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Detroit has had five police chiefs in five years, and each made essentially the same promises on assuming command of the Detroit Police Department: lowering the crime rate, emphasizing community policing, and putting more officers on patrol. How might new Chief James Craig differ from his predecessors, asks the Detroit News. Unlike previous chiefs, Craig has experience turning around troubled police departments, experts said, which could help him succeed where others fell short.
"He's done more than just talk about it; he's gotten out there and proven himself," said city manager Milton Dohoney of Cincinnati, where Craig has been chief for two years. "He hit the ground running, went out and engaged rank-and-file officers, and proved he was a good listener. He was perceived as fair, and he boosted officer morale." Craig, 56, began patrolling Detroit's 10th Precinct in 1977. He spent 28 years in the Los Angeles Police Department before serving as chief in Portland, Me., and Cincinnati. Ex-New York City and Los Angeles chief William Bratton said Craig has an attribute not shared by recent chiefs other than Jerry Oliver: He was hired from outside Detroit. "He was part of the turnaround" in Los Angeles, Bratton said.
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Gov. Jerry Brown and his top state prison official are about to find out how mad they've made the three federal judges overseeing California's overcrowded prison system, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Lawyers for prison inmates yesterday asked the three-judge panel to find Brown and Jeffrey Beard, the state's corrections chief, in contempt for failing to comply with orders requiring the administration to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for reducing the prison population.
Citing "willful defiance" by the governor and his staff, the inmates' lawyers argue the federal court must take strong action to force the state to shed another 10,000 inmates to cut the prison population to about 110,000 at the end of this year. The federal judges previously found California's prisons so overcrowded that they deny adequate medical and mental health care to inmates. The inmates' lawyers want judges to order the state to release more low risk prisoners to solve the overcrowding. Brown said this week he is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Republicans have a message for federal safety regulators who want to lower the legal alcohol limit for drivers dramatically: Washington needs to butt out, Politico reports. GOP leaders on Capitol Hill said the legal limit on blood-alcohol content should be left to state legislatures, not bureaucrats and politicians in Washington. While the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendations are nonbinding, Republicans are warning the government against withholding federal funding from — or offering financial incentives to — states to prod them to adopt tougher drunken driving laws.
“I think it’s a state issue,” declared Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), a member of the Commerce Committee and the GOP leadership team. Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, concurred: “That would be a state issue — that would be my belief.” Tying federal highway dollars to states’ drunken driving laws is a bipartisan practice that goes back decades. The Reagan administration used the threat of lost money to get states to raise their drinking age to 21 in the 1980s, and Congress used similar leverage to prod states to reduce the blood-alcohol threshold to 0.08 percent in the past decade. Still, federal meddling with state dollars has often been described as “blackmail or bribery,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY.)
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The National Rifle Association will sue to block a Maryland gun-control law being signed today by Gov. Martin O’Malley, said by the Washington Post to be on the nation's strictest, the Washington Post reports. It bans the sale of nearly all semi-automatic rifles, plus magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, and requires new gun buyers to submit digital fingerprints to state police.
Supporters will go on the offensive with a television ad campaign designed to build public support for the new law. Ahead of a 2014 election in which every member of Maryland’s General Assembly will be up for reelection, the ad is designed to blunt criticism from would-be contenders hoping to use the legislation as a campaign issue. It’s also a way, proponents said, to demonstrate to lawmakers in less-blue states as well as in Congress that a vote for gun control can be a winning one.
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Heroin is inching back in Florida, the unintended consequence of the state’s epic war on prescription pills, says the Miami Herald. With Florida officials successfully slowing the supplies, shutting down the pill mills that masqueraded as pain centers and arresting thousands of addicts and even doctors, heroin has become a popular substitute. In January, researchers from across the U.S. met in New Mexico at the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Community Epidemiology Work Group conference and swapped frighteningly similar stories about the increased use of heroin. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale region was named one of the regions facing the heroin trend.
“The major drug headline of 2012 was the emergence of heroin both in urban centers and small cities and towns,’’ said epidemiologist and drug expert Jim Hall of Nova Southeastern University’s Center for Applied Research on Substance Abuse and Health Disparities. “Young adults, 18 to 30, white, prescription opioid addicts are making the transition to heroin.” While the raw numbers remain small in Florida and police have seen little street activity, experts are mounting a campaign to slow the trend, from public education about the risks of heroin and needle injection to law enforcement presentations about a Good Samaritan law designed to stop drug overdoses.
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Raised with two sisters by a single mom, Chris Johnson of the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens heard all about the violence that often surrounds women while he was growing up. He never thought much about it until his sister was struck down by multiple gunshot wounds to her chest and head by a man who said he loved her, says the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.
As a result, Johnson started Showtime 37, a nonprofit organization that helps connect victims of domestic violence with resources that can help them break free from their abusers. “I just wanted to be one of the voices that showed a way out,” Johnson said. “You see too many cases of men killing women just like what happened to my sister. A real man doesn’t like to see another man put his hands on a woman.” Eugene Esters, 48, the man convicted last week of murdering Johnson’s sister, will serve a life prison sentence. Chris Johnson’s wife, Mioshi, also joined the cause to break the cycle of violence after her sister-in-law’s death.
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USA Today reports that states should reduce the blood-alcohol level that qualifies as drunken driving to 0.05 percent to reduce fatal crashes, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended Tuesday. The risk of a crash at 0.05 percent is about half as much as at 0.08 percent, the limit in all states, according to a safety board report released Tuesday. Impaired driving remains "one of the biggest killers in the United States," said Deborah Hersman, the NTSB chairman. "To make a bold difference will require bold action. But it can be done."
But the board makes only recommendations to states and the federal government, and can't make laws or regulations. The Governors Highway Safety Association supports the current alcohol threshold. "When the limit was .10, it was very difficult to get it lowered to .08," said Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the governors group. "We don't expect any state to go to .05."
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In ground-breaking action, the Los Angeles Unified school board voted Tuesday to ban suspensions of defiant students, directing officials to use alternative disciplinary practices instead, reports the Los Angeles Times. The action comes amid mounting national concern that removing students from school is imperiling their academic achievement and disproportionately harming minority students, particularly African Americans.
The action marks a decisive step back from "zero tolerance" policies that swept the nation after the Columbine school shooting in Colorado more than a decade ago. But as harsh school discipline policies took hold, studies in Texas and elsewhere found that suspensions did not lead to better behavior but were linked to poor academic achievement and run-ins with law enforcement. African Americans are disproportionately affected — accounting for 26 percent of those suspended in L.A. Unified in 2010-11 although they made up 9 percent of the student population.
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The Kansas Legislature has closed most criminal records to the public--records that are readily available in most other states, reports the Kansas City Star. The Kansas law goes so far as to make it a misdemeanor crime for a law enforcement agency or prosecutor to release those records without a judge’s order. “I know of no other states where these records can be closed forever,” said Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, a nonprofit that works to protect the public’s right to open government.
Several law enforcement officials in Kansas said the records are closed to protect the rights of the accused and to keep publicity from tainting a jury. In addition, the records may contain the name of a confidential informant or investigation techniques such as wiretapping that police want to keep secret. Johnson County District Attorney Stephen Howe said that if certain information is released it could subject people to harm or death. As in national security matters, “Most people would say, ‘We don’t need to know,’” he said. But several state legislators interviewed did not realize how restrictive Kansas law is regarding criminal records and said the Legislature needs to revamp the law.
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Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky explores the crime "fear factor" in America. He writes, "America is nearly as safe as your mother's arms. Violent crime has dropped by 50 percent since 1993, and gun homicide is down the same - 3.2 gun deaths per 100,000 Americans in 2011, contrasted with 6.6 in 1993, according to FBI statistics. There were actually more gun suicides (18,735) than homicides (11,493) in 2009, the last year reported.
"We are living in the safest times since the 1960s - and the plummeting gun-murder rate happened without new federal gun-control laws. This is not to argue against them: As a gun owner, I strongly supported the criminal-background check. These are facts, whether you find them convenient or not. A recent Pew Research poll found that only 12 percent of Americans think gun violence has decreased. If America is safer, why don't we feel safer?"
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