Federal investigators are looking into allegations that the Secret Service deviated from normal polygraphing methods in checking into the Cartagena...
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State and local leaders called for independent audits of the Milwaukee Police Department's crime numbers, citing a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation...
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When Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn touted the city's fourth-straight year of falling crime in February, hundreds of beatings, stabbings and child abuse cases were missing from the count, says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More than 500 incidents since 2009 were misreported to the FBI as minor assaults and not included in the city's violent crime rate. That tally is based on a review of cases that resulted in charges - only about one-fifth of all reported crimes. The misreported cases found in 2011 alone are enough that Flynn would have been announcing a 1.1 percent increase in violent crime in February, instead of a 2.3 percent decline from the reported 2010 numbers, which also include errors.
At the request of the Journal Sentinel, FBI crime experts reviewed dozens of incidents and confirmed that they should have been labeled as aggravated assaults. In addition to the more than 500 misreported incidents, the investigation found at least 800 more that fit the same pattern but could not be confirmed through available public records. Criminologists reviewed the Journal Sentinel's findings and said they showed a pattern of misreporting that has helped drive down the city's crime rate. "Misreporting is cheating the public," said Michael Maltz, criminology professor at Ohio State University. He called the Journal Sentinel findings just "the tip of the iceberg."
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For the first time, police departments across Cleveland's Cuyahoga County have the chance to all follow the same rules when investigating sex crimes, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A policy put together after months of work by police, prosecutors, nurses, and victim advocates will be unveiled at a news conference today. The collaboration took off at the urging of County Executive Ed FitzGerald after the Plain Dealer reported that the majority of police departments in the county -- 46 of 59 -- did not have a stand-alone policy for investigating sex crimes and that among those that did, the procedures varied widely.
Yet to be seen is how many of the cities, villages, townships, and other law enforcement agencies will embrace the recommended policy, which in 11 pages outlines steps for responding to a report of sexual assault. The policy covers such topics as which area hospitals are best suited to treat victims and collect evidence and how to gather information sensitively from victims who have undergone a traumatic attack. The policy also suggests that reports should be made on all sexual assaults. The Cuyahoga County Police Chiefs Association has approved the guidelines.
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Four Secret Service employees are contesting their dismissals for inappropriate conduct in Colombia last month, reports the Washington Post. The agents argue that the agency is making them scapegoats for behavior that the Secret Service has long tolerated, a charge that Director Mark Sullivan may address today before a Senate committee. He plans to say there was no breach of operational security.
Several agents say that what happened in Cartagena differ from initial media accounts describing a group outing of a dozen men in search of prostitutes. Instead, the men went to different bars and clubs and met women under a variety of circumstances, in some cases resulting in voluntary trysts that did not involve money. The scandal has damaged the Secret Service’s reputation, and the fallout has spread to other federal agencies. A dozen members of the military also are accused of hiring prostitutes on the trip, and the Drug Enforcement Administration is looking into allegations, made by a Secret Service agent during the investigation, that DEA staffers brought prostitutes to their apartments in Cartagena.
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The sight of Chicago police raising billy clubs against demonstrators at the NATO summit last weekend was the kind of image that has dogged the city's police force for decades, says the Associated Press. But virtually no one was talking about a "police riot," as they did in 1968 when baton-wielding officers entered crowds of demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention. Nor was there the kind of criticism at the Seattle police after a violence-plagued 1999 international summit.
Protest leaders where President Barack Obama met with world leaders offered a harsh assessment of police tactics. Most others praised the police for their restraint, and they performed mostly as Superintendent Garry McCarthy vowed they would, from their crowd-control tactics to their interactions with protesters. "We got them trained and equipped, and they executed the plan on all levels," McCarthy said. In all, 90 people were arrested and eight officers were injured before and during the summit. "I think they helped their reputation," said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor. "Generally speaking, the CPD seemed to exercise an extraordinary amount of restraint."
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The advocacy organization Justice Policy Institute issued a report complaining of "over-policing" in the U.S., saying that although crime rates
are at their lowest in more than three decades, the arrest total declined only slightly in recent years, and the nation still spends more than $100 billion annually on police. The money funds 714,921 sworn police officers and an increasing number of militarized police units, the institute says.
The group contends that "police forces have morphed over the years from a locally funded and managed entity to protect public safety, to also serving
as a federally‐funded jobs initiative, an engine for surveillance, and a militaristic special forces agency engaged in a war on drugs, gangs, and youth." The institute maintains that federal funding and involvement have helped create large police forces that are disconnected from communities and operate in a punitive rather than preventative way resulting in more arrests, more prison, and more costs to taxpayers, among other negative effects on communities." The group takes issue with the current style of policing, which it argues "treats entire communities as though they should be contained, surveilled, and punished."
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Los Angeles school police officers, the nation's largest school police force, issued more than 33,500 tickets to students between 10 and 18 years old between 2009 and 2011, reports the Center for Public Integrity. That worked out to about 30 citations a day. More than 40 percent of the citations were to kids 14 and younger, mostly for disturbing the peace, followed by daytime curfew violations, including tardiness, and scattered tickets for cigarettes, lighters, marijuana, vandalism, or having graffiti “tools,” such as a Sharpie.
Black students, about 10 percent of the district’s student body, received 15 to 20 percent of all tickets, depending on the year, and Latino students, 74 percent of enrollment, also received a disproportionate number. The issue of police citations has been included in a federal review of discipline-reform plans that the Los Angeles Unified School District – under pressure to reduce high rates of suspensions of black students — was required to submit this year to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. “Generally speaking, in all but the most serious cases we would hope that district officials review a range of options [ ] before referring students to the court system,” said assistant secretary for civil rights Russlynn Ali.
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At least 20 people arrested or detained by Chicago police during yesterday's NATO protests were released from custody overnight, according to other...
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When Arlington, Tx., police officer Zhivonni McDonnell reported for a shift earlier this year, she was armed with one of the Police Department's newest tools: a smartphone equipped with Twitter. As she accompanied a Citizens on Patrol member that night, McDonnell, the department's social media specialist, tweeted updates on what they were seeing and doing, giving followers a taste of what the volunteer group does, says the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.
The key, said Chyng-Yang Jang of the University of Texas at Arlington's department of communication, is having personnel who are trained in social media use. "If you're going to use it to just post information, then I don't think it will be too effective," he said. "The real powerful thing is the two-way communication." Cleveland police used it during an Amber Alert in April and received a tip within a few hours that led to the children's rescue. In Pennsylvania, a police department made three arrests in one week off leads generated by social media. Recently, one of Denton's most-wanted misdemeanor fugitives saw his mug shot on the Police Department's Facebook page and turned himself in, hoping to keep his family and friends from finding out.
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Charlotte, N.C., Police Chief Rodney Monroe he faces his biggest test yet, says the Charlotte Observer. His job is to work with the U.S. Secret Service to keep Charlotte safe during the Democratic National Convention in September, requiring an extraordinary level of planning and coordination never before undertaken in the city. If something goes wrong – whether it’s an unprecedented terrorist attack or the mass arrests that tarnished St. Paul’s image in 2008 – Monroe will be judged.
“When you think of the number of eyes internationally that will be on Charlotte, that the president of the United States will be right here in this city, and when you think of all the security needed to ensure his safety and all the citizens of this community that need to be protected, there is no heavier weight than Chief Rodney Monroe will bear,” said Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon. “He’s calm under pressure,” said Isaac Fulwood Jr., a former police colleague of Monroe in Washington, D.C., now chairman of the U.S. Parole Commission. “He communicates well. He’s not afraid to talk with people, listen and hear their advice.”
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The two West Memphis, Ar., police officers who pulled over an old, white van two years ago today knew neither about the father and son occupants nor the sovereign citizen movement they espoused. FBI investigative files obtained by the Memphis Commercial Appeal under the Freedom of Information Act show the FBI had been tracking Ohio-born Jerry Kane since at least 2004. Agents suspected him of various financial fraud schemes in several states, but never charged him with a crime.
There's no hint in the massive record that agents knew Kane and his 16-year-old son, Joe, crisscrossed the country armed with an AK-47. Even after probes in Oklahoma, California, and Ohio, records show, nothing suggests the agency suspected Kane would turn violent against law enforcement officials. When Kane's son killed Sgt. Brandon Paudert and officer Bill Evans at exit 275, the FBI's investigation of a potential network of like-minded friends and potential co-conspirators quickly became an intensive national effort. In the two years since the shootings, the FBI has warned of sovereign citizens' growing threat to law enforcement. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that tracks hate groups, has documented a proliferation of its adherents nationwide. "West Memphis woke a lot of us up to how bad this situation really is," said the center's Mark Potok. "I think things are likely to get worse before they get better."
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A day after a federal judge issued a ruling fiercely criticizing the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly unveiled new measures on Thursday intended to reduce the frequency of illegitimate stops, reports the New York Times. They include a re-emphasis on an existing departmental order banning racial profiling. The order is to be incorporated in routine training sessions for officers beginning next month.
Another calls for greater scrutiny of the work sheets known as UF250s that officers fill out after each street stop. Now, Kelly said, the executive officer at each of the city’s 76 precincts will be in charge of auditing the forms. He also said the department was moving to develop a “quantitative mechanism” to pinpoint those officers who were the object of complaints from civilians over street stops.
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The U.S. Department of Justice has closed its investigation into allegations of excessive force and sexual abuse by members of the Lorain, Ohio, Police Department, concluding that while those issues existed in the past, there is no longer a pattern of such misconduct by officers, reports the Lorain County Chronicle-Telegram. “During our investigation, we found that there were instances of excessive force in the years preceding our investigation, along with allegations of sexual misconduct,” Jonathan Smith, chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote. “LPD’s management did not adequately address this misconduct, and failures in LPD’s accountability and discipline systems may have allowed the use of excessive force and sexual misconduct to continue.”
The Justice Department offered up a 30-page technical assistance report that recommends sweeping changes to the Police Department’s policies and procedures governing use of force, complaints about officers and how internal investigations are handled. The report also recommends the city “investigate and remedy command deficiencies that permitted LPD’s past use of excessive force.” Lorain Mayor Chase Ritenauer said although the investigation, which was launched in November 2008, pointed out numerous problems, the Justice Department would have taken far more serious action if those issues persisted.
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The Department of Justice isn't satisfied with the Baltimore Police Department's recently issued orders on citizens' right to record officers, reports the city's Sun. Jonathan Smith of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division filed an 11-page letter with the court this week in the case of a Howard County man suing police for allegedly deleting videos from his cellphone after he recorded an officer arresting a woman in 2010. Since then, police drafted new guidelines and implemented training to instruct officers that citizens can record officers' actions.
But in his letter Smith said the new police policy still does not adequately protect individuals' constitutional rights in some areas. It should be more clear in prohibiting the deletion or destruction of recordings "under any circumstances," Smith wrote, and it does not define what constitutes the "public domain" where recordings can take place. The policy also should instruct officers "not to threaten, intimidate or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or other recording devices," Smith wrote. The case is believed to be the first where the Justice Department has weighed in on citizens' right to record police officers, an issue that has exploded in recent years with the growing prevalence of camera phones.
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