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November, 2014 - Week 4

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Missouri

Resignation of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson unlikely to halt protests

by Fox News

City officials in Ferguson, Mo. were due Sunday to address the resignation of Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed teenager Michael Brown in a confrontation in August that fueled protests in the St. Louis suburb and around the nation.

Stephanie Karr, Ferguson city attorney, told the Associated Press that city officials planned to make a statement regarding Wilson's resignation. Karr earlier this week said Wilson had been on paid leave pending the outcome of an internal police investigation.

Wilson's resignation was announced Saturday by one of his attorneys, Neil Bruntrager, who said his client's decision was effective immediately.

"I have been told that my continued employment may put the residents and police officers of the City of Ferguson at risk, which is a circumstance that I cannot allow,” Wilson said in his resignation letter released late Saturday.

“It was my hope to continue in police work, but the safety of other police officers and the community are of paramount importance to me. It is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal,” the letter read.

Meanwhile, Brown's parents planned to attend services at the church where their son's funeral was held, with the Rev. Al Sharpton scheduled to preach.

"We were not after Wilson's job," Sharpton wrote in a statement. "We were after Michael Brown's justice."

On Saturday night, more than 100 protesters gathered near police headquarters, where they were outnumbers by officers, following the news. At least one person was arrested after a brief standoff with officers, while others wearing white masks sat in a nearby street blocking traffic. Another protester burned an American flag. By midnight, only about two dozen protesters remained.

But many seemed unfazed by the resignation. Several merely shrugged their shoulders when asked what they thought, while Rick Campbell flatly said he didn't care about the resignation, noting: "I've been protesting out here since August."

A grand jury spent more than three months reviewing evidence in the case before declining in November to issue charges against Wilson. He told jurors that he feared for his life when Brown hit him and reached for his gun.

The U.S. Justice Department is still conducting a civil rights investigation into the shooting and a separate probe of police department practices.

After the shooting, Wilson spent months in hiding and made no public statements. He broke his silence after the grand jury decision, telling ABC News that he could not have done anything differently in the encounter with Brown.

Wilson said he has a clean conscience because "I know I did my job right." Brown's shooting was the first time he fired his gun on the job, he said.

Asked whether the encounter would have unfolded the same way if Brown had been white, Wilson said yes.

Away from the protests Saturday night, resident Victoria Rutherford said she believed Wilson should have not only resigned, but been convicted of a crime.

"I'm upset. I have a 16-year-old son. It could've been him. I feel that he was absolutely in the wrong," she said.

Another resident, Reed Voorhees, said he hoped Wilson could find similar work "someplace where he would enjoy life, and move on with his life."

In the days after the shooting, tense and sometimes violent protests popped up in and around Ferguson, a predominantly black community patrolled by a mostly white police force. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon called in the National Guard to help.

Then on Monday night -- when prosecutors announced that a grand jury declined to indict Wilson -- the St. Louis suburb of 20,000 residents was ravaged by looting and violence.

At least a dozen commercial buildings were destroyed in Ferguson and neighboring Dellwood, mostly along West Florissant Avenue, not far from where Brown was killed. By Tuesday, Nixon had sent more than 2,200 National Guard members to the Ferguson area to support local law enforcement.

Demonstrations, which also have been held other U.S. cities, are expected to continue, though a sense of normalcy -- or at least a new normal -- has begun to settle on the city.

Police earlier Saturday reopened several blocks of West Florissant that had been barricaded off since Tuesday. Although most store windows were still boarded up, many have been decorated or spray-painted with messages saying the stores are open and welcoming shoppers.

Some business owners spent an unseasonably warm day Saturday tidying up, hoping customers soon would return.

Tracy Ballard, 44, brought her 7-year-old daughter to a store on West Florissant to buy candy and soda, before a trip to the beautician up the street.

"I feel sad for the business owners," Ballard said. "It's really sad it had to come from this. We just wanted justice. If we'd have had justice, none of this would have happened."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/11/30/ferguson-police-officer-darren-wilson-resigns/

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U.S. warplanes hammer ISIS stronghold in Syria, activists say

by CBS News

BEIRUT - U.S.-led coalition warplanes carried out as many as 30 airstrikes overnight against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants in and around the group's de facto capital in northeastern Syria, activists said Sunday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes targeted ISIS positions in the city of Raqqa as well as the Division 17 air base, which the militants seized earlier this year from government forces.

The monitoring group, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, reported at least 30 coalition strikes in all. The Local Coordination Committees, an activist collective, also confirmed the airstrikes. Neither group had casualty figures.

There was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. military.

Raqqa has been the site of heavy bombardment by Syria government forces as well. Activists say 95 people, including many civilians, were killed in strikes there by Assad government air force bombings last week.

The American-led coalition began targeting ISIS in Syria in September, expanding an aerial campaign already hitting the extremist group in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials say two separate bombings have killed seven people in the capital Baghdad.

Police officials say a bomb exploded on Sunday near a small restaurant, killing four people and wounding nine others in northwestern Baghdad. A separate bomb blast near a wholesale fruit and grocery market killed three people and wounded 12 others in a southern Baghdad suburb.

Medical officials confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

Iraq sees near-daily bombings and other attacks mainly targeting Shiite neighborhoods, security forces and Sunnis allied with the government. The attacks are often claimed by the Sunni extremist group ISIS, which seized much of northern and western Iraq in a summer offensive.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-warplanes-hammer-isis-in-syria-activists-say/

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Illinois

Residents needed for community policing program

by Jim Rodenbush

Participants are needed for a new community outreach program designed to improve communication between Murphysboro residents and the police department.

“Improving our Community by Involving Citizens and Law Enforcement,” or ICICLE, was proposed to the Murphysboro City Council at its November meeting by police chief Brian Hollo.

ICICLE will be made up of two residents from each of Murphysboro's five wards. Those 10 residents will meet with Hollo and other members of the police department on a monthly basis.

According to the department, this program “will enable citizens to work closer with the police department to assist in the efforts to deter in, and the reporting of, nuisance complaints, traffic concerns and criminal activity within the city.”

“The thought of this was to have a go-to person, two people, in each ward that's publicized,” Hollo said. “Hey, if you've got an issue and don't want to talk to the police, talk to them. Then, once a month, we're going to meet and then we'll discuss things as a committee.

“Right away, there'll be 10 issues. What's the most important? How do we go about solving it?”

Hollo said the program, which has the support of the City Council and would be of no cost, could get going as soon as January. He sees ICICLE becoming a positive influence on the community, so long as residents are willing to take part.

“Community policing and neighborhood watches are good, if there's participation and communication. You've got to talk to me,” said Hollo, who will mark one year as Murphysboro's chief on Dec. 2. “You've got to tell me what's' going on. And that's what this is. We're hoping these people are willing to come to us and report.”

The community outreach program is part of a larger effort to help make Murphysboro safer.

In addition, the Carbondale/SIU Crime Stoppers is set to extend its services to Murphysboro as soon as Jan. 1. The City Council approved a $2,000 payment to the group at its November meeting.

“We want to do everything we can to be proactive,” mayor Will Stephens said at the time. “We want people to feel like the city is not only hearing their concerns, but doing something tangible about them.”

Hollo hopes these steps will empower Murphysboro residents.

“I want true community involvement,” he said. “It's your neighborhood. How do you fix it? What's your take? It's not just telling us something that's wrong, then running away. Are we working as a group?”

Residents who are interested in becoming a part of ICICLE should contact their alderman.

http://www.murphysboroamerican.com/article/20141129/NEWS/141129376

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South Carolina

Opinion

Community respect, trust critical for effective policing

by Hassas Aden

The situation in Ferguson, Mo., is the most recent example of what can go wrong when a police department has no social capital in its community.

When the police department is seen, and behaves, as an occupying force, community policing, procedural justice and legitimate policing cannot occur. The low level of trust and mutual respect in Ferguson effectively gave the police department no chance to complete a comprehensive investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown without civil protest, and eventually, civil disturbance.

As a police chief with more than 27 years of law enforcement experience, I suggest there is a growing number of chiefs nationwide who are highly educated, experienced and committed to police reform. We are committed to making policing a safer, more just, ethical and customer service-oriented profession.

Law enforcement officers are incredibly devoted to service and will sacrifice everything, even their lives — which happens nearly every day — for the communities they serve.

The organizational culture, officer training, policies and practices, accountability and level of positive community engagement begin with the chief of police, and drive and predict how well the police will perform in their communities.

Genuine community engagement, respect, transparency and the understanding that public safety incidents mandate the sharing of information with the community, demonstrate a level of respect for the people who rely on police service.

In contrast, the Ferguson Police Department did not release any information on what occurred between their officer and Mr. Brown, even preliminary information. I believe that was a crucial mistake. There are always known facts that can be proffered to the community that will not impact the subsequent police investigation.

The actions by the city of St. Louis Police Department, on a day of civil unrest in Ferguson a few miles away, provide an example of how immediate community engagement can satisfy the public's need for information when tragedy occurs. St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson conducted a press conference after two St. Louis police officers shot and killed an African-American man. By engaging the community and focusing on police legitimacy over the past several years, Chief Dotson has built the social capital and the community trust needed to keep tense situations calm.

The examples of Ferguson and St. Louis highlight the fact that police require legitimacy if they are to function effectively, ethically and legally. When citizens consider the police to be legitimate, they are more likely to cooperate with officers, defer to them in moments of crisis and obey the laws they enforce.

Without voluntary consent of the public to be policed, police will become oppressive and forceful, undermining their goal to act on behalf of and in cooperation with those they police.

It is widely known among police leadership and social researchers that American policing is undergoing a significant transformation. Some think that the role of policing in America needs to be critically re-examined. This push for the reexamination of how and what American police departments do is attributable to both internal and external causes, including an increasing emphasis on economic development and growing expectations for police to participate in the social services that hold our communities together.

Very little has actually been studied about how police legitimacy impacts American policing — the concept is noble and seems to be what we need to maximize our opportunity to serve the public in a manner that is civil, respectful and helpful — after all, we are at the core of critical services needed for communities to exist. The study of what behaviors increase police legitimacy will make it possible for police to help their communities thrive rather than just exist.

Hassan Aden is Chief of Police of the city of Greenville.

http://www.reflector.com/opinion/other-voices/aden-community-respect-trust-critical-effective-policing-2722119

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Florida

Opinion

When communities resent police, trouble is inevitable

O n Tuesday, the day after it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the slaying of Michael Brown, the president for a second time called for calm. His statement was measured, careful and responsible. He condemned violence and looting while acknowledging the legitimate concerns animating the protesters. He wasn't all that moving or eloquent, but this might have been one of those times when swinging for the rhetorical fences wasn't what the moment needed.

One theme he hit repeatedly, and correctly, was that the passions of many protesters are rooted in something very real. The "frustrations that we've seen are not just about a particular incident," Obama said. "They have deep roots in many communities of color who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly."

There's no doubt that is true. As John McWhorter writes in Time magazine, "The key element in the Brown-Wilson encounter was not any specific action either man took — it was the preset hostility to the cops that Brown apparently harbored." Officer Wilson made a legitimate request of Brown. Brown, in turn, saw no legitimacy in it and behaved recklessly.

In a community where cops are feared, resented or reviled, it's almost inevitable that bad things will happen when cops try to do their job, even if they do everything by the book. Moreover, to simply say that the resentment of the police is unwarranted does nothing to solve the problem. People forget that for a brief moment in August, the protests turned peaceful and law-abiding when Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, an African-American from Ferguson with credibility in the neighborhood, was put in charge of policing the protests.

Eventually, thanks in large part to an influx of professional agitators, rabble-rousers and opportunists — attracted to television cameras like ambulance chasers to a bus accident — the protests got out of hand again. But that moment was instructive.

Now, if you've been following the news lately — and by lately, I mean the last several years, or even decades — none of this is particularly shocking. Friction between police departments and minority communities has been part of the national conversation on race (that liberals insist hasn't been going on) for as long as I can remember. The New York Times has been regularly covering that beat for at least half a century. It's a major theme of movies and music. It's a huge profit center for Al Sharpton, who doesn't lack for influence or microphones.

And while I have no respect whatsoever for Sharpton, I do think the issue is real. President Obama is right about that.

But what's left out of the narrative that drives so much of the national conversation are the other real experiences of other Americans. On MSNBC, particularly last August, the discussion of Michael Brown — much like Trayvon Martin before him — has been almost entirely abstract. Brown wasn't a person who allegedly robbed a convenience store. He was a stand-in for racial injustice. That's what was so powerful about Brown's (probably mythological) "hands up" gesture.

The outrage that followed when the convenience store robbery video was released and details from the grand jury were leaked was at least in part fury at having the narrative muddied. No one likes to see fresh gospel fact-checked. No one wants to hear that their martyr was in fact no angel. And, in the case of Wilson, no one wants to see their demon humanized.

My point here isn't to "blame the victim" — or even assign blame in this tragic nationalized game of Rashomon. It's simply to note that there is a huge chasm between the way the talking heads and politicians talk about America and the way Americans actually live their lives. Most people aren't lawyers or academic theorizers. The people we interact with on a daily basis aren't abstractions, they're normal human beings, which means they're a mixed bag. In the nightly shouting match, for instance, we're told immigration is all This or all That. But in our lives we see the good and the bad.

The national media — on the right and left — has an insatiable desire for storylines so clear-cut they might as well be allegories. The problem is that life isn't allegorical. It's messy.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-jonah-goldberg-113014-20141129-column.html

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Why Ferguson touched a raw, national nerve

by Ray Sanchez

The rage echoing across the nation after a grand jury's conclusion in Ferguson, Missouri, goes far beyond the decision not to indict white police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of unarmed black teen Michael Brown.

Protesters have blocked bridges and tunnels, spilled into roadways and disrupted Black Friday shopping in more than 150 cities in mostly peaceful protests that conjure memories of the civil rights movement for some. The demonstrators were furious at the grand jury decision, but their frustration transcends anger over what happened between Wilson and Brown in the shadow of St. Louis one Saturday afternoon in August.

"It's bigger than what happened in Ferguson," said Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta.

After the grand jury completed its work, many around the United States have interpreted what happened in Ferguson squarely in the context of a larger, historic narrative about race and justice in America.

To them, Ferguson is just the latest reminder that the American criminal justice system doesn't treat blacks and whites the same -- and that young black men in particular are often killed with impunity.

"It's sort of a quasi-movement that's afoot," said Matthew Whitaker, a history professor who directs the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Arizona State University. "And what we can attribute this to is the fact these things seem to happen so regularly now that the frustrations folks are feeling are leading them to plan almost in advance."

A week ago in Cleveland, a white police officer shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice, seconds after a squad car pulled up. The officers were investigating reports of someone pointing a gun at people. Police said Tamir had an air gun that looked real.

Some protesters in Cleveland linked Tamir's death with Brown's. One held a sign that said "Michael Brown to Tamir Rice, this must stop." Others had signs that said things such as "the whole damn system is guilty!"

Last year, marchers took to the streets in several cities after a jury in central Florida acquitted George Zimmerman, who identified himself as Hispanic, in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was black. Zimmerman said he killed Martin in self-defense after the teenager attacked him.

The visible reaction to Brown's death was even more widespread.

"Ferguson's hell is America's hell," hundreds of students chanted this week at historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. earned his first degree.

Echoes of the past

The case in Ferguson has reminded some people of unsavory episodes from America's past.

Wilson described Brown to grand jurors and a national television audience, for example, in a way that offended some, buttressing their view of how too many white police officers see and treat black men.

Wilson told the grand jury that Brown looked "like a demon." In an interview with ABC News, he described Brown as almost super-human.

"I just felt the immense power that he had," said Wilson, who is about 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds. "It was like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. That's just how big this man was."

Brown was about the same height as Wilson. He weighed nearly 300 pounds.

Whitaker, the history professor, heard echoes of the past in the way Wilson described Brown.

"That's always been one of the painful realities on the black community, is the perception of black men," Whitaker said. "We're regularly portrayed as being these gigantic, threatening, dangerous, oversexed individuals."

He added, "At the end of the day, Michael Brown was essentially a kid, and if you can't see the humanity in a kid, even a recalcitrant kid, there's something wrong with that."

Another aspect of the case that caused some to draw historic parallels: The fact that authorities left Brown's body on the street for four hours.

"The nicest thing you can say is that it's the most insensitive thing we've seen in a long time," said Dorothy Brown, the law professor. "The other extreme is, this was done deliberately. It's sending a signal. We don't want anybody challenging the status quo. Here is a body as a reminder."

Some people compared the immediate aftermath of Brown's death to a lynching in the old South. They drew parallels to a time of public hangings, when mobs killed blacks, sometimes for perceived infractions such as stealing, and left the bodies in public to sow fear.

Police said officials couldn't reach the area where the body lay because a crowd had gathered, making it too dangerous. Ferguson's police chief, Thomas Jackson, later apologized to Brown's family.

"I'm truly sorry for the loss of your son. I'm also sorry that it took so long to remove Michael from the street," he said in a videotaped statement.

Whitaker sees links between Michael Brown and historical figures such as Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly violating an unwritten Southern racial code by whistling at a white woman.

Assailants abducted him at night from his great-uncle's home and tortured and murdered him. Their actions drew national attention to a prejudiced and corrupt legal system in the Jim Crow South.

"Certainly there are connections," Whitaker said. "All you have to do is say, 'Emmett Till,' and images and a time period and feelings come to mind. It's the same with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown."

Jason Johnson, a professor of political science at Hiram College in Ohio and CNN contributor, grew up 30 minutes south of Ferguson and spent time there studying the government response to Brown's killing.

"I have been saying sort of tongue in cheek and very seriously, institutional racism actually works better than this," Johnson said. "This is incompetence."

Dorothy Brown drew a similar conclusion.

"They're not used to being held accountable," Brown said of Ferguson officials. "This is what absolute power looks like. That's why it reminds me of the South in the '50s and '60s."

The nationwide interest in the case also had people making historical comparisons.

Before the grand jury decision, U.S. Rep. John Lewis predicted that a "miscarriage of justice" in the case would create the "same feeling and climate and environment that we had in Selma." Lewis is a black Democrat from Georgia who was among demonstrators police beat in a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

"Selma was the turning point," Lewis told Roland Martin's radio program "News One Now". And I think what happened in Ferguson will be the turning point."

A powerful reaction across the country

Events in Ferguson triggered a national response, experts said, because they embodied themes that resonated far beyond Missouri -- and because social media let people follow along and share opinions in real time.

Last year, a Pew Research Center survey showed that seven of 10 African-Americans, and nearly four in 10 whites, felt blacks were treated less fairly than whites in dealings with the police.

Nearly a quarter of black men ages 18 to 34 reported that police treated them unfairly in the past 30 days, according to a 2013 Gallup poll.

"I would argue the protests that are occurring in Atlanta, in San Francisco, in New York, in Chicago and Cleveland are actually more powerful than the ones in Ferguson," Johnson said.

In an editorial, The New York Times said this week that "many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings." The distrust "presents a grave danger to the civic fabric of the United States," the editorial said.

A report by ProPublica found that young black men were 21 times as likely as their white counterparts to be shot to death by police, the newspaper said.

"Those are the types of statistics that have been with us for a while, but people are finally starting to understand their gravity," Whitaker said.

It was against that backdrop that people shared news on social media of what transpired in Ferguson, helping transform a local news story into a national conversation.

From August 9, the day that Wilson killed Brown, to August 25, the #Ferguson hashtag was used on Twitter 11.6 million times with retweets and 1.9 million without retweets, according to Sysomos.

After Monday night's grand jury announcement, the news spread on social media, with Twitter mapping the explosive use of the #Ferguson hashtag.

Post-racial America?

The unrest that greeted the grand jury decision laid bare to many that a post-racial America remains elusive despite the election and re-election of Barack Obama, America's first black president, and the service of its first black attorney general, Eric Holder.

"We thought we had symbolically and, in some substantive ways, come to a place we've never been," Whitaker said. "How painfully ironic is it that you have these types of representations at the highest levels, yet we still see the smoldering tensions of racial and economic discord bubbling over.

"At the same time, African-American lives, young people, poor people seem to be worth less than the dominant population."

Holder has opened two civil rights investigations in Missouri -- one into whether Wilson violated Brown's civil rights, the other into the police department's overall track record with minorities.

The December 8 cover of The New Yorker magazine illustrates the tragic rift in Ferguson as well as other U.S. cities. The magazine cover shows the Gateway Arch in St. Louis broken and divided by color -- one part white, one black.

African-American activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, told CNN on Friday that it is tragic that America still dealing with hatred against blacks.

Asked if Obama should visit Ferguson, she said: "I don't know if he should go, but he should speak loudly, strongly his beliefs, and to all of the American public, that it is not just a black problem, it's a problem of all Americans. How dare we tell the rest of the world how to live when we don't carry out that message within ourselves?"

Yet Johnson said he found reason for hope.

"For the first time in American history, you have a reasonable number of white Americans who actually think this is a problem," he said.

Adding complexity to the national picture is the arrival in recent years of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including many from countries with corrupt police forces.

"They're bringing with them heightened concern and distrust" of the police, Whitaker said. "And younger people are identifying with it, and those younger people could be poor white Americans. It's spreading."

And people around the United States already are preparing responses to the next Ferguson, Whitaker said.

"Folks are anticipating ... these types of tragic incidents," he said. "Each time, it's going to become large and more intense."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/us/ferguson-national-protests/

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Texas

Gunman rampaging through downtown Austin killed in hero horse cop confrontation after more than 100 shots

by Katie Friel

A suspected gunman is dead after a rampage through downtown Austin on Friday morning that left more than 100 rounds in the U.S. Federal Courthouse, the Consulate General of Mexico, a BB&T Bank and the Austin Police Department headquarters.

Though the investigation, which is led by FBI Special Agent Dan Powers and Austin Police Department, is still ongoing, APD Police Chief Art Acevedo gave a press conference to elaborate on the timeline of events. Beginning at 2:22 am, emergency dispatchers started receiving reports of a gunman in the vicinity of the Federal Courthouse near Fourth and Nueces streets. These were corroborated by patrol officers who also reported hearing gunfire in the area.

At 2:24 am, APD received more reports of gunfire from a possible automatic weapon. This was followed five minutes later at 2:29 am with a report of shots fired at the Mexican Consulate on Baylor Street near West Fifth Street. A later investigation found what Acevedo described as a "small, green cylinder" had been set on fire near the consulate. It was extinguished and did minimal damage to the building.

At 2:32 am, Austin Police Department headquarters came under fire. "An Austin police sergeant who was in process of loading horses from mounted patrol saw the gunman and heard gunfire," said Acevedo. At 2:33 am, the sergeant, a 15-year veteran of the force, returned gunfire and the suspect was killed. Acevedo said it was unclear if the bullet that killed the suspect was from the officer's gun or if it was self-inflicted.

The officer has been placed on administrative leave with pay, per APD policy. Acevedo also noted that the officer was holding the horse steady in one hand while firing with the other.

At 2:34 am, emergency services was called to respond and patrol officers went to grab the suspect. At this point, officers noted that the suspect was wearing an unidentifiable vest and also reported "cylinders" in the suspect's vehicle. The officers disengaged the suspect and called for a bomb squad. At 2:40 am the bomb squad responded, APD headquarters was evacuated and at 2:41 am, I-35 and the streets surrounding the department's downtown headquarters were shut down.

The bomb squad was later able to determine there was no bomb and I-35 was reopened around 6:30 am.

The suspect has been identified as 49-year-old Larry Steven McQuilliams. He is a resident of Austin. Police are unsure of motive.

"I give thanks that no one but the suspect is injured or deceased," Acevedo said. "We should all take a lot of comfort [in that]."

http://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/11-29-14-gunman-rampaging-through-downtown-austin-killed-in-hero-horse-cop-confrontation/

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California

Opinion

We should get rid of local policing. Ferguson shows why the system just doesn't work.

The old, fragmented approach to law enforcement doesn't work.

by Sunil Dutta

Sunil Dutta, Ph.D., is a 17-year-veteran police officer in Los Angeles. His book, “Blood Lines: the Imperial Roots of Terrorism in South Asia,” will be released in December. These are his personal opinions.

Public outrage over perceived police misconduct has led to violence again, after a grand jury on Monday chose not to indict officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Various law enforcement agencies responded to control protests and stem rioting, including local police, county and federal forces. Buildings and police cars were set ablaze, amid tear gas, looting and vandalism in parts of the city.

While the response in Ferguson has been extreme, calmer demonstrations against police brutality and misconduct have been occurring across the country. Protesters' slogans and the media's obsessive coverage largely have focused on demands to punish individual officers and police departments. But the real problem with law enforcement is far more systemic. Issues of unprofessional and inefficient policing are rooted in our decentralized approach to policing, allowing some local departments to get away with subpar officer training, shoddy practices and corruption. This fossilized and inefficient system needs to be thrown out. Instead, policing should be managed at the state level, which would provide for higher-quality law enforcement and more oversight.

Law enforcement in the United States is disturbingly fragmented. The system evolved in an ad hoc manner over time, with a complex jumble of municipal, county, state and federal police. While local agencies constitute the bulk of law enforcement, even those forces are broken down into housing, transit, airport, school and park police agencies. That complex network leads to overlapping boundaries and authorities, creating confusion and redundancies.

In total, there are almost 18,000 police agencies in the United States, employing about 765,246 sworn officers. Half of police departments employ fewer than 10 officers, and three-quarters serve areas with fewer than 10,000 people, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Jurisdictions that can't afford officers must contract with county police or neighboring agencies, which can cloud accountability and breed resentment in the community.

This fragmentation of policing is ineffective and inefficient. For one, the training and policies that dictate officer behavior vary widely from town to town. When an uncooperative driver refuses to provide his license to a cop, officers in one jurisdiction might respond with verbal judo, but in the neighboring town, it could result in arrest or use of force. Differences in policies and training mean that some cops can use pepper spray and Tasers on passive resisters, while other departments permit it only when a person is physically resisting an officer. With no central standard of conduct, there is plenty of room for incompetent policing.

The patchwork structure of our law enforcement system leaves some agencies inexperienced and ill-prepared to respond to certain situations. The Ferguson Police Department's militaristic response to public protests in August was a prime example. In Los Angeles, police would not have deployed armored trucks with machine guns pointing toward the protesters — not because the Los Angeles police don't have the equipment, but because experience has taught the department that a militaristic response is counterproductive and alienates the community. Because smaller agencies rarely face events like large-scale disasters, riots and major violent crimes, they can be caught off guard when they do occur.

There are numerous other flaws with decentralized law enforcement. The current model hinders coordination and information sharing between law enforcement agencies, and creates expensive redundancies in resources. It also allows for crime displacement, where suppression of crime in one jurisdiction simply moves criminals into neighboring areas.

The old, disconnected approach to law enforcement doesn't work. To improve the professionalism and training of our police force, we should get rid of local departments and consolidate them into statewide agencies. The foundation for such a system already exists in state highway patrols and state troopers. By moving all police forces into statewide organizations, we would create a much more efficient system of policing that allows for consistent officer training, uniform standards of operation, and wider application of best policing practices. And by cutting back on system redundancies, these improvements would come at a lower cost to taxpayers.

Centralizing law enforcement also will improve oversight and reduce corruption. In the current system, corrupt cops and police chiefs often enjoy long tenures, sheltered in autonomous local departments. A statewide system offers more accountability. While concerns about misconduct or corruption are being investigated, accused officers — or entire divisions — could be moved to another part of the state to ease tensions in the local community and reduce opportunities for biased treatment in their home jurisdictions.

A state-level approach to law enforcement also would allow for faster and more coordinated responses to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies. Currently, there's often a chaotic initial response to these kinds of events, with multiple law enforcement agencies converging on the scene, creating confusion over who is in charge and leaving gaps in communication. Consolidation of police also would ensure that all communities in a state receive the same level of professional service and equal access to needed resources and equipment when circumstances demand them.

To be sure, there is resistance to the idea of centralizing police. Critics believe that consolidation threatens local governance and would reduce law enforcement's responsiveness to the unique needs of each community. But as Ferguson showed, local representation does not necessarily make an agency more responsive to or more perceptive of a neighborhood's needs. And a statewide policing model wouldn't prevent officers from creating local connections. The state could form local units that reflect each community's diversity. Those local units should be evaluated based on the satisfaction of the communities they serve instead of the misguided approach of judging police solely on crime reduction, which fails to measure qualitative police work. Work evaluations and promotions should always be pegged in part to the level of community support officers receive.

Violent demonstrations in Ferguson have revealed the critical breakdown of trust between the public and law enforcement. This calls for a major reform of our policing system. To rebuild public trust, we must make the system more transparent and accountable to the people. That means dismantling the current law enforcement structure that allows for substandard police training, inefficient operations and too many opportunities for corruption. All officers should be held to uniform standards for use of force, and policing in all communities should reflect universal best practices. By consolidating policing responsibilities in statewide agencies, we can prevent the next Ferguson.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/25/we-should-get-rid-of-local-policing-ferguson-shows-why-the-system-just-doesnt-work/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Florida

Firefighters teach hands-only CPR to shoppers

by Jennifer Harwood

PANAMA CITY BEACH — Panama City Beach Fire Rescue took advantage of the high traffic at Pier Park to teach the basics of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, on dummies for shoppers passing by Friday.

“We're doing it here at Pier Park on Black Friday because we figured we'd have a big crowd out to teach as many as possible,” said firefighter Brandon Mumford.

Firefighters had four adult-sized dummies out on the sidewalk in front of Dave & Buster's and four infant dolls for the public to practice CPR. Mostly parents with groups of small children took advantage of the quick instruction.

“Normal CPR is the compressions and the breaths,” Mumford said. “They came out with hands-only CPR, which is for when you're not at home or with a loved one.”

Mumford said many are not comfortable doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation if an emergency evolves with someone they don't know.

“Studies found that compression-only CPR is nearly just as effective as CPR with the breaths,” Mumford said. “You're at least doing something for them in keeping their heart moving blood throughout their body.”

Firefighters demonstrated on the dummies how to administer chest-only compressions and then let participants give it a try.

Mumford said four out of five cardiac arrests happen at home with a loved one, but every second of time becomes precious when it can take EMS or firefighters 3 to 7 minutes to arrive.

He said basic hands-only CPR doubles or triples the victim's chances of surviving a cardiac episode.

The basic hands-only procedure is for the responder to first call 911 if they see someone go unresponsive and then administer hard, fast compressions in the center of the victim's chest at a rate of at least 100 compressions per minute until help arrives.

He said 911 callers are given instructions over the phone on how to perform the same procedure.

“The longer they lay there without getting CPR, their chances of survival are diminished greatly,” Mumford said. “We just wanted to show as many as possible how to do the basics.”

http://www.newsherald.com/news/crime-public-safety/firefighters-teach-hands-only-cpr-to-shoppers-1.407273?page=0

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Missouri

Ferguson protesters move from streets to stores on Black Friday

by Fox News

Dozens of protesters interrupted holiday shopping in the St. Louis area late Thursday and early Friday as part of the ongoing reaction to a grand jury's decision to not indict the Ferguson police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown this past August.

Protester Johnetta Elzie, who who had been tweeting and posting videos of the demonstrations, told the Associated Press that the group went to a Wal-Mart and Target in Brentwood, two Wal-Marts in St. Charles and one Wal-Mart in Manchester. KTVI-TV reported that in the suburbs of Maplewood and Kirkwood, several police cars and some National Guard vehicles patrolled Wal-Mart stores in case of protests.

Protesters spent a few minutes at each store, shouting inside. Officer in at least one store ordered them to leave. There was no immediate word of any arrests.

At the Manchester Wal-Mart, about two dozen people chanted "no justice, no peace, no racist police" and "no more Black Friday" after officers warned that protesters risked arrest if they didn't move at least 50 feet from the store's entrance, then began advancing in unison toward the protesters until they were moved further into the parking lot.

The mostly black group of protesters chanted in the faces of the officers -- most of whom were white -- as shoppers looked on.

"We want to really let the world know that it is no longer business as usual," said Chenjerai Kumanyika an assistant professor at Clemson University. He added although part of the aim in disrupting Black Friday was to call attention to disagreement with the grand jury's decision and the way the case was handled, Kumanyika said it was also to highlight other forms of injustice.

"Capitalism is one of many systems of oppression," he said as the group cleared out of the parking lot.

Ferguson itself was quiet overnight as the Thanksgiving holiday put a break on the protests that had rocked the town over the previous three nights. No police officers or Missouri National Guard members stood sentry outside the Ferguson police station, which had been a nexus for protesters since Monday night's announcement that officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted. Early Friday, St. Louis County Police said no arrests had been made overnight.

On a downtown street, beneath a lighted "Season's Greetings" garland, three children used paintbrushes to decorate the plywood covering many storefront windows that was put up to foil potential vandals. One quoted from "The Lorax" by Dr. Seuss: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not."

"We thought we'd do what we could to make it a little more attractive and then try to bring the kids into it and get them involved in making the businesses appear a little less scary, depressing," said Leah Bailey, as her 7-year-old son Dennis climbed a ladder to finish an orange dragon.

Several hours after dark, a few people continued painting, but there was no visible protest activity. National Guard troops occasionally patrolled the area and surrounding neighborhoods in vehicles and on foot.

Greater St. Mark Family Church sits blocks from where several stores went up in flames after the grand jury announcement. A handful of people listened to the Rev. Tommie Pierson preach Thursday that the destruction and chaos was by "a small group of out-of-control people out there."

"They don't represent the community, they don't represent the mood nor the feelings of the community," Pierson said. "I would imagine if you talked to them, they probably don't even live here. So, we don't want to be defined by what they did."

In downtown St. Louis, a group gathered near Busch Stadium for what organizer Paul Byrd called a "pro-community" car rally meant to be peaceful and counter the recent Ferguson violence he suggested has tarnished the region's image.

Byrd, a 45-year-old construction worker from Imperial, Missouri, declined to say whether he supported Wilson but noted, "I totally support police officers." The cruise was escorted by a city police vehicle; no protesters showed up.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/11/28/ferguson-protesters-move-from-streets-to-stores-on-black-friday/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Missouri

Ferguson: Darren Wilson 'Knows He Will Never Be A Police Officer Again,' Lawyer Says

by Mark Hanrahan

Attorneys representing Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson, Mo., police officer at the center of a firestorm over the shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown, said he has accepted that his career in law enforcement is over, as reports surfaced Wilson is in talks to resign his post at the Ferguson Police Department.

“Realistically speaking, Darren will never be a police officer again, and he understands that,” lawyer Jim Towey told NBC News. “Going forward, it will be school and trying to carve out a new niche, new career, for he and his family.”

Neil Bruntrager, another of Wilson's attorneys, said it's a “matter of when, not if” the officer will step down and he may give up policing as a profession altogether. “He's on paid leave, and there are discussions that are going on right now to separate from the department in an amicable fashion,” the lawyer told CNN.

“He knows how to do the job, and could do the job. He believes that if he ever went back to a department, he would put other officers at risk. And he just, he won't do that, he won't do that,” NBC News quoted Bruntrager as saying.

Wilson has become the focal point of national and international outrage, after a grand jury in Missouri declined to indict him over the Aug. 9 killing of Brown.

Brown's father, Michael Brown Sr., branded Wilson “a murderer” in an interview with CNN. “He understood his actions. He understood exactly what he was doing. You know, he didn't have a second thought, a pushback thought, or nothing. He was intending to kill someone. That's how I look at it.”

Attorney Bruntrager told KDSK that “people have offered bounties on [Wilson's] life and that sort of thing.” The police officer had been in hiding for more than three months, after his address was revealed online, according to the Washington Post.

In an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that was shown this week, Wilson said, “I have a clean conscience because I know I did my job right.”

http://www.ibtimes.com/ferguson-darren-wilson-knows-he-will-never-be-police-officer-again-lawyer-says-1730394

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Texas

Gunman killed after targeting Austin police headquarters

by Amber Downing and Doug Stanglin

AUSTIN, Texas — A gunman targeted three downtown public buildings -- the Mexican consulate, federal courthouse and police headquarters -- before police shot and killed him, according to local media reports.

Police said the unidentified man was suspected of opening fire on buildings at around 2:30 a.m. local time, KVUE-TV reports.

The Austin American-Statesman reported hat the Mexican consulate and federal courthouse were among the target locations, as well as the police building.

Assistant Chief Raul Munguia told reporters that the suspected shooter, who was wearing a vest, was killed near his vehicle, which may have contained an improvised explosive device. The police bomb squad was on the scene.

Police say the male suspect died early Friday in what authorities call an officer-involved shooting.

Officers were also investigating an address in North Austin where the suspect lived. They said they are checking the residence for any other potential bombs.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/28/gunman-killed-targeted-austin-buildings/19607141/

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Texas

Aransas Pass police fosters community with toy pigs

by Elaine Marsilio

ARANSAS PASS - You might say Aransas Pass police are toying with the derogatory statement: “Police are pigs.”

Department staff poke fun at it and encourage others to do the same by bringing home a little bacon: toy pigs.

The stress ball foam material piggies landed on the scene in Aransas Pass about a year ago as a marketing and education tool for the 38-staff department, Police Chief Eric Blanchard said.

“It's kind of an icebreaker,” he said.

Blanchard started handing out the pink piggies — emblazoned with sunglasses and the police department logo — to local children during community events.

Other residents soon caught on and snagged their own pigs by dropping by the police department, located at 600 W. Cleveland Blvd., in Aransas Pass.

Humor is a common ground, Blanchard said, and the toys aim to establish a line of communication within the community so police seem more approachable.

“And if we start on that level then it helps us expand into that comfort zone,” he said.

Building trust was a priority since Blanchard became police chief in 2012, he said, adding the department worked to change its image and shed an “old-fashioned” style of policing.

The best tactic might just be using humor to disarm others, he said.

“It kind of casts a message that maybe we are a little laid back,” he said.

The pigs strategy has gone off with such a squeal Blanchard recently ordered 500 more for a little more than $1,173 with drug forfeiture account funds, he said.

Blanchard tends to keep tabs on the piggies by asking others to share their latest pig tales on the department's Facebook page.

Stephanie Diaz, a Child Protective Services investigation supervisor in Aransas Pass, posted photos earlier this month of one of her piggies staged in heroic poses, such as sitting atop a police vehicle and mugging for the camera next to a toy helicopter.

In another photo, her piggy is being saved by a Superman action figure.

Diaz, who works closely with Aransas Pass police, said the pigs also serve as an education tool for her when she explains to children about the role of police.

She said she likes that the pigs defuse a negative term.

“It's a comical way of putting a positive spin on it,” she said.

http://www.caller.com/news/local-news/aransas-pass-police-foster-community-with-toy-pigs_61050412

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

California

Ferguson Fallout: Dozens Arrested in Calif. Unrest

by TAMI ABDOLLAH

Police in Oakland and Los Angeles arrested scores of demonstrators during a third night of unrest linked to the shooting protest in Ferguson, Missouri.

At least 130 demonstrators who refused to disperse during a Los Angeles protest were arrested Wednesday night, while 35 people were detained in Oakland following a march that deteriorated into unrest and vandalism, according to police officials.

About 200 or 300 largely peaceful demonstrators crisscrossed the streets of downtown Los Angeles for several hours in the afternoon and evening over a decision not to bring criminal charges against a Ferguson policeman for killing a black man.

Later some of the protesters were stopped by a phalanx of riot-clad police near the Central Library.

Lt. Andy Neiman said an unlawful assembly was declared after some marchers began walking in the street and disrupting traffic. They were ordered to disperse but instead reformed, with police trying to corral them.

Neiman said 130 protesters were arrested.

Meanwhile, Oakland police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said the 33 arrests there came after a march by about 100 people through Oakland streets.

She said that later small groups began moving through the streets with some vandalizing property, mainly breaking windows.

Most of the protesters had dispersed but shortly before midnight Watson said that there was still a very small group that police were monitoring.

On Monday and Tuesday, some demonstrators in Oakland vandalized businesses and blocked freeways to protest the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

During the demonstration Wednesday in Los Angeles, demonstrators had marched to a federal building and police headquarters but they were turned away by lines of police after heading toward the county jail and then the Staples Center arena, where the Los Angeles Lakers were playing.

"The system is wrong," demonstrator Jovan Brown told KCAL-TV. "We're trying to let everybody know if we come together as a people and unite, we can change it."

There was a brief, tense confrontation where a handful of demonstrators screamed at officers, who held raised batons. One officer struck a woman who had moved forward, and another shoved a protester.

Finally, squads of police boxed in and began arresting around 60 remaining protesters for failure to disperse, Neiman said.

Most of those arrested were expected to be released after posting $500 bail for the misdemeanor. However, those unable to pay the bail could remain jailed through the Thanksgiving weekend pending scheduled Monday court hearings, authorities said.

Earlier Wednesday, nine people were arrested after they sat down in a bus lane on U.S. 101 near downtown during one of the busiest driving days of the year.

There were smaller, peaceful protests in other communities, including San Diego and Riverside.

More than 300 protesters have been arrested over the past three days by Los Angeles police and California Highway Patrol officers.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ferguson-fallout-dozens-arrested-calif-unrest-27215260

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Massachusetts

Boston police used ‘soft approach' with protesters

by Peter Schworm

Boston police on Wednesday credited a “soft approach” in handling the street protests against police brutality and racism, which helped avoid the disturbances seen in other cities in the wake of the Ferguson, Mo., grand jury decision.

A day after throngs of people took to the streets of Boston, police officials said they made a concerted decision against an aggressive show of force, worried it would stoke anger. Police did not wear riot gear, for example, and held many officers in reserve. Many officers tracked the march on bicycle, a symbol of community policing.

Boston police Commissioner William Evans said he wanted to maintain public safety while allowing people to “express their frustration.” A measured approach is often more effective, he said, because it shows officers to be “more human.”

“It's about establishing respect and setting expectations and making sure people understand that,” he said. “Sometimes helmets and sticks can get in the way of that.”

Evans went out of his way to thank the protesters for maintaining relative calm. The rally was also, with an estimated 1,400 people, small compared to protests in other cities — or the street disturbances that followed championship victories by Boston sports teams.

On Tuesday night, nearly 50 people were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, but authorities reported no serious confrontations or injuries. About 40 had their criminal charges converted to civil infractions in court Wednesday, authorities said.

Some protesters said police overreacted to what was a peaceful protest, and in some cases used excessive force.

Tripp Diaz, 24, who lives in Roxbury, had a large abrasion on her right cheek and said she had bruises all over her body, which she said were sustained during her arrest. She was among two dozen protesters brought before a Boston Municipal Court judge on Wednesday.

Holding an ice pack to her head, Dernice Oliver, 20, said she was kicked in the head by a police officer when she was arrested. She was treated for neck and head injuries at Tufts Medical Center.

“The police were very excessive,” Oliver said. “I was taken to the ground by five police officers and just thrown around like a rag doll.”

Oliver said she was arrested after she fell to the ground when protesters tried to get onto the Massachusetts Turnpike near South Station. Oliver said she and other injured protesters are considering taking legal action against police.

State Police spokesman David Procopio declined to address the individual allegations but said troopers used “exemplary restraint in a very chaotic situation, holding a line against a surge of more than a thousand people who were trying to trespass onto major highways.”

Officials said that while officers were subjected to taunts and in some cases pushed to the ground, the march was generally peaceful. A police spokesman declined to comment on specific complaints about injuries.

Evans praised officers for their restraint in the face of goading from demonstrators, preventing the situation from escalating. “We were engaged with the crowd, and as much as they tried to take us to the next level, we were disciplined,” Evans said.

State Police said they did not activate specialized crowd and riot control units, opting to keep them on standby given the peaceful nature of the protest.

“We allowed the patrol units already in place to handle the crowd control,” Procopio said. “We showed all possible restraint.”

Tactical units were ready to respond in a matter of minutes if the protest had become more unruly, he said. “We made a conscious decision that we would not use them if they were not absolutely needed,” he said.

Police officials said a primary goal was to prevent protesters from reaching highways, as had occurred in other protests across the country. Evans said he worried that large crowds on the highway could potentially cause a panic.

“We made the decision to hold the line,” he said.

Boston has become known in law enforcement circles for its measured approach to mass demonstrations, a strategy honed through numerous championship celebrations and the Occupy movement in 2011.

Boston police on Wednesday credited a “soft approach” in handling the street protests against police brutality and racism, which helped avoid the disturbances seen in other cities in the wake of the Ferguson, Mo., grand jury decision.

A day after throngs of people took to the streets of Boston, police officials said they made a concerted decision against an aggressive show of force, worried it would stoke anger. Police did not wear riot gear, for example, and held many officers in reserve. Many officers tracked the march on bicycle, a symbol of community policing.

Boston police Commissioner William Evans said he wanted to maintain public safety while allowing people to “express their frustration.” A measured approach is often more effective, he said, because it shows officers to be “more human.”

“It's about establishing respect and setting expectations and making sure people understand that,” he said. “Sometimes helmets and sticks can get in the way of that.”

Evans went out of his way to thank the protesters for maintaining relative calm. The rally was also, with an estimated 1,400 people, small compared to protests in other cities — or the street disturbances that followed championship victories by Boston sports teams.

On Tuesday night, nearly 50 people were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, but authorities reported no serious confrontations or injuries. About 40 had their criminal charges converted to civil infractions in court Wednesday, authorities said.

Some protesters said police overreacted to what was a peaceful protest, and in some cases used excessive force.

Tripp Diaz, 24, who lives in Roxbury, had a large abrasion on her right cheek and said she had bruises all over her body, which she said were sustained during her arrest. She was among two dozen protesters brought before a Boston Municipal Court judge on Wednesday.

Holding an ice pack to her head, Dernice Oliver, 20, said she was kicked in the head by a police officer when she was arrested. She was treated for neck and head injuries at Tufts Medical Center.

“The police were very excessive,” Oliver said. “I was taken to the ground by five police officers and just thrown around like a rag doll.”

Demonstrators gathered in Dewey Square near South Station and an entrance ramp to Interstate 93.

Oliver said she was arrested after she fell to the ground when protesters tried to get onto the Massachusetts Turnpike near South Station. Oliver said she and other injured protesters are considering taking legal action against police.

State Police spokesman David Procopio declined to address the individual allegations but said troopers used “exemplary restraint in a very chaotic situation, holding a line against a surge of more than a thousand people who were trying to trespass onto major highways.”

Officials said that while officers were subjected to taunts and in some cases pushed to the ground, the march was generally peaceful. A police spokesman declined to comment on specific complaints about injuries.

Evans praised officers for their restraint in the face of goading from demonstrators, preventing the situation from escalating. “We were engaged with the crowd, and as much as they tried to take us to the next level, we were disciplined,” Evans said.

State Police said they did not activate specialized crowd and riot control units, opting to keep them on standby given the peaceful nature of the protest.

“We allowed the patrol units already in place to handle the crowd control,” Procopio said. “We showed all possible restraint.”

Tactical units were ready to respond in a matter of minutes if the protest had become more unruly, he said. “We made a conscious decision that we would not use them if they were not absolutely needed,” he said.

Police officials said a primary goal was to prevent protesters from reaching highways, as had occurred in other protests across the country. Evans said he worried that large crowds on the highway could potentially cause a panic.

“We made the decision to hold the line,” he said.

Boston has become known in law enforcement circles for its measured approach to mass demonstrations, a strategy honed through numerous championship celebrations and the Occupy movement in 2011.

“You have a police commissioner who had first-hand experience in dealing with the Occupy movement, and this is one of the lessons,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., research organization. “I think that carries over.”

Police officials are increasingly recognizing that outfitting police in riot gear and bringing in military vehicles in an effort to control crowds can backfire.

“The unintended consequence is that the crowd thinks you expect violence,” he said. “It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Specialists said Boston police have adopted a more conciliatory approach to crowd control through painful experience.

In 2008, a 22-year-old college student stopped breathing and later died after a confrontation with police during a Boston Celtics championship celebration. In 2004, a 21-year-old man was killed by a drunk driver during rioting after the Super Bowl, and a college student was killed when police fired pepper pellets into a crowd celebrating a Red Sox victory.

“Boston police definitely learned lessons from those unfortunate tragedies,” said Tom Nolan, associate professor of criminology at Merrimack College. “The sentiment at the time was might makes right.”

The approach Tuesday, Nolan said, stood in sharp contrast to the militarized approach seen in Ferguson.

“What that serves to do is exacerbate the situation,” he said. “It just fans those flames.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/26/boston-police-say-soft-approach-demonstrations-helped-maintain-control/XBvJzzG7M3UyKO5NW9BigI/story.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ohio

Cleveland Video Shows Police Shot Boy Within Seconds

Reuters

CLEVELAND - Cleveland officials on Wednesday released a video of the fatal police shooting of a 12-year-old boy, which shows the boy pointing a pellet gun around a park before police arrive.

Tamir E. Rice was shot by a patrol officer on Saturday after a 911 call reported someone pointing a gun at people at the Cudell Recreation Center. The caller said the gun could be a fake.

The video shows the boy walking back and forth in the snowy park, pointing the gun in different directions. He goes under a gazebo.

A patrol car with two officers pulls up to the gazebo. The view of the boy is partly obscured by the patrol car, but it appears that the first officer to get out of the car, identified by a city official as Timothy Loehmann, 26, shoots almost immediately.

There is no audio on the video, but police said they told Rice to raise his hands three times before he was shot, police said. He died on Sunday.

Cleveland police said Loehmann and the second officer, Frank Garmback, 46, are both on leave.

A union representative said the officer who shot Rice had been on the force for less than a year.

Rice had an Airsoft-type replica gun that resembles a semiautomatic pistol, but typically shoots plastic pellets, police said. An orange tab that would have indicated it was not a firearm had been removed, authorities said.

A statement from Rice's family described him as “a bright young man who had his whole life ahead of him."

“Though the hurt our family feels is too painful for words to describe, we still have faith in the justice system,” it said.

The video release follows a second night of sometimes violent protests over a Missouri grand jury's decision not to indict a white Ferguson police officer for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager.

Both Rice and Brown were African American.

The Rice family has asked that protests stay peaceful.

Under a 2013 policy for police deadly force cases, the Rice shooting will be sent to the Cuyahoga County Grand Jury for possible charges, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty said.

An Ohio grand jury in September decided not to press charges against two police officers who fatally shot a man while he held a pellet gun at a Dayton-area Walmart.

http://www.newsweek.com/cleveland-video-shows-police-shot-boy-within-seconds-287554

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Massachusetts

Commentary

Community Policing: Not just a buzz word

by Joseph M. Perkins / Middleborough Chief of Police

A hot-button issue for the past few decades in the world of law enforcement has been the concept of Community Policing.

By title alone, Community Policing sounds intriguing. It seems like all law enforcement agencies have adopted it, but most agencies have adopted it in terminology alone. It is my desire to attempt to clarify what it is and how it affects the Middleborough Police Department, and more importantly, the citizens of the town.

The idea of Community Policing evolved during a time in history when policing failed to meet the needs of the individuals and communities it served. Specifically, the turbulent 60's and 70's revealed the deficiencies of what unchecked law enforcement looks like with bouts of corruption and brutality. Robotic, militaristic police officers accustomed to “crook catching” and production-centered standards failed miserably at customer service and problem solving.

Police officers during that era were not encouraged or even allowed to identify underlying issues that caused crime or issues that created a need for police services. These examples, coupled with extremely high crime rates and citizen demand for police accountability, forced law enforcement experts to reevaluate the how and why of policing.

So what is Community Policing? Community policing is a philosophy. It is an attitude of an agency or an individual officer that is focused on the community, encourages community input, is concerned for those who are served, builds trust, shares power and is credible and transparent in all it does.

Community Policing is not a set of programs that the police develop without community input. How do the police know what will be effective and efficient if feedback from the customer is not sought? An effective Community Policing program is the product of a strong police/community partnership that allows for information exchange and fosters dialog between the server and those who are served in an attempt to prevent crime and victimization.

It is my opinion that the Middleborough Police Department excels at reactive policing. A crime occurs and the Middleborough Police Department responds and makes arrests. The Middleborough Police Department makes every effort to reduce the fear of crime via highly mobile and visible patrols in the second largest town in the state. Seasonal police officers walk and ride bikes in the downtown area displaying a visible presence to the business community and high population area. Middleborough Police officers are superb at determining who, what and when of crime.

However, a true community policing attitude requires us to do more. We, the Middleborough Police, need to be better at asking, “Why is this crime recurring, and how can we prevent it or reduce it?” This is where you, the citizen, enter the partnership.

The local police don't always know the issues that impact your quality of life, the issues that scare you, the issues that make you question what it is the police actually do. In order for the police to better understand those issues, some type of communication channel must be developed. A collaborative effort between the community and the police needs to be established so the community's needs are met. Whatever you want us to call it — outreach, relationship building, or partnering — policing in Middleborough needs to be communicated between the police and the citizen, and more importantly, between the citizen and police.

In January of 2015, I will establish a police advisory team. A police advisory team is made up of a group of everyday citizens from all walks of life. The team will meet regularly, informally, and in a public setting to examine the issues that concern us as a community. You will hear about issues that concern the police: the opioid epidemic, school violence, Ferguson, traffic accidents, tagging, and the overall safety of our children. More importantly, you the citizen can tell us what concerns you. Together, the community and the police identify issues of concern, foster ideas for prevention, and agree on police planning and approach.

I encourage anyone who is interested in serving or attending this informal information exchange to contact me by calling me at the station, sending me a letter or emailing me at jperkins@mpdmail.com. Make sure to list your contact information.

For anyone who wants to observe the process, make sure to watch social media for the date of the first meeting; it will be posted there. You can follow us (Like us) on Facebook at Middleborough Police Department and on Twitter at @MiddleboroughPD.

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20141127/NEWS/141129762/101136

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Background check for gun purchase can be a shot in the dark

With gun sales booming on Black Friday, the FBI's researchers are truly besieged.

by Matt Stroud

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. — Black Friday isn't just when shoppers rush to stores for holiday sales. It's also one of the busiest days of the year for gun purchases.

In the U.S., there are nine guns for every 10 people. Someone is killed with a firearm every 16 minutes. And every minute, gun shops make about 40 new requests for criminal background checks on people wanting weapons.

On Black Friday, the rush accelerates to nearly two checks a second, testing the limits of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

“We have a perfect storm coming,” says Kimberly Del Greco, a manager in the FBI division that helps run the system, known as NICS.

Much of the responsibility for preventing criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns is shouldered by about 500 men and women who run the system from inside the FBI's criminal justice center near Bridgeport, West Virginia.

Granted a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the NICS, The Associated Press was able to see first-hand why 512 gun sales a day effectively beat the system last year.

By federal law, NICS researchers must race against the clock: They have until the end of the third business day following an attempted firearm purchase to determine whether a buyer is eligible. After that, buyers can legally get their guns, regardless of whether the check was completed.

TIME NOT ON FBI'S SIDE

This clock ran out more than 186,000 times last year.

The problem is the data.

States voluntarily submit records, which are often missing information about mental health rulings or criminal convictions, and aren't always updated to reflect restraining orders or other urgent reasons to deny a sale. It's a particular problem on Black Friday, when so many background checks are done at once.

There are more than 48,000 gun retailers in the U.S., from Wal-Mart stores to local pawn shops. Store clerks can use the FBI's online E-Check System, which federal officials say is more efficient. But nearly half the checks are phoned in. Three call centers – in Kentucky, Texas and Wheeling, West Virginia – take these calls from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day but Christmas.

NICS did 58,000 checks on a typical day last year. That surged to 145,000 on Black Friday. They're bringing in 100 more workers than usual for the post-Thanksgiving rush.

The call centers have no access to privileged information about buyers' backgrounds, and make no decisions. They just type in their name, address, birthdate, Social Security and other information into the system. On Black Fridays, the work can be grueling: One woman took a call that lasted four hours when a dealer phoned in the maximum 99 checks.

“Rules had to be stretched,” recalled Sam Demarco, her supervisor. “We can't transfer calls. Someone had to sit in her seat for her while she went to the bathroom.”

RED FLAG NOT ALWAYS APPARENT

In the years since these background checks were required, about 71 percent have found no red flags and produced instant approvals.

But 10 factors can disqualify gun purchasers: a felony conviction, an arrest warrant, a documented drug problem or mental illness, undocumented immigration status, a dishonorable military discharge, a renunciation of U.S. citizenship, a restraining order, a history of domestic violence, or an indictment for any crime punishable by longer than one year of prison time.

Any sign that one of these factors could be in a buyer's background produces a red flag. FBI researchers then investigate, scouring state records in the federal database and calling state and local authorities for more information.

“It takes a lot of effort … for an examiner to go out and look at court reports, look at judges' documents, try to find a final disposition so we can get back to a gun dealer on whether they can sell that gun or not,” Del Greco says. “And we don't always get back to them.”

The researchers must use their judgment, striking a balance between the rights of gun owners and the need to keep would-be killers from getting firearms.FBI contractors and employees oversaw more than 9 million checks in the first full year after the system was established as part of Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1998. By last year, they oversaw more than 21 million. In all, only 1.25 percent of attempted purchases are denied. Denials can be appealed.

People can get guns without background checks in many states by buying weapons at gun shows or from individuals, a loophole the National Rifle Association does not want closed. But even the NRA agrees that the NICS system needs better data.

Del Greco doesn't see the states' data improving soon, which only adds to the immense challenge of getting through huge numbers of requisite checks on Black Friday.

“It's really critical that we have accurate information,” Del Greco says. “Sometimes we just don't.”

http://www.pressherald.com/2014/11/27/when-background-checks-are-a-shot-in-the-dark/

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Kansas

Community police helps prevent violence in Kansas City

by Bonyen Lee

KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -- Some believe community policing efforts have helped stop any possible outbreak of violence in Kansas City.

The St. Louis Police Department has long had community policing, but it's seen an increased emphasis by the St. Louis County Police Department since Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. A grand jury on Monday cleared Wilson of any wrongdoing, leading to property destruction and violence. The Ferguson Police Department, which is largely made up of white officers in a predominantly black city, hasn't used community policing.

Tom Bibbs has lived in the Palestine neighborhood on Kansas City's east side for five decades. He has much experience with his neighborhood community police officers. He also remembers when violence erupted during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

“Rioting similar to Ferguson - we had that back in the 60s. I lived through that and got a chance to see a first hand what is going wrong,” Bibbs said.

Bibbs says community policing is vital to his neighborhood's safety.

“Two police officers go through our neighborhoods and come in and inquire with us about where the hot spots of crime are,” Bibbs explained.

On Tuesday, community policing has Officer Jason Cooley looking for donations for the Palestine Community Action Network.

“I touch base with resources like Harvesters to see if they're available to assist,” Cooley said. "It's all about good relationships plain and simple."

He said community policing makes a difference in Kansas City and helps explain why Kansas City hasn't seen some of the issues that other cities have.

"Ultimately the police department is not the cure-all, fix-all for any issues in the city," the officer said.

http://www.kctv5.com/story/27482801/community-police-helps-prevent-violence-in-kansas-city

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Alabama

Police Chief: It takes action every day to build trust in the community

by Daniela Perallon

MADISON, Ala. (WHNT) – With the tensions between civilians and law enforcement in sharp focus in Ferguson, people have called for “community policing.” The term can take on different definitions to different people, but Madison Police Chief Larry Muncey says it is a philosophy they try to live by.

Muncey says for him the philosophy of community policing isn't “reactive” – going out and trying to make peace only when there's strife – but rather always working to build relationships and trust.

“It's an understanding that we the police department come from our citizens and we work hand in hand,” said Muncey. “Police officers are entrusted with the right to take property, your freedom, or your life in the blink of an eye. nobody else has that power and authority, but our authority comes from the community we serve.”

Muncey says the key to community policing is finding the right people to entrust that authority.

It also means taking action every day.

“Anybody can talk. It takes action over and over and over to build trust. So these police officers being out in the community, doing what's right in all situations builds that history, builds that foundation where the community trusts the police officers.”

Some of the ways Madison police are putting their philosophy into action have nothing to do with crime or even traditional “police work.” A current example: some of the policemen here have been working to help a struggling family get the home repairs they need before the holidays.

This year the Madison Police Department won the International Association of Chiefs of Police award for Community Policing. For the past three years they have been finalists in that category.

Chief Muncey keeps a blog on the IACP website. You can read more of his thoughts on Community Policing by following this link.

http://whnt.com/2014/11/25/police-chief-it-takes-action-every-day-to-build-trust-in-the-community/

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Georgia

Community Policing Builds Bonds Between Deputies and Citizens

by Deon Guillory

Augusta, GA - The Richmond County Sheriff's Office has been working to erase the negative view of law enforcement since Sheriff Richard Roundtree took over the department.

The department has three promotional videos on its Facebook page to promote it's "We've Got Your Back" campaign.

It boasts the office's new approach to crime fighting called 'Community Policing'.

That relationship is helping to reduce crime.

"It's not just ride by and wave your hand. It's literally get out of the car. Walk up to them. Introduce yourself. You're developing a relationship," said Sgt. Shane McDaniel with the Richmond County Sheriff's Office.

Numbers through August show the total number of arrests is more than 31-hundred.

That's 100 less during the same time period in 2013.

Helping with those numbers is Sheriff Roundtree's SMART Unit.

A team of deputies and community safety officers on patrol in the downtown area.

Sheriff Roundtree is working to keep his deputies on the streets, asking commissioners for more money to give salary increases.

For now, the message is clear.

"We want the public to know, they can count on us. They can count on the Richmond County Sheriff's office if they need us," said McDaniel.

Sheriff Roundtree hopes to expand the SMART unit in other parts of the county.

http://www.wjbf.com/story/27482009/community-policing-builds-bonds-between-deputies-and-citizens

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Connecticut

Former officer: Ferguson will "change how we police for the next 25 years"

by STEVE?KOBAK

NORWALK-- A former Norwalk Police officer called the fallout after the killing of Michael Brown in Furgeson, Mo. a "seismic event" that will "change how we police for the next 25 years."

Greg Riley, the former president of the Norwalk Guardians Association -- an organization for minority officers in the department, believes the events unravelling in Ferguson will change the way departments recruit and train their officers and also put an emphasis on community policing.

"People don't understand," said Riley. "This is not just about Ferguson. Ferguson happened to be the point where it boiled over. This is about how we police people of color. Twenty-five years from now, you're going to be looking back on this event in policing. This is going to be a turning point."

Riley, now an adjunct professor of criminal and juvenile justice at Norwalk Community College, believes from the evidence he has seen through media reports that Officer Darren Wilson was justified in shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown, because Wilson was in fear of his life. He said Brown was at fault for escalating the situation. He was unsurprised when the grand jury delivered its verdict on Monday.

"The grand jury does not deal with emotions," he said. "It deals with the law."

Riley envisions departments across the nation becoming more cognizant of their racial makeup in proportion to the population they serve. He said recruiting, hiring and training has to adapt so that the makeup of the department adequately reflects the population of the community.

"Show me a department where whites make up 90 percent of the community and they're policed largely by people of color," he said. "You won't find it."

Riley sees more of a shift toward community policing and education. He said the manner in which police interact with the community should be examined, and more of an emphasis should be placed on developing relationships with the community. As a Norwalk officer, he was heavily involved in community policing and taught a class on law at the city's three high schools. The course is no longer offered.

"Police departments are going to have to go back and start looking at how we interact with our community," he said.

Riley said the impetus does not lie simply with police.

"The minority community is going to have to look at itself and say, 'Wait a minute, how are we talking to our children about police?'" he said. "We, as a community, have to look at ourselves as well. It's just not police's fault. Part of the fault lies within our own community."

For his part, Police Chief Thomas Kulhawik said the Norwalk Police Department has "strived to address the concerns that exist regarding fair and impartial policing as well as the perceptions of the police in our community and we will continue to do so."

He said many of the criticisms leveled at police departments in the wake of the events at Ferguson, such as the racial makeup of the department in proportion to the racial makeup of the population, have been addressed through the department's accreditation through Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc.

"Interestingly, as a result of a recent symposium conducted by the FBI here in Connecticut, a list of 'best practices' was created and recently distributed to the chiefs," he said. "In reviewing this list, I was proud to find that we have already implemented virtually everything recommended."

The chief said he does see a shift on training and focusing on providing tools to police and administrators that assist in "assuring fair and impartial policing, improved community relations and therefore improved service to our communities."

Kulhawik said he has been in touch with Norwalk-branch NAACP President Darnell Crosland about hosting town hall-style meetings to assure that police "fairly and professionally service all segments of the community." The meetings will also be a forum wherein police can "educate the community on the role of the police and how best we can interact together to improve relations and reduce misperceptions," Kulhawik said.

"We will continue to look for ways to improve police -- community relations, but this is not the result of what occurred in Ferguson,"?said Kulhawik. "It is a continuation of the path we have been on for some time, only now being highlighted as result of Ferguson."

The chief called the events unfolding in Ferguson "unfortunate" and said it takes away from the constructive dialogue the could address the issues at hand.

"I believe it is very unfortunate, as I believe the disorder only takes focus away from the underlying issues that obviously need to be addressed," he said "It's obvious there is work to be done, and the images of what was occurring last night in Ferguson should not be what first comes to the mind of most Americans."

http://www.thehour.com/news/norwalk/former-officer-ferguson-will-change-how-we-police-for-the/article_b816d071-04b4-5160-91f2-399519b024c3.html

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President calls for long-term solutions to police, community relations

by RNN Staff

FERGUSON, MO (RNN) – President Barack Obama said he and the top law enforcement official in the country, Attorney General Eric Holder, would take more action to fight the perception of police injustice in communities.

Obama made brief comments about the turmoil in Ferguson before an address on immigration in Chicago on Tuesday night. He announced that Holder had been instructed to establish regional meetings throughout the country in an effort to build trust between law enforcement and citizens.

The president acknowledged distrust in the fair application of justice is not always founded, but it is enough of a problem in the U.S. to re-evaluate the process.

"The frustrations people have are generally rooted in some hard truths that have to be addressed," Obama said. “Don't take the short-term, easy route and just engage in destructive behavior. Take the long-term, hard but lasting route of working with me and governors to bring about some real change.”

His comments echoed those Holder made earlier in the day when he said the reaction in Ferguson revealed a "deep distrust" between the community and its police force.

"The reality is what we see in Ferguson is not restricted to Ferguson," Holder said. "There are other communities that have these same issues that have to be dealt with, and we at the Justice Department are determined to do all that we can to bridge those divides."

During a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles said the National Guard was not deployed in time to save all businesses in Ferguson from violent protests Monday night.

"We will continue to work with National Guard and local authorities and we will work hard to build more diverse and stronger community," Knowles said.

Community leaders criticized the decision not to bring the Guard in earlier, and Knowles said Officer Darren Wilson's future is undecided.

Gov. Jay Nixon ordered National Guard forces to the city days before the announcement that the grand jury did not find probable cause to charge Wilson in Michael Brown's shooting death. Nixon increased the number of troops from 700 to 2,200 Tuesday to help police after riots broke out.

“The violence we saw in areas of Ferguson last night is unacceptable,” Nixon said. “That is why today I am meeting with leaders from the Guard and law enforcement to ensure the protection of lives and property.”

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar welcomed the move, saying it would help local law enforcement do their jobs better in the face of increasing violence.

"It is frustrating because I feel like certain individuals took advantage of not only the business owners and the community, but in many ways of Mr. Brown's life and legacy," Belmar said. "This has to turn into something good, otherwise, an 18-year-old man lost his life for nothing. It cheapens it when we look at the criminal activity that spun out of this."

Earlier on Tuesday, lawyers for Michael Brown's family criticized law enforcement officials in Ferguson and questioned an overall legal system they say unfairly favors police officers who use lethal force.

During the morning news conference, attorney Benjamin Crump focused much of his attention on Robert McCulloch, the prosecutor for St. Louis County.

"A first-year law student would have done a better job cross examining a killer of an unarmed man than the prosecutor did," Crump said.

There had been calls for McCulloch to step aside in favor of a special prosecutor since the case began, a notion he adamantly refused. McCulloch's impartiality was called into question because his father, a police officer, was killed in the line of duty by a black man in 1964.

The Rev. Al Sharpton called for more accountability in community policing and said McCulloch improperly used the grand jury system in the case. He questioned the timing of the announcement of the grand jury's decision, 8 p.m. CT on Monday night.

But Sharpton also strongly denounced the use of violent protests, which reached a head after the nation learned charges would not be brought against Wilson.

"For over 100 days, young people old people, people of all races marched and did so peacefully and nonviolently," Sharpton said. "Those who acted last night do not reflect the spirit of Michael Brown. If you're on Michael Brown's side, you walk with dignity."

He said he and other civil rights leader have called for an emergency meeting next week in Washington, DC, to discuss continued marches, possible legislation and financial sanctions.

“It has been the legacy of the civil rights movement that you have to go to the federal government. You can't depend on the states," Sharpton said.

Brown's mother and father, Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, said they were "profoundly disappointed" in a statement Monday night after the announcement of the decision. They had also asked for people to remain peaceful in the final weeks of the grand jury deliberation.

The New York Times released video of McSpadden's husband, Louis Head, shouting "burn this [expletive] down" after the announcement of the decision Monday night. Soon after, looting and violence broke out on an unprecedented scale since Brown's shooting death.

Crump said that video was taken during a moment born from frustration and not to be taken at face value.

"That was raw emotion, not appropriate at all," Crump said. "God forbid, your child was killed and with that announcement, what would your reaction be? Don't condemn them for being human."

Wilson's lawyers released a statement about the decision.

"Law enforcement personnel must frequently make split-second and difficult decisions," the statement said. "Officer Wilson followed his training and followed the law. We recognize that many people will want to second-guess the grand jury's decision. We would encourage anyone who wants to express an opinion to do so in a respectful and peaceful manner."

Despite pleas for peaceful demonstrations from the president, the Missouri governor and civic leaders in Ferguson and nearby areas, protesters lit up the city with fires and smashed windows in businesses Monday night. Angry people burned more than a dozen buildings, set cars in a lot on fire and also tried setting several police cruisers ablaze.

Most of the damage was done along West Florissant Avenue, including a beauty supply store where multiple explosions went off because of chemicals inside. The street has been a hot spot for violence since uproar began in the city, and police are treating part of it as a crime scene.

Soon after Wilson, who is white, shot black 18-year-old Brown on Aug. 9, people flooded the streets and took up the chant "No justice, no peace." They and others around the country raucously demanded an indictment. Protesters brought that mantra to life after it was announced the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to charge Wilson in the shooting.

At least 14 people were injured and treated at area hospitals in Monday night's riots, which were more destructive than any of the previous protests. According to the Associated Press, police arrested 21 people in St. Louis and 61 people in Ferguson.

Obama talked about the national importance of the decision, especially since protests on varying scales were held in cities around the U.S. About 120 different demonstrations are planned for Tuesday.

"We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation," Obama said Monday. "The fact is in too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color."

St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch released all of the evidence presented to the grand jury Monday evening, including photographs, testimony and diagrams.

http://www.19actionnews.com/story/27478113/president-calls-for-long-term-solutions-to-police-community-relations

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Missouri

Ferguson Smolders After Night Of Fires, Unrest Following Grand Jury Decision

by Ed Mazza

Ferguson, Missouri, is waking up to a city that is still smoldering after a night of unrest following a grand jury's decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

At least a dozen buildings were torched and looted, many of them local businesses that police said were total losses. Dozens of cars -- including two police cruisers and rows of vehicles at a car dealership -- were also vandalized and left charred. St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said he heard about 150 gunshots, none from police.

"What I've seen tonight is probably much worse than the worst night we had in August," he said, referring to the summer protests after the shooting death of Brown, an unarmed black teenager who some witnesses say had his hands up when he was shot on Aug. 9.

Police said they made at least 61 arrests, and that there were only minor injuries.

Shortly after St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch made the rambling nighttime announcement, officer Wilson's grand jury testimony was released, in which he claimed Brown looked like a "demon" during the deadly confrontation.

"I mean it was, he's obviously bigger than I was and stronger and the, I've already taken two to the face and I didn't think he would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right ...Or at least unconscious and then who knows what would happen to me after that," Wilson said during his grand jury testimony.

The prosecutor's office also released photos of Wilson taken after the incident that show his injuries from the confrontation, which appear to be a bruise on his face and a mark on his neck. The photos, which were used as evidence in the proceedings, had not been previously released to the public.

Other grand jury evidence released overnight reiterated witnesses' firm beliefs that they saw Brown throw his hands up before he was shot.

As about 1,000 vocal protesters gathered on Ferguson's main street to learn the grand jury's decision, Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, cried out in anguish while standing on top of a car.

Brown's family also released a statement, which read in part:

"We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions," Brown's family said in a statement. "While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen."

As President Barack Obama spoke to the nation and appealed for calm, the tense demonstrations were already starting to boil over into violence.

On West Florissant Avenue, a focal point of summer protests, police ordered protesters off the streets. But once police left, some smashed the windows of a McDonald's and others set fire to a beauty supply store and other businesses.

The unrest in the wake of this news wasn't limited to Ferguson and the surrounding area. Protests also sprung up across the nation. In New York, demonstrators crowded into Times Square and someone sprayed fake blood on NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton.

Also in the city, protesters shut down at least three major bridges while decrying other police-involved shootings.

Politicians and community leaders and change-makers alike pleaded for peace. But fury had already spread across the United States.

In Seattle, protesters reportedly threw rocks at cars and eventually shut down I-5. Others linked arms at 12th and Pike:

In Oakland, Calif., vandals lit fires in trash cans, spray painted anti-police slogans on buildings and blocked a major freeway.

In Los Angeles, protesters took to the streets and at one point tried to take to the freeway:

In downtown Los Angeles, police used foam projectiles to disperse a crowd.

However, it's in Ferguson where by far the most devastating damage took place.

"We're going to have to come together and be better," Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol said during a news conference held at about 1:30 a.m. local time. "We're going to have to come together to make some changes. But we have to understand that this community has to be whole, and right now this community is really fractured."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/25/ferguson-fires_n_6217182.html

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After Ferguson, can the use of force by police be addressed?

by Stephanie Condon

After meeting for 25 days, a Missouri grand jury has decided that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will face no charges for shooting and killing Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old in August.

The decision, announced Monday night, is a profound disappointment to many seeking justice for Brown and other victims of unjustified police force. However, the discussion that activists are hoping to spark -- in Ferguson and nationwide -- "doesn't start or end" with the grand jury's decision, Montague Simmons, chairman of the Organization for Black Struggle, told CBS News.

"The community's outraged not just by Mike Brown," he said, but also by repeated stories of African-Americans who are wrongly shot by police, like 28-year-old Akai Gurley who was killed in New York last week, or 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed on Sunday in Cleveland.

"Black skin cannot be used as probable cause," Simmons said.

Reports out of Missouri, Rhode Island, New York and elsewhere suggest racial bias in policing is a widespread problem. It's a serious enough concern that the Justice Department in September launched a major, five-city probe into the issue. At the same time, at least one lab-based study out of Washington state showed that local officers were slower to aim their weapons at black suspects in simulated scenarios.

Whether racially biased or otherwise, there's little information available about the use of force by police. The FBI reports on "justifiable" police homicides -- there were 410 in 2012 -- but does not report on unjustified homicides, or about nonlethal uses of force. Only a small fraction of the nation's police forces produce reports on misconduct.

Simmons and others have said that collecting such data would be a strong first step toward improving police conduct and police relations with the communities they serve.

"It would help at least determine whether [racially-motivated] behavior exists," Simmons said.

Still, he insisted it's just the first step.

"The people that were actually hired to protect us -- who were empowered to protect us and our rights -- are attacking us, and it's intolerable," he said. "There are solutions that can actually bring those relationships back into balance, but we need to compel elected officials to do their job."

David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor who formerly served as a police officer, told CBS News that "it's important for people to not draw conclusions that cops are out there looking to shoot people -- they're not."

His research into the issue, which has included interviewing hundreds of officers involved in shootings, shows that in "the vast majority of cases where officers have lawful cause to shoot, they hold fire."

Still, he said, there are without doubt "lawful but awful" incidents -- where an officer may have been legally justified in using force but did so unnecessarily. Law enforcement officers have a broader right to use force -- including deadly force -- than normal citizens.

"What I can tell you from interviewing officers is... often times the training is not what it should be," Klinger said.

Every state has some kind of licensing process for police officers that mandates certain levels of training, but Klinger said that it's up to the departments themselves to do more than the bare minimum and ensure their officers are ready to engage with their communities. He said that establishing a use-of-force database would be "hugely valuable" for improving those efforts.

"Every time a police officer discharges his or her firearm, we need to know that," he said. "We need to get fine grain information about the incident -- race of those involved, age, what type of weapons did the suspect have, that the officer used."

With that sort of information, he said, "Not only will we be able to track the rate at which cops are shooting, we'll also be able to get valuable information about where the shootings occur so we can improve police training."

After the Michael Brown shooting, the Justice Department stepped into Ferguson to help improve the police department's community relations. Specifically, the Justice Department's Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS) has been on the ground working with local police forces and community groups.

Along with imparting advice through agencies like COPS, the federal government can encourage stronger police conduct with the grants it doles out. Already, the Obama administration is reviewing policies that let police departments acquire military equipment for free from the federal government. Congress is similarly looking at that issue. A report produced this year by the Brennan Center for Justice suggested at the administration should review all grant programs for police -- not just those which transfer military equipment or funding for military equipment.

Klinger said that relying primarily on reforms at the federal level can make the process unnecessarily political. Furthermore, he noted that there's no "one size fits all" approach to improving police forces' community relations.

"You cannot train a police officer in Bismarck, North Dakota... with the same tactics and procedures as I was trained with in South Central Los Angeles," he said.

Civil rights groups and others have called for other reforms at the local and state level. For example, Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, suggested that after an officer uses force, the adjudication process should be taken out of the hands of the police and their natural allies, like county prosecutors.

"Internal affairs doesn't really seem to work in most situations," he said.

While it's impossible to know how often officers are exonerated for using force, Burrus said his work tracking the issue leads him to believe that officers are let off the hook far too often. The Cato Institute runs the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, which uses media reports to track alleged and confirmed cases of police misconduct. In 2010, the group found 1,575 reported allegations of excessive force.

"Power without accountability is always a problem," Burrus said.

Simmons agreed that police forces should be subject not just to internal reviews, but civilian oversight as well.

"We've got to get serious about what it means to be held accountable," he said.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/after-ferguson-what-can-be-done-about-the-use-of-force-by-police/

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Do Online Death Threats Count as Free Speech?

by EMILY BAZELONNOV

Exhibit 12 in the government's case against Anthony Elonis is a screenshot of a Facebook post he wrote in October 2010, five months after his wife, Tara, left him. His name appears in the site's familiar blue, followed by words that made Tara fear for her life: ‘'If I only knew then what I know now . . . I would have smothered your ass with a pillow. Dumped your body in the back seat. Dropped you off in Toad Creek and made it look like a rape and murder.''

Exhibit 13, also pulled from Facebook, is a thread that started when Tara's sister mentioned her plans to take her niece and nephew — Elonis's children — shopping for Halloween costumes. Tara responded and then Elonis did, too, saying their 8-year-old son ‘'should dress up as a Matricide.'' He continued: ‘'I don't know what his costume would entail though. Maybe your head on a stick?'' This time, Elonis included a photo of himself, holding a cigarette to his lips.

After Tara saw these posts — and another one, from the same time, which begins: ‘'There's one way to love ya but a thousand ways to kill ya. I'm not gonna rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts'' — she went to court in Reading, Pa., and got a protection-from-abuse order against her husband.

On Nov. 7, three days after Tara got the ruling, Elonis linked to a video satire by the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U' Know. On camera, a member of the group mocks the law against threatening to kill the president. Elonis mimicked the group's lines but subbed in his own text, to make it about Tara. ‘'I also found out that it's incredibly illegal, extremely illegal to go on Facebook and say something like the best place to fire a mortar launcher at her house would be from the cornfield behind it because of easy access to a getaway road and you'd have a clear line of sight through the sun room,'' he wrote. ‘'Yet even more illegal to show an illustrated diagram.'' Elonis added a diagram with a getaway road, a cornfield and a house. ‘'Art is about pushing limits,'' his post concluded. ‘'I'm willing to go to jail for my Constitutional rights. Are you?''

At the same time that he was posting about Tara, Elonis used Facebook to threaten his co-workers at an amusement park in nearby Allentown, where he worked. In one photo, from Halloween, Elonis held a fake knife to a co-worker's neck. They were both dressed in costume, but Elonis added the caption, ‘'I wish.'' His boss saw the image and caption and fired Elonis. He also called the F.B.I. In December 2010, Elonis was charged under a federal law that makes it a crime to use a form of interstate communication (like the Internet) to threaten to injure another person.

A jury convicted Elonis, and he spent more than three years in prison. On December 1, the Supreme Court will hear Elonis's First Amendment challenge to his conviction — the first time the justices have considered limits for speech on social media. For decades, the court has essentially said that ‘'true threats'' are an exception to the rule against criminalizing speech. These threats do not have to be carried out — or even be intended to be carried out — to be considered harmful. Bans against threats may be enacted, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in 2003, to protect people ‘'from the fear of violence'' and ‘'from the disruption that fear engenders.'' Current legal thinking is that threats do damage on their own.

Elonis, however, claims that he didn't make a true threat, because he didn't mean it. ‘'I would never hurt my wife,'' he told the jury. ‘'I never intended to threaten anyone. This is for me. This is therapeutic.'' Talking about the loss of his wife, he continued, ‘'helps me to deal with the pain.'' He had copied the Whitest Kids U' Know, along with the rapper Eminem, to try his hand at art and parody. Tara said she knew her husband had borrowed some of his words, but they still scared her. ‘'I felt like I was being stalked,” she said in court. ‘'I felt extremely afraid for mine and my children's and my family's lives.''

The central question for the Supreme Court will be whose point of view — the speaker's, or the listener's — matters. The jury was instructed to convict Anthony Elonis if it was reasonable for him to see that Tara would interpret his posts as a serious expression of intent to harm her. The court could uphold the standard, or it could require that jurors be asked to convict only if they believe the speaker truly intended to threaten harm. In essence, the court will have to decide what matters more: one person's freedom to express violent rage, or another person's freedom to live without the burden of fear?

The legal issue is connected to a larger question: how to deal with the frequent claim that online speech is a special form of playacting, in which a threat is as unreal as an attack on an avatar in World of Warcraft. Gilberto Valle — known as the Cannibal Cop for fetish chat-room messages in which he talked of capturing, cooking and eating specific women — persuaded a judge to overturn his conviction by saying he was just expressing a dark fantasy. In the ongoing ‘'GamerGate'' campaign, a faction of video-game enthusiasts tweeted death threats to women who had criticized misogyny in video-game culture. When a few of the women felt scared and left their homes, some gamers scoffed, dismissing the threats as ephemeral.

If it's possible to shrug off anonymous online threats, it's much harder to do that when a threat is made by someone you know intimately. In these cases, dread felt by targets is rational and may leave them struggling to sleep, eat or work. To escape, they may uproot themselves and their families. This kind of disruption fits with the Supreme Court's rationale for allowing laws that ban threats. ‘'We usually think of freedom of speech as enhancing liberty, but this is speech that takes away someone else's liberty,'' said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland.

For years, activists have lobbied for laws that punish stalking, given that burden of fear. Elonis's threats, they say, should be treated like stalking because it was reasonable for Tara to feel threatened by them. Cindy Southworth, a vice president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, points out that when a relationship goes bad, threats become both a tool of manipulation and a reliable predictor of physical assault. ‘'Every abuser says, ‘I didn't mean for her to think I would kill her,''' Southworth said.

But advocates for civil liberties want to give more breathing room to free speech and don't think the question of whether a statement online qualifies as a threat should be ‘'in the eye or ear of the beholder,'' the A.C.L.U. and other groups put in a brief they filed in the Elonis case. ‘'Words are slippery things, and one person's opprobrium may be another's threat.'' In a case that worries free-speech activists, a teenager named Justin Carter got into a Facebook exchange and wrote, ‘'I think I'ma SHOOT UP A KINDERGARTEN.'' After someone in Canada alerted the police, he spent months in a Texas jail for that comment and is still facing charges. ‘'I wasn't trying to scare anyone, I was trying to be witty and sarcastic,'' he wrote to the judge. ‘'I failed, and I was arrested.''

To prevent people from being locked up over a misunderstanding, the A.C.L.U., like Elonis, wants a higher bar for conviction. ‘'The age-old principle is that we don't criminalize speech without that clear intent,'' said Lee Rowland, an A.C.L.U. staff attorney.

The truth is that even when intent to do harm seems obvious, online threats are rarely prosecuted. Citron looked at the federal law that is the basis for the Elonis case and found that it has been enforced fewer than 50 times, online and off, over the past eight years. Stalking laws, domestic-violence advocates say, aren't enforced much, either.

If the Supreme Court requires evidence of a speaker's intent to harm in true-threats cases, it could give the police and prosecutors one more reason not to bring them. Maybe that's simply the unavoidable consequence of a broad interpretation of the First Amendment. Let's be clear, though, that such an approach to free speech doesn't come free. The choice in this case between points of view — Anthony's or Tara's — mirrors another choice, between types of personal liberty. His or hers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/do-online-death-threats-count-as-free-speech.html?_r=0

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Feds, state clash: Does new state immigrant policy pose public safety risk?

by Ana Radelat

Washington – The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency blasted a new state policy on when Connecticut's prisons will detain undocumented immigrants, saying it poses a risk to public safety and could release dangerous criminals into the community. The Malloy administration disagreed.

The state Department of Correction notified ICE last week in a memo from interim Commissioner Scott Semple that, as of Dec. 15, it will cease to honor ICE detention resquests and would hold for deportation only immigrants convicted of a violent felony or those subject to a court order.

A spokesman for ICE issued a statement Monday accusing the state of endangering public safety.

“The release of serious criminal offenders to the community, rather than to ICE custody for removal, undermines ICE's ability to protect public safety and impedes ICE from enforcing the nation's immigration laws,” said a statement from Daniel Modricker, a regional spokesman for ICE. “While some aliens may be arrested on minor criminal charges, they may also have more serious criminal backgrounds."

Some jurisdictions that have stopped honoring ICE's detainers have released dangerous criminals who have gone on to commit serious and violent crimes, Modricker said, rather than being turned over to ICE and placed in removal proceedings. In his speech on immigration last week, President Obama said he wanted to deport "felons and not families."

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a close ally of the Obama administration, downplayed the conflict with federal immigration officials.

“We notified them of the changes we were making," Malloy told The Mirror. "There's been some court cases that could lead us to being sued. We're making the policy compliant with recent case law. My job is to do that.”

Michael P. Lawlor, the governor's top adviser on criminal justice issues, said that the state was responding to a string of federal decisions, notably an Oregon case in which a federal judge found that jailing a defendant solely on the basis of an ICE detention request violated the woman's due-process rights.

By issuing a detainer, ICE requests that a law enforcement agency notify ICE before releasing a subject and keep him or her in custody for up to 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays, to allow ICE to take custody. Three states—California, Colorado and Connecticut—have adopted the same policy of noncompliance, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

In addition to those states, county officials have adopted similar policies. In most states, pre-trial prisoners are held in county jails, not state prisons. Connecticut has no county government.

Lawlor said the state policy poses no danger to public safety. All criminal defendants, whether they are citizens or undocumented, are subject to a bail commissioner's evaluation as to flight risk or a danger to the public, he said.

The Malloy administration's action takes the state one step further than most others in shielding the undocumented from deportation. It was cheered by immigrant advocates in the state.

In July of 2013, Connecticut became the first state to enact a version of the TRUST Act, a law that prevents state authorities from holding undocumented residents for immigration officials if they haven't committed serious crimes.

The state implemented the policy to settle a court case challenging the constitutionality of the state's previous policy of honoring all ICE detainers.

John Jairo Lugo of Unidad Latina en Acción said Semple's actions “improves upon the TRUST Act.”

“It means that people whose only issue is being a victim of unjust policies will now be protected from ICE's overreaching quota,” Lugo said.

Department of Correction spokeswoman Karen Martucci said her agency "routinely reviews its policies."

Martucci said concerns about public safety drove the latest policy change.

"Our concern was the full enforcement of ICE detainers would deter the immigrant community from reporting crimes," she said.

Two years ago, Malloy riled ICE when he informed the agency Connecticut would no longer participate in “Secure Communities,” a federal program to identify potentially deportable immigrants by providing immigration agents with fingerprints collected at local jails.

Sometimes, federal agents would ask local law enforcement officials to hold inmates believed to be in the country illegally beyond the length of their jail terms so that they could be transferred to federal custody.

Malloy said he would turn over these inmates on a case-by-case basis. Other states and local communities also defied Washington over the program, which was criticized by immigration advocates who said it eroded immigrant communities' trust in police and often resulted in the deportations of those accused of only minor infractions.

Last week, Obama said he would scrap “Secure Communities” as part of his immigration overhaul. He said federal agents should focus on deporting "felons, not families," and announced a new initiative, the Priority Enforcement Program, which would target only those convicted of serious crimes.

Obama said he would also provide the opportunity for millions of undocumented aliens to apply for provisional legal status. But to qualify, an immigrant must have no criminal record, belong to a “mixed family” whose members include U.S. citizens or legal residents and who have lived in the United States for at least five years.

Recent immigrants and those with criminal records or no relatives with legal status will continue to be deported, and ICE will continue to ask states to help the agency by issuing detainers.

Connecticut has a diverse immigrant community with peoples from South America, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe and Africa. Many are here legally, but an estimated 55,000 to 100,000 are undocumented.

http://ctmirror.org/feds-state-clash-does-new-immigrant-policy-pose-public-safety-risk/

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New Jersey

Atlantic City, police chief say complaints down, community trust up

by LYNDA COHEN and JOHN SANTORE

Atlantic City's Police Department is working to mend the city's image as a crime-ridden town with violent police — and the effort is working, leadership says.

Use-of-force reports, Internal Affairs complaints and violent crime have all decreased this year, according to information released during a meeting Mayor Don Guardian requested with The Press of Atlantic City's editorial board Friday.

Initiatives include an early warning system to track potential problems with officers, new technology and a more community-oriented mindset.

“There's no way of sugarcoating it, we've had problems and we still have some issues,” Police Chief Henry White said. “We've totally revamped our Internal Affairs process. I wanted to send a message to our officers and to the public that this is not business as usual.”

Use-of-force reports dropped from 675 in the first nine months of last year to 440 through Sept. 30 of this year, a nearly 35 percent decrease, according to the provided numbers. Internal Affairs complaints dropped from 157 to 115 during that same time frame. Complaints of excessive force also were down more than 18 percent, from 43 to 35.

K-9 bites are down by 81 percent, with just three apprehensions this year. None, the chief said, resulted in Internal Affairs complaints.

But the numbers are still too high, said one local activist.

“They're still having this problem,” said Steven Young, who heads the local National Action Network and has led several protests against the department. “I think training is still key, and the culture in the Police Department is still that they can get away with anything. We can beat 'em up, and we will not have discipline. I still see nothing in here dealing with” disciplining officers.

The city has a history of not finding fault with police accused in citizen complaints.

“Some complaints in the past could have definitely had a different outcome,” White said. “Everyone can't be wrong.”

But now the department is looking beyond that.

The Administrative Investigative Management system, or AIM, works as an early warning system to alert the department to potential problem officers.

It tracks not only complaints but commendations and even sick days that could be indicators of other problems, explained Lt. Bridget Pierce, of the newly created Professional Standards Unit.

Now, when an officer is called in about a complaint, the officer's entire chain of command is also in the room, from direct sergeant to the deputy chief who oversees that section.

“Some of them are our best officers,” said Pierce, who oversees Internal Affairs. “We explain to them what it looks like to the attorneys.”

It also allows the department to be more proactive and take steps before things get out of control.

For example, one officer kept getting complaints on a club detail, so he was kept from doing that detail to see if another officer would have the same problem.

“Is it the officer or is it the bar?” Pierce asked. “It gives us a little more to go on.”

Another officer was moved from an area where he'd had problems, and there have been no further instances, she said.

Officers also are trying to engage more in the community, with those attending events such as Coffee with a Cop including officers who work the streets and make the big arrests.

“I don't want it to be looked at as us against them or the thin blue line,” White said.

It's also about having the community understand what police are doing, he said. For example, “We need to educate the public on what to do when stopped by the police.”

“The community and the police are more engaged as one now, and I think the Police Department is getting their trust,” said Perry Mays, of the Coalition for a Safe Community. “I think by the police being more (interested in) community policing, coming out in the communities, walking with average citizens, not coming just to arrest somebody, I think it's made a drastic change in the reduction of violence.”

The community has been more engaged, including trusting tip411, the texting system that allows people to anonymously give information to police by texting 847411 and beginning the text with ACPD.

Tip411 has become almost too successful, the chief said.

“Folks are tipping (us about) crimes in progress rather than calling 911,” he said.

Lawsuits resulting from off-duty officers working details also caused changes, including that officers are not to be used as “glorified bouncers,” White said.

The casinos with the highest instances include Harrah's Resort, which made up 32 percent of the lawsuits. Now, there are two sergeants hired to supervise the casino details, and the officers on those assignments must wear body cameras.

There currently are 20 cameras rotated throughout the department, but this past week the purchase of 100 was approved. The chief expects those to be in place by the beginning of the new year.

Supervisors are also immediately called to scenes where there is use of force, which also helps the department collect evidence such as video footage, said Deputy Chief James Pasquale, who heads the Professional Standards Unit.

With cameras throughout the city and even on police officers, more information is available to investigate complaints, Pierce said.

“It's a different story,” she said. “It's a more objective story.”

The city also is looking to add 30 Special Law Enforcement Officers, or Class IIs, who work for $15 per hour with no benefits.

A measure is pending before the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority that would have the agency pay for those officers plus two sergeants to oversee them. The Class IIs are only $3 more per hour than the Boardwalk ambassadors and don't get benefits, Guardian pointed out.

The Class IIs were originally brought on to police the Boardwalk to clear up full-time officers to go into the more troubled areas.

“In addition, they are providing good, sound technology that will reinforce safety in real time, which increases their chances in apprehending criminals while maintaining the secrecy of individuals who use tip411,” Mays said.

“The public is starting to believe in us,” White said. “We're getting information we haven't in the past.”

“He's really a social worker at heart,” the mayor said of the chief.

Guardian recalled White's speech when he was sworn in as police chief last December, focusing on a need to earn the trust of the community.

“When I listened to that speech, I thought I wrote it,” Guardian said.

“Overall, the chief is doing an excellent job revamping Internal Affairs, and I do believe, if given some time, it can change,” Young said. “But there has to be some kind of change in the sensitivity and the culture of the Police Department.”

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/atlantic-city_pleasantville_brigantine/a-c-mayor-police-chief-say-complaints-down-community-trust/article_89f13a8c-7279-11e4-bc83-5f1f4b66a175.html

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Florida

Fla. man who ambushed cops had anti-government beliefs

Man fatally shot Deputy Christopher Smith, 47, on Saturday and wounded another deputy before he was killed

by Gary Fineout

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A man who set his house on fire and ambushed responding police officers held "anti-government, anti-establishment" views and had previously threatened law enforcement, authorities said Sunday.

The gunman was identified as 53-year-old Curtis Wade Holley. Authorities said he fatally shot Leon County Sheriff's Deputy Christopher Smith, 47, on Saturday and wounded another deputy before he was killed in a gun battle outside his home.

At a news conference Sunday, sheriff's Lt. James McQuaig wouldn't detail the nature of the previous threats or Holley's anti-government beliefs. Holley had lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a middle class neighborhood for about a year, McQuaig said.

Smith was the first Leon County Sheriff's Office employee to be killed in the line of duty in nearly 40 years, according to the department. The deputy who was wounded was shot while telling firefighters to stay away. Because he was wearing a bullet-proof vest, his injuries were not life-threatening. No one was hurt in the fire.

Two Tallahassee police officers also responded to the shooting, including one who lived nearby and fatally shot Holley.

"Our responders yesterday were targeted for no other reason than they chose to spend their lives helping people," said Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo. "There is no doubt that the actions of our deputies and officers prevented additional loss of life."

McQuaig said that it appeared the fire had been burning for a while before authorities arrived because they didn't receive the 911 call until flames were visible from the outside. The house was completely destroyed.

Holley's name and address had been entered into a law enforcement computer system because of his previous threats, but the 911 dispatcher who took the fire call put in the address of a neighbor who reported the blaze, so the alert wasn't activated and the Leon County deputy who responded first had no warning, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.

McQuaig would only say Sunday that there would be an investigation into how deputies were dispatched.

"There will be days and weeks of us combing over every minute detail of this investigation and we are not going to take action until we have all the facts," McQuaig said.

The shooting near Florida's capital came just two days after a police shootout at Florida State University left a gunman dead after he wounded two students and an employee.

http://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/7855500-Fla-man-who-ambushed-cops-had-anti-government-beliefs/

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Utah

Killings by Utah police outpacing gang, drug, child-abuse homicides

by ERIN ALBERTY

In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members.

Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.

And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives — 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan — than has violence between spouses and dating partners.

As the tally of fatal police shootings rises, law enforcement watchdogs say it is time to treat deadly force as a potentially serious public safety problem.

"The numbers reflect that there could be an issue, and it's going to take a deeper understanding of these shootings," said Chris Gebhardt, a former police lieutenant and sergeant who served in Washington, D.C., and in Utah, including six years on SWAT teams and several training duties. "It definitely can't be written off as citizen groups being upset with law enforcement."

Through October, 45 people had been killed by law enforcement officers in Utah since 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all homicides during that period.

A Salt Lake Tribune review of nearly 300 homicides, using media reports, state crime statistics, medical-examiner records and court records, shows that use of force by police is the second-most common circumstance under which Utahns kill each other, surpassed only by intimate partner violence.

Saturday's shooting, which occurred after an officer responded to a trespassing call, remains under investigation.

Nearly all of the fatal shootings by police have been deemed by county prosecutors to be justified. Only one — the 2012 shooting of Danielle Willard by West Valley City police — was deemed unjustified, and the subsequent criminal charge was thrown out last month by a judge.

Does that mean such deaths should be treated as the inevitable cost of keeping police and the public safe?

"Police are trained and expected to react to deadly threats. As many deadly threats emerge is the exact amount of times police will respond," wrote Ian Adams, a West Jordan police officer and spokesman for the Utah Fraternal Order of Police. "The onus is on the person being arrested to stop trying to assault and kill police officers and the innocent public. … Why do some in society continue to insist the problem lies with police officers?"

But Robert Wadman, a criminal justice professor at Weber State University and former chief of the Omaha, Neb., police department, said the factors leading up to the decision to shoot a subject are more subtle than what prosecutors consider when reviewing the legal justification. Under Utah law, an officer is justified if at the moment of the shooting the officer reasonably believes deadly force is necessary to prevent death or serious injury.

"Sometimes the line between is it legal and is it necessary becomes difficult to distinguish," Wadman said. "In the judgment of the officer, ‘Is my life in jeopardy? Yes.' At that point in time, they're legally grounded in using deadly force. But the question is, is it necessary? That's something that needs to be firmly addressed, for example, in training."

‘Officers may use any force available'

The Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) division of the Utah Department of Safety oversees, directly or indirectly, the basic training of all police recruits in Utah. At its four-month academy, cadets are introduced to the use-of-force continuum, a diagram showing officer force options — simply showing up at the scene; verbal commands, touching or holding a subject, pepper spray, police dogs, baton, Taser, or deadly force — arrayed in a circle for the officer's selection.

"Officers may use any force available provided they can justify the reasonableness of force used," the manual states.

Adams maintains that officers in Utah typically use less force than may be justified.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/1842489-155/killings-by-utah-police-outpacing-gang