2011 Harry F. Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America

Twenty-six journalists from across the nation gathered at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Jan. 31st and Feb 1st, 2011 for the 6th Annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America to discuss the conference theme: “Law & Disorder: Facing the Legal and Economic Challenges to American Criminal Justice.”

The journalists were joined by criminal justice professionals and speakers including New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Hon. Sue Bell Cobb, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court; Hon. Andre Davis, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and Hon. Robert T. Russell, Associate Judge for Buffalo City Court and a pioneer of the nation’s Veterans Courts. They were joined by ACLU president Susan Herman;  John T. Chisholm, District Attorney, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; Daniel F. Conley, District Attorney, Suffolk County, Massachusetts; and George Gascon, newly appointed DA in San Francisco and the city’s former Police Chief.

Panels included:THE COURTS, PUBLIC SAFETY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES: CHALLENGES IN 2011, THE COURTS ON TRIAL: IS THE SYSTEM FAILING US?,TECHNO-CRIME FIGHTING: LAW ENFORCEMENT, CIVIL LIBERTIES, PUBLIC SAFETY AND THE WEB.

See the symposium agenda here.

Fellows ask colleagues follow-up questions in a closed forum.

Can You See Me Now?

Location-based social networks using geotagging technology are a cool way of letting friends and family keep track of you—and as a law enforcement tool, they  can protect public safety. But when we share, do we really know who’s watching?

In the world of social networking, Carri Bugbee is hardly a novice. The Portland, Oregon social media marketing strategist has 7,164 followers on Twitter, 1,197 Facebook friends and more than 500 connections on LinkedIn. But when she got involved with geotagging through a location-based network, she received an uncomfortable wake-up call.

Literally. One evening last February, she used foursquare, the popular location-based mobile network, to “check in” at a local restaurant, letting friends know where she was sitting down to dinner. Then she got a call on the restaurant telephone.

The caller, who swore at her and called her stupid, had tracked her down through PleaseRobMe.com, a site whose unsubtle name reflected its purpose: to warn people about the risks of geotagging by aggregating and publicizing location data from users of those networks. In Bugbee’s case, the warning was effective. She quit foursquare. She started hiring a house sitter. She became, as she put it a “geotagging curmudgeon.”

“I think that a lot of people have drunk the Kool-Aid without actually thinking that hard about it,” Bugbee said about location-based technologies. “At some point, some tragedy will occur.”

PleaseRobMe shut down last spring after a string of incidents like Bugbee’s suggested it may be more helpful to would-be criminals than to users. Nevertheless, its founders said they had accomplished their goal of educating users about the risks of broadcasting their location to the world.

“What is often forgotten is that you’re not really talking to a small group of friends,” said Douglas Salane, director of the Center for Cybercrime Studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You’re potentially talking to anyone on the internet.”

This can be incredibly useful for law enforcement.

Salane, who has worked with the Manhattan District Attorney and the FBI, notes that “one of the most useful devices for law enforcement is a cell phone.” But at the same time, he adds, users have largely ignored the longer term risks to privacy and public safety.

Our Digital Trail

About 59 percent of American adults now use wireless Internet, up nine percent from one year ago, according to a Pew report on Internet use. About 76 percent use their mobile device to take pictures, and 54 percent have used it to send a photo or video.

And things are getting more complex.  The future of the Internet—Web 3.0, if you will—will likely rely heavily on information that users produce and broadcast, either willingly or unwillingly.

In the world of social networks and applications, location-based services are the next big thing. Twitter and Google already use them. Facebook, which hit 500 million users in July, plans to roll out a location-based feature any day now. As more emerge around the digital world, they will leave millions of pieces of location information in their digital wake.

And a small but growing number of programmers are trying to do something about it.

Ben Jackson and Larry Pesce had both safety and privacy in mind when they started ICanStalkU.com in May. With $1,000 and some programming language, the New England-based securities information researchers picked up where PleaseRobMe left off.

ICanStalkU automatically searches thousands of photos on Twitter for geotags, tiny location markers attached to about three percent of all photos posted to the micro blogging site. Then it turns them into a location message, showing how photos can be used to trace people in real time, using information many have no idea they have put out there.

Despite the eyes-in-the-dark logo and dramatic name, Jackson said they intended the site to teach rather than threaten. “We just want people to make an informed decision,” explained Jackson. “If they are posting this information, we want them to know what kind of risk this entails.”

Stalking in Cyberspace

Stalking experts say the rapid evolution in locational technology has upped the risks. “It doesn’t cause stalking but it makes stalking a lot easier,” said Rebecca Dreke, a senior analyst at the National Center for Victims of Crime.

About 25 percent of the 3.4 million people who reported being victims of stalkers during 2005-2006 said they had been stalked using some form of cyber technology such as e-mail or instant messaging,  according to the most comprehensive evaluation of data to date.  The data, reported in a 2009 study by the Department of Justice, predated the wide use of newer technology such as geotagging and may thus seriously underestimate the scope of the problem, says Dreke, who points out that many of those exposed to location-based tracking will not even know they are being watched.

Dreke helps educate law enforcement about how they might use the same technology to help uncover the offenders. It’s an uphill battle. “The offenders and the criminals are usually keeping ahead of the people investigating the crime,” she said.

A recent study recent study by the security company Webroot showed many social network users are aware of the perils of their digital life. Webroot found 32 percent of men and 49 percent of women reported being “highly concerned” about stalkers. More than half of the 1,500 respondents worried about the privacy implications of their geo-tagged lifestyles.

Todd Zwillich shares their anxiety.

Zwillich, the Washington correspondent for the Public Radio International program, The Takeaway, was driving around the capital on a recent Saturday when he spotted a blue Chrysler with the license number NCCI70I. He grabbed a friend’s iPhone, and ran into traffic to snap a shot of the “awesome” plate. “It’s awesome because that is the ID number of the Starship Enterprise,” said Zwillich, with a laugh.

Zwillich knew the image would lay bare his Trekkie obsession to friends and followers. But until ICanStalkU picked it up and The Crime Report contacted him, Zwillich didn’t know he was tagged as standing “nearby 669 New York Avenue NW Washington DC” that day.

The idea didn’t sit well. “I’m not interested in having constant GPS social surveillance,” he said. “It’s information I want to control.”

But increasingly complex privacy settings and out of date laws can make that hard to do.  In the courts and on Capitol Hill, debates have begun about how to fashion laws governing cell phone records and electronic communications that strike the right balance between safety and privacy.

Geo-Location and Civil Liberties

Locational data can be culled from information we’ve opted to offer up to private companies—information emitted by our cell phone and collected by our service provider, pictures we’ve posted on Twitter, or profile information on Facebook.

The Constitution protects our privacy rights with respect to government prying. Private companies, on the other hand, may collect information on their users and often have wide leeway to use it as they see fit.

Often, that means cooperating with government. Recently, law enforcement has been using the Stored Communications Act to access locational data from cell phone providers, which requires law enforcement agencies to  provide  “reasonable grounds” before being granted the right to access location records from cell phone companies as well as social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The right to do so can help catch criminals and save lives, said Jack Killorin, director of a federal anti-drug task force in Atlanta. Like the FBI and NYPD, his agency has used location data emitted from cell phones in a number of cases, such as tracking a load of narcotics on the move.

“Where its certainly immediately helpful is when it’s used to track down victims of kidnapping, or fugitives,” said Killorin, who downplayed privacy concerns about this kind of technology.

“I don’t think that there’s a threat to the privacy of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the United States,” he said. “At least not from law enforcement.”

Gray Areas

But law enforcement is already moving into some gray areas that raise questions not just about government access to data, but how it uses the data it collects.

Recently, police in a suburb of Dallas, Texas received $60,000 in federal stimulus funds to set up a license plate scanning system, a database of snapshots it can use to keep and track plate numbers to look for stolen cars or kidnap victims. The technology allows the department to track where and when any plate has been photographed, potentially offering up a map of how many of the city’s citizens spend their day—where they live, shop, eat, sleep, meet up with lovers and go to political meetings.

The legal scope for using this information is still murky, says Andrew Blumberg , a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas, who has done extensive work on locational privacy.

“Most people’s intuitions about their privacy and public space are wrong or out of date,” adds Blumberg, which is why he welcomes sites such as PleaseRobMe and ICanStalkU as useful counterforces to the notion that citizens have nothing to fear, as long as the users of such metadata act responsibly.

“Is it legal to keep (such information) forever?” wonders Blumberg,  who co-authored a paper on locational privacy with the San Francsico-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends privacy rights in cyberspace. “We need to have a national debate about what the right legislation is.”

The debate has started. The law currently governing the use of email communication is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. In an unusual show of cooperation, privacy advocates, tech companies and service providers from the ACLU to Facebook have come together to form Digital Due Process, a coalition seeking to update the law for the modern webbed world.

The courts may soon weigh in as well.  A case now pending before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals will rule on whether the government should show “probable cause” before obtaining location records from cell phone providers,  as it would for a warrant—rather than the present lower standard of “reasonable cause. ”

In February 2008, a lower-court judge sided with the coalition of digital rights and civil liberties organizations that brought the suit, which included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union. But the Justice Department says the judge was wrong. “An individual has no Fourth Amendment-protected privacy interest in business records,”argued DOJ lawyer Mark in a brief submitted to Third Circuit defending the current standard.

But ICanStalkU’s Ben Jackson isn’t sure the law can ever keep up. That’s why he and others on the cutting edge of technology will likely keep setting up sites to show the world the digital breadcrumbs they have left behind.

Jackson is already thinking beyond geotagging. The question stuck in his mind is: “What’s going to happen next year and the year after that to information I don’t know I’m giving out now?”

Lisa Riordan Seville is a freelance reporter based in Brooklyn, NY.

Zahn Calls For More Media Coverage Of Stalking, Domestic Violence

Television journalist Paula Zahn moderated a discussion at the U.S. Justice Department this week on National Stalking Awareness Month. Zahn is now producing a series for the Investigation Discovery (ID) network. She wrote on a Justice Department blog that, "Despite the gains made in reducing stalking incidents, I am alarmed by the number of victims who are simply falling through the cracks, who are let down by the very system that is in place to protect them."

Zahn noted that the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported that an estimated 3.4 million persons ages 18 and older were victims of stalking each year. Some 76 percent of domestic violence homicides were preceded by stalking. Zahn called for more media coverage of the stalking issue.

What does the Future hold for Domestic Violence?

What does the future hold in store for domestic violence? October, the National Domestic Violence Awareness Month reminds us to reflect on the changes that have been made and keep striving towards our goals. People want to see an end to the use of violence as a means to control women and children, as a public health epidemic, and as a violation of human rights.   Yet, domestic violence continues to plague households and communities across the country.

One in four women experiences intimate partner violence in her lifetime, reports the National Center for Victims of  Crime. Women ages 20 to 24 have the highest level of physical violence from an intimate partner.  And, it turns out, it starts even younger. About 10% of students nationwide report being physically hurt by a boyfriend or girlfriend in the past 12 months, found the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fortunately, experts have taken notice, and are taking steps towards controlling domestic violence. For one, we are paying more attention to teen dating violence. A 24-hour National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline was launched in 2007, with the help of sponsor Liz Claiborne, Inc. Research is underway to further our understanding of this field and prevention programs are starting to be implemented in schools.
Second, several areas are being investigated in domestic violence, but two issues stand out.  One is coercive control. Coercive control is more than just physical violence, often counted by the number of assaults; it involves ongoing coercion, intimidation, isolation, and control. The emphasis is on violations against the person’s freedoms – what they can and can’t do. Another issue involves strangulation. According to the Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, “Strangulation has only recently been identified as one of the most lethal forms of domestic violence.” Strangulation can serve as a potent threat to a victim and is considered a precursor to homicide.  Nonetheless, only about 26 states make strangulation a felony; others consider it a misdemeanor.
Lastly, other issues have gained national attention recently, such as domestic violence being used as a “pre-existing condition” in health insurance, the link between domestic violence and pet abuse and domestic violence victims losing their jobs or becoming homeless.
But there is a bright spot on the horizon: On October 1st of this year, President Obama nominated Susan B. Carbon as the Director of the Office of Violence Against Women.   Carbon brings a wealth of experience from working in family court, on commissions, and as head of a council. With her knowledge of how battered women fare in family court, it is hoped changes occur that help victims retain custody of their children. Her appointment confirms the Administration’s effort towards helping survivors retain their jobs, health insurance, homes, pets and children. But most important, it provides the hope that the Federal Government will commit the funding and resources necessary to accomplish this huge, but vital, agenda.

Joan Dawson serves as a Secretary and Board Member of Guatemala Human Rights Commission and a Board Member of a domestic violence campaign.  She's also active in the Battered Mothers Custody movement.

Police Taking Stalking, Often Hard To Prove, More Seriously

Why do only one in three stalking victims report their cases to authorities? The New York Times asks that question in a review of a recently released U.S. Justice Department study on stalking, which was previously reported by Crime & Justice News. For one thing,  they may know from those who do report that stalking can be difficult to stop. In one Ohio case, a woman said that a man, over 11 years, he appeared at her house or at the mall, sat behind her at the movies, sent demands by e-mail, and threatened her life. She said, the police told her that it was hard to “connect all his actions” and that he had denied them.

Three-quarters of victims know their stalker, whether it is a current or former friend, roommate or neighbor, this study and others have found. "Often stalkers want to make their victims fearful," said Eugene Rugala, a former FBI profiler who advises on workplace threats. "They are thinking, ‘How dare you do this to me? I’m going to make you pay.’ But others feel it could be a way of getting back into the relationship." Mary Lou Leary of the National Center for Victims of Crime, a former federal prosecutor, said that "Stalking is treated  like domestic violence was 20 or 25 years ago. Law enforcement is often suspicious or cynical, but is now beginning to deal with stalking as a crime." "Many people told us they were uneasy, felt creeped out or scared," said Katrina Baum, a Bureau of Justice Statistics researcher and an author of the study. "There’s a reluctance to label the behavior because it’s too frightening. At some point the behavior can escalate to where it can’t be ignored."

3.4 Million Say They Were Stalking Victims, Many For Five Years

More than one-third of the victims reported being followed or spied upon; some said they were tracked by electronic monitoring, listening devices, or video cameras. Nearly 75 percent of victims knew their stalker in some capacity _ most commonly a former spouse or ex-boyfriend/girlfriend. About 130,000 victims said they had been fired or asked to leave their job because of problems arising from the stalking. Mary Lou Leary, a former federal prosecutor now executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, was struck by the persistence of some of the stalking behavior depicted in the report. "When you consider the impact that stalking has on a victim's life, five weeks is forever--five years is incredible," she said. "They often have to give up their current life, leave their jobs, their homes, establish a whole new identity."

Stephen Thompson

Professor, Central Michigan University

Mount Pleasant, Mich.

(989) 774-6677

thomp1sm@cmich.edu

Thompson’s expertise includes sexual aggression, stalking, dating violence and sexual harassment. He says he can talk about date/acquaintance rape, stranger rape, stalking, sexual harassment, predatory behavior, criminal profiling, sexual assault laws and prevention.

National Center for Victims of Crime

Washington, D.C.

Liz Joyce, media coordinator

(202) 467-8700

ejoyce@ncvc.org

The center offers resources on teen dating violence, violence against women and stalking. It says it can offer the media expert analysis and interviews on those and other areas of intimate partner violence.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Denver

Rita Smith, executive director

(303) 839-1852

mainoffice@ncadv.org

Founded 30 years ago, this group is based in Denver, with a public policy center in Washington. It focuses on forming coalitions, supporting community-based shelters for women and children, public education and policy and legislative initiatives. The group publishes an annual directory of shelters and safe homes, available for purchase through its website.

National Center for Victims of Crime

Washington, D.C.

Liz Joyce, media coordinator

(202) 467-8700

jbaldassari@ncvc.org

The center offers resources on teen dating violence, violence against women and stalking. It says it can offer the media expert analysis and interviews on those and other areas of intimate partner violence.

Family Violence Prevention Fund

San Francisco

Lisa Lederer, media contact

(202) 371-1999

lisa@prsolutionsdc.com

For more than 20 years this group has focused on preventing violence against women and children and supporting its victims. It focuses on public policy and has separate programs on—among other things--violence against children, teens and immigrant women, as well as workplace violence. Its website includes a footnoted fact sheet on the issue.

Domestic Violence Courts

This links to a backgrounder on Domestic Violence Courts, an innovation begun in New York in 1996. Some 300 of the specialized courts are now in operation across the nation.

Bureau of Justice Statistics

Washington, D.C.

(202) 307-0765

This web page of the BJS, a bureau of the U.S. Department of Justice, includes links to a number of BJS reports, backgrounders and statistics on intimate partner violence, including victim and offender characteristics and trends. A 2006 BJS study concluded that intimate partner violence had declined 50 percent from 1993 to 2004. The author of the study was a BJS researcher, Shannan Catalano, (202) 616-3502 or shannan.catalano@usdoj.gov.

American Bar Association

Commission on Domestic Violence

Washington, D.C.

Robin Runge, director

(202) 662-1000
http://www.abanet.org/domviol/

The commission provides support to attorneys representing victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking, including such things as research assistance, model pleadings and access to experts.

Introduction to Domestic Violence