"News of the Week"   Daily Local & Regional NewsWatch December 2018 - Week 4

Terri Lanahan ~~~~~~~~~~ Many thanks to NAASCA's Terri Lanahan, Butte, Montana, for her research into the news that appears on the LACP & NAASCA web sites.

Holiday Peace Holds As No Murders In NYC Enter Seventh Day

All remains calm as the streak of no murders continues for a seventh day.

Crime is down in Brooklyn -- which is one of the success stories for the NYPD in 2018.

At 278 murders so far in 2018, the NYPD says the city is on track for fewer murders this year than last.

In 1990, 2,245 murders were tallied in the city. As of mid-December, the count stood at 278 -- three fewer than last year.

The experts say that the downward spiral that began in the 1990s with Compstat -- the system that used technology to track crime -- continues with community policing and other NYPD efforts.

And its more than murder: Major felonies are tracking lower this year. There have been 91,734 of them so far compared to the 95,215 recorded in 2017.

And Brooklyn set a record with 97 murders so far this year. This is the first time on record the murder rate in the borough was less than 100.

https://wcbs880.radio.com/articles/brooklyn-so-far-sees-less-100-murders-2018-first-time-record

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New Jersey

West Windsor officer Kyle Brown embodies concept of community policing

by Andrea Mandel

The WWP News in conjunction with West Windsor Gives Back, a new community organization, will be running articles throughout 2018 in celebration of the West Windsor Police Department's 50th anniversary. In addition to honoring the department and its officers, the group is working to raise funds to help the department purchase a drone.

West Windsor Police Department officer Kyle Brown has done it all—coach, patrol officer, SWAT team member and teacher. As an area resident since childhood, he fits naturally into the role of community policing.

Brown grew up in West Windsor and Plainsboro, and attended Maurice Hawk, Millstone River (formerly UES), and WW-P High School, where he was in the last graduating class before it became High School South.

He says he fondly remembers the coaches and friendships from his time playing sports including baseball at Ward Field and football with the WW-P Wildcats. In high school, Brown played basketball and was MVP in 1999-2000. He has since used both his sports and people skills to coach basketball for West Windsor travel and recreation teams.

Brown says being influenced positively by his coaches is an integral part of his desire to pay it forward as a coach, instructor and police officer.

Brown says he remembers one student in particular who was struggling in middle school and started playing basketball on a team Brown coached.

The kid “really stuck with it” and went on to finish high school and then college. It was a wonderful moment when the student thanked Brown for his part in his ultimate success.

Brown's emphasis on excellence in physical fitness is not just about muscle strength and capability. Like several West Windsor police officers before him, he earned the Physical Fitness Award when he graduated from the Mercer County Police Academy in 2009.

“I knew going into the academy that I really wanted to win that award,” Brown says. “It shows more than just physical condition but also heart and determination, and those traits go hand and hand with making a successful police officer.”

In addition, he has competed along with other WWPD officers in the Elite Law Enforcement Fitness Challenge against police and members of the military in the New York to Maryland area. They competed twice, earning 2nd and 3rd place.

Brown's physical and mental toughness has been invaluable on West Windsor's SWAT team (called the Tactical Response Team) for the last five years.

Members of TRT receive additional training that enables them to respond to emergency situations in West Windsor and to assist other agencies throughout the county.

To become a member of the team they have to complete a physical fitness test—run a mile, complete pull ups, dips, a sprint, low crawl and body drag—all in SWAT gear. There is also an oral interview and a shooting test to determine accuracy with firearms.

But it is his outgoing personality and service to the community that most West Windsor residents see daily. As a DARE instructor for the past three years, Brown says he enjoys working with students.

“It's not only about educating them in making positive decisions but it's also about building bonds with the community that last long after DARE is over,” says Brown.

He has participated in many events, including National Night Out, TRT display and presentation for Girl Scout Night at the Citizens Rifle and Revolver Club, Emergency Vehicle Day at the library, West Windsor Community Day, DARE Splash, Career Day at MCCC, and the Special Olympics Torch Run.

One of his most interesting and memorable events was on Christmas Day in 2009 when he assisted in the birth of a baby during rush hour on Route 1.

Besides the TRT and his various WWPD assignments, Brown is also a police academy instructor. He teaches physical fitness, emergency driving, and courses such as Crime Prevention and Patrol Techniques.

“Teaching at the academy was something that I really wanted to do because I remember the impact that my instructors had on me,” he says. “And I wanted to be able to have a positive impact on new officers, too.”

Brown holds a degree in communications from The College of New Jersey. He lives with his wife Erin, a 4th grade teacher and their two sons, Carter and Caden.

https://communitynews.org/2018/12/12/west-windsor-officer-kyle-brown-community-policing/

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Brazil

Lingering Trauma in Brazil: Police Violence Against Black Women

Black women disproportionately experience the trauma of police aggression in Brazil. Understanding how requires complicating and expanding our definitions of state violence.

On March 16, 2014, military police shot and severely wounded 38-year-old Cláudia da Silva Ferreira in the suburban community of Madureira in Rio de Janeiro. She was leaving her house to buy groceries at a local market in her neighborhood when she got caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between police and alleged drug dealers. The police waited until the battle was over and put the unconscious Silva Ferreira in the hatchback trunk of the police car to take her to the hospital. They refused to let any of her family members ride with her. On the way to the hospital, she fell out of the trunk but stayed pinned to the car, held by a piece of her clothing. The police officers, who either didn't notice or didn't care, proceeded to drag her for approximately 250 meters until they reached a red light where they stuffed her limp body back inside the car. Silva Ferreira was pronounced dead on arrival at the Carlos Chagas State Hospital.

Almost four years to the day later, on the night of March 14, Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco was riding home with her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes and her assistant, when an unidentified car pulled up beside her and shot repeatedly into her car. The assassin(s) shot her four times in the head, killing her, and also shot her driver, killing him as well. Her assistant escaped with injuries. Soon thereafter, it came out that the bullets that the killers used to kill Franco and Gomes were from a lot of ammunition that the Federal Police had purchased in Brasília in 2006, that an alleged death squad used to massacre 17 people in metropolitan São Paulo in 2015.

Police violence is a phenomenon that gravely affects Black men, but it also disproportionately targets Black women. Black women are also shot, tortured, and killed by the police in addition to facing sexual assault and terror due to both physical threats and the lingering, deadly effects of police terror. Following the work of Andreia Beatriz dos Santos, co-coordinator of the React or Die! Campaign Against the Genocide of Black People and co-founder of the Winnie Mandela School in Salvador, Bahia, I call this process sequelae, which draws from the medical definition of the term sequela, meaning “a condition that is the consequence of a previous disease,” as I have written in recent articles. I use the term to describe the lingering, deadly aftereffects of police terror on the bodies of the living in the aftermath of police killings.

Like Cláudia Ferreira's death four years before, Marielle Franco's death was yet another disturbing reminder of the complex ways that Black women experience police violence in the Americas.Like Cláudia Ferreira's death four years before, Marielle Franco's death was yet another disturbing reminder of the complex ways that Black women experience police violence in the Americas. But in order to come to grips with the full spectrum of the gendered realities of anti-Black policing in the Americas, we must pay closer attention to the violence Black women experience at the hands of on duty and off duty police officers and complicate and expand our definitions of police violence to include the mundane and the lingering impact of trauma in addition to the spectacular. Examining these recent examples through a gendered perspective provides insight into the multiple ways that Black women experience police violence in Brazil.

Killed for Speaking Out

Franco's assassination sent shockwaves throughout Brazil and around the world. For many, she was the embodiment of the possibility of a new paradigm in Brazilian politics. She was a bisexual Black woman, mother, socialist, outspoken critic of racialized and classed repression, and councilwoman from the favela of Maré. She represented the seemingly outlandish possibility that a Black woman from Brazil's margins could leverage the political arena to enact real change. Her death was a devastating loss to Brazil's socialist movement, the Black Women's Movement, the Maré community, and people around the world who still hold out hope for a progressive future. It was also a painful reminder of the dangers of speaking out against police violence in Brazil.

In August 2018 more details about the connections between Franco and Gomes' assassinations and the police surfaced. Police investigators in Rio began to suspect that a group of current and former military police officers and “militiamen” known as the Office of Crime killed Franco and Gomes. The Office of Crime is what many would classify as a “death squad”—an organization of assassins typically made up of current and former police officers that engage in systematic extrajudicial killings. Historically, these groups have had clear and evident ties to both the Military and Civil Police in Brazil, and can be traced back to the emergence of the secret police as far back as the early 20th century. Death squads are often the clandestine face of police lethality in Brazil. They are also very close kin to the milícias(militias) that occupy and terrorize the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: “organizations primarily made up of police officers, military firemen, and prison guards—active and retired—that guarantee the security of residents of some neighborhoods in exchange for a monthly fee,” according to an article by Alba Zaluar and Isabel Siqueira Conceição. The Office of Crime's headquarters are located near where Franco and Gomes were killed.

For years, Franco played an active role in denouncing militarized policing, militias, and clandestine activities orchestrated by the police and related forces like prison guards and militarized firemen.For years, Franco played an active role in denouncing militarized policing, militias, and clandestine activities orchestrated by the police and related forces like prison guards and militarized firemen. Firemen, like the police forces in Brazil, are militarized—one of the many legacies of the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. In 2014, Franco wrote her masters' thesis at the Universidade Federal Fluminense on Unidades de Polícia Pacificadores (Pacifying Police Units, UPPs), militarized forces that occupy working class, majority-Black communities across Brazil, like Rio's favelas. In her thesis, Franco deconstructed the militarization of the police and the occupation and terrorization of the favelas of Rio:

The politics of the Department of Safety of the State of Rio de Janeiro maintain the characteristics of a Penal State … the central elements that define this reality are militarized police action, the repression of [favela] residents, the inexistence of rights and the displacement of residents from their communities to the peripheries of the city (which happens in many cases). That is, the continuity of a racist logic of the incarceration of Blacks and the poor, in addition to the discarding of a part of the population to the right of the city, continues to define public safety in the advent of UPPs. These elements are central to the relationship between the Criminal State and the police forces in Rio de Janeiro.

Franco did not shy away from critiquing the endemic problem of state violence against Black and poor residents of communities like Maré, and she recognized this violence as genocide against Black people in Brazil. She was clear about the role that militias, the militarization of the police forces, and police intervention play in terrorizing the favelas of Rio. The night before she was killed, Franco tweeted about the police killing of 23-year-old Matheus Melo de Castro in Rio, another young person who may have been killed by the Military Police (PM). He had been leaving church.

Marielle Franco posed a threat to the status quo in all that she embodied, and her outspokenness extended into the political arena. In 2008, Marielle served on the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission into Militias (CPI), which was charged with investigating paramilitary groups in Rio de Janeiro. The CPI found clear ties between militias and the police forces in Rio and involvement of politicians. Although the investigations into Franco and Gomes' deaths have not concluded, the evidence thus far points directly to police participation, and implies that Marielle was targeted because of her outspoken and active denunciations of police violence. Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar story.

On May 21 2007, Military Police from Sussuarana invaded the home of Aurina Rodrigues Santana —a well-respected organizer for the city's Homeless Movement—and brutally tortured her son Paulo Rodrigo and 13-year-old daughter for three hours, ransacking their house, removing furniture, and leaving books and clothes strewn about everywhere. On May 27, Aurina and her children went to the Center for the Defense of Children and Adolescents (CEDECA /BA) to report the incident. There, they were appointed a lawyer to help them to file a formal complaint against the police officers they suspected were responsible for the aggression. On August 6, two of her children—whose names were withheld because they were minors and in hiding—testified at a public hearing regarding the torture they suffered and clearly identified the responsible police officers. Just eight days later, on August 14, plain-clothes police officers invaded Aurina's home in the neighborhood of Calabetão and executed Aurina, Paulo, and her partner, while two of her three younger children were in the other room.

Both Marielle Franco and Aurina Rodrigues Santana were assassinated after direct, public, and formal denunciations of police abuseSome of the boldest and most unabashed critics of police abuse are Black women whose personal lives have been touched by that abuse. This boldness puts them at risk for abuse, torture, and even murder or death. Both Marielle Franco and Aurina Rodrigues Santana were assassinated after direct, public, and formal denunciations of police abuse —Marielle participated in a legislative investigation of police corruption and Aurina pressed charges against the officers who tortured her children. Black women also die when they personally confront the police in their everyday lives. The story of Luana Barbosa is one such story.

The Murder of Luana

On the evening of Friday, April 8, 2016, in the municipality of Ribeirão Preto in northeastern São Paulo state, Military Police (PM) invaded the working-class region of Jardim Paiva 2 where they confronted 34-year-old Luana Barbosa dos Reis—a masculine-presenting lesbian woman—while she was riding her motorbike taking her 14-year-old son to his computer class. Officers approached Luana brusquely and ordered her to open her legs and stand with her hands behind her head against the wall to be frisked— standard protocol for stopping and frisking men in Brazil. When Luana protested, insisting that she was a woman and should not be required to follow this protocol, one of the officers hit her. Luana responded by punching one of the officers in the face. In return, they began beating her severely with batons.

Later that evening, the officers took Luana to the police station for processing. When Roseli, Luana's sister, went to go pick her up from the police station, Luana was completely disfigured. Her right eye was almost out of its socket. She had vomited blood. She was only semi-conscious and her speech was slurred. She could not walk. The police would only let Luana leave on one condition: she had to sign a statement saying that she was responsible for the incident. Despite a clear lack of lucidity, she complied. On the sidewalk outside of the police station, Roseli took video footage of her sister's story in her own words in order to create an archive and counter-narrative to the police—a deliberate, political act of resistance.

Fearing police retaliation, the family hid Luana overnight. They then took her to the hospital the next morning. She was barely conscious, and her entire body was covered in large bruises. Five days later, Luana died in the hospital from multiple traumatic blows to the head that precipitated a stroke. Like Marielle and Aurina, Luana confronted police abuse directly, and was mortally targeted because of it.

https://nacla.org/news/2018/12/27/lingering-trauma-brazil-police-violence-against-black-women

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Brazil

Politics

License-to-Kill Policing to Get a Trial Run in Rio de Janeiro

The state's governor has promised gunmen will face ‘slaughter' -- City and its slums are a test case for Brazil as a whole

Teams of marksmen next year will patrol swaths of Rio de Janeiro with high-powered weapons and a license to kill, said a security adviser to Governor-elect Wilson Witzel.

As many as 120 sharpshooters will accompany police incursions into the slums of Brazil's postcard city to exterminate gun-toting criminals, according to Flavio Pacca, a longtime associate of Witzel who the governor-elect's press office said will join the administration. The shooters will work in pairs -- one to pull the trigger, one to monitor conditions and videotape deaths.

“The protocol will be to immediately neutralize, slaughter anyone who has a rifle,” Witzel, a federal judge and former Brazilian marine, told reporters in Brasilia on Dec. 12. “Whoever has a rifle isn't worried about other people's lives, they're ready to eliminate anyone who crosses their path. This is a grave problem, not just in Rio de Janeiro, but also in other states.”

Rio has long exemplified Brazil's charm and its chaos, and what happens there echoes at home and abroad. Like President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, Witzel cruised to victory in October promising a brutal crackdown on criminals who make daily life a harrowing ordeal. Rio will be a proving ground for Bolsonaro's philosophy of maximum force -- and whether law enforcement devolves into a storm of extrajudicial killings.

Witzel's Eyes

Witzel declined Bloomberg's interview requests and declined to comment on the sharpshooter plan Pacca described.

Rio's homicides last year surged to an eight-year high of 5,346 and robberies and muggings have more than doubled since 2011. In February, President Michel Temer put the army in control of security through year-end and Witzel, as he takes over, intends to seek out the fight.

Witzel will create a security council that answers to him directly and envisions a web of surveillance and control. He plans public-private partnerships to purchase as many as 30,000 security cameras, according to his press office. This month, he traveled to Israel to visit Elbit Systems Ltd. and Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., both of which work on drones. Pacca said the unmanned aircraft will gather facial images of drug traffickers holding weapons so police will have evidence to arrest a suspect when he emerges from his neighborhood.

Distant Death

Pacca, a police officer himself and a regular attendee at Witzel's transition meetings, said groups of 20 policemen will begin undergoing month-long marksman training as soon as March. After they can kill at 600 meters, they will typically clear the way into favelas, where many residents live under the deadly sway of drug traffickers. Gangs often position roadblocks and lookouts to impede police and rival gangs.

Marksmen will alternate, with one shooting and one spotting targets and filming so as to prove a person deserved killing, Pacca said in Bloomberg's Rio office. Society and jurists are shifting their views of what constitutes “imminent danger'' that justifies lethal force, he said, and targets don't need to be actively shooting.

“That concept is changing; it's not for nothing that Bolsonaro was elected, not for nothing that Witzel was elected,'' Pacca said. He pointed to a jewelry-store thief who this month used an octogenarian as a human shield during his escape. As he stumbled, officers shot him dead at point-blank range. “The people gave the police an ovation. That's what you're going to see.''

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-12-22/license-to-kill-policing-to-get-a-trial-run-in-rio-de-janeiro

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Canada

How neighbourhood policing in Ottawa was gutted — and why it's making a return

by SHAAMINI YOGARETNAM

A park full of non-stop drinking. A drug dealer making small-time sales in front of a crack den. Five car break-ins on the same city block in less than a week.

In every single Ottawa neighbourhood, there are issues flagged by residents that inevitably lead to 911 calls — time-sensitive issues that need to be addressed but aren't actual emergencies.

“You don't really want to take up a 911 resource for something that is incredibly important (to the community) but it's more of a nuisance than an actual emergency,” says Jasna Jennings, executive director of the ByWard Market business improvement area.

Not long ago, these types of incidents didn't require a 911 call. The Ottawa Police Service employed a district model of neighbourhood officers to deal with community-specific needs. Various areas of the city had a group of officers who patrolled those regions, addressed issues and were never expected to respond to 911 calls as their primary job.

Instead of calling the emergency line, residents could call on a team of officers ready and able to deal with low-level crime and social disorder problems that were neighbourhood-based.

But that changed in 2017.

Facing budget constraints, and in a bid to become more efficient, the force began a radical restructuring of the organization — a byproduct of which was a major blow to its neighbourhood policing model.

Now, less than two years later, after public backlash and the force's own admission that aspects of the restructuring were flawed, police have announced they'll be re-introducing officers to neighbourhood roles.

But why was the neighbourhood policing model gutted in the first place?

To answer that question is to first understand the force's perpetual juggling act, one that sees it attempting to satisfy its own members, its political masters and the public it serves — and second, to understand that in a city the size of Ottawa, there is no viable way to create a one-size-fits-all approach to policing.

Ottawa Police Service Const. Kevin Williams addresses a large crowd assembled at a Bells Corners neighbourhood watch information session. Williams is the community officer for the area.

In January 2017, the Ottawa Police Service began rolling out a new model of “service delivery.” In police speak, it meant a new way of taking reports, deploying officers, and communicating with each other.

Years in the making, the project saw the force hire consultants and hold public consultations and town halls for their own employees. It was intended to modernize the police service, but also to cut costs as police salaries soared and budgets remained tight.

The overhaul was called the “Service initiative” and with it came changes — an operations centre, online report taking, the amalgamation of some investigative units and the creation of collision reporting centres (which were expected to turn profits but have failed to do so).

But the biggest tangible consequence of the “Service initiative” — at least from a community perspective — was the collapse of the district model of neighbourhood officers.

Neighbourhood officers, or NHOs, were the “back up” in any community, says Hintonburg's Cheryl Parrott. Parrott, who heads the area's community association, fervently opposed the changes to the model.

Community police officers, of which there remain 13 in the city, are the primary focal points for issues in their neighbourhoods. But they relied on the neighbourhood officers as foot soldiers.

NHOs were the cops who did john sweeps in Vanier, monitored problem bars in the Market, or conducted surveillance to find out who was behind a string of personal robberies in the west end. They also gathered information on who was who in the area they covered and sent it to other units in the force. They were often called local intelligence officers by colleagues. It was proactive policing.

A 2010 file photo of Ottawa Police Service central east neighborhood officers Const. Tom McFadden and Const. Alain Rochette arresting a man in breach of his probation.

NHOs were “project-oriented” and they were the “problem-solvers,” says Parrott.

In 2017, nearly 100 officers, including some community police officers and all neighbourhood officers, were folded back into patrol, itself a term outdated in the local police force, which opts now to call them “front-line” officers. It's these officers who respond to 911 calls for service. The move increased front-line strength, but it also decimated the NHO role.

Matt Skof, the Ottawa Police Association president, says the change was an attempt to address a staffing crisis that was a natural result of the political decision-making surrounding police budgets.

For years, Mayor Jim Watson and his councils have set an annual increase cap of 2.5 per cent or less on budgets for all city departments. Several have argued that the police force shouldn't be constrained to the cap, including newly appointed police board chair Coun. Diane Deans. For 2019, Watson and council have set the cap at three per cent. A police budget has yet to be tabled.

But the cap and a five-year-long hiring freeze that lifted in 2016, meant several things for the police service.

First, it meant that any contracts bargained to include pay increases for rank and file officers larger than council's cap were immediately considered too rich for the city's blood — even though that's what forces across the province were getting.

Second, it meant that the service couldn't afford to grow and pay their existing officers while abiding by the cap. Third, it meant that any new officers, hired over and above attrition, would have to come from money the service saved, or from money it wasn't spending elsewhere.

What resulted, according to Skof, was a crisis on the road and a race to find efficiencies. Woefully understaffed, patrol units could barely scrape together enough officers to meet their minimum standards.

“Because of that decline in staffing, the service was unable to meet the commitments of the district for staffing.”

All NHO positions were dissolved, the number of community police officers was reduced with each remaining one covering a larger service area, and the problems of the neighbourhood were left to patrol officers to deal with.

“We developed a model where we said our front-line officers are going to be the ones that respond to it,” says Ottawa police deputy Chief Steve Bell. “It didn't work out like we thought it would.”

Bell thinks it was a good plan on paper but when the force put it into practice, it didn't work the same way.

“The community feels the pinch when they have issues.”

“Our community police officers are the mainstay in the community. They're our main connection. They doubled their territory and took away every single backup they had.”

Taking away NHOs and leaving the issue with patrol “just did nothing,” Parrott says.

If the community officer was confronted with an issue and they couldn't solve it on their own, quickly or easily “it just languished and grew.”

It's the low-level drug dealer, with blatant hand-to-hand sales that makes passersby uncomfortable, avert their eyes and avoid the area, who destroy communities, not the big-time dealers, she says.

Jennings, the ByWard Market BIA executive director, says she “certainly felt the change.”

Their prime contact used to be a staff sergeant. Now it's a constable. A more senior officer brings with them the ability to direct troops, can create projects and identify patterns, whereas a more junior officer needs to go up the chain to see what can be done.

Having officers bound to an area meant they knew the different players — the people who lived on the street, the staff at businesses, neighbourhood residents.

“They just had that intimate knowledge,” Jennings says.

Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper also opposed the model changes. Having officers “dedicated to the geography” is paramount, he says.

In the Market, where there are three different homeless shelters that can see the same people at a different location on any given night, an NHO could respond knowing what the issue with a specific person was. Now, staff often have to call 911 to deal with disruptive behaviour and give dispatch the background on the person. It can take what seems like an eternity for something that used be a two-second call to an officer directly.

Jennings doesn't doubt what the impetus for change was. The police will say they had to move around officers, she says.

“At the end of the day, you don't have enough officers because you don't have enough budget to hire people. It's a matter of budget.”

The loss of neighbourhood officers had a “dramatic impact” in Vanier, says Lucie Marleau, founder of Crime Prevention Vanier.

Dealing with the same officers built trust in the community.

In Vanier, specifically, over the last few years, changes to prostitution laws, changes to the Ottawa Police Service delivery model and changes to how and when police can stop people and ask for their information has “put a lot of onus on the residents to up their game.”

The work didn't go away, just because NHOs did.

The burden is on the community. The “supposed cost saving” is being transferred to residents and businesses, Marleau says. Condo buildings and businesses are increasing their security and neighbourhood watch volunteers have also grown.

“It's not sustainable.”

The community's understanding of community policing, says Skof, is not simply the bricks and mortar of a community office.

“The community is quite intelligent. They are live to the fact that the resources that were put into community policing have been slashed,” he says.

Deans, the new police board chair, had urged the last board against approving the changes to the model. Re-shaping that is already a priority for her.

“I'm a big advocate of community policing, and the move away from the neighbourhood officers has been problematic, in my view, in our communities. I know that there's going to be a return in some measure to that in the new year and I want to make sure it's properly resourced,” she said after just minutes on the job.

In November, less than two years after full implementation, the force admitted the neighbourhood strategy was flawed.

Public opinion research commissioned by the force easily identified community policing as a major concern for residents and with that came a promise: A dedicated unit of officers, free from the queue of calls for emergency service, who could address these community-specific issues.

What's old was new again.

Long before he became a deputy chief, Bell was an NHO in Vanier. He walked the beat and found his stride in drug work. He came up through the system. And he understands why cuts to it rankled some community members.

He says feedback over the cuts had been building for the last year, and the force-commissioned public opinion survey confirmed what city councillors and community groups had been anecdotally relaying to police.

The recently announced community response unit, he says, will build back that capacity to respond to neighbourhood-level issues.

“They're going to go, they're going to listen, they'll take input from community groups, from their community police officers … they will get out there and more quickly address those issues that affect the residents in the neighbourhood.”

These officers will do a lot of the same things the old NHOs did, but with some notable differences — the unit, which will consist of 10 officers in 2019 in two teams, will be city-wide. They won't be tied to a specific area and probably won't be out in full force with boots on the ground until the summer at the earliest.

The precise plan will be open to community and officer consultation, Bell says.

The unit is just one way the force is trying to make sure the community understands that it still values and is engaged in community policing.

“We continue to do community policing. We continue to have school resource officers, community police officers, who are actively doing community policing every day.”

The collapse of the district model did indeed help to address staffing challenges on the front line, but Bell maintains that staffing issues weren't the only reason to revamp the model. That model was 20 years old and it was worth time and effort to reassess it for the needs of a modern city.

“It was a model that wasn't perfect. We can look back and lament about how great it was but it wasn't perfect. It didn't address all the issues that we wanted to address, (the old model) didn't bolster the front line in the way we had hoped it would and when you have an old model, you need to take a look at it, take what's good and build on it and fix.”

The force did that, he says, now it's time for tweaks and to fill the gaps.

“It's easy for me to say we didn't abandon community policing because I don't actually think we did … but when the community says we're not feeling you the same way, we're not getting the response on these smaller issues that we want, it's important that we respond to that and that's what you're seeing us do.”

Come the New Year, the force will also have a dedicated “bikes and beats” unit — with officers in high-risk areas, particularly in the downtown core and ByWard Market. Like their name suggests, they will be on bikes and walking out on beats. The force has used the same tactic over the years but in a “more ad hoc way,” Bell says. Officers from the front line, would go out day after day. The force now believes it needs to be a dedicated team and 20 officers will be out on Jan. 1 doing that work. Those officers can be redeployed to other areas in the city, if required. Bikes and beats will likely fill in the gap until the community response unit is fully up and running.

Internally, too, the absence of the NHO job has been felt.

In a city with increasing gun violence, the priorities for front-line cops when not responding to emergency calls has shifted. They're doing compliance checks, they're hunting wanted suspects. Patrol can't deal with the nuisance issues while emergencies are called in one after another and when the work to deal with gun and gang violence requires a concerted effort across the force.

“We thought there was the capacity there to do it all and what we're actually seeing now, theoretically it's great; practically it's not working like we want it to,” Bell says.

Community police officers, too, are carrying the burden of all community concerns.

“They could identify problems, but they needed someone to help them. They can't go out and do everything,” Bell says.

They needed support from NHOs.

But those NHO jobs were also stepping stones. It was a place to go after patrol that allowed officers the chance to lead projects and build relationships with the community — the kind of things that were looked at favourably when applying for a promotion or for a transfer to a detective job.

When the positions were eliminated, so were the opportunities that a generation of patrol officers had come to depend on.

It's the drug work and prostitution work that Bell did while a neighbourhood officer that got him to the drug unit.

Bell calls the job “a hugely important developmental position for us at the time,” that was a “natural progression” for young officers to transition into.

In eliminating the job, “we didn't plan how our officers were going to progress,” Bell says. “We hear that now.”

Now, front-line officers have some developmental rotations, which see them go into other sections for short-term stints. The community response unit will also give them opportunities to develop in the areas they like.

The force, too, is trying to figure out the best way to encourage specializations — in drug work, domestic violence or sexual assault response or investigations — while still being on the road.

“I want to move away from the thought that you actually have to move away from front-line policing in order to become something else,” Bell says. “It's the bread and butter of what we do.”

* * * *

There remains some skepticism among community groups and leaders who question whether 10 officers, which is significantly less than under the old model, can ever be enough to address the concerns of the whole city and whether not tying the officers to a permanent area will undermine the efforts.

“I won't say it's too late, but I will say it's too little,” says Marleau, from Crime Prevention Vanier.

Neighbourhood policing “nips things in the bud,” and it needs to be prioritized, she says.

Parrott, though, is thrilled to know the feedback was heard.

“It's a start, we're looking forward to it.”

And Jennings calls the current plan a “huge step in the right direction,” but would still like to see improvements.

Bell will present an update on the plan to the police board in January. The 2019 draft police budget, which will include the community response unit, will be tabled in February.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/how-community-policing-in-ottawa-was-gutted-and-why-its-making-a-return

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New York City

NYC top cop wants cops to fight crime and cut red tape

by GRAHAM RAYMAN

If the city's top cop has his way, at some point in the near future, police officers will not only fight crime, but will help needy New Yorkers cut through bureaucratic red tape to get services they need.

Police Commissioner James O'Neill's latest neighborhood policing initiative would have cops armed with access to a powerful, up-to-the-minute database that would lay out all points of contact for city services in a given precinct.

"We want to make sure that we leave people who need help with someone in this city whether government or a (nonprofit) who will follow up and help make people's lives a little better," he told the Daily News on the fourth anniversary of the murders of Officers Wenjian Lu and Rafael Ramos — a tragedy that in part spurred the creation of neighborhood policing. "I'm not looking for the Neighborhood Coordination Officers (NCOs) and steady sector cops to go to a job and just kind of think this isn't part of my responsibility and just leave people with nowhere to go."

Right now, cops refer people who are sick, depressed, mentally ill, hungry or losing their apartments to city agencies for help.

But that's not enough, O'Neill believes. The city's red tape is daunting and even impassable, and people need a kind of champion to guide them to the right people. "It is frustrating for police officers. I think it would be frustrating to anyone in city government that the help sometimes doesn't come to people in need," O'Neill explained.

With the new database, available first as a website and eventually as an app to their department-issued iPhones, officers can reach out to the agencies for help — and those agencies would have to respond. Their response would be mandated by mayoral decree and tracked.

O'Neill credited Chief of Department Terence Monahan, Chief of Patrol Rodney Harrison and NCO officers for help in coming up with the idea.

"I have a lot of interaction with sector cops and NCOs, and they want to be able to help people beyond just responding to crime and quality of life conditions," he said.

For now, the NYPD, the Mayor's Office of Operations and City University of New York's Institute for State and Local Governance have embarked on an initial planning stage with $175,000 in city money.

"This goes well beyond 'Am I arresting this guy or not,'" said Michael Jacobson, a former city correction commissioner. "It sort of maximizes the resources that people can get. But you don't just send out a memo and say 'Do this.' In order for it to work, the city agencies and (community organizations) have to want to do it and see the value in it and cooperate."

Told of the plan, one officer grumbled, "Sounds like they want to make us social workers."

Jacobson, who is now at CUNY, disagreed.

"We don't see this as turning police into social workers," he said. "For the day-to-day lives of the folks in New York City, this will be a well-received policy when they get to see it and understand it."

Police brass believe the initiative will continue to reduce crime by dealing with underlying causes in a better way. Though the 2017 crime numbers are on pace to set record lows, O'Neill thinks they can drop even more.

"We're not at bottom yet. I think there's more work that can be done. The only way we can do that is by building trust," he said. "If New Yorkers trust their local cops, they will be more apt to help them if there's a crime issue on the block."

Some of the 15,000 CUNY students who live in public housing will help by conducting surveys about the plan.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-citywide-james-oneill-new-neighborhood-policing-initiative-20181219-story.html

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Maryland

As police struggle to solve homicides, Baltimore residents see an ‘open season for killing'

by Wesley Lowery, Steven Rich, Salwan Georges

BALTIMORE — Daphne Alston used to go to every funeral.

A co-founder of Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters United, Alston has worked with hundreds of families here, helping them navigate the pain, paperwork and logistics that come with each killing. But recent years have brought such a spike in violence that there are now too many funerals for Alston to attend. She has enlisted other members of her group to help her with outreach to the families of the slain, sometimes going to three or four funerals each day of the weekend.

A key component of that outreach was once helping families endure the legal proceedings that followed — and sitting next to them during the trials. But this year the court cases are scant. Alston knows of just a few killings for which anyone has been arrested.

As Baltimore has seen a stunning surge of violence, with nearly a killing each day for the past three years in a city of 600,000, homicide arrests have plummeted. City police made an arrest in 41 percent of homicides in 2014; last year, the rate was just 27 percent, a 14 percentage point drop.

Of 50 of the nation's largest cities, Baltimore is one of 34 where police now make homicide arrests less often than in 2014, according to a Washington Post analysis. In Chicago, the homicide arrest rate has dropped 21 percentage points, in Boston it has dropped 12 points and in St. Louis it is down 9.

Baltimore is also one of 30 cities that have seen an increase in homicides in recent years, with the greatest raw number increase in killings of any city other than Chicago, which has four times the population. While homicide rates remain near historical lows in most American cities, Baltimore and Chicago are now both seeing murder tallies that rival the early 2000s.

The wave of violence here began not long after the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man arrested in West Baltimore and placed — hands cuffed and legs shackled — in the back of a police van. There, he suffered a severe neck injury and lost consciousness. He died in the hospital about a week later.

Gray's death prompted massive protests that at times turned to riots. The years since have come with a documented officer slowdown — patrol officers say they are hesitant to leave their vehicles and have made fewer subjective stops of people on Baltimore's streets. That, coupled with a crisis of police legitimacy as residents express distrust and frustration with the force, has fueled a public safety emergency in parts of the city, community leaders say.

“It's an open market, open season for killing,” said Alston, whose son Tariq was murdered in 2008. “After Freddie Gray, things just went berserk.”

A dramatic shift in 2015

While there is evidence for and against a nationwide Ferguson effect — the theory that crime increased after 2014 as police faced more scrutiny following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — in Baltimore there is an indisputable Freddie Gray effect. As violence in the city has risen since 2015, the likelihood of a killer being arrested has dropped precipitously.

For most of the decade before 2015, Baltimore's annual homicide arrest rate hovered at about 40 percent. Since 2015, the arrest rate hasn't topped 30 percent in any year. And while most cities saw their arrest rates drop gradually, Baltimore's decline was sudden — plummeting 15 percentage points in 2015, after Gray's death, the largest single-year drop for any city already solving less than half its homicides.

“Our clearance rate isn't what I think it should be,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, who has been running the department on an interim basis since May, said in an interview. “We've got a really, really talented homicide unit, but we're understaffed.”

Tuggle, who noted that violent crime is down from its peak levels last year, said that the depressed arrest rate is due to a combination of factors. In many cases, detectives struggle to find cooperative witnesses. Police grapple with community relationships still deeply singed by the unrest that followed Gray's death. And, perhaps most crucial, the department's homicide detectives are overwhelmed.

Each Baltimore detective, on average, now is responsible for nine homicide cases and, with other suspicious deaths factored in, about 31 total active cases, Tuggle said.

A Post analysis of homicides nationwide found that major police departments that have success in making arrests generally assign detectives fewer than five cases a year.

“Our average caseload per detective is far higher than it should be,” Tuggle said. “Generally, if we can't clear a case and get it off of the board within the first 25 days, chances are it's going to be a lot longer. If we can ever get it off of the board at all.”

Community leaders and residents say that leaves hundreds of families who have been robbed of a loved one without a chance at seeing justice done. Of the 1,002 homicides between 2015 and the beginning of this year, just 252 — one out of every four — resulted in an arrest.

“It's a cold case,” said Cynthia Bruce, whose son Marcus Tafari Samuel Downer, 23, was shot and killed in Baltimore in July 2015. “They have a suspect and the detective is confident that someone witnessed my son's murder, but people are scared to come forward because of retaliation.”

Downer died in Northwest Baltimore, near his grandmother's home. Bruce said that the word on the street is that her son had jokingly messed with — either kicking or sitting in — a neighborhood child's stroller, prompting someone to summon the child's father. When the father arrived, he brought a gun, Bruce said she has heard from neighbors.

Downer was shot 19 times in broad daylight. It has been three years; no one has been arrested.

“My son was killed senselessly and the person is just walking freely as if nothing happened,” Bruce said.

The killings, both solved and unsolved, are clustered in a small number of the city's neighborhoods — even as the citywide homicide rate has soared, there are neighborhoods that are safer today than they were before Gray's death in 2015.

The 'butterfly' effect

The neighborhoods that have seen the most violence are familiar to social scientists and experts in Baltimore: They fall within what is known as the city's black “butterfly,” a set of neighborhoods that spread out to the east and west of the city's center.

Homicides have soared in several neighborhoods since Gray's death. Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray died, has seen 22 more homicides in the three-year period since Gray's death than it did in the three years before he died. Southwest Baltimore saw its homicides rise by 35, and Greater Rosemont has seen 26 more since 2015.

In each of those neighborhoods, police make an arrest in fewer than 25 percent of cases, including 16 percent in Sandtown-Winchester.

These areas long have been among the city's most economically depressed and, because of years of residential segregation, populated almost exclusively by low-income black residents.

“This structural violence contributes to the street violence that we see,” said Lawrence Brown, a Morgan State University professor who coined the term Baltimore butterfly in 2015. “What hypersegregation does is that it distorts social dynamics. You don't have resources in these communities, and people have to fight for every little crumb. And then comes the violence that ends up on the evening news.”

Local criminologists and activists say that the surge in violence and the police department's low success rate in solving homicides is directly linked to the deep distrust both highlighted and stoked by Gray's death.

“This boils down to the relationship between communities and police,” said Tara Huffman, director of criminal and juvenile justice programs at Open Society Institute-Baltimore. “They need people to come forward, they need people to answer the door when they knock, and they need people to talk to them on the scene.”

“You cannot coerce that,” she said. “You can beg and plead all you want to. If the relationship is screwed up, you're simply not going to get the help that you need to solve these crimes.”

And those relationships, never great, have been further damaged within a few tumultuous years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/as-police-struggle-to-solve-homicides-baltimore-residents-see-an-open-season-for-killing/2018/12/26/7ee561e4-fb24-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html

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Maldives

Society & Culture

Community policing introduced with neighbourhood support officers

Neighbourhood support officers have been assigned for the capital and its suburb islands.

The Maldives police announced Monday a new initiative to introduce community policing with neighbourhood support officers assigned for the capital city and its suburb islands.

Malé will be divided into four neighbourhoods, while Hulhumalé will have three and the smaller Villimalé will be considered as one neighbourhood, Mohamed Hameed, the new acting commissioner of police, told the press.

Neighborhood policing is a community-oriented policing strategy that focuses on police officers building ties with members of the public.

The neighborhood support officers will be high-ranking police officers who will command patrolling teams. Contact details will be shared with their neighbourhoods, Hameed said.

“The main aim of this is to ensure that the neighborhood support officer can take care of the neighborhood and that the patrol teams can [work while] engaging with the public,” he said at Monday's press briefing.

The new strategy will help police become “proactive” within their neighbourhoods, he added.

“This is actually the main fundamental of policing. Our service is to work closely with the public and as part of the public,” he said.

https://maldivesindependent.com/society/community-policing-introduced-with-neighbourhood-support-officers-143214

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New Iberia

(part 1 of a 3 part series)

A New Era: Six Months after its Relaunch, NIPD is Trying to Regain Trust of Community

NIPD success equals economic multiplier for city

by DWAYNE FATHERREE

If you are looking for a splash of color on Hopkins Street, there's no better place to start than Da Berry Fresh Market.

The combination market/co-op/art gallery is a spot of calm on the usually active street.

Carl Cooper Jr., a recent transplant to New Iberia, is the sole employee, working with a group of volunteers to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to the neighborhood.

“It's good to have a place where you can find an apple when everything else around you is fast food,” Cooper said.

A former offshore worker, Cooper said he found his calling to provide some physical and spiritual grounding for the West End community.

“It's important to show people how to have a connection with the culture,” Cooper said. “It's something you're usually taught when you are growing up. If you don't get it then, then you usually don't have it.”

He has worked at the market since before it opened as a member of the Envision the Berry community effort. And while he has had a ringside seat to the violence that has marked the West End neighborhood, he said the transition from the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office to the New Iberia Police Department was transparent to him.

“I don't pay any attention to the police,” Cooper said. “I try to focus on what I am doing, and to keep this growing.”

For other businesses, especially those being courted to locate new enterprises in the city, the law enforcement presence is essential. New Iberia Mayor Freddie DeCourt said the NIPD's presence is definitely making his sales pitch easier.

“When we were doing the public hearings, and talking about the plan, it was like a sketch,” DeCourt said. “The second that the community came together and that tax passed, we had something real that we could show and say, ‘Hey, we did this.' Now, with six months under our belt and the crime stats going down, the call volume dropping to almost half of what we had, we are starting to paint in the rest of the picture.”

According to NIPD Chief Todd D'Albor, the first day the new department came online it handled 155 calls. That number decreased throughout the year to a point police officers are now handling an average of 80 to 85 calls per day. Another plus for the new department is for the first time since 2008 the city of New Iberia's crime statistics will be reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for inclusion in its annual crime report.

“We are still compiling the statistics by hand for now,” D'Albor said. “When we get our new computer system in, we will be able to generate that report automatically.”

That reporting is part of the accountability that D'Albor said is central to the success of the department and to its drive to build credibility with the populace.

“You've got to have accountability,” D'Albor said. “They're not going to tolerate it if you don't. People won't trust you in the community, and people won't want to work with people they can't trust.”

That trust and the statistics to back it up make it easier for the department to secure federal, state and private grants to help grow the department.

“We have already gotten some small grants, one for desks, one for a dog,” DeCourt said. “But now we can start to look at larger grants. Eventually, that can help us grow the size of the department.”

D'Albor and DeCourt both talked about the process of hiring police officers for the NIPD, about the 170 interviews done to find the initial crop of 70 police officers.

Even with a solid vetting process, there has been turnover in the department. Two visible departures were a technology officer who was arrested for domestic abuse. Another was a patrol officer who was found to have roughed up a suspect while previously employed with the IPSO. Those two men are no longer with the department.

“You are going to hit these obstacles,” DeCourt said. “Accountability is about how you handle them. We are a small department, and with the focus on community policing, there is no place to hide. If you are not a member of the team, it is obvious. The unique part of a start-up is that you get to build your team from scratch.”

DeCourt said the process is both ongoing and rewarding

“I am very proud of what we are doing,” he said. “We are checking those boxes and showing this is how we are solving these issues. When an industry is looking to locate, every town has violence and crime. But you can't show many towns that have taken the steps that we have in the last few months to move forward and make things better.”

Improving public safety, DeCourt said, will increase the city's marketability. And, as more businesses locate to New Iberia, more jobs become available. That offers other opportunities for people seeking to escape the economic downturn without having to relocate.

“We have things starting to happen,” DeCourt said. “Rouses, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A, Kentucky Fried Chicken. We are seeing some growth and will continue to see growth.”

That growth trickles down.

Cooper said 2018 was better than 2017 for Da Berry Fresh Market, and that his plans are to continue making a difference for the people in his community.

“Right now, I am the only employee,” he said. “But the goal is to grow, get people in, offer them the opportunity to work and learn and become part of it.”

And he said he has a positive feeling about his future on Hopkins Street.

“I see it happening,” Cooper said. “It's a slow process, but a sure process. I see so much potential here. What we're doing brings life to New Iberia.”

https://www.iberianet.com/news/safer-streets-an-easier-sell/article_9d5f7ace-0a56-11e9-a347-fbb6ec553ceb.html

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OPINION

Keeping officers on the streets

by Ruben Navarrette

For my father, it all started with a children's book depicting a cat stuck in a tree.

Once a cop, always a cop. My dad was on the job for 37 years, and — although he's now retired — he'll remain a cop until he draws his last breath.

The book in question was from a series that was popular in the 1950s and 1960s. The main characters were two children named Dick and Jane, and they had two pets: a dog and a cat. One day, the cat climbs up a tree and a friendly neighborhood policeman helps get it down for the kids.

My dad was sold. That's it, he thought to himself. He decided to be a policeman, so he could help people.

Now I hear, courtesy of National Public Radio, that police departments around the country are having an extremely tough time recruiting new officers. In fact, in many cities in America, tough has become more like “nearly impossible.”

There are many reasons that recruiting cops has become so difficult in so many places.

But let's get something straight right off the bat: Salary is not one of those reasons. Today, police officers often earn a comfortable living. And when they retire, many of them wind up with a generous pension and lifetime health benefits.

Over the years, current and former law enforcement officials have told me that one factor that hurts recruitment is a dried-up pipeline from the military. From the 1970s to the 1990s, they said, police departments could count on recruiting people who had just been discharged from the military. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and America found itself on a constant war footing that has continued to this day. Suddenly, the military isn't so eager to discharge the people it has spent years and millions of dollars training. That leaves police departments out of luck — and looking for warm bodies elsewhere.

Also, the last five years have been brutal for the public image of law enforcement. Ever since the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014, and the riots that followed — and the scattered shootings of police officers, seemingly in revenge — an already difficult and thankless job has become more difficult and more thankless.

You can't blame millennials for not wanting to go within a hundred miles of a gig like that.

Some police departments have stooped to poaching prospects from departments in other parts of the country. Others are tweaking the marketing process to help their chances of appealing to young people who grew up in an area where police are often seen as bullies and provocateurs.

This subject weighs on the mind of Bob Harrison. Having been on the job for more than 30 years, and served chief of police in a number of California cities, Harrison has also studied business strategy at Oxford University and worked as a researcher for the RAND Corporation.

He now spends his time training the law enforcement leaders of the future. As a faculty member and course manager for the CA POST Command College, he runs weeklong programs in the San Diego area that allow those in middle management to gain the additional skills necessary to lead departments.

I asked Harrison why he thought it has become so difficult to lure recruits into law enforcement.

He cites a pair of factors: a decline in what used to be called “community policing” and the failure of many departments to do effective public relations.

“We don't have a recruitment problem,” he told me. “We have an attraction problem. Most people want to respect and have confidence in the police but the police don't think about building bridges back to the people.”

For him, the whole concept of policing boils down to simply lending a helping hand when people need it most.

“If I have the worst day of my life, I want to know that someone shows up,” he said.

In the last half century, police officers have gone from guardians to warriors to social workers.

“People say, ‘Well, I'm a cop, not a social worker,' ” he said. “Sadly, you're both. Because, at that moment when this person's life is blowing apart, you're the only one there.”

Wise words. At our most stressful moments, cops are often not just the first ones there. They're the only ones coming.

Police departments need to do everything they can to get recruitment flowing again and keep officers on the street.

This starts with something that turns out to be my line of work: telling a good story. In this case, the story that needs to be told is the story of policing.

If the public understands why the police are so important, more people will step forward to fill that role.

https://angelusnews.com/voices/ruben-navarrette/keeping-officers-on-the-streets

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New Jersey

Newark public safety director: Crime down by 15 percent

by David Cruz

Next week, the City of Newark is set to unveil new crime statistics, that they say will be record breaking. Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose is giving an exclusive preview to Senior Correspondent David Cruz.

Cruz: I remember about three years ago when you were coming back on the job, we had an interview then, and you seemed optimistic but it seemed like behind that you were a little concerned. It was a different time then.

Ambrose: Oh, yes, it was. I like a challenge, but that was a kind of tall order challenge once I did come back into the police division and accept the role as Public Safety [Director].

Cruz: What was the biggest challenge? What bothered you the most when you were coming back? What did you say, “Oh, this is bad.”

Ambrose: Well, two things right off the bat: there was no resources and we had a consent decree that was going to be enacted, so they were my two priorities. There was 800-plus police officers, only about 600 coming to work, so it was definitely a public safety issue.

Cruz: From a top number of what? What was at its peak, the department was over 1,000?

Ambrose: At one time, the department was almost up to 1,700, so the department was down to about 835 and 200 were either sick, injured, that did not work the street so it made it less officers on the street. And that was a major problem, so I think some of the things that I had addressed head-on was, you know, restoring the police division.

Cruz: Just in terms of numbers — straight up numbers — right?

Ambrose: Yes, yes, without a doubt.

Cruz: So you have a press event coming up on Jan. 3 where you're going to unveil some new statistics. And I know you want to hold off on revealing all of it, but you wouldn't be having a press event on Jan. 3 if things were going badly, so what can you tell us? What numbers are you going to be unveiling?

Ambrose: Well, I have to say that this year, 2018 versus last year, our crime is down about 15 percent. These are preliminary UCR numbers — Uniform Crime Report numbers. About 1,300-plus less victims, we're down in every category of crime except for rape and aggravated assaults. Our rapes are the reporting mechanism that change in 2015 and they're mainly they're mainly incest rapes. And our aggravated assaults, we're seeing, you know, there's a spike on less violence with firearms but more with tire irons and bats, so that's where we have a spike.

Cruz: You would have to say that that's progress, right, because guns is the biggest thing in big cities. You know, a beef that might have been settled with fists or a bat are now settled with firearms.

Ambrose: Yes, and I must say knives too. We saw an uptick in stabbings. But when you talk about violence, you know, we recovered over 560 guns this year to date, and what helps is that our intelligence unit that we formulated that goes after the worst of the worst. You know, we can't arrest our ways out of this, so I think that we have 106 less people that were shot this year, we have a 50 percent reduction in robbery since 2016. These are some really large numbers in reducing violence. Homicides were down also. As of today, we have a 68 homicides. Last time we had that low was about 10 years ago.

Cruz: Really? That's real numbers there. What would you say has been the impact of this federal monitor that you mentioned before. How has that been going? I know you were one of the people who welcomed them?

Ambrose: I still do. I think that having the monitor is a great thing. There's things that we couldn't get done systemically in the department for years and years, that we have the mayor that supports it. With the monitor, training is our biggest, you know we're training more officers — training them in arrest search and seizure, training people in community policing where it's not just a word, community policing. Actually teaching them what community policing is rather than just that block of instruction they have in the police academy and I think it's important that it's changing the culture. And it's the right time because we have, over the last three years, we have over 500 new officers, so it's the right time to change the culture, and also to train them right and make sure that they do the right thing.

Cruz: You talk about changing the culture, we always talk about that in the department as well, but the city itself. Are residents starting to see this city differently because things are going so well, like economically.

Ambrose: Yes, without a doubt. You know, three years ago it was very slim but we could always do better but we have a great, great partnership with community groups throughout the city. You know, we invite them to our compstat. We bring them to the neighborhood, our compstat. We're very transparent. We cannot do it alone — without the residents; without our federal partners, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the prosecutor, the sheriff and the State Police. You know, back when I got here three years ago, State Police was sending 50 troopers right away. It was important so partnerships — the Newark street team that was made up of civilians — they're a big help to us, so there's an array of things while we have progress.

https://www.njtvonline.org/news/video/newark-public-safety-director-crime-down-by-15-percent/

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California

San Francisco's homicide count may sink to level not seen in 50 years

by Evan Sernoffsky

Violent crime dropped sharply this year in San Francisco, with killings in 2018 approaching the lowest number in more than 50 years to continue a decade-long trend of declining violence around the region.

Identifying precise causes for crime trends has been a long-standing challenge, but the city's police officials believe several recent initiatives — including a new gun unit whose work is credited with a decrease in shootings — have had a significant impact.

“We are extremely pleased with where we are with violent crime at this point in the year, but there is still a lot of work to be done,” Police Chief Bill Scott said in an interview at department headquarters. “There's no magic formula, but what we try to do is implement strategies.”

As of late Saturday, when a man was shot to death in the Excelsior neighborhood, San Francisco had recorded 44 homicides — a 21 percent dip from the last year, when there were 56 killings. If the number holds through the end of the year, 2018 will see the lowest number of homicides since 1963, according to data provided by the state Department of Justice and reports in The Chronicle's archive.

“I am glad that we are in a better place this year than last year, and, of course, I want those numbers to improve,” Mayor London Breed said. “I'm excited that violence is dropping in our city. I think it has a lot to do with us having more beat officers and that we are working hard to develop better relationships with the community to prevent things from happening in the first place.”

In its darker days, the city had runs of years with killings in the triple digits. In 1977, when the city's population was 20 percent lower than today, there were 142 homicides. As recently as 2007, San Francisco had 100 killings.

This year's drop in homicides corresponds with declining gun violence in the city. As of Dec. 10, shooting deaths were down 41 percent, nonfatal shootings were down 28 percent, and gun violence overall was down 30 percent from the same period last year, according to Police Department figures.

Officials attribute the decline in part to a new gun unit they established in November 2017. The Crime Gun Investigations Center is made up of half a dozen officers, including a lieutenant and investigators, along with an agent and analyst from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The unit collects guns, spent shell casings and bullets and enters them into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which shares digital images of the ballistic evidence across jurisdictions. Investigators use the shared information to develop leads and determine whether a gun was used in other crimes.

“Typically, a lot of agencies don't test casings when there's not a victim,” Scott said. “What's important with our policies is all casings are entered. You might have indiscriminate shooting in the air. The casing might connect to a casing that was used in a murder. So, it helps us close the gap on the investigations.”

Helping investigators is the city's gunfire detection system, ShotSpotter, which can now alert officers of shootings through an app on their phones, giving them a map of the location.

The U.S. Department of Justice recently awarded the Police Department an $800,000 grant for its gun unit. The Board of Supervisors must sign off on the money.

The new unit has proved effective, officials said, but it's just one of several strategic initiatives Scott has rolled out since being named chief at the beginning of 2017. In September of that year, he announced a staff shakeup, breaking up some investigative units and doubling the number of officers walking neighborhood beats.

A recent study showed the move helped decrease the number of auto break-ins and assaults in San Francisco, but officials also credit it with helping solve more violent crimes.

“When we pushed some investigators from the Patrol Bureau Task Force and narcotics back onto foot patrols, we sent some very experienced officers back into the community and into uniform,” said Cmdr. Greg McEachern, who heads investigations at the department. “Not only did it give us additional resources out there, but it gave us additional expertise. We saw the communication between the district stations and the investigations units really improve.”

The increase in foot patrols has also helped the city improve community policing efforts, which strengthen ties with residents and increase cooperation from witnesses.

“Part of my plan as mayor is to make sure officers are out there making good relationships and attending events in the community,” Breed said. “That's how we get to a place where people develop trust and respect, so our communities are safer.”

Moreover, the department has expanded its efforts to work more closely with other law enforcement agencies and community organizations. Among the most successful collaborations has been with the district attorney's office, which oversees the Crime Strategies Unit.

The unit places prosecutors in city police stations to work with crime analysts and identify trends that help police build stronger cases before trial.

“We've seen cases they put together, and they're really incredible,” District Attorney George Gascón said in a recent interview at Dolores Park in the Mission District.

The park is a popular hangout for families and young people, but it wasn't always so welcoming. For years it was the scene of shootings between rival gangs as homicides around the city spiraled out of control. Part of the trouble was that the Police Department wasn't solving many cases, Gascón said.

In the late 1990s, San Francisco had the lowest clearance rate of the 20 largest cities in the country. On average, just 28 percent of violent crimes were solved, according to a Chronicle analysis at the time.

“When we solve a case, we garner more trust,” Scott said. “It gets to whether people have confidence, not only in the Police Department, but the criminal justice system.”

Of the 44 killings in San Francisco so far this year, 29 cases have been cleared and 25 have resulted in arrests. But the overall homicide clearance rate, which compares the number of killings to the number of cases solved, including those from previous years, is around 100 percent, police said.

Gascón acknowledged it would be “disingenuous” to think all of the reductions in crime are related to law enforcement. His philosophy has evolved as he's moved from being San Francisco's police chief to its top prosecutor.

He's often cited as one of the most progressive district attorneys in the country after pushing for numerous statewide criminal justice reforms that have drawn criticism from tough-on-crime groups. But Gascón says big-picture reforms ultimately help people stay out of the system.

“We're not just simply locking people up,” he said. “We're being more thoughtful about the people we lock up. The people who need an opportunity are being given another opportunity, and I think that has an impact in reducing recidivism.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Killings-violent-crime-in-San-Francisco-drop-to-13485344.php

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OPINION

The Idea That Made America's Cities Safer

Thirty years ago, crime was out of control. Then came ‘broken windows' policing. Are politicians forgetting its lessons?

by William McGurn

When it comes to crime, America has undergone a political sea change. Last week President Trump signed the First Step Act, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and aims to relieve the problem of “overincarceration.” Many states—including right-leaning Georgia, Texas, South Dakota and Utah—have enacted criminal-justice reforms with the same goal.

What a difference 30 years makes. In 1988 George H.W. Bush, seeking the presidency against Gov. Michael Dukakis, made an issue of Massachusetts' lenient prison-furlough program. Four years later Gov. Bill Clinton was so anxious to prove himself tough on crime that he left the campaign trial and returned to Arkansas to sign the death warrant for a murderer who had damaged his brain in a pretrial suicide attempt.

Crime has since declined dramatically. The number of homicides nationwide peaked in 1991, at 24,703, and declined some 42% by 2014, to 14,249, even as the U.S. population increased by one-fourth.

Substantial credit for the decline goes to criminologist George L. Kelling, who along with the late political scientist James Q. Wilson came up with the idea of “broken windows.” It began in 1982 as a metaphor. A decade later, it became the operating philosophy of the New York City Police Department, where it helped transform America's biggest city into one of its safest.

In an article for the Atlantic, Mr. Kelling and Wilson made the case for a form of community policing that emphasizes maintaining order in public spaces. “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired,” they wrote, “all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Broken windows are “a signal that no one cares”—an emboldening message for those who would commit serious crimes.

“What Jim and I wanted to do was to empower residents to control their own public spaces,” Mr. Kelling tells me in his quiet living room. He and his wife—Catherine Coles, a lawyer, anthropologist and sometime professional collaborator—moved here years ago when she was teaching at Dartmouth, and liked it so much they stayed.

Mr. Kelling is 83, and Wilson died in 2012. Broken-windows policing is sure to outlive them both, but it remains controversial—even in New York, where its success made it famous.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in office since 2014, has sent mixed signals. On the one hand, he hired William Bratton as police commissioner. Mr. Bratton had implemented a broken-windows strategy during earlier stints as chief of the city's Transit Police (1990-92) and the NYPD (1994-96). On the other hand, Mr. de Blasio's New York has been gradually scaling back enforcement of quality-of-life offenses such as public drinking and urination, sleeping in the streets, and subway-fare evasion.

“I think it's a high risk,” says Mr. Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “I can see why you might want to pull back on a few things. But to do so in such a public way, the danger is that people who see others behaving badly will copy it. That's how the disorder spreads. You don't know where the tipping point is.”

Mr. Kelling says one problem is that his critics often don't understand what broken-windows policing is. Some complain that it makes criminals of young African-American men over minor infractions. Others conflate it with tactical approaches such as “zero tolerance” or “stop and frisk.”

“Broken Windows isn't one-size-fits all, and it isn't about increasing arrests,” Mr. Kelling says. “It's about maintaining order and giving police more discretion.” It entails adapting to local conditions: What works in the South Bronx may not work in East Los Angeles—or even in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood. To figure out what works, beat cops constantly listen to citizens in the communities they police. “You can have a plan that is perfect in theory, mathematically sound and scientifically valid,” Mr. Kelling says, “yet it fails in practice because of one variable.”

The confusion of broken windows with excessive arrests especially rankles Mr. Kelling, who says avoiding an arrest is sometimes more effective. He offers this example: Officers come across two men fighting. The traditional response would be to haul them to the station and charge them. But a better alternative might be for the cops to break it up and tell the men to move on. The police need that kind of discretion, Mr. Kelling says, and neighborhoods need cops who have the local knowledge and professional training and judgment to exercise it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-idea-that-made-americas-cities-safer-11546039296

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Tennessee

Blount County school resource officers program starts with relationships

by Amy Beth Miller

The school resources officers with the Blount County Sheriff's office took a photo this month with Sgt. While school resource officers became a hot topic in 2018, with all three local districts adding officers, the start of the program here in Blount County arguably can be traced back more than 20 years, to an officer on a bicycle.

When Blount County Sheriff James Berrong asked then-Deputy Jeff Hicks to be part of a community policing initiative in the mid-1990s, he gave the officer a bicycle to ride in Eagleton.

Hicks already had worked with the schools on the DARE program, for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and he approached then-Principal Jerry Bailey and asked, "Can I have an office here to park my bike and come in and cool off and stuff?"

The value of having an officer on campus became apparent, Hicks said, and in January 1996 the Blount County Sheriff's Office put on officer at each of the county's two high schools, making it one of the first in the state with an SRO program, along with Rutherford County.

"Blount County has been at the forefront from the beginning, and Jeff has been a big part of that," said Mike Herrmann, executive director of school safety and transportation for the Tennessee Department of Education.

"He's a big hero of mine," Herrmann said, pointing to Hicks' participation on Gov. Bill Haslam's working group formed in spring 2018 to review school safety.

For the past seven years, Hicks has supervised the SRO program in Blount County Schools, but the sergeant is retiring this week.

Herrmann noted Hicks' focus on the basics: relationships, communication and planning.

"He's never lost sight of the importance of building that relationship between the officers and the students," Herrmann said.

"We're going to miss him at the state," he said. "He's been a tremendous asset."

A teacher at heart

A 1982 graduate of Alcoa High School, Hicks was working concert security for bands including Poison in the late 1980s when he decided to return home to Blount County and pursue a career in law enforcement.

As Hicks tells the story, one day he woke up and had to look at the phone book in the hotel nightstand to know what city he was in. That's when he called his father and said he was coming home.

Hicks had earned a degree in education from Maryville College, but the state had a hiring freeze on teachers when he graduated.

He was still in college when someone saw him working out at Primo's Gym and recruited him to work concert security in Knoxville, an opportunity that included working during the Jackson Victory Tour at Neyland Stadium.

He had worked his way up to planning security when he was offered a position based in Los Angeles. The man told him, "You've got a good disposition. You're intimidating, but you're nice," Hicks recalled.

"I got to travel and see the world," he said.

After attending the law enforcement academy in 1990, Hicks was a patrol officer before being assigned to the bike for the community policing initiative.

"I was like a circus bear," he said with a laugh.

Blount County Schools Director Rob Britt agreed, saying in a separate interview, "He was a big man to be on a bike."

When the kids saw Hicks, the officer said, "They thought it was cool I had a bicycle with a blue light on it."

Although his career has been in law enforcement, "I was a teacher in some ways, " Hicks said. But "I didn't have to worry about test scores."

Securing campuses

"Before there were SROs, the assistant principal really had the full brunt of the safety and security, and we'd have to call in a road officer" when needed, recalled Britt, who was an assistant principal at William Blount High School when the program began.

"They were instrumental in doing some things that made our campuses more safe and secure," Britt said.

Blount County began its SRO program three years before a school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado took 15 lives and injured 20, rocking the nation.

"That was the first time the nation woke up, and we were already doing it," Hicks said. "Everybody else was trying to catch up."

Blount County has hosted training for SROs for decades, and Hicks has spoken to schools across the nation. He also served as president of the Tennessee School Resource Officer Association.

Having an officer in the schools is a natural bridge to reach the students and address issues, he said, both on campus and off.

“We've learned about things and we've understood what's going on in the community because of that relationship," Hicks said.

"A school resource officer is different because they reach outside that fence or that campus, and the students understand that," he said. "We are in the community, and they see us work patrol." Students know if something is going on at home or in their neighborhood, they can reach out to the SRO, he added.

Layers of protection

Over the years, the schools, law enforcement agencies and the Blount County Emergency Communications Center have added layers of protection.

In 2010, for example, the Text-a-Tip program began, giving students an anonymous way to report issues. Within its first six months, the program was credited with preventing a suicide, and well as collecting information on bullying, child abuse, drugs and fights, according to articles in the Daily Times archives.

Students still use it daily, Hicks said.

Instead of just one or two officers on campus, that program adds hundreds more eyes of people who can "see something, say something," he noted.

Today, students even will send screen shots of what's happening on social media, problems the schools and law enforcement officers might have no idea about otherwise.

When a principal was held hostage at Montvale School in 1999 by a student with a gun, law enforcement officers had to rely on the assistant principal drawing a sketch of the office. Today, cameras in schools send a live view to the Blount County E-911 Center, and emergency responders can access virtual floor plans, with still camera views of classrooms and a map of any hazardous materials.

While once officers had to review VHS tapes from cameras in schools if there was an issue, today the schools have access to Avigilon video analytics technology.

"We can teach the cameras what to look for," Hicks explained.

However, none of the technology replaces what an officer can offer by being on campus. "You can't replace the personal contact every day," Hicks said.

The SROs are on campus from before students arrive until after school ends.

At the elementary schools, Hicks said, "Some of them are like Walmart greeters," welcoming students and family members by name.

Throughout the day they interact with students in the classrooms and walk the perimeter, something Hicks did for a decade at Heritage High School. "That's why I have two bad knees and a bad back," he said.

At the elementary school, they might be helping open milk cartons in the lunch room or tying a student's shoes. "It's not in their job description, but they do it," he said, reinforcing the image that a law enforcement officer is someone who will help them.

Many SROs also help coach athletic teams, something Hicks did at Eagleton.

The students are accustomed to seeing the officers not only in school but also in the community.

"My wife won't take me to Walmart, she won't take me to the mall, she won't take me anywhere," Hicks said. "All the SROs are like that. Every time they go out somewhere, everybody knows them, even if they're out of uniform, they get recognized," he said.

"My wife just keeps pushing the buggy and leaves me."

Even on vacation at Disney World, a Blount County SRO has received a shout-out from a student.

Middle school is a highly influential time, when SROs can develop relationships, offer advice and reinforce lessons about being respectful and polite to others. "I wish we had more time to be in the classroom," Hicks said.

"High school is reactive," he said. "It's wide open."

As the schools continue to look at ways to improve safety and security, Britt said the county probably could use a third officer at each high school and a second at each of the four middle schools, and he'd like to see them work more with students on anti-bullying and anti-drug education.

Just having an officer's car in the parking lot can have a calming effect.

"The best weapon in the world is your people skills," Hick said, particularly listening.

When people are upset, he said, "they're there to be the Dr. Phil and hopefully not the Jerry Springer."

The officers also know what's going on in the community, so they might know before the school hears, for example, that a student's family has been in a motor vehicle accident. All the SROs have worked patrol first, so they are familiar with the neighborhoods.

They work closely with the Department of Children's Service and the Family Resource Center, too, to help families that are struggling.

"Some students, the only stability they have is during school," Hicks said. "Some of these kids you want to take home."

One time he did, with Hicks and his wife welcoming a student into their home until she could transition to living with another family member. "We took her in and gave her foster care when she didn't have anything," he said.

SROs from different districts also communicate, such as checking on a new student who transfers into the district. "We reach out all the time and build that network," he said.

During the course of a year, Britt said, school resource officers deter hundreds of events. For example, he said, "we have less fights in our schools because he have SROs there."

The SRO program also does more than protect the schools. "We solve so many crimes that have not even been reported yet," the sheriff said.

With his retirement from BCSO, Hicks isn't leaving school security. Instead he'll be working for NaviGate Prepared, the software company local schools use to monitor actions such as evacuations during drills.

In his first month on the job, he'll be traveling to schools in Ohio, Arizona, Texas and Louisiana.

Hicks said he'll miss being in the know about what's happening in the local community, but not the calls at all hours of the day and night.

When he began as an SRO, he might have to walk outside the school to get reception on a radio. Now alerts come in on his watch, and he has to charge his cell phone twice a day. When a threat was made a few weeks ago in an online gaming forum in Finland, the alert was transferred through Interpol to Washington, D.C., and before the threat was pinpointed within Tennessee, Blount County decided to take the precaution of putting students on a "soft lockdown."

Hicks has been with the SRO program long enough that today's students hear from their parents that he was their officer. He says it's time to leave, before the students are hearing those stories from their grandparents.

https://www.thedailytimes.com/news/blount-county-school-resource-officers-program-starts-with-relationships/article_7726d90f-a14a-51de-9f17-0a60ef4519c2.html

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Portland, Oregon

Will Portland's New Unarmed Officers Fix Police Bureau Woes?

by Alex Zielinski

In the first week of December, Portland City Council unanimously voted to hire a dozen police officers who don't carry guns.

Called “Public Safety Support Specialists” (PS3s for short), this new type of cop will only respond to reports of low-level, non-emergency crimes—the type that have most contributed to Portland's steady uptick in 911 calls. Armed only with pepper spray, PS3s will write up reports about stolen property, help people exchange insurance information after car crashes, attend neighborhood meetings, assist in searching for missing persons, block off roadways when needed, and help inventory evidence and found property—among other tasks that sworn officers often handle. Dressed in green polos emblazoned with a PPB logo and tan khakis, the PS3s will be divvied up between Portland's three precincts. The city is expected to start hiring PS3s in January.

Most agree that PS3s have the potential to improve policing in Portland. But in a city with a shaky history of police accountability, any change at the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) comes with a skeptical pause from the public.

“Where are the people of Portland represented in today's decision?” asked a man identified as John who testified at city council before the vote. “[We've] said we want police reform with transparency and accountability to the community. This proposal provides neither.”

City commissioners agree that the city's clunky unveiling of the stalled program didn't help gain public trust.

The idea of a PS3 role was first mentioned in 2016, during the city's tumultuous contract negotiations with the PPB's union, the Portland Police Association (PPA). That contract promised a future chat between both the city and the PPA regarding “the feasibility” of a new unsworn position, which was then called a “Community Service Officer.” As with most PPA meetings, those conversations took place behind closed doors.

Aside from Mayor Ted Wheeler quietly tucking $1,159,293 into the city's 2017-2018 budget to fund a community service officer program (the majority of which still sits untouched), the concept has largely remained off the public's radar. Then, on Friday, November 30, the city announced it would be voting to approve 12 new police jobs the following week.

Even regular police activists seemed caught off-guard by the vote to approve the PS3 program.

“It is really shameful that there was no real lead up and no community discussion before today,” said Portland Copwatch's Dan Handelman, testifying before council before the vote. “If this is about community-engaged policing, well, the community wasn't engaged in defining what they're going to do.”

Others raised concerns that the job doesn't focus on improving PPB's response to mental health crises, an issue the bureau is still struggling with six years after being ordered to improve by the US Department of Justice.

But that never was the point of the PS3 program, according to Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who sat on council when the position was first proposed. Fritz said the role was not created to serve as a liaison between police officers and the homeless or the mentally ill.

Wheeler reiterated the limits of the role before he called for the council vote.

“This is not a community engagement or a community policing unit, per se,” Wheeler said. “Community policing is a policy that has to be embodied throughout the organization.”

The public's hazy understanding of the PS3 program is expected, based on the way Wheeler's discussed it in the past. In his 2017-2018 budget, Wheeler noted the program would be “focused on engaging directly with the community.” And in a public list of his 2017 accomplishments, Wheeler said he had “developed a new Community Service Officer program... to enhance community policing efforts.”

In the official job description job description for PS3s, that community-focused mission has been reduced to “assisting sworn officers with community engagement.”

More concretely, the PS3 positions do appear to address a problem that both police officers and members of the public have been urging the city to address: Dangerously slow response times to 911 calls.

According to the city budget office, 911 call volume has increased by more than 22 percent in the past five years, with a specific uptick in “low and medium priority” crimes. But the number of police officers hasn't grown, causing an imbalance that earlier this year led Wheeler to expand the force by 58 additional sworn officers. That decision sparked outcry from community members who called for reform before making any new hires and grumbles from PPB and union officials who believed 58 new officers still weren't enough to help an overburdened bureau.

Ideally, the PS3s will address both of these concerns by allowing unarmed non-officers to share sworn officers' heavy workload.

“There's quite a lot of work that's done by sworn members that does not require police authority,” said Wheeler before the council vote. “To hire PS3s means... we'll give our officers time to do more than just run from call to call to call. It's a better allocation of our scarce resources.”

It's certainly going to be cheaper than hiring more sworn officers. According to the job description, PS3s will start with an annual salary of around $49,800. (Entry-level salaries for sworn police officers start at $64,400.) And instead of plodding through sworn officers' mandatory 400 hours of state law enforcement training in Salem, PS3s will only need 200 hours of local training.

PPB Assistant Chief Chris Davis, who will oversee this program, says the job would be a good fit for recent college grads interested in law enforcement, or retired officers who want to stay involved. It won't be easy for PS3s to climb the ladder into a sworn position, however. The PS3 contract notes that any hours accrued by PS3 officers won't roll over to a sworn position and despite their history with the bureau, every PS3 will enter a sworn position with entry-level pay.

Portland joins dozens of other jurisdictions across the country that have introduced this type of low-level policing position into the traditional law-enforcement system. The roles vary slightly by city—in Seattle, community service officers mediate disputes between neighbors and investigate child abuse, while those in Beaverton focus on parking enforcement. A Stanford University study of community service officers in California found that 94 percent of them did administrative and clerical work. It's not clear what Portland's PS3s will spend most of their time doing—yet.

The city has requested a review of the PS3 program in one year. Davis s ays the best way to measure the efficacy of the program will be reviewing which officers are responding to calls. If sworn officers end up taking fewer calls for low-level crimes than they are now, that will be an easy sign of success, says Davis. But it probably won't be that simple.

“I have to manage expectations with this program,” Davis says. “It's entirely possible that we'll come back after a year and find out that we've used PS3s a lot, but that the load on officers hasn't gone down... because the overall number of calls is going up and up and up.”

https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2018/12/20/25224411/will-portlands-new-unarmed-officers-fix-police-bureau-woes

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Portland, Oregon

911 center's woes could affect public safety

City leaders were briefed about issues plaguing the county's Emergency Communications Center during a recent board meeting of all the county's mayors.

Nearly three dozen emergency dispatchers have left their jobs in the past 17 months and that's starting to affect response times for those residents calling 911.

The facility opened in July 2017 in Gallatin with the idea of dispatching all of the county's police, fire and emergency medical personnel from one central location. Participants include the cities of Hendersonville, Gallatin, Portland, Westmoreland and Millersville, as well as Sumner County.

Mayor Mike Callis said he continues to have concerns regarding the high turnover rate at the facility, fearful it could create even longer wait times for emergency care and create safety issues for Portland residents

“Absolutely, I'm concerned - citizens have come to me - I've heard the reports,” Callis said. “Obviously, I'm not alone in those concerns because they called for this meeting to recognize we've got to improve something.”

Callis said the proper people are not dispatched in the right amount of time and that the administrative calls have to go through the center to be addressed.

“I think what I'm hearing from chiefs, not just from Portland, and listening to other mayors and elected officials, is that after a year-and-a-half, they expected us to be in a better position than we are in now.”

When asked if there were rumors that some cities might pull out of ECC Callis said, “I know we've got council members that have heard the complaints and citizens that are concerned. You know if you get enough political pressure you never know what's going to happen. I have to protect the citizens of Portland. That's my biggest focus.”

Callis added that the cities have contracts and it could be very hard to get out right now, and the cities have put money into new equipment for ECC. He compared it to a stacked deck of cards that would collapse if one card was pulled out.

Police Chief Anthony Heavner also expressed concerns about how the 911calls were received.

Currently a call taker answers the call and sends the dispatcher a message via computer. Often the dispatcher needs additional information which delays the call being dispatched.

In addition, he said he is concerned that Portland is grouped with Millersville and Westmoreland at the center, and fears because of that, local calls might get lost in the shuffle.

Fire Chief Al West said he too hopes to see major changes in employee turnover and response times at the center.

“Until we do that, we will continue to have inefficiencies,” he said. “The major concern right now is that we have a state of the art dispatch center, but don't have people with sufficient knowledge to run (it).

“We've got to do something. We can't continue to be working with an inexperienced work force; especially in the communication center. We're at the point of no return. We must find a solution and put it in place.”

https://www.theportlandsun.com/news/center-s-woes-could-affect-public-safety/article_d62b571a-097a-11e9-8070-13069a17cf09.html

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Canada

GIESBRECHT: Thunder Bay police treat Indigenous in systemically

A damning report concludes Thunder Bay Police treat Indigenous people in a “systemically racist” way. With the police and city politicians blamed, there has been a flood of announcements promising change. No doubt there will be cultural sensitivity courses and other measures, positions such as “Indigenous relations officer” created, and consultants hired. While the hope is that those actions will solve the problem, but is that likely?

Is Thunder Bay's police any more racist than any other police force? While all police forces likely have a few true racists, I suspect the majority of Thunder Bay's police and officials are not. However, Thunder Bay police encounters a disproportionate number of situations involving Indigenous people (the result of an elevated crime rate of Indigenous people – a phenomenon with complex historical causes).

This is somewhat similar to the American situation, where a black man is eight times as likely to be involved in the commission of a crime. In the case of Indigenous men in Canada, the numbers are worse – in Saskatchewan, an Indigenous man is 32 times as likely to commit a crime as a non-Indigenous man. I suspect the Thunder Bay situation is similar.

Indigenous people residing in Thunder Bay come mainly from surrounding First Nations' communities, which are deeply troubled places. Alcohol abuse, welfare dependency, and all of the pathologies that stem from those grim factors (such as criminal involvement and child neglect) make it virtually inevitable that people coming to the city from those communities are highly over-represented in the groups of people that police officers have to deal with.

Those factors make it inevitable that police encounters feature Indigenous people who have been drinking. Problem drinking is virtually a way of life in many deeply troubled Indigenous communities. Police encounters with inebriated people are dangerous and volatile situations; situations most likely to lead to tragic results. Police officers are entitled to protect themselves first in dangerous situations, and confronting Indigenous people over potential crimes and poor behavior has the unfortunate effect of hardening attitudes.

The situation is a highly complex problem that should not be blamed on any one party, and recommendations coming from a one-sided report will likely do more harm than good. By scapegoating police and ignoring the complexity of the situation, the only people likely to benefit will be those who are able to collect some of the “government money” that will inevitably be thrown at the problem.

Some of the spotlight should shine on the chiefs running First Nations communities. It is not the fault of either the police officers or the city politicians that so many of the people coming from those communities have so many problems. Chiefs and band councillors are well-paid to manage those communities. Is it not reasonable to ask them to account for the fact that so many of their constituents do so badly?

But, regrettably, Gerry McNeilly's Report does not ask Indigenous politicians any tough questions. This has been the history of many one-sided inquiries into Indigenous-related issues. The formula remains simple: victimhood culture with Indigenous people as victims.

The blame always goes to others and nothing changes. And, nothing changes as long as this simplistic formula is followed.

https://winnipegsun.com/opinion/columnists/giesbrecht-thunder-bay-police-treat-indigenous-in-systemically-racist-way

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from Police One

5 of the biggest issues facing law enforcement in 2019

From active shooter response protocols to screening processes for new recruits, police leaders will face many challenges in the coming year

by Paul Cappitelli

5 of the biggest issues facing law enforcement in 2019 From active shooter response protocols to screening processes for new recruits, police leaders will face many challenges in the coming year

Based on Paul Cappitelli's predictions, what do you think will be the biggest issue in policing in 2019? Click here to answer our poll.
Each year, law enforcement faces new challenges that redefine the profession. The term “business as usual” is never applicable in policing, as the landscape can change in an instant.

In order to stay abreast of trends, police leaders must constantly read and process information from many sources, because one thing is certain – if you don't read the tea leaves, you can get broadsided.

This article focuses upon five critical issues (in no ranking order) likely to challenge policing in 2019.

1. ACTIVE SHOOTER RESPONSE

If anything, 2018 showed us that law enforcement officers are expected to act without hesitation when responding to an active shooter situation. In many cases, there has been praise for the immediate engagement of the threat without regard for one's safety, with criticism lobbed when officers did not respond quick enough to stave off injury or loss of life.

While firefighters are cautioned about when and how to run into burning buildings, policy changes are dictating that police officers run into the “burning building” despite the risks. Sadly, we are seeing incidents where officers are injured or killed in this rush to engage an active shooter. Public pressure appears to be dictating police policy while undermining the basic tenets of officer safety in some situations.

The answer to this dilemma lies somewhere between where the profession was pre-Columbine and where we are today. Each active shooter incident should be analyzed and de-briefed with the lessons learned shared widely to mitigate officer mortality. It's perhaps time to take a step back and reassess existing active shooter protocols to shift the focus back toward officer safety without fear of public scrutiny and castigation. While there is no clear answer, having a dialogue is a good start.

2. POLICE TRANSPARENCY AND PUBLIC RECORDS

The average police officer will probably tell you they are well aware that their department phones, emails, text messages and alike are a matter of public record. But if you ask about their private phones, they will likely say that such devices are not public record.

Unfortunately, there is no hard precedent that will protect any of the information a public servant shares in the course and scope of duty. To the contrary, the courts are migrating toward a position wherein ALL information is a public record regardless of source. The term “reasonable expectation of privacy” is becoming more obsolete. To this end, devices are potentially subject to subpoena if they contain evidence that may be deemed exculpatory in nature. As if this isn't enough to worry about, add body-worn cameras into the mix and the associated public disclosure requirements, which vary by jurisdiction.

The media and the public's thirst for additional details about field activities are likely to increase in 2019 and beyond. Smart police leaders are already having discussions within their ranks about the prospect of increased transparency and crafting policies and protocols to reflect same. The curtain has been pulled back, and there is little forgiveness in the court of public opinion.

3. OFFICER RECRUITMENT

As the struggle continues to find new recruits and retain seasoned officers, it may be time for police leaders to admit they are contributing to their own recruitment crisis through their hiring strategies.

Here are some uncomfortable questions for agency heads:

How many good candidates are being disqualified for requirements/parameters the agency feels strongly about?

If law enforcement agencies across the country are confident in their respective screening processes, why are there still officers who break the law and commit crimes after they were vetted?

How many candidates who are deemed unqualified might have actually made better police officers than the ones selected?

Are the police officers' selection standards criteria moving targets depending upon the needs of the community and their geo-political environment?

Are there “gatekeepers” within agencies that may be keeping the better candidates from succeeding as a result of personal bias or preference?

These are the tough questions that need to be answered, and 2019 is a good time to revisit internal screening processes. The first step might be for police leaders to spend time reviewing recently rejected candidates to determine if some applications can be salvaged.

4. IMMIGRATION AND SANCTUARY LAWS

There is no other way to address the issues surrounding immigration and sanctuary laws other than to state the obvious: it's a big mess. Some states are passing laws to undermine federal law, local municipalities are passing laws to undermine state laws, the federal government is threatening those who violate the federal laws and the states and suing the feds.

The best suggestion at this point is to encourage detailed internal documentation of all situations (arrests, detentions, releases, etc.) wherever applicable. Educating the public about the limitations under applicable laws and court orders is also a good start.

5. POLICE USE OF FORCE AND DE-ESCALATION POLICIES

The 1993 movie “Demolition Man” with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes is about a futuristic society where the police do not use force and all critical field decisions are made by command personnel via live video feed to police headquarters. Snipes played a hardened criminal who uses extreme lethal force against the police who are powerless to respond. At the time of this film's release, it seemed like far-fetched fiction. In present day, one could opine that policing is moving in a direction to where the use of physical force by law enforcement will be severely constricted and live video could soon supplant individual decision-making.

The 21st Century Policing Initiative (21CPI) has been in the implementation stages for over three years. Many of the police-community relations elements of 21CPI have been validated and appear to be effective in most respects. However, the elements addressing the use of force have not been as seamless in the transition. Is policing better off today than it was before 21CPI? Is the term “de-escalation” over-used and confusing? Is anyone safer? If so, who? The police? The community?

The elephant in the room with 21CPI is the inconsistency between the past, present and future of police use of force. This consternation begs the following questions:

Is it time to revisit the use of force aspect of 21CPI now that the political winds have shifted?

What are the consistently acceptable “rules of engagement?”

Are officers hesitating before taking action thus putting themselves and/or the public at risk?

The 21CPI contra-argument suggests that de-escalation was already factored into existing police training and any modifications put officers at greater risk. One thing is certain, if the profession as a whole does not clear up the confusion, state lawmakers will enact legislation to redefine the justification for use of force. It's already happening in states across the country. It may be time to regroup.

CONCLUSION

There will no doubt be new and unforeseen challenges in the coming year. For the time being, police leaders should stay focused upon these and other issues that will carry over from 2018. We cannot predict what future crises await this noble profession, but we must ensure we do not allow the mistakes of the past to carry on into the future without intervention.

https://www.policeone.com/2018-review/articles/482372006-5-of-the-biggest-issues-facing-law-enforcement-in-2019/

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Georgia

(video on site)

Bodies of 2 children found buried in father's backyard, never reported missing

by Emily Van de Riet

GUYTON, Ga. (AP/Meredith) — Two Georgia children were found dead and buried in their father's backyard, and their disappearances were never reported.

A Georgia sheriff said the bodies of the two children were found buried in the backyard of their father's Guyton home. Autopsies are underway and a cause of death has not been determined.

Authorities said 14-year-old Mary Crocker hadn't been seen since October, and her brother Elwyn Crocker Jr. hadn't been seen since Nov. 2016 when he was 14.

The Effingham County School System said Mary and Elwyn were removed from school and transferred to a homeschool program.

Effingham County sheriff's officials said two children's bodies were found last week, and four people have been charged in their deaths: the children's father, 49-year-old Elwyn Crocker; stepmother, 33-year-old Candice Crocker; stepgrandmother, 50-year-old Kim Wright; and Wright's boyfriend, 55-year-old Roy Anthony Prater.

Effingham County sheriff's officials said Mary and Elwyn's bodies were found last week, and four people have been charged in their deaths: the children's father, 49-year-old Elwyn Crocker; stepmother, 33-year-old Candice Crocker; stepgrandmother, 50-year-old Kim Wright; and Wright's boyfriend, 55-year-old Roy Anthony Prater.

In a Facebook post, officials said all four suspects had their first appearances in court and were all denied bond.

Sheriff Jimmy McDuffie said deputies received a tip Wednesday night that 14-year-old Mary Crocker hadn't been seen since October and was feared dead.

He said deputies arrived at the girl's home and were told conflicting stories by family members about how she lived elsewhere. Deputies then searched the property and found the bodies of Mary and Elwyn.

A living 11-year-old child with cerebral palsy was taken from the home and placed this week in the care of his mother, Rebecca Self, of South Carolina.

County Sheriff Jimmy McDuffie said despite noticing signs of possible abuse, neighbors and acquaintances didn't report their suspicions to authorities.

Chilling 1989 cold-case murder revisited in true-crime series

by Michael Starr

Investigation ID pays the bills with a 24/7 slate of true-crime programming — and “Who Killed Amy Mihaljevic?” won't disappoint its audience.

The three-hour special, premiering 9 p.m. Sunday on ID, takes a deep dive into the still-unsolved 1989 murder of 10-year-old Amy Mihaljevic, who lived in a town on the shores of Lake Erie. It's the lead-in episode to “The Lake Erie Murders,” a miniseries airing over successive Sundays through Jan. 27, documenting unsolved killings in that region (Erie, Pa., Cleveland, Buffalo, Parkdale, Ontario) — all of which share disturbing similarities.

Here it's bucolic Bay Village, Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie, where Amy Mihaljevic — who loved horses, her bike and the movie “Dirty Dancing” — disappeared in late October 1989 after leaving school with three friends. She never made it home.

One of Amy's friends eventually told authorities that Amy had received a phone call from a man who claimed he worked with her mother. The man told Amy her mother was being promoted at work — and that he wanted Amy to accompany him to buy her mother a surprise gift. Amy was last seen waiting alone in front of a local strip mall on Oct. 27, 1989; two eyewitnesses later reported seeing a man approach her and put his hand on the small of her back, as if guiding her to his car.

Amy's disappearance made national headlines — including segments on “Oprah” and “Sally Jessy Raphael” — once the FBI got involved and released a composite sketch of the suspect (later revised). There was a massive manhunt; later, other young girls from neighboring towns told similar tales of getting that creepy phone call from a man claiming to know their mother. In early February, 1990, Amy's body was found by a jogger in a remote field in neighboring Ashland County. Evidence suggests she may have been raped or sexually abused. Her killer was never found. Theories abound: It was the over-friendly local handyman or the creepy caretaker with glasses who worked at the stable where Amy took riding lessons. One thing everyone knows for sure: There's a predator on the loose — and he hasn't been caught to this day. (There's still a $27,000 reward from the FBI for information pertaining to Amy's murder.)

There's much more involved, and “Who Killed Amy Mihaljevic?” does a solid, professional job recounting the timeline and probable circumstances of Amy's disappearance and murder. There are a lot of reenactments — always a slippery slope — but they're tastefully done, and many of Amy's friends and family, including her brother and her father, are interviewed here. (Amy's heartbroken mother, Margaret, who did much to publicize the case, died in 2001.)

It's a horrifying story we've heard all too often — but still compels our insatiable curiosity in the monsters who walk among us.

https://nypost.com/2018/12/26/chilling-1989-cold-case-murder-revisited-in-true-crime-series/

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Super Bowl

(video on site)

Not For Sale: Fighting Sex Trafficking As Super Bowl Nears

Ahead of Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta, 'Not For Sale' is a series of articles highlighting the battle against child sex trafficking.

EDITOR'S NOTE: As Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta approaches, more attention is being focused on the issue of child sex trafficking. Patch is committed to covering this international plague with a focus on local efforts to combat the crime. This is the first in a series of articles on child sex trafficking as it relates to one of the world's biggest sporting events, which will happen on Feb. 3, 2019, in Atlanta.

ATLANTA, GA -- An Atlanta-based faith organization dedicated to eradicating child sex trafficking is using technology to help victims of the crime receive help and even prevent them from entering what could be a lifetime of degradation and tragedy. Street Grace, whose mission is to eradicate the commercial sexual exploit of children, launched a program called Transaction Intercept exactly seven weeks ago as of Dec. 17, 2018. The technology uses a unique chatbot that poses as a minor available for sex. The bot, called "Gracie," even knows how to chat like a teenager.

Once a customer is identified, the bot has already collected insights and data about who the customers are and when they're looking for connections. "Gracie" then sends messages about the risks and consequences of their actions, including trauma and therapy resources to aid them in taking the first step in receiving help. The technology has the power to intercept thousands of messages each day.

The program was developed in a partnership with the Centers for Disease Control, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Kennesaw State University and advertising agency BBDO.

"Gracie is cutting edge," said Bob Rodgers, Street Grace's president and CEO. "She is learning and has already had thousands of conventions with people calling in to buy sex with minors. She's getting smarter and is already in 13 cities in eight states, intercepting and disturbing transactions." Street Grace said the bot has successfully disrupted over 15,000 transactions.

The problem of child sex trafficking is gaining more attention in Atlanta with the approach of Super Bowl LIII on Feb. 3 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. But Rodgers points out the game alone isn't solely responsible for the crime.

"The Super Bowl doesn't cause sex trafficking," Rodgers said. "Conferences and conventions, like so many we have in Atlanta, don't cause sex trafficking. It is already occurring in every metro Atlanta county and it will still be happening when the Super Bowl leaves. The Super Bowl brings millions of people into the city and sex trafficking will ebb and flow with the event, just like business at restaurants, bars and adult establishments."

Rodgers brings more than 30 years of corporate and nonprofit leadership experience to Street Grace's mission. The organization presents information about domestic minor sex trafficking to more than 70,000 people annually, ranging from students and educators to government workers and corporations.

Each year, Street Grace reaches nearly 60,000 youth under age 18 with a comprehensive curriculum and trainings covering many topics that parents, schools and youth groups do not generally feel comfortable discussing. In 2018, Street Grace reached over 12,000 Georgians through awareness events surrounding commercial exploitation of children. Street Grace also trains more than 2,000 ministry and youth leaders annually to identify and prevent sex slavery.

https://patch.com/georgia/atlanta/not-sale-fighting-sex-trafficking-super-bowl-nears