a bottle of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, which is often used in combination with opiates. An arriving officer suspected an overdose and, although naloxone would have no effect on an overdose from Xanax alone, administered the medication.

The man, a 27-year-old whose name was not released, revived somewhat after the first dose, the police said, and regained consciousness after the second. He was taken to Richmond University Medical Center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/nyregion/in-expanded-program-officers-across-new-york-city-will-carry-antidote-for-heroin-overdoses.html?_r=0

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Maryland

All Montgomery high schools to have police on campus for new school year

by Donna St. George

Police will be posted in all 25 Montgomery County high schools next fall as county leaders bolstered the schools' security force in a final budget approved last week.

The budget for the year that begins July 1 includes 10 new school resource officers (SROs), who will join 12 school police officers in place and three supported by the cities of Rockville and Gaithersburg and the county sheriff's department.

The addition of the officers, expected to start when the next school year begins, goes a long way toward restoring a program that was slashed amid recession-driven budget cuts in recent years.

“It's been a long time since we had an SRO in every high school,” said Montgomery County Council President Craig Rice (D-Upcounty). “I think we have a great framework for a strong program.”

Montgomery's approach to school-based officers has shifted since the program was cut, officials say. Officers now get specialized training for working in school environments, and school-police relationships are spelled out in more detail, with more communication.

At the time of the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — which brought a sharp focus to questions of school security nationally — Montgomery had six official police positions in its budget, down from 32 positions in the 2003-04 school year.

In Virginia, Fairfax County, with 53 SROs, and Loudoun County, with 27, assign an officer to each middle school and high school. Neighboring Prince George's County has 22 county and municipal officers in the schools. Most districts also rely on non-uniformed security personnel.

“This is a pretty significant increase,” said Michael A. Durso (5th District), a school board member and retired school principal who has supported reviving the program and sees it as both prevention and security. Officers might hear of a possible fight or a party, and intercede, help a family in a crisis, work a football game or speak in a law class, he said.

“Every officer I've worked with has made a difference in the school,” Durso said. “There's just so many different things a good SRO can do that can be helpful that don't necessarily show up on a police report.”

During the budget cycle that followed Sandy Hook, Montgomery increased its SRO staffing to 12, from six. It also had other arrangements with county and municipal police that brought additional officers onto campuses.

Nationally, civil rights advocates say a police presence in schools often leads to a spike in law enforcement referrals and arrests on campus for misconduct that would typically be handled by a principal. Montgomery officials say their program will not result in the criminalizing of minor school misbehavior.

With a focus on prevention and intervention, “I think it's going to mean more compassion for kids,” Rice said. “These officers are going to get to know these kids. It's community policing in our schools.”

Superintendent Joshua P. Starr has supported the idea, saying at a recent school board meeting that the school system had succeeded in reducing out-of-school suspensions and is working with police and prosecutors to keep schools safe and “make sure that our schools do not contribute to a school-to-prison pipeline.”

As of last summer, all school resource officers undergo a week of training that includes sessions on adolescent development, threat assessments, de-escalation practices, use of force and other topics.

Under a police-school memorandum created last year, the SRO selection process includes a formal interview, with the involvement of a high school principal.

“It's not a job every officer can do for a number of reasons,” said Assistant Montgomery Police Chief Darryl McSwain, speaking at a recent council committee meeting on the issue.

For fiscal 2015, the 10 new positions are expected to cost approximately $467,000, mostly for salaries and benefits. County officials say they anticipate looking into the possibility of expanding the program into middle schools in the future.

The county council of PTAs has passed resolutions supporting an SRO in all secondary schools, said Susan Burkinshaw, co-chairman of the group's health and safety committee.

Burkinshaw called the restoration of the program “phenomenal” and said she was reminded about the need for officers during recent bomb threats — which turned out to be false alarms — at Montgomery high schools.

“What small town of 3,000 people doesn't have an officer in it?” Burkinshaw asked. “To not have an officer on premises to help manage what is like a small city is ludicrous.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/all-montgomery-high-schools-to-have-police-on-campus-for-new-school-year/2014/05/26/2f25bf04-e10d-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html

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California

New details emerge about California mass killer and victims

by Holly Yan, Pamela Brown and Alan Duke

At the I.V. Deli Mart in southern California, purple flowers now fill a bullet hole in the front of the store.

It's just one of at least 10 crime scenes left behind by a young man bent on wreaking havoc because of his perceived slights and his difficulties with women.

In the three days since the stabbing and shooting spree that left six people and the assailant dead, a slew of new information has emerged about the victims, the suspect and what led up to the tragedy. Here's what we know:

The rampage started with his roommates

Authorities now know Elliot Rodger's killing spree across Isla Vista, California, began before he even left home.

The 22-year-old former Santa Barbara City College student fatally stabbed three young men in his own apartment -- George Chen, 19, Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, and Weihan Wang, 20.

Chen and Hong were the attacker's roommates.

A friend of Rodger's family said Rodger recently had a feud with his roommates, complained to his landlord that his roommates were too noisy and played lots of video games.

The assailant himself outlined his plan to kill two roommates in a 137-page manifesto he left behind.

"I'd even enjoy stabbing them both to death while they slept," Rodger wrote.

The assailant had been seeing therapists

Rodger's history of mental health issues was no secret to his family, and the young man was seeing at least two therapists prior to his death.

He had been seeing therapists on and off since he was 8, family friend Simon Astaire said. When he went to high school in Van Nuys, California, he met with a therapist "pretty much every day," Astaire said.

Rodger's family contacted police after discovering social media posts about suicide and killing people, family spokesman and attorney Alan Shifman told reporters Saturday.

Six policemen showed up at Rodger's home in Isla Vista on April 30, but they found nothing alarming. So they told Rodger to call his mother and they reassured her that he was OK, according to Astaire.

Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown told reporters Saturday that at the time, deputies "determined he did not meet the criteria for an involuntary hold."

Brown said Rodger told deputies it was a misunderstanding and that he was not going to hurt anyone or himself. Rodger said he was having troubles with his social life.

But even then, Rodger was already plotting his deadly "Day of Retribution."

"I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it," Rodger wrote toward the end of a 137-page account of his life. "If that was the case, the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, along with my writings about what I plan to do with them.

"I would have been thrown in jail, denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. I can't imagine a hell darker than that."

He sent his manifesto to two dozen people

Perhaps some of the most obvious clues as to why the rampage took place come from Rodger's 137-page manifesto, which chronicles his birth all the way to his planned "Day of Retribution."

Minutes before he shot three young women in front of sorority house and killed a young man at a nearby deli, Rodger e-mailed his dissertation -- "My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger" -- to two dozen people, including his parents and at least one of his therapists.

"My orchestration of the Day of Retribution is my attempt to do everything, in my power, to destroy everything I cannot have," Rodger wrote.

"All of those beautiful girls I've desired so much in my life, but can never have because they despise and loathe me, I will destroy. All of those popular people who live hedonistic lives of pleasure, I will destroy, because they never accepted me as one of them. I will kill them all and make them suffer, just as they have made me suffer. It is only fair."

Rodger's mother, Lichin, saw the e-mailed manifesto at 9:17 p.m. PT. She went to Rodger's YouTube page and saw a disturbing video in which her son talked about "slaughtering" women at a sorority house at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Astaire said.

His mother called 911 and Rodger's father, and the parents left from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, the family friend said. En route, they heard there was a shooting. Later that night, they found out their son was the gunman.

All the deceased victims were UCSB students.

Chen, Hong and Wang, the three men fatally stabbed Rodger's apartment, were students at the University of California, Santa Barbara -- as were the three other victims who didn't survive.

UCSB canceled classes until Wednesday and declared Tuesday to be a day of mourning, with a memorial service set for Tuesday afternoon. Counselors are available on campus for anyone needing support, the university said.

The two young women fatally shot outside the Alpha Phi sorority house -- Katherine Cooper, 22, and Veronika Weiss, 19 -- were members of the Delta Delta Delta sorority at UCSB.

"Katie will be remembered for her generous spirit and warm heart. Veronika will be remembered for her vibrant personality and enthusiasm for life," Delta Delta Delta President Phyllis Durbin Grissom wrote.

The sixth victim killed was Christopher Martinez, who was getting a sandwich at a deli when he was shot. The 20-year-old UCSB student known for his selflessness.

"Chris was just an amazing guy," Jeff Dolphin, Martinez's freshman-year roommate, told the Los Angeles Times.

"If I was going through something, he was always there for me. If I needed something, he was there. If I needed a textbook, if I was locked out of the room because I forgot my key, he would stop playing basketball or doing what he was doing to unlock the door so I didn't have to get charged. He was just a great guy."

Martinez's father, Richard Martinez, lambasted politicians and the National Rifle Association after his son's death. He told CNN's Kyung Lah that nothing has changed since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012, when 20 children and six adults were killed.

"Have we learned nothing? These will continue until somebody does something. Where the hell is the leadership?" Richard Martinez asked.

"He's our only child. And he died on Friday. I'm 61 years old now. I'll never have another child. He's gone."

Inside the gunman's head: Rejection, jealousy and vow to kill 'beautiful girls'

Who's the man behind the rampage

Transcript of Elliot Rodger 'Retribution' video

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/26/justice/california-killing-spree/

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California

Killer's Family Tried To Intervene Before Rampage

by The Associated Press

It was Friday night when Elliot Rodger's mother got a call from her son's therapist that he had emailed a ranting manifesto about going on a deadly rampage.

The mother went to her son's YouTube channel and found the video in which he threatens to kill people. She alerted authorities and set off frantically with her ex-husband to Santa Barbara.

By the time they arrived, it was too late: their son had killed six people and then, authorities say, himself.

"They're in deep, deep grief," family friend Simon Astaire said Sunday as he recounted the family's ordeal. "Their grief which is nearly unbearable to be close to is as much for the loss of their son as for the victims."

It was the second time in recent months that Rodger's mother tried to intervene. In April, she had called one of her son's counselors after seeing bizarre videos he had posted on YouTube, though not the disturbing one he posted shortly before the killings, Astaire said. The counselor called a mental health service, which then called police.

Santa Barbara County Sheriff's deputies who showed up at Rodger's doorstep to check on his mental health, however, weren't aware of any videos, the department's spokeswoman Kelly Hoover said. They concluded after their visit that the well-mannered if shy young man posed no risk.

Sheriff Bill Brown has defended the deputies' actions, but the case highlights the challenges that police face in assessing the mental health of adults, particularly those with no history of violent breakdowns, institutionalizations or serious crimes.

"Obviously, looking back on this, it's a very tragic situation and we certainly wish that we could turn the clock back and maybe change some things," Brown told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

"At the time deputies interacted with him, he was able to convince them that he was OK," he said.

It's not clear whether the mother's concern about the videos was conveyed to the deputies. An email to the counselor was not immediately returned.

Doris A. Fuller, executive director of the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center, said California law has provisions that permit emergency psychiatric evaluations of individuals who pose a serious threat, but that was never triggered.

Rodger's family has disclosed their son was under the care of therapists.

"Once again, we are grieving over deaths and devastation caused by a young man who was sending up red flags for danger that failed to produce intervention in time to avert tragedy," Fuller said in a statement.

"In this case, the red flags were so big the killer's parents had called police ... and yet the system failed," she said.

Rodger, writing in a manifesto, said the police asked whether he had suicidal thoughts, and he was able to convince them he was fine. He said he was relieved his apartment wasn't searched because deputies would have uncovered the cache of weapons he used in the rampage in Isla Vista.

He posted at least 22 YouTube videos. He wrote in his manifesto that he uploaded most of his videos in the week leading up to April 26, when he originally planned to carry out his attacks. He postponed his plan after catching a cold.

"On the week leading up to date I set for the Day of Retribution, I uploaded several videos onto YouTube in order to express my views and feelings to the world, though I don't plan on uploading my ultimate video until minutes before the attack, because on that video I will talk about exactly why I'm doing this," Rodger wrote.

In the final video posted Friday, he sits in a black BMW in sunset light and appears to be acting out scripted lines and planned laughs.

"I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you," the son of a Hollywood director who worked on "The Hunger Games" says.

In his videos and writings, Rodger voices his contempt for everyone from his roommates to the human race, reserving special hate for two groups: the women he says kept him a virgin for all of his 22 years and the men they chose instead.

The rampage played out largely as he sketched it in public postings. He said he would start by "silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery." He said he would knock them out with a hammer, and slit their throats.

On Sunday, the sheriff's office identified the final victims as Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, and George Chen, 19 — both from San Jose — and Weihan Wang, 20, of Fremont. Hong and Chen were listed on the lease as Rodger's roommates. Investigators were trying to determine whether Wang was a roommate or was visiting the apartment.

Around 9:30 p.m., the shooting rampage began and lasted about 10 minutes.

In the end, he shot and killed three others at random, and injured 13 more either with gunshots or the BMW that he used as a battering ram against bicyclists and skateboarders.

Deputies found three semi-automatic handguns along with 400 unspent rounds in the car. All were purchased legally.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/26/315975214/killers-family-tried-to-intervene-before-rampage

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Arizona

Have coffee with a cop, talk community issues in Peoria

PEORIA, Ariz. -- The Peoria Police Department is hosting Coffee with a Cop, Saturday May 31, to give the community a chance to interact with officers and talk local issues, department officials said.

The event will offer the opportunity for residents and officers to come together in an informal, neutral space to discuss community issues, build relationships and drink coffee.

All community members are invited to attend.

The event will be held from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. at Crossroads Books and Coffee, 9069 W. Olive Ave., No. 105.

"Coffee with a Cop provides a unique opportunity for community members to ask questions and learn more about the department's work in Peoria's neighborhoods," stated public safety information officer Amanda Jacinto in a prepared release.

The majority of contact law enforcement has with the public happens during emergencies, or emotional situations. Those situations are not always the most effective times for relationship-building with the community, and some community members may feel officers are unapproachable on the street. Coffee with a Cop breaks down barriers and allows for a relaxed, one-on-one interaction, Jacinto added.

“We hope that community members will feel comfortable to ask questions, bring concerns, or simply get to know our officers,” said Peoria Police Chief Roy Minter. “These interactions are the foundation of community partnerships.”

Coffee with a Cop is a national initiative supported by The United States Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The program aims to advance the practice of community policing through improving relationships between police officers and community members one cup of coffee at a time.

http://www.yourwestvalley.com/peoria/article_b225531a-e1e4-11e3-bc2a-001a4bcf887a.html

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New York

New York's Next Public Safety Revolution

The city's ambitious plan to combat dangerous and often deadly driving

by Nicole Gelinas

Belkys Rivera wept as her English translator conveyed her words to the New York City Council in February. “I remember my heart breaking when hearing the news. The last day I saw my son alive was December 25, 2011.” Josbel was 23, starting a new store-management job. Belkys worried when he didn't come home. “Nunca,” she responded when asked if she had expected to see two detectives on her doorstep at dawn. “The police asked me to get my other children nearby, and that's when I began to realize that something had happened. The detectives were heartbroken as well, and they were explaining through [my] younger children what happened.” Josbel was dead—killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the Bronx's Mosholu Parkway. “The driver . . . left the scene and burned the car,” she said. “I did my job as a mother,” she added, but “because of an atrocity committed by a man who should not have been driving”—the driver's license had been suspended—“the world will be denied Josbel's contribution.”

Amy Tam's story was just as wrenching. She told the council about her three-year-old daughter, Allison Liao, who sang “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” as she rode the Q44 bus and who loved “using upside-down laundry baskets as drums”—and who died last fall, “holding Grandma's hand,” after “a huge SUV” abruptly turned into a Main Street crosswalk in Flushing, Queens, and struck her. “We are never going to see her start kindergarten,” Tam lamented.

Too many New Yorkers die every year because of reckless drivers. Thankfully, new New York mayor Bill de Blasio has shown leadership in this area, unveiling an ambitious and workable plan to make traffic safer. Backed strongly by New York Police Department chief William Bratton and the city council, the mayor's multiagency initiative, called Vision Zero, will seek to reduce traffic deaths in the city to zero, just as the police try to cut murders to zero. The inspiration behind the plan, which reinforces and expands on efforts by Michael Bloomberg's administration, comes from Sweden's use of innovative road design and smart law enforcement, which has reduced overall traffic fatalities in Stockholm by 45 percent—and pedestrian fatalities by 31 percent—over the last 15 years. When a child runs after a bouncing ball into a residential street and a speeding car strikes and kills him, the Vision Zero philosophy maintains, the death shouldn't be seen as an unavoidable tragedy but as the result of an error of road design or behavioral reinforcement, or both. We already think this way about mass transit and aviation. These days, a plane crash or a train derailment is never solely explained by human error (a train conductor falling asleep, say); it also is a failure of a system that allowed a mistake to culminate in disaster. Of course, engineers and regulators can't eliminate all injuries and deaths; but by applying rigorous, data-based methods, they can cut down on them dramatically.

Nobody favors road deaths, but Vision Zero won't be an easy sell. Implementing it will require working out complex power issues between city hall and Albany, as well as transforming public attitudes. Even in New York, teeming with pedestrians and traffic, many still view speedy driving as an entitlement. Drivers will need to realize—and here, better engineering, law enforcement, and education will be crucial—that getting behind the wheel in a dense urban environment is very different from seizing liberty on the open road.

New York City has already come a long way in reducing traffic fatalities, it's important to recognize. Last year, New York suffered 288 crash deaths, including 170 pedestrians. That sounds bad, and it is, but in 1990, New York had 701 traffic deaths, with 366 pedestrians killed. And 20 years before that, the city saw nearly 1,000 traffic deaths in a single year; it wasn't unusual to lose 500 pedestrians annually. New York's current traffic-fatality numbers compare favorably with other American big cities. An Atlanta resident is more than three times more likely to die in a traffic crash (adjusted for population); a Los Angeleno faces twice the risk. But New York remains behind—in some cases, far behind—other global cities in this area of public safety: Paris, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are all less dangerous. A citizen of Stockholm—the gold-standard metropolis for traffic safety—faces just a third of a New Yorker's risk in dying by vehicle. Last year, the Swedish city, with a population of 900,000, suffered only six traffic deaths. The Gotham equivalent would be 60 such fatalities—not nearly five times that number.

New York City's improved numbers have resulted in part from state-level policy reforms. New York was the first state to get a seat-belt law, in 1984, a controversial measure at the time—the governor of Maine vetoed a similar bill, saying that it “crosse[d] the line between public interest and personal choice”—but a major lifesaver. New York was also a pioneer in fighting drunk driving. More than half a century ago, everyone, including most public officials, thought it was perfectly okay for people to drink and drive. The legal limit for blood-alcohol content was 0.15 percent, nearly twice today's limit, and enforcement was nonexistent. A handful of New York State leaders—above all, health chief William Haddon, Jr.—sought to change this blasé attitude. As Barron Lerner, author of One for the Road , a history of drunk driving, recounts, Haddon headed the first state health department driver-research center, in 1954, and it soon found that half the drivers involved in single-car crashes in New York's Westchester County had blood-alcohol levels above the 0.15 limit, and another 20 percent had levels of at least 0.05 percent. By 1960, thanks in part to Haddon's visionary work, New York lowered the legal limit to 0.10 percent (it's now 0.08). During this same period, New York also became the first state to enact an “implied consent law,” which revoked the licenses of drivers who refused to submit to alcohol tests. And police stepped up enforcement while numerous public campaigns targeted drunk driving.

Countless lives have been saved. In Mississippi or Louisiana, you're two and a half to three and a half times more likely to die in a car crash than in New York State, in part because it's still more culturally acceptable in those Southern states to get plastered and hit the road. Nationwide, 13 percent of drivers are drunk when they kill a pedestrian. In New York City, 8 percent of vehicular killers are inebriated.

Haddon, it's worth noting, was one of the first public-health researchers to think of auto crashes as predictable and preventable rather than as random tragedies. “Haddon had come to deplore the use of the word accident , which he believed made automobile crashes sound inevitable, and, by implication, not preventable,” writes Lerner. His approach was to figure out who—and what—was causing deaths on the road, and then work to prevent the fatalities.

Over the past half-decade, New York City has pursued that vision aggressively, seeking to determine who and what continues to kill on the road. Despite media focus on taxi crashes, the city found, 79 percent of New York's killer drivers are behind the wheel of their own private car or truck, not a commercial vehicle. Most of the drivers are male. In pedestrian deaths, vehicle speed and driver inattention are major culprits. As a recent analysis of five years' worth of crashes by the city's department of transportation concludes, “in 53 percent of pedestrian fatalities . . . dangerous driver choices—such as inattention, speeding, failure to yield—are the main causes of the crash. The pedestrians in these cases were following the law.” Three-year-old Allison Liao's grandmother was following the law when the SUV killed the little girl. The MTA bus driver who hit and killed 23-year-old Ella Bandes on January 31 “was looking in the mirror to try to avoid a taxi at this complicated, pedestrian-unfriendly intersection,” her father, Kenneth Bandes, told the city council; his daughter wasn't “texting or talking on her phone,” as some people often assume of crash victims. In another 17 percent of pedestrian deaths, a driver error—often excessive speed—made a pedestrian's mistake a death sentence.

Make no mistake: speed is lethal. Someone hit by a car going 20 mph will live, 90 percent of the time; someone hit at 40 mph has only a 30 percent chance of surviving. Speeding distorts the judgment of both driver and potential victim. “Drivers overestimate their own ability to stop” and “underestimate the impact” of a crash, says Rune Elvik, a civil-engineering professor at Denmark's Aalborg University. Drivers wrongly think that they'll save a lot of time by speeding on free stretches of otherwise clogged roads (lights or traffic eventually slow them down). And a child crossing the street has difficulty judging a fast-moving vehicle's distance. A 2010 paper by the University of London's John P. Wann and colleagues found that “children . . . could not reliably detect a vehicle approaching at speeds higher than approximately 25 mph.”

Mayor Bloomberg's transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, used her authority over street design to try to reduce speeds and sharpen driver attention. Times Square's now famous pedestrian island, filled with tables and chairs, and similar islands and protected bike lanes that Sadik-Khan set up across the city give drivers something to notice, reminding them that people live and work where they're zooming along. Streetscape changes like these often narrow traffic lanes, as well, which tends to make drivers more careful and makes it less likely that pedestrians will get stuck in oncoming traffic as they rush to cross a street—they can now can take refuge on the islands. Other Sadik-Khan changes included “countdown clocks,” which show crossing pedestrians how many seconds they have before a light turns green, and “split-phase” green lights, which let pedestrians cross before cars and trucks get to turn—a response to the fact that left-turning drivers disproportionately kill.

The numbers show the effectiveness of the design changes. At modified intersections, fatalities have fallen by a third since 2005, twice the city rate. Redesigning Jackson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens—a very dangerous road—by extending medians, painting new crosswalks, and delaying turns cut crashes with injuries by 63 percent. Building a pedestrian island and adding crosswalks on Macombs Road in the Bronx reduced deadly crashes by 41 percent. “Pedestrian-oriented designs save lives,” says Polly Trottenberg, de Blasio's transportation commissioner.

De Blasio's Vision Zero project will keep up the Bloomberg-era engineering efforts to change driver behavior, focusing on 25 key “arterial” streets, wide avenues like Queens Boulevard (long called the “Boulevard of Death” for its many traffic fatalities) and the Bronx's Mosholu Parkway, where Josbel Rivera died. These roadways make up just 15 percent of Gotham's streets—but 60 percent of the city's traffic-related fatalities occur on them. The arteries “were designed for the fast movement of cars and trucks,” says Trottenberg, and making them look less like highways will slow drivers. To get the job done, though, de Blasio must be willing to take the heat, as Bloomberg did, for imposing changes that a vocal minority will strongly resist. It's not a good sign that the mayor, in his February press conference on Vision Zero, wouldn't say whether he thought that redesigning Times Square had been a good idea.

The smart use of data is a second crucial component of Vision Zero. De Blasio is directing his taxi regulators to explore outfitting taxis with “black boxes,” which can record data and sound warnings when drivers go too fast. The devices could not only deter drivers from breaking the law but could also give the city more data on who speeds, and where. The police could use the information to deploy manpower and the transportation department to redesign dangerous intersections. And Commissioner Bratton says that improved data collection and presentation in all areas of NYPD activity, including traffic enforcement, will be a major goal of his second term as the city's top cop. That Bratton's NYPD takes traffic safety seriously was evident in its recent flyers warning drivers that illegal double parking, by reducing visibility and forcing bicyclists into traffic lanes, put innocent people in harm's way. In March, police officers were out in force ticketing drivers who had parked in bike lanes, pleasing street-safety advocates who had long complained of lax enforcement.

In addition to road design and data crunching, the de Blasio administration will take a more traditional approach to combating speeding: reducing city speed limits. Lowering limits was “the most important” step that Sweden took two decades ago in its traffic-safety turnaround, says Stockholm mayor Sten Nordin, whose city helped pioneer Vision Zero. New York will ask Albany, which controls many of the city's laws, to let it cut the city's default speed limit—the maximum speed that drivers can move when they're not on a highway—from 30 mph to 25 mph. And the city wants to set up more “slow zones,” where 20 mph is the top speed. “The standard in densely populated cities where Vision Zero has been implemented around the world” is 20 mph, Amy Cohen, whose son, Sammy Cohen Eckstein, died on Prospect Park West last year, reminded the city council.

The real challenge will be enforcement. “His memorial is still up,” says Cohen of the site where her son died, yet people still speed there. Deterring such lawbreaking will mean ticketing speeders more aggressively, as well as revoking recidivist speeders' licenses. After a series of high-profile traffic deaths this winter, the NYPD has been nabbing more speeders and other reckless drivers. The police wrote 7,648 speeding tickets in January, up 20 percent from last year.

An NYPD-led traffic-ticketing blitz runs into problems as a permanent strategy, though. As City Council Member James Vacca notes, “Since 2001, the highway division has been cut by 50 percent. Local resources are stretched.” De Blasio is adding some officers but not nearly enough to make up for past cuts. Moreover, enforcement is inconsistent and incomplete. Thus, Elvik argues, “there are advantages in using automated enforcement”: speed cameras. “There is a much higher risk of detection” with cameras, he adds, and they make for “a fairer system. Speed cameras treat all drivers equally”—even drivers with public-sector union stickers on their cars, for example, whom police tend to treat leniently. The unpredictability of “ticket blitzes” also angers the public. Over time, people appreciate consistency and predictability. If you know that you will always pay a price for driving 10 miles over the speed limit, you probably won't speed.

Speed cameras are common in cities with better safety records than New York's. A decade ago, London was only 29 percent safer than New York for pedestrians, relative to population size; now, with lots of cameras in place, it's twice as safe. “London has a pretty decent network of speed cameras,” says Bruce McVean of Movement for Liveable London. “It makes it a lot easier for local authorities.” London's transport authority estimates that the cameras help save 500 people annually from death or severe injury. And after New York City started ticketing red-light runners two decades ago, serious injuries at the targeted intersections fell 25 percent; more red-light cameras would improve on those safety gains.

New York politics have made speed-camera use tricky, though. Albany, not city hall, controls the number and placement of the city's speed cameras, just as it controls the speed limit. Last year, the city won the right to install 20 speed cameras only after a protracted campaign, which benefited from then-mayor Bloomberg's support, including his shaming of three state senators who had stalled legislation. “Maybe you want to give [their] phone numbers to the parents of the child when a child is killed . . . so that the parents can know exactly who's to blame,” the mayor said. This year, Mayor de Blasio secured Albany approval for an additional 120 cameras. The power the mayors won is limited, though. The city can only use the cameras to enforce the law on roads that run past schools, and during school hours, though drivers have the most opportunity to speed at night, when there is less traffic congestion. The fine for exceeding the speed limit by at least 10 mph isn't high: $50. And speed-camera tickets don't result in penalty “points” on a lawbreaker's driver's license—a significant omission, since drivers with too many points for violations can temporarily lose their licenses. As part of Vision Zero, de Blasio wants Albany to relinquish its right to dictate the number, placement, and use of cameras.

Albany will probably resist. First, police unions hate cameras, fearing that they will make human officers redundant. “Ridiculous,” says Paul Steely White of the Transportation Alternatives advocacy group. There would still be plenty for cops to do in traffic enforcement—stopping drivers and levying fines and points for failing to yield to a pedestrian, say, or for texting behind the wheel. Another, more reasonable, charge is that cameras will just become another way for the government to shake people down for revenue. The city and state must combat this perception. “The sole purpose of traffic law should be to prevent harm,” says Leonard Evans, a research veteran of the auto industry and author of the book Traffic Safety . As a way of easing concerns, the city and state could announce that they would split camera-ticket money equally among all New Yorkers via a rebate on their tax return. Expanded camera use should actually shrink revenue over time, as drivers learn to obey the rules. Privacy is a third concern. As Evans notes, though, driving is a public activity, monitored by police for a century now, and traffic cameras “record only people who are breaking the law.” Anyone who uses an E-ZPass already has his movements tracked. A fourth obstacle is the state's dislike of “home rule.” New York governor Andrew Cuomo isn't known for giving up power, and de Blasio is pushing for home rule on multiple fronts, from the minimum wage to rent regulation. De Blasio would be wise not to take an all-or-nothing approach, as he did for a time in his battle with Cuomo over a proposed city income-tax surcharge to fund a prekindergarten program.

When a cabdriver runs over a little boy in a crosswalk, or an SUV driver mounts a sidewalk and plows into someone, the public reaction is: the driver should be behind bars. But he's not. As Karen Friedman Agnifilo, chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr.'s office, says: “It can be difficult for people to understand why a crash is not always a crime.” For one thing, in 1990, the state's appeals court ruled that, as Agnifilo puts it, “an unexplained failure to perceive” on the part of a driver—absent some outrageous conduct—“is not a crime.” In other words, a driver really can say “I didn't see him” and walk free under the law, even if he had been driving irresponsibly.

New York law currently limits vehicular homicide or assault charges to drunk-driving cases. Several states, though, including Illinois and Florida, now make it possible to charge sober drivers with homicide if they kill. New York does let prosecutors charge for criminal recklessness. Vance is willing to use this law aggressively, as he did in charging Adam Tang, who allegedly videotaped himself trying to break the speed record for motoring around Manhattan. The question is whether juries will accept that driving dangerously is similar to driving drunk.

New York unquestionably needs tougher penalties for deadly driving. “Look at these sentences,” says Agnifilo, pointing to two 2013 vehicular-homicide cases in the city. One defendant got a maximum of four years; the other, six. “Do these sentences seem long enough to you?” Without stiffer punishments for drunk offenders like these, it's hard to justify longer sentences for other forms of careless driving; the maximum penalty for criminal recklessness is a year. State Senator Mike Gianaris and Assemblywoman Marge Markey of Queens have introduced a bill that makes it a felony if someone with a revoked or suspended license injures or kills someone with a vehicle. Senator Joseph Addabbo, Jr., a cosponsor, observes that, over the last five years, license-less drivers have killed 181 people in New York City crashes—and largely gotten away with it. Under the bill, they could face four years in prison. The measure not only targets a particularly lethal set of drivers; it also could help change public attitudes by making it clear that operating a potentially deadly machine on roadways is a privilege. A related proposal empowers police and prosecutors to seize the plates from a car or truck operated by a driver without a license before he crashes. City hall, backed by several local lawmakers, is asking Albany for several other legal changes, including increasing the punishment for fleeing a crash—one year in prison—so that it's equivalent to the four-year penalty, practically speaking, for inflicting a drunk-driving injury or death. As Juan Martinez, general counsel at Transportation Alternatives, explains, the driver who hit Josbel Rivera faced a more serious charge (arson) for torching his car than he did for leaving Rivera to die.

Agnifilo says that the NYPD's “crash investigation squad” now responds to crashes that result in death or “critical” injury. That's an improvement over two years ago, when the police investigated crashes only when victims were “likely to die.” She would like to see them respond to crashes that cause “serious” injury, the standard for criminal charges. In that case, “district attorneys would be called to more crash scenes, allowing prosecutors to make more appropriate charging decisions,” she says.

To prepare cases, the DA relies on witness testimony as well as subpoenaed cell-phone and text records and, increasingly, thanks to a new federal law, on black-box evidence from cars. Agnifilo wants some straightforward changes from Albany to give prosecutors more resources to prepare their cases. Prosecutors need the right to draw blood at the scene of a serious crash without a warrant, which can take hours to secure—while the driver detoxes. The DA's office would like more time, under “speedy trial” requirements, to prepare vehicular-homicide cases—as it gets for other homicide cases.

Prosecution of smaller infractions can serve as another deterrent. Thanks to better police enforcement, the Manhattan DA received 2,556 drunk-driving cases last year, up 18 percent from 2009. Though the charge is only a misdemeanor, it can mean thousands of dollars in legal costs and a license suspension, as a current public-service advertisement reminds potential drunk drivers. Here, too, tighter laws could complement better police enforcement and prosecution. Currently, if you rack up two DUI convictions in five years, you lose your license for six months. Cuomo wants anyone convicted of drunk driving twice in three years to lose his license for five years. “Three strikes, and you're out and you are off the road, period,” the governor said this winter.

The most potent factor in making Gotham traffic safer is that citizens and lawmakers are starting to demand change. “We're reaching a point of critical mass on the pedestrian safety issue,” says Gianaris. The senator says that after two Queens deaths—eight-year-old Noshat Nahian and Angela Hurtado, an older woman on her way to play bingo—caused by drivers with suspended licenses, he grew angry. “This should be a felony.”

New York is a city made up of powerful special interests, and now a grim new lobby has organized itself: family members of crash victims. Parents, including Amy Cohen and Amy Tam, have helped create Families for Safe Streets, encouraging the public to push for speed cameras and other traffic-safety measures. Lerner, the historian of drunk driving, whose own nephew, Cooper Stock, died on the Upper West Side in January after a cabdriver struck him in a crosswalk, says that the movement is similar to the early movement against drunk driving. “Angry parents and relatives” highlighted “the absurdity of a society” that looked the other way as drunk drivers killed. Just as you now know that you shouldn't drink and drive, texting and driving should be equally taboo. “As more and more potential distractions for drivers emerge, we should be less—not more—tolerant of a mind-set that excuses such behaviors because ‘everybody does them,' ” says Lerner. The politically active New Yorkers who show up to community meetings to pressure city council members and Albany legislators on bread-and-butter issues are starting to view dangerous driving as one of those issues. Parents want their kids to get to school safely; elderly people perceive themselves as vulnerable.

Those demanding safer streets expect local government to use better data and smarter engineering and enforcement to achieve that end. Many observers once contended that the murder rate would never fall, but thanks largely to smart policing, it is down 85 percent since 1990—nearly twice as big a drop as traffic deaths. New Yorkers are thus likely to hold de Blasio to his stated goal: a quick and marked reduction in traffic deaths. “We are thrilled that the mayor is so supportive,” says Amy Cohen. But she and her fellow grieving parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, and aunts will be “a public force” if “things aren't moving along as expected.”

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_ny-reckless-driving.html

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Ohio

UC Public Safety Announces New “LiveSafe” Application

by Taylor Rhoten

The University of Cincinnati launched a new mobile app May 1 in an effort to increase student safety on and around campus.

The LiveSafe app provides an alternative way to contact campus police for students who may be hesitant to contact 911. It is available for free to anyone with an iPhone or Android and can be downloaded from iTunes and Google Play.

The app provides options for reporting different situations including vandalism, mental health and disturbances, according to a UC press release.

Users can upload videos, pictures and audio and can send their location information to UC police. The university can also use the app to send safety and emergency updates to students.

Brad Cousino, a second-year student, said the app is a more relaxed way to contact police, but adds, “911 is definitely the quicker and more effective option rather than using the application.”

Second-year student Jordan Staley says more than an app is required to keep students safe.

“Although the application is a good idea and a good initiative, until surrounding, off-campus property is purchased and rented to students by the university, students off campus will never be entirely safe,” Staley said.

LiveSafe has also been implemented at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

John Venuti, chief of VCU police, had only positive things to say about the app on the LiveSafe.com homepage, the official website for the safety app.

"The value in the LiveSafe app for a student is having the ability to directly contact the police department for absolutely anything they need, not just emergencies,” Venuti said. “We can only address the problems and issues we are aware of."

http://www.newsrecord.org/news/uc-public-safety-announces-new-livesafe-application/article_d9ea5dee-e466-11e3-b2de-001a4bcf6878.html

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How Solitary Confinement Destroys Women

The rate of female incarceration is increasing rapidly, mostly for crimes driven by poverty and abuse. Then solitary confinement compounds the trauma.

by Sarah Shourd

“I always felt unsafe is solitary,” said 53-year-old Jacqueline Craig, who was incarcerated at age 16 for a drug offense and went on to spend 20 years of her life in prison, roughly six or seven of those in “the hole,” or solitary confinement. “I had to put on this bad-ass persona. I got more confrontational and ended up with more and more time in solitary.”

Women make up 7 percent of the 2.4 million people in prison in the United States. But despite this relatively small percentage, the rate of incarceration for women is growing faster than any other demographic. Recent scrutiny in an ACLU report released last month, “Worse Than Second Class: Solitary Confinement of Women in the United States,” posits that women are affected by solitary confinement—what typically amount to 22 to 23 hours alone in a cell the size of a large bathroom for weeks, months or years at a time—in distinct and often uniquely harmful ways.

“Women are put in the hole for small things,” said Craig, who now works as a supervisor at a domestic violence safe house in Washington, D.C. “Sometimes there's a fight or something, but it can be for something stupid, like stealing a tomato from the kitchen, or having two blankets instead of one.”

According to the ACLU, the number of children with a mother in prison doubled. “My son was about 2 the first time I was put in solitary,” Craig said. “As a mother it effected my relationship with him in a bad way—you're not able to call, you can write but it will take at least a week to get there, if they get it. I didn't want my children to see me in handcuffs and shackles. Your children forget you, that's a hurtin' feeling.”

The vast majority of women in prison, like Craig, are nonviolent offenders who pose a very low security risk. Poverty is the dominant reason women commit crime, whether it's sex work, welfare fraud, or drug offenses. For many women, these are crimes of survival. In 2004, more than 90 percent of imprisoned women reported annual incomes of less then $10,000 before their imprisonment, and most hadn't completed high school. When women do commit violent crimes, it's typically to defend themselves against an abuser. In addition, as many as 90 percent of female prisoners are rape, domestic violence and/or survivors of other trauma; many are mentally ill and even more are the primary caretakers of young children that depend on them.

“When a prisoner is in solitary, visits are more likely to take place through video conferencing, where the mother and child are in separate buildings,” said Gail Smith from CLAIM, an organization in Chicago that provides legal aid to prisoners on family law issues. “This is a terrible thing to do to a child, to have them travel three or four hours to see their mom and not even be able to hug her.”

If your child is in foster care, the situation can be ever more dire. “Up to 20 percent of women in prison have children in foster homes,” Smith said. “These women are required to demonstrate ‘reasonable progress' in order to prevent that child from being permanently taken away from them. This includes drug treatment, anger-management, parenting classes and survivor groups, all of which they are barred from while in solitary. Everything is at stake…they may never be able to see their children again.”

Incarcerated women are twice as likely to be rape survivors than women in general, and abuse often continues in prison. “There's a causal development for many women prisoners between being separated from their children—past trauma, depression and suicide,” said Terry Kupers, a California psychiatrist who focuses on the effects of prolonged isolation on prisoners. “There's a general rule in psychology that men get angry and women get depressed; this principle is taken to its extremity in solitary.”

When a woman reports being raped by a guard or another inmate, she is immediately placed in solitary confinement. This is ostensibly for her protection, but critics say it is in fact retaliation, designed to discourage women from reporting abuse in the first place. While in solitary, women are regularly supervised by male guards. They are watched while showering, changing their clothes and even using the toilet, a loss of privacy and bodily autonomy that can often be re-traumatizing. Cut off from lawyers and family, and isolated from the general prison population, women in solitary are often at even greater risk of being sexual assaulted by staff with total impunity.

According to the ACLU, 75 percent of incarcerated women have mental illness, an even higher percentage than their male counterparts. Sensory deprivation, the absence of human interaction, and extreme idleness can lead to severe psychological debilitation, even in healthy, well-functioning adults—while people with mental illness more rapidly deteriorate. “People with a history of trauma and mental illness tend to be emotionally labile,” Kupers added. “They have more ups and down emotionally. Eighty percent of incarcerated women have been sexually or physically abused, so the emotions that everyone has in solitary—anger, depression, anxiety, fear and paranoia—are going to be much, much stronger for them. In isolation, these emotions will magnify and just keep reverberating with no one to talk to.”

Placing women with mental illness in solitary confinement can amount to punishment for behavior beyond their control. “Women with mental illness have a much harder time conforming their behavior to staff expectations,” Smith said. “I know of a women thrown into solitary for ‘reckless eyeballing,' which means she gave an officer a exasperated look. Another woman was pregnant and struggling with mental illness. She had just gotten back from the hospital the night before and was completely exhausted. When the officer insisted she get up early for breakfast, the woman refused. The officer shook her, insisting she get up. When the women pushed back she ended up in solitary, where she had zero access to even basic prenatal care.”

Widespread criticism of solitary confinement has led to congressional hearings in recent years and forced the Bureau of Prisons to embark on its first-ever internal review of the practice. In addition, new legislation was recently passed in New York and Colorado, limiting the use of isolation among some of the most vulnerable prison populations—juveniles and the mentally ill.

Though critics largely see these changes as positive, many feel they don't go nearly far enough. “In order to become more healthy, not just women, juveniles or the mentally ill but all prisoners need greater freedom to make new and better choices,” Smith said. “Stuck in a cell by yourself 23 hours a day, this simply isn't possible.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/26/how-solitary-confinement-destroys-women.html