History > 2006 > USA > Police

Seven New Orleans officers

indicted in post-Katrina killings

Updated 12/28/2006
8:22 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Seven police officers were indicted Thursday on murder or attempted murder charges in a pair of shootings on a bridge that left two people dead during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The district attorney portrayed the officers as trigger happy.

"We cannot allow our police officers to shoot and kill our citizens without justification like rabid dogs," District Attorney Eddie Jordan said.

The shootings took place under murky circumstances six days after the storm and became one of the most widely cited examples of the anarchy that descended after Katrina.

Two young men were killed and four people wounded on the Danziger Bridge, which spans the Industrial Canal.

At the time, the sweltering city was still littered with corpses as rescuers tried to evacuate stranded residents and looters ransacked stores.

Police initially said the Sept. 4, 2005, shootings occurred after shots were fired at Army Corps of Engineers workers.

Defense attorneys said their clients are innocent.

"As a wise man once said, a district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich," said Franz Zibilich, attorney for officer Robert Faulcon, who is charged with murder. "They heard only one side of the story."

After hearing weeks of testimony, the grand jury deliberated for two hours Thursday before issuing the charges. The foreman of the panel, Lee Madare, declined to comment in detail as he left the courthouse but asked a reporter, "Do you understand the word coverup?"

A spokesman for Mayor Ray Nagin declined to comment on the indictments. Police Superintendent Warren Riley and a police department spokeswoman did not immediately return messages from The Associated Press.

According to a police report, several officers responded to a radio call that two fellow officers had been hurt. When they arrived, seven people were seen running, and four began firing at police, the report said. The officers returned fire.

The victims were Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally retarded man, and James Brissette, 19. The coroner said Madison was shot seven times, with five wounds in the back.

In addition to Faulcon, police Sgt. Kenneth Bowen and officers Anthony Villavaso and Robert Gisevius were charged with murder. Officers Robert Barrios, Mike Hunter and Ignatius Hills were charged with attempted murder.

    Seven New Orleans officers indicted in post-Katrina killings, UT, 28.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-28-police-charged_x.htm

Many Origins but One Pledge: To Protect and Serve the City

December 27, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

Afghanistan, Albania, Argentina, Australia.

That’s where the latest crop of New York City police officers comes from.

Also Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize and Bosnia, along with some 50 other countries.

The 1,359 police cadets who graduated in yesterday’s ceremony at Madison Square Garden included 284 immigrants, who hailed from a record number of 58 nations , including Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador and Egypt, police officials said.

“The Police Department, more than any other city agency, reflects the diversity of the city it serves,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

At the very least, New Yorkers from El Salvador, France, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, and Honduras can boast that one of their countrymen (or women) is among the newest of New York’s finest. So can Indians, Indonesians, Israelis, Italians, Jamaicans, Kazakhs and Kuwaitis.

Several of the officers became citizens only a few months before entering the police academy, like Phat It, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his family fled Cambodia.

“Whether you trace your heritage to Pakistan or Parkchester, to the Dominican Republic or Ditmas Park, you all love our country and you all love our city,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told the graduates.

The department is growing more diverse by other measures, too. About 28 percent of the new officers are Hispanic, 17 percent are black, and 8 percent are Asian, the police said. About 18 percent are women.

The department also announced yesterday that its police academy had just become the first in one of the nation’s biggest cities to be accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, which certifies training academies all over North America.

The Dominican Republic was the best-represented foreign country in the new class, with 55 new officers. The rookies also included one each from Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Myanmar, Nigeria, Romania, South Africa, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Venezuela, Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia. (Cadets from the islands of Taiwan and St. Croix were also sworn in.)

At the end of the ceremony, the graduates — including members from Montenegro, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom — tossed their white gloves in the air and shuffled to the stage in time with the kilted bagpipers from the Emerald Society Pipes and Drum Band.

The band could be seen as an odd choice. There were no new officers from Ireland.

    Many Origins but One Pledge: To Protect and Serve the City, NYT, 27.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/nyregion/27police.html

Police ID Girl Found Dead Years Ago

December 25, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- From the moment the girl's body was found stuffed in a duffel bag nearly four years ago, her image haunted detective Scott Dudek -- her feminine pajama pants, the single ankle sock decorated with snowflakes, the butterfly clip in her hair.

Yet so much was missing -- she had no identification, and no one had filed a missing person report.

''We had this beautiful child, and no one was coming forth to claim her,'' Dudek said. ''But you knew instantaneously this was someone's little girl.''

The FBI's crime database lists about 6,000 unidentified victims nationally. Some of them have gone unclaimed for decades. But something about the girl abandoned among the weeds behind a Castro Valley diner struck a cord with Dudek and his team at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department.

For the next three years and eight months, the detectives spent long days and thousands of dollars tracking her identity. The teen known as ''Jane Doe'' became ''their girl,'' and the case's ups and downs took an emotional toll. Dudek's wife asked him to stop discussing the case over Christmas.

But the investigators' persistence paid off. Last week, DNA results gave their victim a name: Yesenia Becerra Nungaray.

Interviews with her mother allowed detectives a glimpse into her life: the doe-eyed teenager had an adventurous streak but was close to her family. She left her small, quiet town in Mexico for the United States on March 14, 2003 -- her 16th birthday.

In calls home, she begged her mother to join her, saying even her worst days in the United States were better than her greatest days at home, Dudek said.

Yet six weeks after she left, she was dead.

The detectives were called when the restaurant's employees found a body wrapped in plastic and folded into a green duffel bag on May 1, 2003.

She had been dead for days -- likely asphyxiated with a rag found lodged in her throat. At 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds, she seemed young, somewhere between 12 and 18 years old.

Investigators got to work.

''We felt this was a good kid,'' Dudek said. ''We were doing everything we could.''

They rounded up specialists, who donated their time to examine her bones and her teeth. They had her DNA tested.

They reached out to the community and neighboring police departments, looking into their missing persons reports, eventually checking almost 300 missing girl cases nationwide.

No one had reported her missing.

But the community rallied around her, and the girl without a name was buried under a marker reading ''Unknown Child of God'' in a funeral paid for by nearly 100 people. Dozens attended the ceremony, though none of them likely knew her.

Dudek got a lead in February 2004 while reading an article that mentioned the hundreds of unsolved disappearances of young women along the border with Mexico.

He and other investigators traveled to El Paso, Texas, and met with mothers yearning for news of their missing daughters. They took eight DNA samples from cases that seemed related and waited weeks for the results.

None matched.

In June 2006, the county offered a $50,000 reward for relevant information, adding to the $5,000 reward from the Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation. County Supervisor Gail Steele said she was moved by the death of a child who had no one to mourn her.

The leads flowed in, and investigators hit on a major development.

An undocumented immigrant, Miguel Angel Nunez Castaneda, had apparently lived in Hayward with the victim. He is not a suspect, but is considered a ''person of interest'' and is being sought by police.

Detectives suspected the girl, like Nunez, might be from Yahualica, a small town of 35,000 in the Mexican state of Jalisco where the majority of families have relatives in the United States.

They again made the trip south, taking with them fliers bearing the girl's likeness, and her story, as they knew it, printed in Spanish. For three days, they spread the word to residents.

It paid off.

One of the fliers landed in the hands of Maria Del Carmen, a mother of three whose middle child, her only daughter, had left for the United States. At first she called regularly. One day her calls stopped.

On their last day in Mexico, the detectives visited Del Carmen and talked to her into the night, looking through pictures and sharing their story, Dudek said.

They learned enough to believe they'd hit on the right family. But they needed a DNA test to confirm their hunch.

Last week, they got their answer. The girl's mother was devastated.

''It's sad, but at least now she knows,'' Dudek said.

Del Carmen was moved to learn how a community of strangers had come to care for her daughter, dedicating years to investigate her death and giving her a dignified burial, he said.

Now the officers are raising money to move Yesenia's body back to Mexico so she can be buried near her family. And they're gearing up for the next step: finding her killer.

''We've got this monster out there who killed her and dumped her like she was a bag of trash,'' Dudek said. ''I always felt confident that once we identified her, we'd find her killer.''

    Police ID Girl Found Dead Years Ago, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jane-Doe-Identified.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Ask a Policeman

December 24, 2006
The New York Times
By PETER NEUFELD

AFTER the Nov. 25 police shooting death of Sean Bell, the New York Police Department compiled a preliminary report. The 23-page report summarizes interviews of officers who did not directly participate in the critical encounter, of civilians who heard the gunfire but saw little and even one of Mr. Bell’s two wounded friends, questioned by the police as he lay in his hospital bed. Astonishingly, the report does not include a single interview with any of the four detectives and one police officer who fired the 50 shots at the three unarmed men.

Richard Brown, the Queens district attorney, noted that the report raises as many questions as it answers. But what does he expect when the report contains no interview with the shooters? Not only does this institutional failure make it extremely difficult to get a conviction in the event that a crime occurred, but it also minimizes the ability of the police internal affairs division to discipline police officers for their transgressions.

Good policing and common sense are deliberately ignored when the shooters are officers rather than civilians, as I know from representing Abner Louima and other victims of police misconduct. Not only do police suspects receive far greater protection than the rest of us, but our Police Department and the city’s five district attorneys, inexplicably, afford greater protection to officers than do the police and prosecutors in any other major city in the nation.

In the typical shooting incident where the police know who was involved but not how the shooting happened, investigators are trained to immediately separate and question suspects and participants, preventing those involved from getting together and devising a shared story. A good detective does not necessarily expect a quick confession, but even a superficially exculpatory statement, voluntarily given, can later be used to prosecute if the details of the denial are contradicted by other, more persuasive evidence.

In the 1997 Abner Louima case, preferential treatment bought time for the few bad officers to meet in the basement of the precinct and concoct a story that Mr. Louima had injured himself in the performance of a consensual sex act. In 1999, immediately after Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times, instead of isolating the four officers, their union delegates accompanied them — as a group — to the hospital so they could be treated for ringing in their ears. They spent the next several hours together.

Eventually a narrative emerged, one that was parroted by all four. They all claimed to be looking for a rapist who had been on the run for years. They all believed Mr. Diallo, perhaps in the act of removing his house keys to enter his home, was reaching for a gun. And they all mistakenly believed that when one of their own tripped and fell, Mr. Diallo had shot him, justifying the fusillade of shots.

Of course, we don’t know yet what narrative will be offered by the officers who fired their guns in the Bell case. But we do know that before they utter a single word on the record, they will have had the opportunity to scrutinize every word in the preliminary report and review every finding of the crime scene unit and ballistics team. Indeed, they will know all of this before the case is even presented to a grand jury.

The most infamous obstacle to police questioning had been the notorious 48-hour rule, which gave New York City police officers two business days to retain counsel before they could be questioned. But this rule (recently eliminated by the city), along with other procedural protections, apply only to administrative investigations. They do not govern — and hence cannot pose an obstacle to — investigations into suspected criminal misconduct. In practice it is not the rules of the Police Department that compromise investigations, but rather the orders of the five city prosecutors prohibiting anyone at the department from questioning officers in shootings where crime is suspected. Prosecutors want to be the only ones to question the shooters. That is why the police investigators who prepared the report never got to talk to the people with the most useful information.

Their rationale for this strategy is a 1967 United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that statements made by New Jersey police officers, who had been questioned under threat of dismissal, could not be used against them in a later criminal case. But today in New Jersey, and in almost all large cities, officers who fire their guns are asked, without delay, to give an explanation. The courts have repeatedly held that unless there is an express threat of dismissal, the answers to questions will be admissible in a criminal case. And, even if the statement can’t be introduced in a criminal proceeding, it can be used as the basis for disciplining the officer.

In 1998, when two white New Jersey state troopers fired 11 bullets into the car of four unarmed black and Hispanic college students, the officers were questioned on tape within a couple of hours of the shooting. Their description of where they were standing when they fired was subsequently contradicted by the scientific evidence and provided the basis for a grand jury indictment.

Even if the Queens prosecutors are justified in keeping the questioning of the policemen to themselves, there is simply no reason to put off the interviews. Their purported justification — to wait until all the other evidence has been analyzed — is wanting. There is no rule against multiple interviews. Indeed, it is not unusual for detectives to interview participants several times as new facts emerge in the investigation.

Certainly, police officers should receive no less constitutional protection than we all enjoy. If asked, they can invoke their right to remain silent. But like 80 percent of Americans, including the state troopers in New Jersey, they are likely to waive that right and offer an explanation. It is unconscionable that on the one hand it is O.K. to question a man riddled with bullets and lying in a hospital bed, but it is not all right to simply ask the uninjured officers what happened.

Peter Neufeld is a civil rights lawyer.

    Ask a Policeman, NYT, 24.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/opinion/24neufeld.html

Protesters Denounce Police Killing

December 17, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

A protest march cut a solemn swath through crowds of Christmas shoppers and the joyous mood of the holiday season in Midtown Manhattan yesterday in a rebuke to the police for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Queens on his wedding day last month.

Three weeks after Sean Bell was killed and two friends were wounded in a hail of 50 police bullets, a coalition of civil rights groups, elected officials, community leaders, clergymen and others marched down Fifth Avenue and across 34th Street in a “silent” protest that sputtered scattered chants, but was largely devoid of shrieks, speeches and most of the usual sound-and-fury tactics of demonstrations.

Billed as a “Shopping for Justice” march and led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, the army of protesters, many carrying placards, moved grim-faced between hordes of holiday shoppers and tourists clogging the sidewalks of two of the city’s busiest commercial arteries.

The police had set up metal barricades to confine the marchers to a single traffic lane, but the throng quickly swelled beyond expectations and the barricades were shifted to widen the line of march to four of the five lanes on Fifth Avenue and five of the six on 34th Street. Traffic on side streets leading to the march was halted as the protesters swept on.

Here and there, marchers shouted “No shopping, no justice,” or “Shot” and numbers from 1 to 50. Others carried signs proclaiming: “Stop NYPD Racist Terror,” and “Justice for Sean Bell.” But most stared straight ahead, ignoring those on the other side of the barricades.

The size of the protest, strung out for 10 blocks, was anybody’s guess. The organizers said thousands marched. The police, as is customary, gave no estimate. In any case, there were no confrontations, arrests or untoward incidents during the march, the police said.

“We’re not coming to buy toys, we’re not coming to buy trinkets — we’re coming to shop for justice,” Mr. Sharpton, a man never at a loss for words, said at a morning rally in Harlem, explaining what could not be said in a nonverbal march. “Our presence is a bigger statement than anything we could ever say with our mouths.”

In Midtown, shoppers gawked. Tourists snapped pictures and wondered what it was all about. Salvation Army carolers sang on, and the protesters, who had been admonished repeatedly by organizers to remain silent, kept discipline only in the front ranks, where members of Congress, the Legislature, the City Council and other V.I.P.s marched alongside a stone-faced Mr. Sharpton.

“It’s New York, you always see crazy things,” Margaret Rajnik, a nurse from Atlantic City, said at Rockefeller Center, where mobs of shoppers jammed the plaza in front of the skating rink, the giant Christmas tree and the golden Prometheus.

A sampling of shoppers found many against the protest. “We just came here to go shopping at the American Girl store and go see the Rockettes,” said Cherrie Ostigui, 38, of Odenton, Md. “Now we can’t even cross the street to get our lunch.”

Steve Diomopoulos, 22, a student from Livonia, Mich., called it “a weird time to be doing this,” and added: “It’s an inconvenience to people like myself who came from out of town and want to get some Christmas shopping done. It’s almost like a hostile atmosphere. I don’t think that’s what people came here to see.”

But Seleah Bussey, 22, a Brooklyn College student, said, “I think it’s good because it’s a tourist area and tourists need to know what’s really happening.”

Mr. Sharpton, who called the Queens shooting a case of excessive force, said the march was a moral appeal to the city to change police policies.

Hours before he was to be married on Nov. 25, Mr. Bell was killed and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, were wounded in a barrage of police bullets as they left a bachelor party at a strip club. The police, conducting an undercover operation at the club, said they believed the victims were going to get a gun, and opened fire when the men’s car hit an officer and an unmarked police minivan.

Mr. Bell and his friends were black; the officers were white, Hispanic and black. No guns were found among the victims, and while the police say they are examining reports that a fourth man who ran away may have had a gun, the case has generated vigils and protests that culminated in yesterday’s march.

Besides the complaints of annoyed shoppers, the march generated two negative responses that were aimed at Mr. Sharpton.

Before the march, Steven A. Pagones, a former assistant prosecutor in Dutchess County who won a defamation suit against Mr. Sharpton and two others in 1998, showed up near the marchers’ rendezvous point to remind reporters that he had been falsely accused of being one of a group of white men who abducted and raped a black teenager, Tawana Brawley, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., in 1987. The case stirred racial tensions nationally, but was investigated by a grand jury and found to be a hoax.

“I want people to understand that for years he’s made reckless allegations in furtherance of his own agenda,” Mr. Pagones said of Mr. Sharpton.

Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, also cited Mr. Sharpton’s role in that matter. “I think it’s all about credibility, something the Rev. Al had forsaken a long time ago in the Tawana Brawley case,” Mr. Palladino said. “He’s trying to deny our police officers their civil rights and due process. But in the end, a grand jury will hear the evidence and they’ll come to a decision.”

The protesters, many of whom arrived in buses from Queens, Brooklyn and elsewhere, were joined by Representative Charles B. Rangel, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., and other politicians; by the singer Harry Belafonte; by leaders and members of the N.A.A.C.P.; the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network; and relatives and friends of Mr. Bell, Mr. Guzman and Mr. Benefield.

The group included Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre, who has taken the surname Bell, and one of their two children, Jada, 4, and Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant sodomized with a broomstick by a police officer in a station house nine years ago. Mr. Benefield rode in a wheelchair, but Mr. Guzman, shot numerous times, remained at a rehabilitation center.

There were chants and speeches from Mr. Sharpton and others as the crowd assembled at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, but the exhortations ended as the protesters stepped off in early afternoon, heading down a Fifth Avenue decked out for the season.

The line of march led down a parade of elegant stores, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Rockefeller Center, where a Salvation Army vocalist sang sweet carols. Giant illuminated snowflakes graced the facade of Saks.

Lower down the avenue, the marchers encountered sparser crowds shopping for sneakers and sweatshirts.

The march ended at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue, outside Macy’s. There, Sonia Fatimah, 50, one of the marchers, yelled at a black officer. “I hope they’re not profiling your son right now, Sergeant,” she said.

Mr. Sharpton and members of the Bell family ducked into the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania nearby and waited for the crowd to disperse. Many other protesters, perhaps unaware the proceedings were over, tried to join them inside. There was some pushing and a brief scuffle broke out between some followers and news photographers, but it quickly subsided.

Later, about 150 followers of the radical New Black Panther Party burned an American flag at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue and heaped verbal abuse on a contingent of police officers. But there were no clashes or arrests.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Confessore, Cassi Feldman, Daryl Khan, Rachel Metz and Anthony Ramirez.

    Protesters Denounce Police Killing, NYT, 17.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/nyregion/17protest.html

Police Shooting Reunites Circle of Common Loss

December 2, 2006
The New York Times
By SARAH KERSHAW

The bus from Miami rolled into the Port Authority station at 6:25 p.m. Thursday, 28 hours after Marie Rose Dorismond set out for New York City, alone on her grim pilgrimage.

It was not the first time she had returned to the place she fled after her only son, Patrick M. Dorismond, was killed at age 26 by the police in 2000; she comes back every Feb. 28, on his birthday, and stays through March 16, the day he was shot in a scuffle with undercover detectives only a few blocks from the bus station. He is buried in Queens.

This time, clutching a rolling suitcase and three sets of neatly pressed dress clothes on hangers, Mrs. Dorismond was returning for the funeral of Sean Bell, the 23-year-old bridegroom who died in Queens on Saturday in a storm of 50 police bullets.

And in doing so, she returned to join again what amounts to an anguished club: the widening circle of unintended friends made up of the relatives of those killed by the police in the city’s streets.

She was here to make herself available to the Bell family, people she had never met but who felt to her like instant sisters and brothers. And when she could not find a flight that would get her to New York on time, Mrs. Dorismond, 59, traveling alone for the first time, decided to take a Greyhound bus.

“I don’t know what I would have done without them,” Mrs. Dorismond, a Haitian immigrant who came to New York at 18 to study nursing, said of the relatives of Amadou Diallo and others who died in encounters with the police. “Nobody can understand that pain but me, Mrs. Diallo and the others. When it was my turn, everybody came.”

They had come and been there for her, rushing to her side to introduce themselves — at her son’s wake, at his funeral, at the protests on the streets. Amadou Diallo’s mother, Malcolm Ferguson’s mother, Nicholas Heyward Jr.’s father, Abner Louima himself.

At Sean Bell’s wake yesterday, in a crowded church in Jamaica, Queens, Mrs. Dorismond was weeping in the second row of pews, only a few feet from the open coffin, when Amadou Diallo’s mother, Kadiatou, arrived. Mrs. Dorismond rushed to her friend, the two hugged for several minutes, and Mrs. Dorismond shouted: “Again? Again? Again?”

As hundreds of people passed through the church to view the coffin, a crowd of protesters ebbed and flowed on the streets outside, swelling to about 500 people by the time the funeral was over and Mr. Bell’s coffin was carried out of the church at 8:30 p.m. Many held signs that said, “Justice for Sean Bell,” and demonstrators denounced police brutality over loudspeakers, but the event was largely peaceful.

It was Mrs. Dorismond’s first such funeral since her son was killed, but others, like Nicholas Heyward, whose son was killed in 1994, could count off half a dozen.

In addition to his son, 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr., who was playing with a toy gun when he was killed by a housing officer in Brooklyn, recent victims of violent encounters with the police included Amadou Diallo, killed in a hail of 41 bullets in the Bronx; Malcolm Ferguson, a drug suspect whose death came only five days after officers were acquitted in Mr. Diallo’s death; Gidone Busch, a mentally ill man killed by the police in Brooklyn; Patrick Dorismond, killed by an undercover narcotics detective in Manhattan; and Sean Bell, killed in Queens when five undercover detectives opened fire on his car.

In the days before Mr. Bell’s funeral, the anguished club’s grapevine was in full operation: Mrs. Dorismond heard, but was not positive, that Mrs. Diallo, whose son was killed in 1999, would come from Maryland.

Mrs. Diallo, meanwhile, was in close contact with the mothers of Gidone Busch, whom she speaks to every month, and Timothy Stansbury Jr., an unarmed man killed in 2004, but neither was able to attend the Bell funeral.

Mr. Heyward had said he was going and was pleased to hear that Mrs. Dorismond was coming. Juanita Young, whose son Malcolm Ferguson was killed in 2000, told Mr. Heyward, now a very close friend, that she really wanted to go, but he talked her out of it because she had just been released from the hospital.

“I know what the families are going through right now,” Mr. Heyward had said before the funeral. “It’s really, really tough right now. Right now they are completely lost. Sometimes you may think they are all right, but they are completely lost.”

Mrs. Dorismond recalled feeling exactly that way in the chaotic and surreal days after her son’s death, which a grand jury found to be unintentional and which resulted in no charges against the officer.

There was also the overlaying public spectacle, with protests at her son’s funeral erupting in violence and dozens of people being arrested. There were marches, with the Rev. Al Sharpton by Mrs. Dorismond’s side, the constant glare of television cameras, a public battle between the Dorismonds and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and Mrs. Dorismond’s and Mrs. Diallo’s meeting with Gov. George E. Pataki.

Two weeks after her son died, Mrs. Dorismond, a retired pediatric nurse, said she was looking out the window of her fourth-floor apartment in East Flatbush, where she had lived for 30 years, and saw a dead body on the building’s steps. Mrs. Dorismond and her husband, André, a well-known singer among Haitians whom fans called the “Haitian Frank Sinatra,” had already decided to move to Florida, where they were building a house.

The body, appearing so soon after their son’s death, persuaded them to leave New York as quickly as possible, and they settled in the quiet town of Port St. Lucie with their daughter, Marie, 35, and one of Patrick Dorismond’s two daughters, Infinity, now 11.

As she made her way from the bus terminal to a friend’s car on Thursday and rode to Brooklyn, where she is staying with a brother in East Flatbush, Mrs. Dorismond’s anger boiled up. With every passing police car, every sound of a siren, she fumed.

“You might as well stay away,” Mrs. Dorismond said. “You cannot live with Satan. New York City is like a jungle place.”

Mr. Dorismond’s other daughter, Destiny, 7, is living with her mother in New York. The city settled a civil lawsuit in the case and paid the family $2.25 million. Mrs. Dorismond said all the money was in a trust fund for her son’s daughters, who will be allowed access to what she estimated would grow to $10 million only after they turn 25.

Mrs. Dorismond, who spent yesterday morning on Flatbush Avenue having her nails and hair done for the Sean Bell funeral, said that both of the girls talked about wanting to become police officers, “so they can find out what really happened.”

Infinity seems especially focused on what happened to her father, writing songs that she sings aloud to him, asking her aunt and grandmother all kinds of questions.

“I am young and I don’t know,” begins one of Infinity’s songs. “I’m going to be a police, I want to know how they killed you.”

For a while, her aunt said, Infinity worried about what her father was wearing when he was buried.

“Did my daddy have shoes on his feet when he was in the box?” she asked her aunt.

“No shoes, I don’t think so,” Ms. Dorismond replied. “But he was buried in a cream suit.”

Sean Bell was buried in a pinstriped suit, and yesterday Mrs. Dorismond and Mrs. Diallo spent four hours sitting next to each other, catching up — Mrs. Diallo is now the grandmother of triplets; Mrs. Dorismond has retired — and watching mourners file by the coffin.

When Mr. Bell’s mother, Valerie, approached her son’s body, Mrs. Dorismond burst into tears and laid her head on Mrs. Diallo’s shoulder.

A few minutes later Mrs. Dorismond and Mrs. Diallo walked over to the next pew, introduced themselves to Ms. Bell and said they were sorry. The three of them hugged, and Ms. Bell told the two other mothers she was sorry, too, for their losses.

When they returned to their seats, Mrs. Diallo said, “She’s numb.”

Mrs. Dorismond said, “I know.”

    Police Shooting Reunites Circle of Common Loss, 2.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/nyregion/02victims.html?hp&ex=1165122000&en=cf09d9b4869a4091&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Arizona cop had men rap away ticket

Updated 12/1/2006 9:35 PM ET
By Amanda Lee Myers, Associated Press
USA Today

TEMPE, Ariz. — City leaders have apologized after a program on Tempe's cable channel showed a white police officer telling two black men they could get out of a littering ticket by performing a rap.

Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman and Police Chief Tom Ryff apologized for the show Thursday and suspended its future production after black community leaders voiced outrage and disappointment.

"I accept responsibility for the actions of my staff and apologize to any members of our community who have been offended," Ryff said during a news conference Friday.

The segment appeared on Tempe StreetBeat, a program produced by police in the Phoenix suburb that followed several officers on patrol. It shows Sgt. Chuck Schoville pulling over two men in August in a mall parking lot.

He first asks for a name and ID from the driver and then asks the two men if they know how much the fine is for littering.

The officer then tells the men that they can avoid getting a littering ticket "if the two of you just do a little rap about — what do you want to do a rap about? Littering? About the dangers of littering."

The two men agree, and each performs a short rap, laughing afterward. One says, "The dangers of littering, you will get a ticket. If you ain't wit' it, you better be experienced."

The second man raps, "Yo, I just got pulled over 'cause I threw my trash out the window when they rolled over. They got behind me and pulled me over."

Later, Schoville talks football with the men, one of whom agrees with his prediction that the Oakland Raiders will make it to the Super Bowl this year.

Schoville then says, "You know why you say I'm right? Because I got a gun and badge. I'm always right. That's the way it works, right?" The three laugh and the two men get in their car.

Leaders of chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Action Network expressed outrage and demanded that the city act.

The Rev. Jarrett Maupin of the National Action Network, who was at Friday's news conference, said he had accepted Hallman's and Ryff's apologies and intends to make sure the police department makes good on a proposal for an African American advisory board and increased diversity training.

"It's important for police officers to realize that black people do not speak hip hop," Maupin said. "We're not all rappers and thugs and gangbangers. We speak the English language and we're entitled to the same amount of respect."

Ryff said the department is investigating how the video got on the air, who watched it and who edited it. He wouldn't discuss whether there would be any punishment for those involved.

The chief said that he hadn't been able to contact Schoville, a 25-year veteran of the Tempe force, because the officer is on vacation. A message was left with the department seeking comment from the sergeant.

Because the men in the video were not cited, Tempe police had no record of their names.

    Arizona cop had men rap away ticket, UT, 1.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-01-ariz-ticket_x.htm

Police Commissioner Looks Ahead, and Back

November 30, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has overseen the streets of New York for the last five years in the style of a global warrior against terrorism. With a self-confidence that strikes some people as imperious, and some as impressive, Mr. Kelly has created a network of police officials overseas, recruited former C.I.A. officers and built a 1,000-member terror unit.

Yet over the last few days, Mr. Kelly has had to return to an earlier, less-novel role: the face of a police department involved in yet another public furor, this one a fatal shooting that has the makings of a combustible controversy involving race, politics and the police use of deadly force.

Mr. Kelly’s role in the investigation and his handling of that shooting in Jamaica, Queens last Saturday, in which a young black bridegroom died, has all but been a flashback to his first tour as commissioner, in 1992 and 1993. Then, as the choice of New York’s first black mayor in the aftermath of confrontations in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. Kelly took charge at a moment of considerable daily violence and raw racial emotion, in a city of metastasizing mistrust between black and Hispanic New Yorkers and police officers.

Those tensions have in some ways eased, and Mr. Kelly’s relationship with police critics like the Rev. Al Sharpton is good enough that the two men talked just hours after the Queens shooting. The commissioner said in an interview: “We have an arms-length relationship, but we’ve dealt with each other for years, and I’ve always found him to be forthright. He is telling it as he sees it, and not being duplicitous in any way. I think he would say the same about me.”

Mr. Kelly also took the more forceful step of putting the five officers who together fired 50 rounds in the 4 a.m. confrontation with the group of young black and Hispanic men on paid administrative leave and stripping them of their weapons.

But the return to this delicate public role as a truly local commissioner also brings new complications for Mr. Kelly, 65. He is routinely discussed in political circles as a possible candidate for mayor in 2009, something he has not ruled out, and his actions are apt to be seen as having potential political consequences.

He is also, for the moment, caught between a mayor who has called the shooting “inexplicable,” an array of black leaders who want answers that Mr. Kelly has yet to deliver, and his own officers.

“This is a tough situation for everybody involved, and especially Ray,” said former Mayor David N. Dinkins, who named Mr. Kelly commissioner more than a decade ago. “He’s a straight arrow and I would expect the best from him. There’s also a lot of people who expect a lot from Ray in this.”

Mr. Kelly said that he is as comfortable as ever being the face of the police in a controversy, though he is not so cocky as to predict outcomes.

“I think you build relationships, and you can go back to other incidents perhaps where people relied on something I’ve said or I’ve done, and hopefully that’s built up a certain level of trust,” Mr. Kelly said. “You hope that is something that is going to play a role.”

“I’ve always prided myself on being forthright and open with the community, and not holding very much back — what you see is what you get with me,” he added.

In the hours after the shooting and since then, Mr. Kelly has been more visible than usual in his take-charge role, and it has been far from simple.

He was at the scene in Queens within hours of the shooting, and spent the day gathering details and sharing them with the mayor’s office, other leaders, and Mr. Sharpton, who was designated as an adviser by the family of the slain man, Sean Bell. Mr. Kelly delivered the city’s explanation of the shooting, at a news conference that night.

The next day, Sunday, Mr. Kelly took the guns from the officers.

“There were, and are, still too many unanswered questions,” Mr. Kelly said in the interview. “It’s a privilege to have a gun; you don’t have a right to have a gun.”

And on Monday, the commissioner calmly answered his critics at a private meeting with black leaders and department critics, including one who called for Mr. Kelly’s resignation. He also found himself standing by as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described the 50 shots that killed Mr. Bell as unacceptable.

Later that day, on an NY1 News political talk show, Mr. Kelly was no longer discussing Qaeda sleeper cells and was instead trying to address all sides in the Queens case.

“The mayor is certainly entitled to his opinion,” he said on NY1. “I think we need an in-depth examination of all the facts. It is unusual to have this number of shots fired.”

Explaining police culture in pithy, made-for-television language is not always a skill commissioners possess, but it is a trademark of Mr. Kelly’s — not to mention a political asset, said Lee Brown, who preceded Mr. Kelly as commissioner under Mr. Dinkins.

“Ray brings, to any issue, his experience as a well-educated, well-trained, well-disciplined former marine who knows how to talk like people talk,” Mr. Brown said. “When things occur, like his work with us in restoring calm in Crown Heights, you can expect him to stand on that foundation.”

Mr. Kelly has earned some praise for sharing information with sometime critics like Mr. Sharpton, even if doing so made him seem unconcerned with irritating some of Mr. Sharpton’s detractors in his department.

Mr. Sharpton had his own blunt way of saying what is still at stake for Mr. Kelly.

“Ray Kelly’s word is seen as good in a lot of our community, but now his word is on trial,” Mr. Sharpton said. “He has to come up with more definitive answers about why this young man was shot and killed in Queens. I think this is the greatest challenge of his career. It could result in Ray Kelly having a halo around his head, or the undoing of a very popular image.”

But there are also skeptics, and there is anger. Complaints about Mr. Kelly this week have boiled down to this: Despite his personal touch, relations between the police and minorities remain in many ways strained, and sometimes explosive.

“Ray Kelly may be the same man who was police commissioner under Mayor Dinkins, but I think he is a different kind of commissioner today, and that worries me,” said the Rev. Charles L. Norris, pastor of Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church, in Jamaica. “I’m not confident anymore that he is solving the problem.”

Mr. Kelly said he has a long history inside the department and as a government official in Washington of improving the culture of agencies, combating racial profiling, and holding his own people accountable. He also said his diplomatic skills in times of crisis have not atrophied in the years that his focus has been pulled toward domestic security, an effort that is without precedent in the department.

He cited the case of Timothy Stansbury Jr., the unarmed 19-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in 2004, as an instance in which, early on, he judged a shooting to be unjustified.

“In the Stansbury case, we had information because of statements from the nonshooting officers, so we put out the information,” Mr. Kelly said. “We don’t have enough information yet in this case. I make a determination about what to say based only on the facts.”

Some observers have said that Mr. Kelly’s recent reimmersion into the world of shootings and racial politics and the perceptions of police officers in southeast Queens, rather than those in Scotland Yard, may have a political payoff if he indeed runs for mayor. Mr. Kelly said he was not thinking about 2009, but declined to flatly rule out a bid. If it is not on Mr. Kelly’s mind, though, his performance this week nevertheless has displayed some political prowess.

“I think the way he conducts himself in front of the press, acting as the objective conveyer of information, while still appealing to everybody to reserve judgment, shows how he would handle a city crisis, political or otherwise,” said Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a nonpartisan group that monitors police policies in New York. “You can’t see every police commissioner as a political candidate, but you can with Ray.”

    Police Commissioner Looks Ahead, and Back, NYT, 30.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/nyregion/30kelly.html?hp&ex=1164949200&en=ea98fbb9488097f7&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Mayor Calls 50 Shots by Police ‘Unacceptable’

November 28, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL and SEWELL CHAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg convened an extraordinary meeting of black religious leaders and elected officials at City Hall yesterday to calm frayed tempers over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in Queens, calling the circumstances “inexplicable” and “unacceptable.”

“It sounds to me like excessive force was used,” the mayor said of the conduct of the officers, who fired 50 shots outside a Queens nightclub early Saturday, killing Sean Bell, 23, hours before he was to be wed, and injuring two others. “I can tell you that it is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired.”

Mr. Bloomberg made the remarks after meeting with some of the city’s most influential black politicians and community leaders, including Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Rev. Al Sharpton and dozens of others.

The mayor’s decision to meet with Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders was a stark turnabout from the approach of Mr. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who did not reach out to black leaders in the immediate aftermath of the fatal 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who died in a hail of 41 police bullets.

Mayor Bloomberg’s blunt assessment of events still under investigation was striking, although he took pains to point out that the facts were not all in, saying several times that he did not yet know what happened in the shooting, but that he expected that a grand jury would be impaneled by the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.

In a move that suggests the officers feel their actions were justified, the lawyer representing the men said he had contacted Mr. Brown’s office and offered to have the officers speak to prosecutors and appear before a grand jury voluntarily without immunity. The police have not released the officers’ names, saying they are trying to protect them from retaliation or harassment.

Philip E. Karasyk, who is a lawyer for the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said, “We feel confident that once all of the facts and circumstances of this tragic incident are known, then our detectives will be exonerated.”

“This was a tragedy, but not a crime,” he said.

Mr. Brown said in a statement that he intended to convene a grand jury to hear evidence in the case. While Mr. Karasyk has represented the four men who are detectives in the preliminary stages of the investigation, three of the four will get new lawyers, possibly as soon as tomorrow, because each must have his own and it remains unclear whether they will pursue the same strategy. The fifth man, an officer, has different representation.

Participants at the private meeting at City Hall, which included Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and several high-ranking Bloomberg aides, described the discussions as frequently heated, with the mayor sitting next to leaders whom he counts as supporters. Those more critical of the administration’s response to the shooting, including Mr. Sharpton and City Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn, sat on the opposite side of the table.

Mr. Bloomberg’s approach of reaching out to community leaders has drawn praise, and he plans to go to southeast Queens today to meet with community leaders there. But his efforts have left some unconvinced that the underlying conflicts between the police and predominantly black communities are being addressed.

“We prefer talking than not talking, but the object is not a conversation, the object is fairness and justice,” Mr. Sharpton said as he left City Hall. “Because we’re not just interested in being treated politely, we’re interested in being treated fairly and rightly. And that will happen when police are held as accountable as anyone else.”

Mr. Bloomberg pledged to do just that, saying that the city would review its policies and training procedures to ensure fair treatment, but he added that he did not believe that the shooting was racially motivated. Of the officers who fired on Mr. Bell’s car, two are black, one is black and Hispanic, and two are white.

“I do not at this point believe that there was anything racially motivated here, but we’ll wait and see whatever the facts are,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “A lot of people feel that this on top of other incidents that have happened in the past is a pattern that is unacceptable. I find that pattern unacceptable as well,” Mr. Bloomberg continued, adding that he saw the shooting as an isolated case.

“There is no evidence that they were doing anything wrong,” he said of the men who were shot, referring to the moments leading up to the confrontation with the police.

Some policies appear to have been violated in the shooting, which occurred when, according to the police, undercover officers fired 50 bullets at Mr. Bell’s car after he drove into one of the officers and an unmarked police van.

Officers are trained to shoot no more than three bullets before pausing to reassess the situation, Mr. Kelly said in his most detailed assessment of the shooting yet. Department policy also largely prohibits officers from firing at vehicles, even when they are being used as weapons.

Although several of the leaders at City Hall expressed confidence in the mayor and the police commissioner, the emotional meeting, which began with outbursts of anger and ended calmly, laid bare some of the rifts among New York’s black leaders themselves. Some expressed support for the mayor’s handling of the case or refrained from criticizing him. Many, however, expressed concerns that the administration was failing to deal with what they described as continuing tensions between black residents and police officers even when the officers are not white.

“There were some heated exchanges,” said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, an influential Pentecostal minister in Brooklyn. “We all agree that there is a pattern of police abuse of power, and this abuse of power ranges from police killing to police brutal behavior to disrespect. We reiterated that over and over again.”

Mr. Daughtry warned the mayor not to confuse patience with complacency. “There is a temperature in our communities that is rising, and the tension is intensifying,” he said. “While we don’t want to try to ignite anything, we’d be blind to overlook what’s happening and not to sound the alarm.”

But other leaders played down the anger in the room, saying that some participants seemed determined to bring up past history or to pursue agendas with little bearing on this specific case.

“There’s always anger after incidents like this and there’s always a lot of people that bring up other incidents,” said City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr. of Queens. “People confuse history, and specific people are concerned about their individual actions.” He added: “You have different people that don’t know each other, there’s always room dynamics, you know, because people come in with different agendas or some people are off topic altogether.”

The shooting happened as the police were undercover in the club, Club Kalua, to investigate reports of prostitution and drug dealing. There was a dispute outside between two groups of men, and one group of three or four left. One undercover officer followed them, believing they might have been going to get a gun before returning to the club. In the officers’ version of events, the undercover officer confronted the men in Mr. Bell’s silver Nissan Altima, and they tried to run him over, prompting the fusillade from him and his backups.

Some of the leaders expressed dismay over Mr. Kelly’s revelation that one of the undercover officers had had two beers in the course of the operation inside the nightclub, but was not given a breath analyzer test. Mr. Kelly said that undercover officers are allowed the two drinks and are not normally tested for intoxication. He said they were deemed fit for duty by their superior.

While the office of Mr. Brown, the Queens district attorney, will oversee the criminal inquiry, the tactics employed by the detectives and their supervisor during the events leading up to the shooting and the shooting itself will also be reviewed by the Police Department. Several people who have been briefed on the detectives’ version of events raised questions about their tactics.

For instance, they said that one undercover officer who had been inside the club without his weapon retrieved it from a police vehicle and then engaged the men in the Altima, even though that task should have been left to the backup team. Mr. Kelly said that sequence of events was unusual.

Saying there was a “grave crisis” of confidence in his southeast Queens community, Bishop Lester Williams, who was to have performed Mr. Bell’s wedding, said there had been no improvement in police-community relations since the height of tensions under Mayor Giuliani.

“It’s Little Iraq, I’m sorry, especially toward the blacks in the community,” he said before attending the meeting. “We don’t feel protected.”

But others said that Mr. Bloomberg had made some progress simply by setting a new tone. “Just the simple fact of meeting, or discussion, or expressing concern and outrage on the part of this administration, was different,” said Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., the city’s top black elected official.

Shortly after 5 p.m., many of the same black leaders who had attended the meeting with Mr. Bloomberg went to a briefing at the Queens County Courthouse with Mr. Brown.

Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre, 22, the mother of their two daughters, arrived with her father and Mr. Bell’s mother, Valerie, and uncle.

Nearly two hours later, Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Bell’s family left, pushing past reporters without saying anything. Several other civic leaders said the meeting had been emotionally difficult, with Ms. Paultre and Ms. Bell bursting into tears. The civic leaders declined to discuss the meeting’s specifics, but said they were satisfied with what they had heard.

While officials met and discussed the case, Mr. Bell’s father, William, 53, stood by his house on a quiet, suburban street near Cambria Heights and said that they were all missing the point.

“It’s more about politics than human life,” he said. Mr. Bloomberg has spoken with Sean Bell’s fiancée and said he plans to visit the family soon, but William Bell said none of the officials had reached out to him.

“At least they could say ‘I’m sorry,’ ” he said. “Say ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to find out what’s going on.’ ”

“He’s gone,” he said of his son. Then, patting over his chest, he added, “Not here in my heart he’s not gone, but he’s gone.”

Daryl Khan, Michelle O’Donnell and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

    Mayor Calls 50 Shots by Police ‘Unacceptable’, NYT, 28.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/nyregion/28shoot.html?hp&ex=1164776400&en=20a135cccb2bda67&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Atlanta Officers Suspended in Inquiry on Killing in Raid

November 28, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN and BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Nov. 27 — The police chief placed all eight members of a narcotics investigation team on leave Monday after a confidential informant said they had asked him to lie during the investigation of the death of an 88-year-old woman, shot and killed by police officers during a drug raid last Tuesday.

Chief Richard J. Pennington said the Federal Bureau of Investigation would investigate the death of the woman, Kathryn Johnston, who was killed after she fired at three officers who breached the door of her small house, with its green shutters and a wheelchair ramp. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is also examining the case.

The informant’s claim fueled more outrage over Ms. Johnston’s death, which had already prompted Chief Pennington to announce a review of the Atlanta Police Department’s policies on the use of no-knock warrants and confidential informants. Since the shooting, civil rights activists and community groups have demanded a federal investigation, saying excessive force was used.

In a news conference Monday afternoon, Chief Pennington said the officers involved and the informant had given contradictory accounts.

“There are many unanswered questions,” he said. “But we must all exercise patience as we examine and re-examine every aspect of these tragic events.”

Chief Pennington’s announcement came as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York suggested that the shooting death by the police of a groom-to-be in Queens seemed to be the result of excessive force. And another Atlanta-area police force, in DeKalb County, has been the subject of investigative reports of 12 fatal shootings since January.

The events leading to the death of Ms. Johnston, whose photograph in news reports showed her with a cane and a birthday crown, began with a warrant stating that an unnamed informant had bought two bags of crack cocaine from a man at the house, near Vine City, the neighborhood where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family once lived. The warrant was known as a no-knock, giving the police the authority to burst through the door without warning in order to prevent the destruction of drugs.

But in an interview broadcast Monday by the local Fox affiliate, the informant, whose identity was concealed, said he had never been to the house in question and had not bought drugs there. Ms. Johnston’s family has said that she lived alone.

“They were going to pay me just to cover it up,” he said in the interview, arranged after he placed a call to one of the station’s reporters on Thursday. “They called me immediately after the shooting to ask me, I mean to tell me, ‘This is what you need to do.’ ” He added that the officers told him explicitly that he was needed to protect their story.

The reporter, Nicole Allhouse, said in her report that the informant had told her Ms. Johnston’s death had prodded him to come forward.

Mr. Pennington said it was not clear if the drug dealer, referred to in the warrant only as Sam, existed. He said the officers claimed they had found a small amount of marijuana, but no cocaine, in the house.

In asking a judge for the no-knock warrant before the raid, the narcotics investigator named in the warrant, Jason R. Smith, had said it was needed because a drug dealer inside had several surveillance cameras and monitored them closely.

But Chief Pennington said it was not clear if that was true, either.

He confirmed that the informant’s account in the television interview was the same as what he had told the internal affairs division of the Police Department.

Department procedures call for investigators to observe drug buys conducted by informants, and to watch them enter and exit if a deal takes place indoors. But again, Chief Pennington said it was not clear if that had occurred. He said the informant was considered reliable and had been involved in previous cases.

Once the search warrant was signed, three officers appeared at Ms. Johnston’s door with bulletproof vests and raid shields emblazoned with the word “police.” Department officials have insisted that the officers went to the correct address. They announced themselves as the police after cutting through the burglar bars and forcing down the door.

But Ms. Johnston was already at the door with her revolver, which neighbors said she kept for self-defense in an area where drugs are rampant and an elderly woman was recently raped.

She shot Officers Gary Smith, 38, Gregg Junnier, 40, and Cary Bond, 38, in the face, chest, arm and leg, prompting them to release a volley of bullets. Ms. Johnston died of a bullet wound in the chest; the officers are expected to recover.

Ms. Johnston was initially said by family members to have been 92, but the medical examiner and public records indicate that she was 88.

At the news conference, David E. Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, issued a warning. Now that the case is under federal investigation, he said, “anyone who lies or obstructs justice is committing a serious crime.”

    Atlanta Officers Suspended in Inquiry on Killing in Raid, NYT, 28.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/us/28atlanta.html

Authorities form multinational unit to hunt pedophiles

Posted 11/15/2006 10:54 PM ET
USA Today
By Donna Leinwand

WASHINGTON — U.S. agents are joining authorities in Canada, Britain and Australia to form a global police unit that will help monitor the Internet for child molesters who seek victims online.

Law enforcement representatives from each country met here Wednesday to discuss the program, one of the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at countering the rising number of ways in which pedophiles and pornographers use the Internet to harm children.

Under the program, known as the Virtual Global Taskforce (VGT), agents from each nation will take turns monitoring a London-based website (www.virtualglobaltaskforce.com) that responds to reports from youths and others about suspected predators, says VGT Chairman Jim Gamble, chief executive officer of the United Kingdom's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center.

Investigators can immediately trace a suspect's location through his Internet connection and contact a local police agency to further investigate the case or make an arrest, Gamble says. As authorities have done in anti-child-pornography programs, VGT investigators also will go undercover in chat rooms and on websites where pedophiles are likely to be, he says.

The VGT is one of dozens of ways police and child protection groups try to catch predators and stem the trade in pornographic photos of children. The groups work with Internet service providers and credit card companies to identify websites used to trade such photos. Congress has boosted funding for investigations and prosecutions aimed at child porn.

VGT has operated in Britain and Australia since January 2005. U.S. authorities have been involved in planning the site since the concept arose in 2002 but have not been full participants. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will staff the U.S. part of the operation beginning in January from the agency's cybercrime center in Virginia, ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers says.

Youths and others can report suspicious conversations or contacts to the VGT's website. Several popular chat sites feature the VGT's icon, so people can link immediately to the site to file a report, Gamble says. The website fielded 2,000 reports in the first six months of 2006, he says, more than 75% of which came from children.

The first online offender caught through the global policing program was sentenced June 22 to nine years in prison in England. Lee Costi, 21, of Haslemere, Surrey, pleaded guilty to sexual activity with a child, making indecent images of children, possessing more than 40 such images and several other charges.

According to the Nottinghamshire police in England, Costi was arrested after a teenage girl whom Costi had approached in a chat room had reported the information to the VGT website. Clive Michel, spokesman for the U.K.'s Online Protection Center, says investigators tracked down Costi and the case led authorities to identify at least one other pedophile in Eastern Europe.

In another case, U.S. authorities received information about a man in England who said in a chat room that he planned to molest children, ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback says. U.S. authorities shared the information with VGT investigators. U.S. and British investigators quickly traced the man's location, and British police arrested him at his house, where they found child pornography, she says.

"VGT is the multinational, online police station," Gamble says.

"We really need to ignore the territorial boundaries because the Internet doesn't have territorial boundaries."

    Authorities form multinational unit to hunt pedophiles, UT, 15.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-15-pedophiles_x.htm

Fugitives answer call to surrender

Posted 11/15/2006 10:46 PM ET
USA Today
By Dennis Wagner and Lindsey Collom

PHOENIX — Sean White, wanted on criminal warrants for a probation violation and failure to appear in court, went to church Wednesday morning to get right with the law.

The 32-year-old man was among the 120 suspects who turned themselves in during the first four hours of Fugitive Safe Surrender.

The program, which ends Saturday, basically is an invitation from federal and state authorities who are telling fugitives they might receive "favorable consideration" by turning themselves in at a makeshift justice center at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church.

Doug Weiner, a former Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor and co-founder of Fugitive Safe Surrender, said the long-term goal is to conduct programs nationwide. Plans already are underway for ones in Indianapolis; Rochester, N.Y.; Akron, Ohio; and Richmond, Va.

David Gonzales, U.S. Marshal for Arizona, said the program gives suspects a chance to deal with criminal warrants at a neutral site, which cuts costs for the public and reduces the chance of a dangerous situation for law officers.

Avoiding handcuffs

Defendants who show up at the Phoenix church find public defenders to represent them and judges to conduct hearings. Often, when fugitives are caught in traffic stops or tracked down by agents, they face the humiliation of being handcuffed in front of family and the hassle of going straight to jail.

Under Safe Surrender, Gonzales said, most of those wanted for non-violent offenses will be processed within hours and released without going behind bars. The fugitives who turned themselves in Wednesday morning were suspects in cases involving drunken driving, disorderly conduct and failure to pay fines.

A federal Office of Justice Programs grant for $600,000 is financing the development of Fugitive Safe Surrender. The grant is being supplemented with money, manpower and equipment from state and local agencies. Gonzales said he expects the effort in Phoenix to cost about $75,000.

"We think it's a win-win situation for the community," Gonzales said.

The Safe Surrender concept was first tried 13 months ago in Cleveland. Over a four-day period, more than 840 people visited a church to resolve criminal warrants. Although most were wanted for non-violent misdemeanors, the lineup included 324 felony suspects, with "some wanted for rape, robbery, assault and drug offenses," said Peter Elliott, the U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio.

Elliott said he hit upon the idea for Safe Surrender last year. He said he realized suspects might turn themselves in if they could do so safely, and he figured churches would be good safe havens.

When the suspects in Cleveland were asked why they surrendered, Gonzales said, "The overwhelming response was they were tired of running. ... It's stressful."

Sean White had been on the run since 2002, when he walked away from a work-release program. At the time, White was 20 days into a 40-day DUI sentence at a Maricopa County jail. It was the wrong decision, he said, and life hasn't been easy since.

White lost a construction job because his driver's license was suspended, he said, and lack of income led his family of five to move from a three-bedroom home to a pay-by-week hotel.

Even more, he said, the main motivation for surrendering is to help solve his half brother's murder. Robert Dickey, 40, was driving to work when someone he stopped to help along the roadway fatally stabbed him in June 2005, White said. He said he hasn't been involved for fear of arrest.

"It's pretty much weighed me down every single day," White said. "Whatever I have to serve, pay, I want to get it over with so I can get on with my life."

Earn goodwill, but not amnesty

In Maricopa County, where there are about 70,000 criminal warrants waiting to be served, according to Gonzales and county law enforcement, the operation was preceded by a media blitz featuring newspaper ads, church fliers and public service announcements on radio and television. In the days leading up to the roundup, Gonzales said, the marshals' phone line was "ringing off the hook" with calls from fugitives wanting details.

Gonzales, along with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Attorney Andrew Thomas, stressed that defendants are not being offered amnesty — only a promise that prosecutors will consider the voluntary surrender.

White said he believes that turning himself in helped his case: He was free to leave after the proceedings. A county commissioner at the church quashed one of his warrants; the other will be addressed in a municipal court.

On Wednesday, Gonzales said he was surprised by the turnout so early in the program. "I thought it would start off slow and build up. This is good," he said. "It just shows the desperation."

Despite the program's initial success in Ohio, there have been problems. In Albuquerque, authorities abandoned plans because they lacked resources. And a surrender program in Camden, N.J., was canceled after the state Supreme Court balked because of concerns about mixing church and state.

Elliott and Gonzales said that while ministers support the program and churches provide a venue, Fugitive Safe Surrender doesn't involve preaching or proselytizing.

"This is all about trust," Elliott said. "It's not a faith-based program. It is a law enforcement program that is faith-based in nature."

Wagner and Collom report daily for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

    Fugitives answer call to surrender, UT, 15.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-15-fugitives_x.htm

Philly man charged as serial date rapist

Posted 11/3/2006 11:57 PM ET
By Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press
USA Today

PHILADELPHIA — He was an online dater's dream: Tall, clean-cut, with a fashionable address and a taste for upscale bars and restaurants. He said he was a doctor, an astronaut, a spy — though he was really an on-and-off nursing student. With woman after woman, he would slip something in their drinks and then rape them, police say.

Jeffrey Marsalis, 33, of Philadelphia, is facing trial on nine rape counts involving eight women, while a 10th charge is pending in Sun Valley, Idaho. He met most of the victims here through a popular online dating site, authorities said.

In court this week during Marsalis' preliminary hearing, the women told strikingly similar stories of meeting the smooth-talking Marsalis between 2003 and 2005, then feeling unusually intoxicated after returning from the bathroom or letting him buy a round from the bar.

They said they woke up hours later, back at his apartment — groggy, sometimes undressed — after an apparent sexual encounter or even in the middle of intercourse.

"It was like waking up from surgery," one woman said. "My body was there, and I could see what was going on around me, but I couldn't move."

Marsalis' lawyer says the women simply regret being duped about his accomplishments and dumped after consensual sex.

"Some of this may be buyer's remorse," defense lawyer Kathleen Martin said Thursday.

None of the Philadelphia victims — most of them well-educated professionals — went to police or a hospital afterward, Martin pointed out. Instead, police sought the women out after they seized Marsalis' computer as part of an earlier case.

Marsalis was acquitted of three similar assaults at a trial in Philadelphia in January. Before he could leave the courtroom, however, he was handcuffed by police and accused of the new charges. A judge later denied bail.

One of the women who testified this week said Marsalis posed as a doctor. When he visited her at a hospital he had a stethoscope around his neck and checked her chart, she said.

"This guy is not shy. He's confident. He's plotting," said Capt. John Darby, head of the city's sex crimes unit. "He showed IDs to a lot of these women supporting the various roles, positions that he seemingly held. He really put on a hell of a show."

Prosecutors say it's difficult to prove the use of date-rape drugs, because they metabolize before victims are alert enough to get a drug screen. A jury could still find him guilty of rape if it decides the women were too impaired to consent to sex.

The woman in the Idaho case says she was raped in October 2005. She went to the hospital the next day. There is a gag order in the case, but Sun Valley police said in a news release that she experienced symptoms "consistent with having ingested a date-rape-type drug."

Marsalis met most of the women through Match.com. The company said Thursday that it cannot monitor what goes on once their clients move from online communication to the real world.

    Philly man charged as serial date rapist, UT, 3.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-03-philly-rapes_x.htm

Man Charged in Hate Crimes; Brooklyn Victim Is in a Coma

October 12, 2006
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A 19-year-old man was charged with hate crimes yesterday in connection with an attack on a Brooklyn man who was lured to a desolate meeting place Sunday night, robbed and forced onto the Belt Parkway, where he was struck by a car and critically injured, the police said.

The victim, Michael J. Sandy, was still in a coma yesterday, relatives said. The attack is being treated as a hate crime because investigators believe the assailants singled out Mr. Sandy for being gay and arranged over the Internet to meet him at a place often visited by gay men. Three other men were being questioned yesterday in connection with the attack, the police said. Officials said a group of as many as four men orchestrated the rendezvous in order to rob Mr. Sandy, telling him in Internet messages to bring enough money to pay for a hotel room.

At 9:40 p.m. on Sunday at the meeting place — a narrow, garbage-strewn parking lot near Sheepshead Bay, sandwiched between Plumb Beach and the eastbound lanes of the parkway — Mr. Sandy, 28, was attacked by at least two of the men, the police said. He backed away from them and, at one point, darted into the path of a car, which struck him and kept going, the police said. The police were still seeking the driver of the car that struck Mr. Sandy.Other cars on the highway were forced to stop as the attack spilled across three lanes of roaring traffic. One witness told detectives that after Mr. Sandy was struck by the car, she saw a man drag him to the shoulder of the Belt Parkway and rifle his pockets.

Detectives investigating Internet communications Mr. Sandy had had were led to the first suspect, John Fox, 19, of Knapp Street in Brooklyn, who is a sophomore at SUNY Maritime College. Mr. Fox was charged yesterday with first-degree assault as a hate crime, and first- and second-degree robbery, also as hate crimes, said a spokesman for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney. Mr. Fox faces a potentially longer prison term than if the hate crime statute was not applied, according to the spokesman.

Three other men were being questioned at the 61st Precinct station in Brooklyn, the police said. One of those men, a 20-year-old, was expected to stand in police lineups, according to the police. But the police said it was unclear if the two other men would face criminal charges. Also unclear was what role each of the four men played in the incident. The four men range in age from 16 to 20 and all live in Brooklyn near the attack site, the police said.

“The perpetrators had an online interaction with the victim, and they lured him,” said one investigator, referring to what he said was an exchange of AOL instant messages over the course of about an hour.

When asked why the case was being classified as a hate crime, the investigator said: “Because of the totality of the evolution of the crime.”

But the case underlined the fine distinction prosecutors must consider when applying the state’s hate crime law. Under the law, established in 2000, a hate crime is typically defined as one in which a victim is chosen because of race, color, sexual orientation, religious practice or some other protected category, said Brian S. MacNamara, an assistant professor of law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“The prosecutor will have to prove that in the underlying assault and robbery the victim was targeted in some way because of his sexual orientation,” said Professor MacNamara. “It’s a little bit tricky because, obviously, the main crime was the robbery, so you have to prove that the motivation for selecting that victim was substantially because he was gay.”

As Mr. Fox was led from the precinct station yesterday, his hands cuffed behind his back, his father, John Sr., yelled out, “John, I care about you.”

He later defended his son to reporters, speaking about his son’s goal of becoming a naval officer, and said he was perplexed by the hate-crime charge. “He never did anything like that before,” the elder Mr. Fox said. “Why would he be rabidly anti-gay? I don’t know.”

McCartha L. Lewis, Mr. Sandy’s aunt, said the family was rallying to support her nephew as he remained in critical condition yesterday at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center. She said that Mr. Sandy was in a coma with his breathing supported by a respirator, and that the family was struggling with whether to remove him from it.

Ms. Lewis said the family wanted to wait at least until today, Mr. Sandy’s 29th birthday, before making that decision.

“The doctors want us to pull the plug, but I told them no,” said Ms. Lewis, 66, a singer who lives in Jamaica, Queens.

Mr. Sandy’s father, Ezekiel E. Sandy Sr., is Ms. Lewis’s brother, and she said that another of his sons, Tony, had come from Tobago to be with the family.

“He’s a very good boy,” Ms. Lewis said of Michael Sandy. “He is a hard worker and he is very nice.”

    Man Charged in Hate Crimes; Brooklyn Victim Is in a Coma, NYT, 12.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/nyregion/12attack.html

4 in Chicago gang and drug unit charged

Posted 9/8/2006 3:42 PM ET
By Sophia Tareen, Associated Press Writer
USA Today

CHICAGO — Four Chicago police officers accused of using their badges to intimidate their way into homes have been arrested and charged with felonies including armed violence, home invasion and kidnapping, officials announced Thursday.

Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine declined to give more details about the accusations against the officers, saying that information would be released once the men make their initial court appearances Friday afternoon.

"I think you can see by the nature of the charges, home invasion and kidnapping charges, gives some sense of what we're talking about," Devine said.

The officers are part of the department's Special Operations Section, which focuses on gang and drug crimes, Devine said. They are accused of using their police badges to intimidate people and gain access to their homes, he said.

Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline said the officers will be suspended without pay and the department will move to fire them.

Officials identified those charged as Chicago residents Jerome Finnigan, 43; Keith Herrera, 28; Thomas Sherry, 32; and Carl Suchocki, 32. If convicted, each officer could face up to 30 years in prison.

Finnigan received an Award of Valor in 1999 for his work in special operations.

All four officers had unlisted phone numbers and could not be reached. Neither the state attorney's office nor the police officers' union immediately returned calls seeking any attorneys that are representing the officers.

    4 in Chicago gang and drug unit charged, UT, 8.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-08-police-charges_x.htm

New York City Crime Strategist Picked as Director of Newark Police Force

September 7, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS

NEWARK, Sept. 6 — Mayor Cory A. Booker has chosen New York City’s top crime strategist to lead the police department of this city, which has been struggling against a rising tide of homicides, shootings and public unease.

The mayor’s choice, Garry F. McCarthy, a 25-year veteran of the force, has been the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of operations for the past seven years, a period in which violent crime has dropped significantly. Mr. McCarthy, 47, helped set up Compstat, the data-collection program for crime statistics embraced by the Giuliani administration and since adopted by police departments nationwide.

“Garry McCarthy is the leader Newark has been looking for,” said Mayor Booker, who has made public safety the linchpin of his administration. “I’m confident that with his leadership, combined with all of our efforts across the city, we will create a nationally recognized model for crime reduction.”

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York said Mr. McCarthy’s strong suit was his ability to size up a hot spot and then figure out how to attack it best. “He’s very smart, very analytical and very tenacious,” Commissioner Kelly said.

Mr. McCarthy would replace Anthony Ambrose, the former police director who retired on June 30, the day before Mr. Booker took office. The Newark force has dropped to 1,300 from 1,475 in 2001, and has been buffeted by outdated equipment, negative publicity and sagging morale. With a starting salary of $26,561, Newark police officers — who have been working without a contract since 2004 — are among the lowest paid in the state.

The son of a New York City detective, Mr. McCarthy said he would take a zealous approach to law enforcement, applying the analytical skills he learned as a statistician and the policing tactics he learned as a beat officer in the Bronx in the 1980’s. “Reducing crime is my specialty,” Mr. McCarthy said in an interview Wednesday. “There’s a lot of work to be done in Newark, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. There are a thousand things we can do — fighting gangs, guns, drugs and quality-of-life violations — and I know I can make a difference.”

Mr. McCarthy, who lives in Rockland County, said he and his wife would move to Newark. By hiring someone from across the Hudson, Mayor Booker is diverging from tradition in Newark, where department leaders are often chosen from within the ranks. The mayor conducted a nationwide search for the position, saying he wanted the best candidate possible.

The Municipal Council must still vote on Mr. McCarthy’s hiring, although his confirmation is expected. Augusto Amador, one of four council members who interviewed Mr. McCarthy last month, said he and his colleagues were impressed by his credentials and his thoughts on reining in crime. “I don’t think there will be a problem,” he said of Mr. McCarthy’s confirmation.

Mr. McCarthy does not come without some baggage. Some critics have described his demeanor as occasionally gruff, and there has been much talk in New York about a confrontation last year in which he was arrested by two officers with the Palisades Interstate Police at a gas station on the parkway.

In March, a judge fined him and his wife $200 each for blocking traffic with his police-issued vehicle while they argued with the officers, who had issued a summons to their 18-year-old daughter, who was driving another car. At the hearing, the officers testified that Mr. McCarthy had been drinking and that he used profanities during the confrontation, which started after his daughter parked in a handicapped zone.

In an interview last night, Mr. McCarthy was unapologetic about the incident, saying he was simply protecting his daughter. “I will stake my career and reputation against any of the people involved in the incident,” he said.

In 1983, Mr. McCarthy was disciplined by the New York Police Department for an incident in the Bronx on St. Patrick’s Day, during which he was off duty and drinking when he and his brother, then a state trooper, were confronted by a group of men with a growling dog on a leash. During the dispute, Mr. McCarthy gestured to his gun, he told officials at the time. Mr. McCarthy acknowledged that his conduct was inappropriate, but that it was accepted practice at the time. “That was 23 years ago,” he said. “I think the more important thing is that crime in New York is down 40 percent since I became deputy commissioner.”

Derrick Hatcher, president of the Newark police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, said he was looking forward to meeting with Mr. McCarthy. He said past police directors had been inattentive and at times hostile to the rank and file. “Let’s just say our relationship with management hasn’t been very good,” he said, adding that his members had been chafing under a wave of disciplinary action cases that now number more than 1,000.

Word of Mr. McCarthy’s selection came on the same day that Mr. Booker announced at a news conference the results of his Safe Summer program, an anticrime initiative in which the police, community activists and religious leaders descended on the city’s most lawless neighborhoods every weekend. Although crime dropped in those areas — and violent crime was down markedly in July and August — the number of homicides in the city has jumped to 77 so far this year, up from 60 in the same period last year. Shootings have also been climbing this summer.

Standing beside a series of charts that showed the mixed results, Mayor Booker insisted that his administration would eventually triumph over the violence that plagues New Jersey’s largest city. “We cannot give in to fear,’’ he said. “We cannot give in to hopelessness. I stand here today to accept responsibility for what happens in this city. I want you to hold me accountable.”

    New York City Crime Strategist Picked as Director of Newark Police Force, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/nyregion/07newark.html

A Tough East Coast Cop in Laid-Back Los Angeles September 3, 2006

September 3, 2006
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 31 — Since arriving here from New York four years ago with a reputation for speaking his mind, the police chief, William J. Bratton, has called a civil rights advocate a “nitwit.” He has proclaimed that City Council members critical of his hiring practices do not know what they are talking about. He has also suggested that Californians who do not agree with his stance on policing illegal immigrants ought to take up residence in another state.

Yet Chief Bratton, best known for his role in turning around the crime rate in New York City as police commissioner there, is perhaps the most popular Los Angeles police chief in a generation.

With major crime down 25 percent on his watch and relations between police officers and black residents improving, Chief Bratton, who is white, is poised to become the first chief granted a second term since term limits were imposed on high-ranking police officials in the early 1990’s.

“I think that Chief Bratton has done an extraordinary job,” said the president of the City Council, Eric Garcetti, adding, “I expect him to comfortably sail to a second term.”

His accomplishments have come as crime has risen in many cities around the country, with a police force that is minuscule compared with the city it covers, and in a place where many of the richest and most powerful residents, the denizens of Hollywood, have long eschewed involvement in local affairs for more high-profile global ones like the plight of African children.

As such, it has become a sport in some circles in Los Angeles to wonder what the ambitious police chief — whose weekends seem to involve either a vacation in the Hamptons or dinner with a movie producer in Los Angeles — may be plotting next.

Among the jobs he is said to be eyeing: head of Scotland Yard, mayor of New York, or New York police commissioner yet again. He denies none of the possibilities, and close associates only halfheartedly dampen the speculation. Whether those jobs are attainable is another matter.

“It is entirely possible he will end up back in New York,” said John F. Timoney, the police chief of Miami and one of Chief Bratton’s closest friends. “I think he is quite content where he is, and he obviously wants to serve another five years. But at our age you are always looking for another challenge.”

Chief Bratton, 58, said recently in an interview that running for mayor of New York, something he had considered twice before, was “not likely in my future.” He suggested he had gotten used to Los Angeles and actually liked it here.

“It is quite a life,” he said. “We get to work on important things; you get to interact with a lot of extraordinary people.”

This has been a second life of sorts for Chief Bratton, an East Coaster who turned West for a new beginning.

The chief, who has also run the Boston Police Department, was forced to resign his New York post in 1996 after the national attention over crime reduction there stole the spotlight from his boss, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

He slid from view into the private sector. Inspired by the terrorist attacks of 2001, he sought a way back into the game. He campaigned heavily for the Los Angeles job, a humbling experience for someone whose ego has never been compared to the Dalai Lama’s.

“I blow my own horn because I am good at it,” Chief Bratton said.

Unlike such officers in New York and elsewhere, the Los Angeles police chief serves at the pleasure of the mayor and the City Council, which counts among its more influential members Bernard Parks, the former police chief who was tossed aside and replaced by Chief Bratton. Mr. Parks, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has campaigned vigorously for Chief Bratton’s ouster.

“He will never get over the fact that he is no longer police chief,” Chief Bratton said of Mr. Parks. “I don’t lose any sleep over it.”

Chief Bratton’s East Coast frankness has not always sat well with people here, who generally prefer that their nasty asides and plotting behavior be conducted behind closed doors. Some of the chief’s detractors have grumbled about his travel schedule; he is rarely in Los Angeles for an entire week, preferring police conferences, lobbying in Washington and other trips. Should a scandal hit the police ranks here, his future could be threatened by those who may already be out to get him.

Yet his confidence about a second term seems grounded in a genuine popularity across a broad swath of the city.

Since he took over, several episodes between officers and black residents — including one in which a suspect was beaten with a flashlight and two others in which small children were shot by police officers — have resulted in protests, not riots.

“I am not going to mislead you and suggest that the relationship is perfect now,” said John W. Mack, president of the Board of Police Commissioners, which oversees the department, and a former leader of the Los Angeles Urban League. “But the fact that we did not have big explosions and eruptions those times were due in part to Chief Bratton. A new tone has been set.”

Chief Bratton inherited a department with a history of scandal and inordinate racial tension: from 1922, when a Ku Klux Klan member was named Los Angeles police chief; to the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the riots a year later when his assailants were acquitted; to 1999, when the Rampart scandal erupted, embroiling an anti-gang unit in accusations of framing people, robbing suspects and other brutal conduct.

The department’s troubles are so pervasive that it has operated under a federal consent degree since 2001, in which a federal judge oversees and monitors reforms.

When Chief Bratton arrived, he found a shrinking department, crime rates that had crept up in the previous three years and a demoralized organization.

Among his first acts was to reach out to the department’s critics. He met with church leaders, community groups and labor unions. And he asked Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer and a longtime foe of the department, to lead a committee on the Rampart scandal.

Along with pushing for Compstat, a program that measures crime and responds in force, Chief Bratton has advocated for a culture in which community policing is part of the overall strategy.

“I think it is a pretty radical change at the top,” said Ms. Rice, who has nonetheless remained critical of the department’s culture. “I had deputy chiefs who used to walk out of the room when I came in, saying they can’t breathe the same air as me, now making an open display of showing that they are talking to me. They have gotten the message that they are supposed to stop this us-versus-them mentality.”

Still, Chief Bratton’s goals are bedeviled by the geography of Los Angeles. It is a diffuse area with little sense of community, where some places, like Beverly Hills, are separate cities with their own police forces, and even the most brutal events — perpetrated by gang members or the police — fail to unite the city.

“It is not a tale of two cities, it is a tale of too many cities,” said John Miller, a counterterrorism expert who worked with Chief Bratton in New York and in Los Angeles.

“When children are gunned down in the Bronx or a heat wave kills an old lady in Brooklyn, it affects everyone,” Mr. Miller said. “If you live in Hollywood, you don’t think of South L.A. And if a kid is killed in a gang shooting in the Valley, no one in South L.A. thinks about it either.”

The department has only 9,000 police officers to cover a 468-square-mile metropolis with four million residents. By comparison, New York has more than 37,000 officers for its eight million residents. The result has been a department focused largely on assertive police tactics, deemed necessary by officers fighting an intractable gang culture whose approximately 50,000 members are responsible for the majority of the city’s violent crimes.

At a recent police graduation, a mere 28 men stood in wool uniforms before the chief, who strolled out to meet them to the strains of “Chariots of Fire.” The class seemed dwarfed by the rolling green grounds surrounding them at Elysian Park.

The mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, recently committed to hiring 1,000 more officers over the next five years, a small but important psychic victory that contributed to Mr. Bratton’s desire to stay.

“The beauty of a police chief’s job,” he said, “is that you get to go to a breakfast in a church in South Los Angeles, you can be at a Beverly Hills soiree, you can be eating with the secretary of homeland security. Every day is different.”

    A Tough East Coast Cop in Laid-Back Los Angeles September 3, 2006, NYT, 3.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/us/03bratton.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Officials Say Slain Detective and Suspect Had Crossed Paths Before

August 10, 2006
The New York Times
By NATE SCHWEBER and JOHN HOLL

ORANGE, N.J., Aug. 9 — Detective Kieran T. Shields and Raynard Brown first crossed paths in April 2005, the Essex County prosecutor’s office said Wednesday, when the detective helped arrest Mr. Brown on burglary and weapons charges.

Late Monday night, the two men crossed paths again, only this time, Detective Shields was left dead. The police say Mr. Brown, 19, killed the 32-year-old detective with a sawed-off shotgun in a garbage-strewn backyard of a neighborhood frequented by gang members.

That Mr. Brown — who had acquired the nickname Trouble in the rough-hewn streets of Orange — would find himself cornered in a gang hangout was not surprising, especially to Lt. Earl Graves of the Essex County gang task force, who said Mr. Brown was listed in a county database of gang members.

And Myra Rodriguez, who lives in the house on Taylor Street where Mr. Brown is accused of shooting Detective Shields, said she had heard him talking from time to time with her grandson’s father — a gang member whose identity she would not disclose — about coordinating gang meetings.

Ms. Rodriguez, 38, said that she had seen the two men with weapons, and that they sold drugs on the street in front of the house.

Asked how Mr. Brown was bestowed the nickname Trouble, she said, “He’s a no-good person.”

Mr. Brown was arraigned in Essex County Superior Court in Newark on Wednesday morning, and although he was in the courthouse, he waived his right to appear in the courtroom, where Detective Shields’s grief-stricken family and Mr. Brown’s own mother were assembled.

John McMahon, a public defender assigned to Mr. Brown’s case, entered a not guilty plea on his behalf on murder and weapons charges. Mr. Brown is being held in $3 million bail at the Hudson County Jail.

The killing came at a time of increasing concern about gang violence in New Jersey. Murders in the state rose by 7 percent last year, to 418, and 12 percent of them were gang related, according to the state’s Uniform Crime Report, which was issued Tuesday, the day that Mr. Brown was arrested.

About 30 minutes after the arraignment, Mr. Brown, handcuffed and dressed in a green prison jumpsuit, looked frightened as detectives led him from the courthouse to a prisoner van. He did not say anything and quickly entered the van.

Mr. Brown was released in 2004 from a juvenile detention center in Jamesburg, where he was sent after he was convicted on burglary and weapons charges, according to Paul M. Loriquet, a spokesman for the Essex County prosecutor, Paula T. Dow. In April 2005 he was arrested on robbery and weapons offenses and was indicted by an Essex County grand jury in January. He had been out on bail since then, Mr. Loriquet said.

Members of Mr. Brown’s family described him as a sometimes angry young man who struggled to stay out of jail and to provide for his 20-month-old daughter, Sadajia Brown, and her mother, LaToya Houseman, now six months pregnant with their second child, his family said.

Ms. Houseman was arrested Tuesday on an outstanding fraud-related warrant from Missouri, the prosecutor’s office said.

The two have dated for five years, said Mr. Brown’s aunt, Angela Tyson, 43.

She said that he still displayed some of the symptoms of problems he had as a boy, most notably his tendency to fly into fits of rage. “He had anger-management issues,” she said, and as a child was treated with Ritalin, a drug often used for attention-deficit disorder.

Mr. Brown, who attended Orange High School sporadically, resolved to go back in the fall to get a diploma, so that he could either continue his schooling or join the military reserves, in order to provide for his family, Ms. Tyson said.

She acknowledged his spotted past, but said that for the past three months he had been “doing pretty good.”

Mr. Brown, the middle of three siblings, grew up in a gray, two-story A-frame house with a big backyard on a tree-lined street in Orange. The house is across from Orange Park, where several neighbors remembered seeing Mr. Brown playing basketball.

A woman who described herself as a friend of Mr. Brown’s older sister and who would give only her first name, Passion, said she remembered Mr. Brown playing basketball and PlayStation video games. She added that he loved tattoos. He had a cross tattooed on his left cheek, she said, but his favorite was a tattoo of his daughter’s name on his arm.

Mr. Brown’s parents have made public statements offering condolences to Detective Shields’s family.

    Officials Say Slain Detective and Suspect Had Crossed Paths Before, NYT, 10.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/nyregion/10orange.html

Gunfire Ends Promising Life of New Jersey Detective

August 9, 2006
The New York Times
By TINA KELLEY and JOHN HOLL

ORANGE, N.J., Aug 8 — Life was good for 32-year-old Kieran T. Shields. Promoted to detective last year after only four years on the Orange Police Department, he was about to move his family from their two-bedroom apartment hard by the New Jersey Transit railroad tracks in East Orange to a four-bedroom house in Union.

His family was growing. Four months ago, his third child — a long-awaited son — had arrived weighing only one pound 14 ounces, but was recently able to come home from the hospital, at six pounds.

But then on Monday night, a bulletproof vest could not stop a shotgun blast that the authorities said was fired by a reputed gang member from tearing into Detective Shields’s neck and collarbone, killing him.

The 19-year-old suspect in the shooting, Raynard Brown, who was free on bail while awaiting trial on burglary and weapons charges, fled from the scene but was seized in neighboring East Orange shortly after noon on Tuesday and charged in the slaying.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” said Barry Husain Gatlin of Newark, a cousin of Detective Shields’s and one of the many relatives and police officers who were gathered on the street in front of the garden apartment where the Shields family lives. “Things were going up for him. Everything was looking real bright.”

Kieran Shields had wanted to be a police officer since elementary school, so he followed the path of his father, who retired in 1999 from the same force in this small, rough New Jersey city after being injured on the job. Several other family members were also police officers.

The detective’s father, Christopher Shields, 55, said his son felt that police work was his calling. “He said, ‘I like helping people,’ ” Mr. Shields said.

When Mr. Shields would warn his son that the job was dangerous, his son would say, “You did it, I’ll be fine,” Mr. Shields recalled.

Melvin Burnett of Morristown, an uncle of the detective, traced the arc of his abbreviated life. He said his nephew grew up in Orange and attended Arts High School in Newark, specializing in drawing. He also attended Essex County College, where he made the dean’s list, according to the acting police director of the Orange Police Department, Aric D. Webster. “He was destined to be what he desired, to move up through the ranks,” Mr. Burnett said.

Detective Shields had received several commendations, including one for finding a 5-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and left in a sport utility vehicle in 2004.

Mr. Burnett described how his nephew had worked with juvenile delinquents, part of his longstanding interest in working with young people, which dated from his late teens, when he worked as a camp counselor in Elizabeth. “It was a relief to the family when he made detective,” Mr. Burnett said, explaining that the new job would take him off the streets a bit.

But, he said, “He loved the outside, and doing what he did, assisting with juveniles and youth.”

Now a young man reputed to be a member of the Bloods, a violent street gang, is being held in $3 million bail, charged with murder and weapons offenses. If convicted Mr. Brown faces 30 years to life in prison.

Paul M. Loriquet, a spokesman for the Essex County prosecutor, Paula T. Dow, said Mr. Brown spent time in juvenile detention in Jamesburg for burglary and weapons offenses and was released in 2004. In December 2005, he was arrested for robbery and weapons offenses, and he was indicted by an Essex County grand jury in January 2006. He has been out on bail since then, Mr. Loriquet said.

At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Dow described how events had unfolded.

She said that Detective Shields and his partner, Detective Dave Thompson, were sent to Taylor Street to investigate a shooting.

When they arrived about 11:30 p.m. in an unmarked car, Ms. Dow said, the two detectives saw Mr. Brown in the street with a sawed-off shotgun. Minutes earlier, she said, Mr. Brown had shot an unidentified man with the shotgun after a dispute. Ms. Dow called it a gang-related shooting and said the man’s injuries were not life-threatening.

When Mr. Brown fled, Ms. Dow said, Detective Shields, who was not in uniform, chased him into the trash-filled backyard of an abandoned row house on Taylor Street while his partner remained out front. Ms. Dow said it was then that Mr. Brown, standing on the second-floor landing of a rear exterior staircase, fired his shotgun at the detective from close range and fled.

Detective Shields was taken to University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about midnight.

About 12:15 p.m. Tuesday, Ms. Dow said, someone called the police and said Mr. Brown was in a parking lot in East Orange. Soon after, he was arrested. His girlfriend, LaToya Housman, was taken in for questioning and is being held on an outstanding Missouri warrant on fraud-related charges, Ms. Dow said.

“I don’t think he realizes what he just did,” Mr. Gatlin said. “He took away someone real positive and constructive. It’s one of those senseless killings.”

The killing of Detective Shields — the first member of the police force here to die in the line of duty since Officer Joyce Carnegie in 1999 — rocked a police department that has had its problems in recent years. Five police officers were convicted of conspiracy and found guilty of civil charges in the beating death of a man who was wrongly suspected of killing Officer Carnegie.

A federal investigation led to the forced resignation of the Essex County prosecutor and a state takeover of the office.

On Tuesday, Dan Evans of Orange, who has been a best friend of Detective Shields since the sixth grade, remembered him painting a mural of cartoon characters in a family bedroom when he was in grade school.

“He was a comedian,” Mr. Evans said, “wise beyond his years.”

He said that after he was injured in an accident in 1996, his friend made sure he knew he still loved him by making him laugh.

“I just remember him saying, ‘Yeah, you’re pretty ugly, your face is pretty messed up,’ ” Mr. Evans said.

Detective Shields was in a rhythm-and-blues group, J-Stylz, which appeared at Town Hall in New York in the early 1990’s, Mr. Evans said.

As Detective Patrick Laguerre of the East Orange Police Department — a partner of Detective Shields on the Essex County Auto Headlight Task Force and a classmate at the police academy — put it, “If you were having a bad day and you’d go to work and see him, you’d be smiling by the time the day was out.”

On Tuesday, his family shared those same memories.

“His family was his life,” said Mr. Burnett, referring to the slain officer’s wife, Chatrian, his two daughters, Kieyara, 10, and DéJah, 7, and his infant son, Kamren.

“He basically nurtured the baby while his mom was recovering,” he said, describing how his nephew, who worked the night shift, would visit the baby at the hospital in Livingston every day, feeding him, holding him, and helping him to thrive.

“They said he was a hero,” Mr. Burnett said. “I just want my nephew back.”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting for this article.

    Gunfire Ends Promising Life of New Jersey Detective, NYT, 9.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/nyregion/09orange.html

Retired sleuths heat up cold cases

Updated 8/8/2006 12:02 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Martin Kasindorf

LOS ANGELES — On the TV police drama Cold Case, Philadelphia detective Lilly Rush needs less than an hour to unmask the killer in a decades-old murder every Sunday night.

Real life is different. It can take years to turn dusty boxes of evidence into an accusation that stands up in court. And the cold-case investigators who have made headlines with recent successes aren't sleek Hollywood actors. They're retired cops in their 60s and 70s.

From Los Angeles to Maryland, the hot trend in cold cases is special units of retired detectives who are coaxed off the golf course to comb old files for new leads.

These retreaded sleuths usually work two days a week as unpaid volunteers to bone up on DNA evidence and other new wrinkles in a case. They combine science with their street savvy in questioning witnesses to relieve overloaded staff detectives of some of law enforcement's most tedious work.

Two of these special squads showed last month that they can get results in resolving mysteries:

•Robert Charles Browne, 53, has been in a Colorado prison since he pleaded guilty in 1995 to killing a 13-year-old girl. Charlie Hess, 79, a retired FBI and CIA agent, volunteers at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in Colorado Springs. Hess, through four years of correspondence and 20 prison visits, persuaded Browne to admit to 48 additional slayings.

Browne gave Hess enough evidence of one previously unrecorded murder to charge him with the 1987 slaying of a 15-year-old girl who had been listed as missing in Colorado Springs. Browne pleaded guilty to that crime July 27. Nine more of Brown's claimed slayings have been verified in several states, says Lou Smit, 71, who volunteers in the cold-case unit with Hess and Scott Fischer, 60.

•At the Los Angeles County Sheriff's homicide bureau, retirees Bob Wachsmuth and Richard Adams had a hunch that a photographer on death row since 1988 for slaying two aspiring models may have killed others. In old case files, the detectives found pictures of more than 50 unidentified women who had posed for William Richard Bradford between 1975 and 1984. The sheriff's department released the photos to the public, triggering hundreds of tips.

A fresh set of eyes

Capt. Ray Peavy, homicide bureau commander, says the public has identified 36 of the women. Peavy says most are alive, but family members may have pinpointed "two more potential victims" by providing names for "Jane Doe" women in unsolved homicides in 1979 and 1980. The manner of killing in those local cases was "very similar to what Bradford did," Peavy says.

"Even if we get most of these girls alive and well, it's significant if we get one murder out of it," Wachsmuth says.

Bradford, through his attorney, Darlene Ricker, denies killing anyone.

Police agencies nationwide "are recognizing that these old cases are not to be filed away and lost," says Max Houck, director of a forensic science program at West Virginia University. "Many of them can be rejuvenated. Retired investigators have time to go back and reflect on interviews and photographs."

Wachsmuth, 62, retired in 1998. "I gardened for almost two years, and I almost went crazy," he says. Now he's one of 14 retired detectives working under Peavy on one-year contracts for hourly wages and no benefits.

Peavy says the retirees provide "a fresh set of eyes, but these fresh eyes happen to be with some old, grizzled homicide detectives. They may see information that got missed originally."

"If you've developed some level of acumen, why would you just let it drift away and find yourself sitting on a couch and watching TV?" Hess says. "You owe it to the public."

Smit, who investigated the 1996 slaying of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colo., says he has set up retiree cold-case squads south of Colorado Springs in Pueblo County, Colo., as well as in Titusville, Fla., and Laurel, Md.

Pueblo County Sheriff Dan Corsentino says his three retirees would "rather be doing this than playing golf."

Bob Curtis, 69, a retired detective in Corsentino's unit, says, "There's some gray hairs in this squad." Curtis says the squad has made progress in three cases that date as far as 1976, with no arrests yet.

DNA changed everything

Wachsmuth says crime-fighting has changed. "Today, it's all technology — fingerprint enhancement capabilities, firearms identification advances and the big one, DNA."

Peavy has some of the veterans rifling through old files for items that might contain DNA. "As recently as 1990, a cigarette butt or a sweaty T-shirt picked up at the scene would not have meant much. But if it was saved, today we can take it to the crime lab and get an identification through DNA," he says.

The retirees are so effective at spotting such items that "we've provided more cases than our crime lab is capable of dealing with at this time," Peavy says.

Departments often assign a full-time detective to work with the old-timers. Hess says that as his talks with Browne began revealing new homicide cases, Sheriff Terry Maketa put investigator Jeff Nohr in charge of the volunteer unit and sent him with Hess into Browne's cell. Nohr was needed "to guide us through the minefield of what had transpired in the judicial process since we dinosaurs were on the street," Hess says.

Hess' trips to chat with Browne were an exception for a cold-case volunteer. In most cities, retirees stay in the squad room and provide tips for full-time detectives to follow up.

"Because of their ages, we don't send 'em out on the street," Peavy says. "They'd love to, but for insurance purposes, we can't. I've got one guy back that's 75 years old — my ex-partner."

    Retired sleuths heat up cold cases, UT, 8.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-07-cold-case_x.htm

Chicago Mayor Says He Shares Responsibility in Torture Cases

July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By GRETCHEN RUETHLING

CHICAGO, July 21 — Mayor Richard M. Daley said Friday that he shared responsibility for not preventing the torture of scores of criminal suspects at the hands of police officers when he was Cook County state’s attorney in the 1980’s.

Mr. Daley said he had no knowledge of the torture at the time and had done nothing wrong. He added that the police department had made changes, including the videotaping of interrogations, to ensure more accountability.

“I’m proud of my public service as state senator, state’s attorney and mayor of the city of Chicago,” Mr. Daley said after an unrelated news conference on Friday. “I would not allow anything like this.”

The mayor was responding to criticism two days after special prosecutors released a report concluding a four-year investigation into accusations of torture by former Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command on the South Side in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

The report did not accuse Mr. Daley of wrongdoing.

The report said a police superintendent sent a letter to Mr. Daley’s office when he was state’s attorney in 1982 regarding abuse accusations. Mr. Daley said he did not remember the letter, but he added that proper procedures had been followed and that he assumed it had been referred to his first assistant.

“Though the report does not allege any misconduct or cover-up within the state’s attorney’s office, I know that there are those who will seek to play politics and draw inferences that aren’t there,” Mr. Daley said. “My emphasis is and will continue to be on making sure we are doing everything possible to ensure that the horrendous abuses of two and three decades ago never happen again.”

Flint Taylor, a lawyer representing two people who say they were tortured, and another lawyer served federal subpoenas on the special prosecutors on Thursday seeking several transcripts, including Mr. Daley’s deposition.

Mr. Taylor said the report showed that Mr. Daley had failed to act when he was given information about torture accusations.

“Daley is therefore ultimately responsible for Burge having tortured all of our clients,” Mr. Taylor said. “This case has to be investigated and prosecuted under federal statutes.”

    Chicago Mayor Says He Shares Responsibility in Torture Cases, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/us/22daley.html

Inquiry Finds Police Abuse, but Says Law Bars Trials

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN

CHICAGO, July 19 — Special prosecutors said Wednesday that scores of criminal suspects were routinely brutalized by police officers on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but that extensive legal research persuaded them there was no way to skirt the statute of limitations preventing prosecution.

After four years, more than 700 interviews and $6 million, the prosecutors said they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court at least three cases of torture by the police, involving five former officers, and that they had found credible evidence of abuse in about half the 148 complaints they thoroughly investigated. But they rejected arguments by lawyers for people alleging abuse who said criminal charges could still be filed.

“We want to make it really clear, we only wish we could indict in these three cases,” Robert D. Boyle, the chief deputy special state’s attorney, said at a morning news conference downtown.

But Flint Taylor, a lawyer who represents some plaintiffs in abuse cases against the police, likened the situation to Ku Klux Klan killings in the 1960’s that have led to prosecutions in recent years. “Something as serious as police torture, there shouldn’t be a statute of limitations,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s like murder.”

The prosecutors’ long-awaited 292-page report tries to provide closure on a painful chapter in Chicago history, one that has helped create a chasm between black residents and white police leaders, has driven changes in law enforcement procedures and has played a critical role in the national debate over the death penalty. In May, the United Nations Committee Against Torture highlighted the Chicago abuse accusations, complaining of “limited investigation and lack of prosecution.”

The political implications were clear from the roster of people questioned in the inquiry, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was Cook County’s top prosecutor when some of the most egregious complaints were lodged, and his former assistant, Richard A. Devine, now the Cook County state’s attorney.

Mr. Boyle rebuked a former Chicago police superintendent, Richard J. Brzeczek, saying he “did not just do his job poorly; he just didn’t do his job.” But he had only mild criticism for Mr. Daley, who as prosecutor received a letter alleging serious abuse in 1982 but delegated its investigation. “We accept his explanation, but would not do it the same way he did,” Mr. Boyle said of Mr. Daley.

A few prisoners had cattle prods placed against their genitals, guns shoved into their mouths or plastic typewriter covers held over their heads until they passed out, Mr. Boyle said, adding that most were abused with milder weapons like “the fist, the feet, telephone books.”

Prisoners who have alleged torture and their lawyers said they were profoundly disappointed with the report and that Mr. Daley and Mr. Devine should face federal indictment along with former Commander Jon Burge, whom they accuse of overseeing torture, and some officers under his command at what are known as Detective Areas 2 and 3. They cited at least recent 20 instances of court testimony by police officers, prosecutors and other officials that they said constituted continuing criminal behavior that would justify charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, racketeering and civil rights violations.

“Somebody needs to go to jail,” said one of the lawyers, Lawrence Kennon. “Burge needs to go to jail. His henchmen need to go to jail. The mayor should be indicted for covering up.”

The report, along with 1,452 additional pages on the remainder of the 148 cases, is likely to become fodder for five civil cases alleging abuse pending in federal court, as well as more than two dozen instances in which prisoners are challenging their convictions based on accusations of mistreatment by the police.

Mr. Boyle, whose investigation was ordered by a judge in 2002, said a copy had also been requested by the United States attorney’s office, which has previously declined to pursue the case.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Daley said the mayor was in San Francisco and would not comment on the report until later this week, if at all. The city’s corporation counsel praised the special prosecutors’ “hard work” but said she had not yet thoroughly reviewed the lengthy report.

Mr. Burge, who joined the police force months after returning from the Vietnam War in 1970, and rose to the rank of commander before being fired in 1993, did not respond to a telephone message left at his home in Florida. He has previously denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Brzeczek, who ran against Mr. Daley for state’s attorney in 1984 and is a lawyer in private practice, denounced the report as “a big political cover-up,” and questioned why it focused on his brief tenure as police chief when abuse accusations stretched for many years before and after.

“I think it’s the work of two political appointees who had to fix the blame on someone who’s not connected to Daley — that’s me,” Mr. Brzeczek said in a telephone interview.

Asked whether he would read the report, he added, “I have some back issues of The National Enquirer that I’m going to read first.”

In a written statement, Mr. Devine, the prosecutor, said that when he was Mr. Daley’s assistant, “claims of systemic abuse at Area 2 had not yet crystallized,” and that in terms of the critical complaint that came to his attention, “I had no reason to believe that the claims were not handled appropriately.”

Both he and Philip J. Cline, the current Chicago police superintendent, pointed to changes in policies, including videotaping of interrogations and the computerization of abuse complaints, that they said would prevent such a pattern from occurring again.

The special prosecutors enlisted eight lawyers and several former F.B.I. agents for the investigation, which included 217 subpoenas and produced 33,360 documents.

But the report offers no recommendations and little synthesis of the accusations of systemic abuse under Mr. Burge’s command. Instead, it recounts a handful of cases, giving both the details of the underlying crimes and conflicting testimony through years of criminal and civil actions.

In each case, the prosecutors say whether an indictment could have been sustained against certain officers, though the conclusions are rendered moot by the overall decision that no prosecution is permissible.

David Bates, who said he was tortured four times over two days of interrogation in 1983, called it a “half-baked report” that is “hard on my family.”

“Torture did exist,’’ Mr. Bates said Wednesday. “There were several sessions of torture, starting with slaps and kicks and name-calling. What happened to me happened to so many other individuals.”

“They never gave me water, they never gave me food,” he added. “They only gave me pain.”

Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting for this article.

    Inquiry Finds Police Abuse, but Says Law Bars Trials, NYT, 20.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/us/20chicago.html

Judge Rules Report on Police in Chicago Should Be Released

May 20, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO, May 19 — A judge here ruled on Friday that a special prosecutor's report on accusations of torture by Chicago police officers over two decades should be made public, as a United Nations panel in Geneva urged American authorities to investigate the claims further.

The result of an investigation that has taken four years and cost Cook County more than $5 million, the report is likely to be released in several weeks, prosecutors said.

The investigation stems from accusations by 192 people that police officers at two city stations tortured them — beating them, shocking them with electric devices and trying to suffocate them — from the 1970's to the early 1990's.

"After the third torture session, I understood that these guys weren't going to let me out of there alive if I didn't say what they wanted," said David Bates, who was among the people whose cases were investigated by the special prosecutor. Mr. Bates said police beat him and covered his head with a typewriter cover in 1983 until he confessed to a crime he says he did not commit.

About two dozen people marched outside of the criminal courthouse on Friday morning, calling on Circuit Judge Paul P. Biebel Jr. to make the report public, though lawyers for some of the officers have argued it should be kept from public view.

Judge Biebel, responding to inquiries from prosecutors as to whether they could make the report public, said the public's right to learn details of the investigation outweighed the privacy rights of individual officers.

"The release of the report will address the issues which have led to rumor and speculation which have spread unimpeded over the fabric of the Cook County criminal justice system for more than 30 years," he wrote.

Spokeswomen for the city of Chicago's law department and for the police department said those entities supported release of the report.

Many of the accusers have pointed to officers who were overseen by Commander Jon Burge, who was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. Richard Sikes, a lawyer who represents Mr. Burge in three lawsuits against him, said he has seen no signs of torture in the cases he has handled.

He suggested that Mr. Burge may have become a magnet for people in Chicago who want to claim they were wrongfully convicted, saying, "I think there's a lot of bandwagon here, in my view."

In Geneva, the United Nations Committee against Torture released its own report, which, along with calling on the United States to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and criticizing interrogation techniques, took note of the "limited investigation and lack of prosecution" in connection to the accusations of torture in Chicago.

It called on American authorities to "promptly, thoroughly and impartially" investigate the accusations, and provide the committee with more information.

It was uncertain whether the special prosecutor's report in Chicago could lead to indictments.

Robert D. Boyle, who was appointed as assistant special state's attorney in the case beside Edward J. Egan, the special prosecutor, said the report had to be "fine-tuned" and was not yet ready for release. In addition, a small part of it, including identifying information about a former assistant state's attorney, will not be made public for at least two weeks, a second judge ruled on Friday.

Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting for this article.

    Judge Rules Report on Police in Chicago Should Be Released, NYT, 20.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20chicago.html

Study Fuels a Growing Debate Over Police Lineups

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

The police lineup is a time-honored staple of crime solving, not to mention of countless cop movies and television shows like "Law and Order." Each year, experts estimate, 77,000 people nationwide are put on trial because witnesses picked them out of one.

In recent years many states and cities have moved to overhaul lineups, as DNA evidence has exposed nearly 200 wrongful convictions, three-quarters of them resulting primarily from bad eyewitness identification.

In the new method, the police show witnesses one person at a time, instead of several at once, and the lineup is overseen by someone not connected to the case, to avoid anything that could steer the witness to the suspect the police believe is guilty.

But now, the long-awaited results of an experiment in Illinois have raised serious questions about the changes. The study, the first to do a real-life comparison of the old and new methods, found that the new lineups made witnesses less likely to choose anyone. When they did pick a suspect, they were more likely to choose an innocent person.

Witnesses in traditional lineups, by contrast, were more likely to identify a suspect and less likely to choose a face put in the lineup as filler.

Advocates of the new method said the Illinois study, conducted by the Chicago Police Department, was flawed, because officers supervised the traditional lineups and could have swayed witnesses.

But the results have empowered many critics who had worried that states and cities were caving in to advocacy groups in adopting the new lineups without solid evidence that they improved on the old ones.

"There are people who'd say it's better to let 10 guilty persons free to protect against one innocent person being wrongfully convicted," said Roy S. Malpass, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and an analyst for the Illinois study, who served on a research group on eyewitness identification for the National Institute of Justice in 1999.

"I'm fine with that when we're dealing with juvenile shoplifters," Dr. Malpass said. "I'm not fine with that for terrorists. We haven't figured out the risk there."

The new lineups lack some of the drama of the old. In some places, witnesses view lineups on laptop computers to make them completely "blind" to influence from someone administering the process.

Psychologists who favor these so-called sequential double-blind lineups say that showing witnesses people one at a time makes lineups more difficult for the witness, and therefore better. Witnesses have to compare the person in front of them against their memory of the crime, rather than simply against the other faces in the lineup.

"It turns a lineup into a much more objective, science-based procedure," said Gary L. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University and a prominent proponent of blind sequential lineups. "The double-blind is a staple of science; it makes as much sense to do it in a lineup as it does in an experiment or drug trial."

In classroom studies by Dr. Wells and others, the sequential method was found to reduce the number of times witnesses chose an innocent person, without reducing the number of times they chose the right one.

The movement to change lineups took off in the 1990's after a growing number of DNA exonerations. New Jersey was the first state to adopt the sequential method, in 2001. The Wisconsin Legislature recently recommended the same approach, as did commissions in North Carolina, Virginia and, last week, California. Boston and Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, use sequential lineups, and Washington, D.C., is studying them in one district.

Still, lineup methods remain an open debate: law enforcement officials in California and New York have resisted changes, arguing that the evidence in favor of the sequential approach is not firm.

A guide for prosecutors produced in 1999 by the National Institute of Justice study group said "there is not a consensus" and declined to recommend sequential lineups as a "preferred" method.

But before the Illinois study, released last month, no one had compared the two methods in the field.

The experiment was part of an overhaul package recommended in 2002 by the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment, set up by former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois after DNA evidence exonerated several death row inmates. It tested the two methods for a year in three dissimilar cities; half the lineups were conducted sequentially and half were done simultaneously.

"Surprisingly," the study said, the sequential lineups proved less reliable than the simultaneous ones.

Out of 700 lineups, witnesses in those using the simultaneous method chose the correct suspect 60 percent of the time, compared with 45 percent of the time for the sequential lineups. Witnesses in the sequential lineups were more likely to pick the wrong person — someone brought in as filler — choosing incorrectly 9 percent of the time, versus just 3 percent in the simultaneous lineups.

And witnesses declined to make a pick in 47 percent of the sequential lineups, compared with 38 percent of the simultaneous ones. (Percentages were rounded.)

"If you are going to take officers outside their comfort zone, you have to be able to sell them on the reasons you are doing it," said Sheri Mecklenburg, general counsel to the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department and director of the experiment. "Based on this study, I think we'd have a difficult time having them believe this is a way to get more reliable eyewitness identifications."

Prosecutors elsewhere say the results make them less inclined to move to sequential lineups. "This is very powerful because it's real," said Patricia Bailey, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan who has considered lineup changes for New York City. "This isn't a classroom study where people are watching a 30-second video of a crime that happened to someone else."

Paul A. Logli, president of the National District Attorneys Association, said that his group would discuss lineups at its convention this fall, but that many prosecutors were doubters. "I think many prosecutors think doing it sequentially runs contrary to human nature," Mr. Logli said. "Human nature tells me that having the ability to compare is more helpful than destructive. Doing it sequentially is almost like this is a trick question."

Dr. Wells of Iowa State said the Illinois study had not validly compared the two lineup methods because simultaneous lineups had not been done "blind."

But Dr. Malpass of the University of Texas and Ms. Mecklenberg said the point was to study the new method against the status quo.

The new study will be the focus of a conference Friday at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Thomas P. Sullivan, a former United States attorney in Chicago and the co-chairman of the governor's commission that recommended the study, said that already, the results had "changed the debate."

"It has put a cloud over the sequential system," Mr. Sullivan said. "I think it will retard the system throughout the country until this gets sorted out."

But others say changes to lineups should focus on other elements that studies have shown produce more reliable picks: reducing pressure on witnesses by advising them that they do not have to pick someone; making sure that "fillers" strongly resemble the suspect; and recording what the witness says upon choosing a suspect, so juries can hear how certain they were about a pick.

"I don't understand why the rest of these reforms shouldn't be adopted immediately," said Barry C. Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, a legal clinic that uses DNA evidence to try to overturn wrongful convictions. "The controversy over sequential blind has obscured the fact that all the other reforms are not in dispute."

Ms. Mecklenburg, in Chicago, said, "There are no sides in this debate."

"We all want the same thing," she said. "Whether you are a prosecutor or police or defense counsel, we all want reliable eyewitness identifications."

    Study Fuels a Growing Debate Over Police Lineups, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/us/19lineup.html?hp&ex=1145505600&en=b7b63a2acebd39f0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A New Crime Fighter, for $10 in Hay and Oats

April 18, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS

In this high-tech, gadget-dependent, "CSI"-obsessed age of police work, one of the New York Police Department's most prized and pampered weapons in the war on lawlessness is a temperamental pack of hay-chomping lads named Zeus, Philly and Angus.

Now, after decades of consignment to Central Park patrols, ceremonial trots down Fifth Avenue and the occasional cameo at a raucous demonstration, these horses — and 85 of their brethren — have begun patrolling high-crime neighborhoods, making late-night shows of force through Times Square and taking the lead during search-and-rescue missions along thicket-filled riverbanks and wooded urban parkland.

And there soon will be more of them: Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is increasing the budget for the mounted troop, 75 horses and officers over the next three years, to eventually bring the total to 160, giving mounted patrols a larger role in battling crime.

"There's a reason we call them the 10-foot cop," Mr. Kelly said. "You can see them from blocks away, they're great at crowd control and they're probably the most photographed piece of equipment we have. I'm a huge fan."

So are police departments around the country. After decades of being viewed as a quaint 19th-century throwback, horseback policing is undergoing a resurgence in cities like Honolulu, Las Vegas and Oklahoma City. Law enforcement officials have come to appreciate the tactical and economic advantages of a mobile crime-fighting force whose members cost one-fifth the price of a Crown Victoria cruiser.

One mounted officer, police strategists like to say, carries the punch of 10 beat officers, especially when it comes to making a statement at large public gatherings or on busy downtown streets.

Scott McClelland, whose family in Canada trains and sells horses to law enforcement agencies across North America, said he gets weekly calls from small town sheriffs and big city police chiefs interested in starting mounted units.

"They can do more than a cop on foot, or a guy in a car," said Mr. McClelland, speaking from his ranch on the plains of Saskatchewan. "They can gallop through traffic, go the wrong way up one-way streets, and they're great for community relations. I mean, you can't exactly pet a cop car. Or a police dog, for that matter."

In New York, once paired, officers and their horses often spend the rest of their careers together. For example, Sgt. William McKay and Angus have been partners for nine years. Recently, they helped round up a group of men involved in a shooting. All it took was the approaching clippity-clop of Angus and few stern shouts from Sergeant McKay.

"When a cop on horseback issues a command, people tend to listen," he said. "I mean, I'm sitting on a thousand pounds of animal. It's also human nature to respect and fear a horse."

Sergeant McKay's Coney Island-based unit recently began patrolling some of the more troubled precincts of central Brooklyn, including East New York and Brownsville, where they often draw a crowd that is both appreciative and awed. In communities with a longstanding mistrust of the police, he said, there is nothing like a large animal to break the ice.

At the dawn of the automobile age, the city had 700 mounted officers. In 1970's, in the fiscal crisis, that number dropped to 40. These days, the department spends $4,000 to buy each horse, all of them castrated thoroughbreds or quarter horses that are groomed for police work.

Daily maintenance? About $10 a day for hay, grain and bedding material. "Sure beats the price of gas," said Lt. David Gaynor, who oversees the stables in the Bronx where horses are tested and trained. "And they don't give off carbon monoxide."

For every horse that makes it to the streets of New York, at least five others are returned to the seller, Lieutenant Gaynor said. Inherently skittish and prone to flee at the first hint of trouble, many horses will rear up at a wind-blown plastic bag or back away from a groaning sanitation truck. Horses prone to bucking, bolting or nibbling on fingers are rejected.

Paint horses, those of mottled coloring, need not apply. (The department values dark-hued uniformity, although there is one snow-white horse on the force.) Ultimately, trainers look for a combination of intelligence, fearlessness and the child-friendly demeanor of a show pony.

Prospects that make it to the training center in Pelham Bay Park are put through a nerve-racking gantlet of sensory challenges that include smoke bombs, clanging metal pots, hissing flares and the ultimate test, blanks fired a few paces from a horse's head. After three to six months of training, graduates make a 12-mile victory march to Manhattan.

On a recent afternoon, about a dozen horses, some newly arrived, some tried-and-true veterans, were put through "nuisance training," an ad-hoc obstacle course. Because they are highly socialized pack animals, the old-timers will often lend confidence to the rookies, which is particularly helpful when horses and their riders are forced to gallop across a blue plastic tarp, dash along an allée of burning hay, then made to march against a phalanx of hostile men waving trash bags and firing off air horns.

The idea, trainers explained, is to simulate the more harrowing aspects of city life: a gun battle, the possible mayhem of a United Nations protest or, say, the ugly aftermath of a Yankees-Red Sox game that spills out into the parking lot. (Attention would-be troublemakers: police horses cannot be thwarted by firecrackers, carrots or golf balls rolled beneath their feet.)

Having endured fire, smoke and shouting men, the horses and their riders are rewarded with a rugby-like tournament involving a giant inflatable ball pushed around by snout and hoof. The exercise, Lieutenant Gaynor explained, is to get the horses accustomed to pushing through throngs of people.

Although it is hard to find critics of mounted police — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals supports law enforcement's humane use of horses — some experts say their value is limited. A mounted officer, they contend, might be reluctant to leave his horse behind to chase a fleeing suspect. Ice can be a formidable foe.

Others suggested that horses are a police department indulgence. Then there are waste-related issues, although horse manure, boosters pointed out, quickly dries up and blows away.

"Some cops disparage them as all show," said Peter C. Moskos, a former police officer who is now professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Some guys say they're no better than a set of bagpipes."

Getting a spot with one of the city's mounted troop is highly competitive, and once they get in, most officers stay until retirement, even if it means giving up more lucrative transfers. Old horses live out their final years at an upstate horse farm, and many officers will show up at the stables long before the start of their shift just to groom their partners.

After 10 years on foot patrol, Officer Chris Farino, 33, recently won a coveted spot in the mounted troop. "I played cops and robbers a long time, and now that I'm on a horse, my picture's on everybody's refrigerator," he said.

Friends in the force rib him, saying he is a playboy who no longer works for a living. After all, he said, most people pay good money to spend a few hours on horseback.

"Compared to traditional policing," he said, "this feels like a vacation."

    A New Crime Fighter, for $10 in Hay and Oats, NYT, 18.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/nyregion/18horses.html?hp&ex=1145419200&en=d46bdfd78798f568&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Wrongful Conviction Prompts Detroit Police to Videotape Certain Interrogations

April 11, 2006
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS

DETROIT, April 10 — The Detroit Police Department, whose image has been marred for years by complaints of wrongful detentions, the excessive use of force to obtain confessions and other civil rights abuses, has agreed to videotape interrogations of all suspects in crimes that carry a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Detroit's police chief, Ella Bully-Cummings, said she viewed the new policy as a way to reform her department, which is operating under two consent decrees with the Department of Justice.

The videotaping, part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the family of a mentally ill man who spent 17 years in prison after confessing to a rape and murder that he did not commit, is expected to be in place within six months.

"Number one, it keeps cops honest," Chief Bully-Cummings said. "It's a protection for the citizen that's being interrogated. But from a chief's point of view, I think the greatest benefit is to police because what it does is provide documentation that they didn't coerce."

Chief Bully-Cummings said the department had installed equipment so it could begin taping interrogations once the final settlement was worked out and approved by the City Council and Judge Gerald E. Rosen of Federal District Court here.

A decade ago, the only states to require videotaped interrogations were Minnesota and Alaska. But in recent years, as DNA testing has led to the release of scores of prisoners and raised concerns about the prevalence of coerced confessions, more and more states and municipalities have begun recording interrogations. At least 450 police departments across the country now do so, said Thomas P. Sullivan, a former United States attorney in Chicago who has studied interrogation procedures.

"When you put it all on videotape, it gives you no leeway," he said. "You can watch it. I can watch it. The jury can watch it. I always say it's like having an instant replay so you know whether the guy went out of bounds in a football game or whether the tennis ball went out of the court."

Advocates for the wrongfully convicted applauded Detroit's decision.

"Detroit in this case has real symbolism to it," said Barry C. Scheck, a lawyer who helped negotiate the new policy with the city on behalf of the family of the wrongfully imprisoned man, Eddie Joe Lloyd. "It sends a message to other police chiefs that even in the most difficult departments, this is something you can get done. That's the significance of this."

As part of the consent decrees, which have been in place since 2003, Detroit agreed to overhaul its arrest, interrogation and detention policies.

Mr. Lloyd died in 2004 at age 54, two years after he was released from prison. Though disabled by a circulation problem in his leg and suffering from heart disease, he spent his final years, family and friends said, convinced that his case could serve as an impetus for change.

Mr. Lloyd traveled across the country as a speaker for the Innocence Project, a program at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University founded in part by Mr. Scheck that works to free the wrongfully convicted. Mr. Lloyd's customary sound bite, often uttered in interviews and speeches, was: "DNA is God's signature. God's signature is never a forgery, and his checks never bounce."

Ruth Lloyd Harlin, 56, Mr. Lloyd's younger sister, said the new policy brought "a sense that the wrong has been righted."

"It would have saved Eddie many years of being incarcerated if it had been in place when he went away," Ms. Harlin said. "We can't change that. The only thing we can look forward to now is that it won't happen to anyone again."

The Lloyd family is in the process of finalizing the settlement, reportedly worth more than $4 million, with the City of Detroit and state and county agencies in Michigan, lawyers involved with the case said.

In early 1984, Mr. Lloyd, a patient at the Detroit Psychiatric Institute who suffered from delusions that he had a special ability to solve crimes, sent a letter to the police saying he wanted to help in the investigation of the killing of Michelle Jackson, 16, the latest victim in a rash of several dozen rapes and murders. It was similar to other letters he had written, falsely claiming he knew things that would allow the police to solve heinous and well-publicized cases.

But this time, the police said, the letter mentioned details of Ms. Jackson's murder that had not been made public, and Mr. Lloyd quickly shot to the top of the list of suspects.

Mr. Lloyd's lawyers have said the police interrogated him at the hospital, fed him details of the crime and convinced him that confessing would help them find the real killer. At his sentencing, Judge Leonard Townsend of the Circuit Court in Wayne County said he regretted that Michigan had abolished the death penalty. He sentenced Mr. Lloyd to the maximum, life in prison.

After listening to Mr. Scheck discuss the value of DNA testing in criminal cases on the talk show "Donahue" in 1995, Mr. Lloyd wrote to him and asked for help.

By that time, most of the files had disappeared. But a pair of semen-stained long johns, which Mr. Lloyd said he had wrapped around Ms. Jackson's neck, had survived, and DNA testing determined that the stains had not come from him.

Acknowledging her department's tarnished image, Chief Bully-Cummings said the settlement in the Lloyd case was a step forward. "I'm in charge of a department that's under two consent decrees," she said. "So it's important for me as a chief to be proactive."

Of the videotaping, she said, "I just thought this was the best practice for us."

    Wrongful Conviction Prompts Detroit Police to Videotape Certain Interrogations, NYT, 11.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/us/11detroit.html