History > 2007 > USA > Police (II)

Wounded New York Police Officer Dies

July 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:33 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- An officer shot in the face during a traffic stop died Saturday, and the suspected gunmen now face murder charges, officials said.

Russel Timoshenko, 23, died at a hospital of injuries suffered early Monday after he and his partner stopped a stolen SUV in Brooklyn, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Timoshenko had been paralyzed, suffered brain swelling and was unable to breathe on his own. His partner, Herman Yan, who was saved by his bullet-resistant vest, was released from a hospital Tuesday.

Two suspects captured in Pennsylvania were charged in the assault; a third man suspected of driving the getaway car is being held in New York.

Authorities say the three suspects were in a stolen SUV when police pulled the vehicle over early Monday. As the two officers approached the vehicle, one shot Timoshenko with a pistol, and another fired on Yan with a semiautomatic handgun, police said.

The suspected gunmen face charges of first-degree murder and could be sentenced to life in prison without parole if convicted, the Brooklyn district attorney's office.

Wounded New York Police Officer Dies, NYT, 15.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Officers-Shot.html

Unending Parental Vigil at the Bedside

of a Gravely Wounded Officer

July 13, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

In their own private hell — a small, comfortable room at Kings County Hospital Center and one next door where their only child lies hooked up to life-support machines — Leonid and Tatyana Timoshenko wait.

What else can they do? Their 23-year-old son, Police Officer Russel Timoshenko, has improved little, the police say, since he was shot in the face by a man in a stolen BMW at the darkest hour of Monday morning.

They go to his room and pray and kiss his hands and speak softly to his still, silent figure. When they are exhausted with grief, they go back to their room and wait a little more.

The Timoshenkos’ hell is not without visitors. Yesterday, they received Boris and Maya Marshalik, fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union who thought they might be able to offer some small comfort. In March, their own son, Auxiliary Police Officer Yevgeniy Marshalik, was fatally shot on the street in Greenwich Village by a man who had just murdered a pizzeria worker.

Ms. Marshalik said the Timoshenkos were doing as well as could be expected, which is to say, worse than anyone who has never faced the loss of a child can imagine.

“When you see your child on life support. ...” she said, trailing off momentarily. “Normal things. Crying. They have some hope. They’re not ready to let go.”

The Timoshenkos would like the world to know, Ms. Marshalik said, that they feel their son is getting the best possible care at Kings County.

“They were talking about in the media that it says they were upset at the hospital,” Ms. Marshalik said. “It’s not true.”

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly struck the same note at a news conference outside the hospital yesterday afternoon.

“They could not be more appreciative of the medical staff here at Kings County Hospital,” Mr. Kelly said of the Timoshenkos. “They know that everything is being done for their son.”

Not that this has stopped the Timoshenkos from seeking second opinions.

On Wednesday, Ms. Marshalik said, they contacted a doctor in Russia. They felt they had to do something. “Their son is still alive,” Ms. Marshalik said.

Much of the intervention being done these days is spiritual, rather than medical. On Wednesday, a priest from the Orthodox Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, anointed the officer’s face, his chest, and his arms with holy oil, seven times in succession, said Tatyana Borshchevskaya, a member of the church sisterhood.

The ceremony was not Officer Timoshenko’s last rites, Ms. Borshchevskaya said yesterday. It was intended to heal him.

In the past couple of days, she said, Officer Timoshenko has been looking a little better.

“Yesterday the swelling in his face was down,” she said. “Today I saw a little, little bit of his eyes.”

Commissioner Kelly said the reduced swelling did not mean much. “In essence,” he said, “he remains in the same condition he’s been in since he arrived here at the hospital.”

Ms. Marshalik, who manages the medical office of her husband, a pediatrician, in Sheepshead Bay, has been haunted by Officer Timoshenko and his family all week. Yesterday at her home in Valley Stream, on Long Island, she said, “I woke up at 3 o’clock and said, ‘I want to go there.’ ”

The Marshaliks stayed with the Timoshenkos at the hospital for two hours. They were leery of sharing too much of what was said, but in any case, they said, there wasn’t much to say.

“You cannot say anything,” Boris Marshalik said. “I think anyone who went through that cannot be consoled or comforted.”

“Mostly,” Ms. Marshalik said, “we just talked about our boys. They wanted us to know that their son was nice, too.”

Russel and Yevgeniy had a fair amount in common, Ms. Marshalik said. Their son was 19 when he was shot. Russel was 23.

“Russel came to this country when he was 7,” she said. “Our son came when he was 6. They were American boys.”

After they talked about their boys for as long as they could, the two families parted.

“We hugged, and we said, ‘If there’s anything we can do for you, please let us know,’ ” Ms. Marshalik said.

Then the Marshaliks returned to their medical practice, past the reception desk with the mural of Winnie-the-Pooh characters on the wall, and on into the back.

The high-pitched sounds of not-so-sick children echoed from the treatment rooms. Ms. Marshalik bent over her desk and filled out some paperwork.

The Timoshenkos stayed at the hospital to wait some more.

Ann Farmer and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

    Unending Parental Vigil at the Bedside of a Gravely Wounded Officer, NYT, 13.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/nyregion/13hospital.html

Police Hold Third Man in Shooting,

Calling Him the Leader

July 13, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and ETHAN WILENSKY-LANFORD

The police believe that the third suspect in the shooting of two New York City police officers — found yesterday hiding in the underbrush off a Pennsylvania highway — was the ringleader of the three, and are investigating whether the gang used stolen cars to pull off shootings, traffic in illegal firearms and recruit prostitutes, officials said yesterday.

The suspect, Robert Ellis, was arrested after being pulled from the bushes at 8 a.m. He had a three-day growth of stubble and was in the same ragged sweatshirt the authorities believe he was wearing on Monday when, they say, he and another man, Dexter Bostic, fired shots at the officers.

Mr. Ellis bore little resemblance to the pictures of him in tailored jackets on a MySpace page that offered aspiring models entree into the worlds of advertising and film.

Officials are investigating the bonds among Mr. Ellis, Mr. Bostic and Lee Woods, the first man arrested in the police officers’ shooting. They said they believed that the men crossed paths in prison, where all three served extended sentences for a variety of violent crimes, and that they joined forces after they were freed.

“There is a couple of elements here,” one law enforcement official said. “They may have done this before, gone out in cars, and did whatever crimes they did, and then brought the cars back.”

Another official said it was Mr. Ellis, 34, who hit on the idea of stealing cars from the auto dealership in Inwood, on Long Island, where he had once worked and where Mr. Bostic, 34, now worked in sales — and was recently named employee of the month.

Law enforcement officials said activities at the dealership, Five Towns Mitsubishi, had been under investigation for more than a year, one reason detectives were quickly able to focus on Mr. Bostic after the two officers were shot. They were seeking him in his sister’s Queens apartment on Monday when they caught Mr. Woods, the sister’s boyfriend. The authorities say that Mr. Woods was driving the vehicle the officers pulled over, but that he did not fire any shots.

Officials said the men would take a car off the dealership lot, cruise the roads of the metropolitan area and then return it — as Mr. Bostic did a day before the shooting of the officers, when the police believe he used a Porsche in a drive-by shooting of a man in Jamaica, Queens.

Detectives are trying to identify a motive in that shooting, possibly robbery or a prostitution turf battle, the authorities said.

Ballistics evidence from the gun used in the shooting on Sunday, a .45-caliber Llama, linked it to Mr. Bostic; investigators say they believe he used the same gun to shoot one of the officers, Russel Timoshenko.

The authorities are also trying to determine whether the suspects are tied to the June 11 shooting death of a 24-year-old Queens rapper, Rayquan Elliot, who performed under the name Stack Bundles. Relatives of Mr. Elliot said at the time that he had felt threatened by people envious of his show business success.

“Both are career criminals,” one investigator said of Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis. “Both are real bad guys.”

When Officer Timoshenko, 23, and his partner, Officer Herman Yan, 26, pulled the trio over in their stolen black 2003 BMW sport-utility vehicle early Monday in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, they had no idea that each of the men had amassed a long criminal record, or that they were heavily armed.

As the officers approached, Mr. Ellis and Mr. Bostic opened fire, the police have said. Officer Timoshenko, shot in the face and neck, remained in critical condition on life support yesterday; Officer Yan, hit in the arm and in his bulletproof vest, was released from a hospital on Tuesday.

The BMW, abandoned after the shooting, had the fingerprints of all three men inside, an official said, and Mr. Woods’s fingerprints were lifted from a box of food found lying just outside the driver’s door.

Three guns — the Llama, a 9-millimeter Hi-Point pistol and a Tec-9 semiautomatic — were found in an alley near the vehicle. The Tec-9, which court papers said was being loaded during the shooting, was not fired at the officers. All three guns were illegal, and each has been traced.

The Tec-9 was bought more than 11 years ago in Tennessee. The Hi-Point was bought in January in Alabama. The buyers of those guns have been identified and interviewed, and officials are investigating how the suspects came to possess the weapons. The Llama was originally purchased about eight years ago in Virginia by a man who has since died.

“Every gun tells a story,” said William G. McMahon, the special agent in charge of the New York office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “These are three pieces to the puzzle.”

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has said that investigators are looking for links between the men and any other crimes. In addition to the shooting in Jamaica on Sunday, he said, a shooting in Lawrence, on Long Island, is being examined.

“Obviously, we are looking at the possibility of them committing other crimes,” Mr. Kelly said. “We believe that Bostic was the shooter at 4 o’clock in the morning on Sunday. We believe they used a vehicle, a used vehicle, a Porsche, from the car dealership. We are doing an examination of other robberies, other events that have taken place over the last several months, to see if they have been involved, individually or jointly, in any more crimes.”

Mr. Ellis and Mr. Bostic were driven to Pennsylvania on Monday by a friend who has told the police he did not realize when he picked them up that they had been involved in the shooting of the officers. They took a ferry to Connecticut from Long Island before driving across New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

Mr. Ellis was caught on a wooded hill near Mile Marker 293.8 off Interstate 80, in Jackson Township, Pa., only a few hundred yards from where officers had captured Mr. Bostic about 14 hours earlier.

Officials said a city police bloodhound picked up Mr. Ellis’s trail and, along with a German shepherd, pursued him. Mr. Ellis was hiding in a thicket, where the police said they found a container of peanut butter he had been eating to sustain himself while on the run.

Officer Yan’s handcuffs were placed on Mr. Ellis’s hands. Officer Timoshenko’s had been used on Mr. Bostic earlier. “It’s an important symbol, and I think it shows that this is a very close-knit organization,” Mr. Kelly said.

The Brooklyn prosecutors handling the case, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi and Mark Hale, flew to Pennsylvania yesterday in a police helicopter with a video technician. A law enforcement official would say only that Mr. Ellis had made admissions in a videotaped statement. A person with knowledge of the statement characterized it as a “full confession,” and said it was “tight as a drum.”

Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis were taken together to the Monroe County Courthouse, in Stroudsburg, Pa., where each appeared before Judge Ronald E. Vican and waived the right to a full extradition hearing.

They were then taken to New York, arriving at the 71st Precinct station house at 6:20 p.m. Neither man said anything. Police officers lined the walkway in front of the station in the yellow sunlight of early evening.

Later last night, as the two men were led out of the station to be taken to Central Booking, Mr. Bostic was covered in sweat, while Mr. Ellis stared down a phalanx of reporters. Neither man spoke.Mr. Woods was arraigned on Wednesday. Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis are expected to be arraigned in criminal court in Brooklyn today. A lawyer for Mr. Bostic’s family did not return a call for comment.

Jacqueline Hill-Bennett, 32, a longtime friend of Mr. Ellis’s, said that Mr. Ellis, who goes by the name Roger, set up the MySpace site “so that he could have the modeling agency. He is trying to. That was his hustle.”

Ms. Hill-Bennett, a fashion designer and a photographer, said Mr. Ellis had helped her set up fashion shows with aspiring models. “He is trying to start a business,” she said. “He’s been rather unsuccessful with it.”

She said Mr. Ellis had worked at Five Towns Mitsubishi with Mr. Bostic until sometime last year. “I’ve known Roger since I was 14 years old; we met in Hillcrest High School,” said Ms. Hill-Bennett, who lives in Jamaica, Queens. “He’s my very good friend. The story that’s going on, I really don’t know what to believe.”

Michael Brick, Kate Hammer, Trymaine Lee and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

    Police Hold Third Man in Shooting, Calling Him the Leader, NYT, 13.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/nyregion/13cops.html

2nd Police Shooting Arrest

Made in Pennsylvania

July 12, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A second suspect in the shooting of two New York City police officers in Brooklyn early Monday was arrested Wednesday near Stroudsburg, Pa., officials said.

The suspect, Dexter Bostic, 34, who the police say shot at Officer Russel Timoshenko, 23, was taken into custody around 6 p.m. as he ran on a wooded median on Interstate 80 about 80 miles west of Manhattan. Law enforcement officers had been swarming the Pocono Mountains area throughout the day, acting on information that Mr. Bostic and another suspect, Robert Ellis, 34, had sought refuge there after fleeing New York City. Mr. Ellis remained at large late last night. Pennsylvania police said that they had surrounded a thickly wooded two-mile length of I-80, where they believe Mr. Ellis is hiding.

A break in the case came Tuesday, when city detectives found a man “who had driven the two suspects from Queens through four states to Pennsylvania,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference last night. “Their odyssey began just around the corner from Bostic’s residence in Queens on Monday morning.”

The driver, whose name the police would not release, said that he had driven Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis to Pennsylvania using a four-state route that went through Long Island, across Long Island Sound on the Port Jefferson ferry to Bridgeport, Conn., and into Tarrytown, N.Y., early Monday, Mr. Kelly said. There, the driver said, he stopped and bought tuna fish, crackers, peanut butter and water.

Later Monday, the men continued through New Jersey, and the driver dropped the two suspects on an isolated road about 14 miles from where Mr. Bostic was caught two days later. The driver returned to his home in Queens, where his brother, a city police officer, learned of his activities and persuaded him to tell the authorities, officials said.

James Murtin, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, said they were still investigating the men’s ties to the community, which has become a far-flung bedroom community for working-class New Yorkers. “We have not confirmed they have family here,” he said at a news conference last night near the search site. “We have confirmed they have been in this area before.”

Yesterday, a driver called the police to report seeing a pair matching the suspects’ descriptions walking west along Interstate 80, said Lt. Brian K. Kimmins of the Stroud Area Regional Police Department. He said that a Pennsylvania state trooper and an officer from his department were part of a team that caught Mr. Bostic. Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Ellis ran, and escaped. Mr. Ellis, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall and around 150 pounds, was last seen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt.

“The two were seen walking together along the interstate,” Lieutenant Kimmins said. “The other fellow took off into the woods, and we have manpower and dogs being used and unfolding as we speak.” Lee Woods, 29, the third suspect in the shooting that left Officer Timoshenko near death and his partner, Herman Yan, wounded, was charged on Tuesday and arraigned yesterday in criminal court in Brooklyn.

Assistant District Attorney Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi described Officer Timoshenko’s injuries in grim detail during the arraignment. He was shot in the face and neck. “He is currently paralyzed,” she said. “He cannot breathe on his own. He has swelling to his brain. His injuries are so severe that nothing less than his sheer will to live is keeping him alive.”

The hunt for the suspects led the police not only to Stroudsburg, but also to the Rockaways; North Carolina was another area of inquiry. Before Mr. Bostic’s arrest was announced, the senior managing editor of The Pocono Record newspaper, Susan Koomar, said several New York police officers— equipped with a forensic van — had been searching behind a shopping center.

Mr. Kelly said the city detectives found footprints leading toward a marsh on Tuesday night. Near Franz Street, they found empty tuna cans and cracker wrappers. Police dogs tracked a scent for nearly a mile along a creek bed before the trail went cold, he said. Then yesterday the 911 call from the interstate driver came in just before 6 p.m.

Meanwhile, the local officers were acting on information that Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis “were last seen in the area of Ramble Bush Road in Stroud Township,” at 4 p.m. on Monday, said Capt. William J. Parrish of the Stroud Area Regional Police.

Captain Parrish said the Pennsylvania State Police, the Pocono Township police and the United States Marshals Office were assisting New York detectives in “searching the woods and making contact with homeowners in the area.”

“The police consider the subjects armed and dangerous,” he said, adding that bloodhounds, a helicopter and 50 officers had been pressed into service. “Police are investigating any ties they may have to this area.” Mr. Kelly said looking for any links to the area was “part of the investigation.”

A woman who lives near Stroudsburg said she stopped in her car yesterday to ask a group of officers what was going on. The police “were all over the road,” said the woman, who was reached by telephone at her home on Ramble Bush Road and spoke on the condition that her name not be used. “They told me go home, lock my doors and not to go out.”

She added: “There sure are a lot of police cars down there.”

Legal papers filed at Mr. Woods’s arraignment say Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis fired at least seven times as Officers Timoshenko and Yan approached their stolen BMW in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn. The shots, the papers said, caused “brain damage and paralysis from the neck down” for Officer Timoshenko, and caused Officer Yan “significant blood loss requiring surgery.” Ms. Nicolazzi said Mr. Woods was driving the BMW when the two officers pulled it over. Mr. Woods is not accused of firing at the officers.

“There is nothing to suggest he shared the intent to harm anyone else,” Mr. Woods’s lawyer, Patrick Michael Megaro, told Judge Richard N. Allman.

Drawing on Mr. Woods’s statements to investigators, officials said the men had three guns in the BMW; two were used to shoot the officers, and the third was loaded at the time, the court papers said. After the officers were hit, Mr. Woods drove the BMW away, abandoned it and hid the three handguns, the papers said. He is charged with aggravated assault of a police officer, attempted murder, evidence tampering, hindering prosecution, unauthorized use of a vehicle and possession of a weapon.

At his arraignment, Mr. Woods stood quietly, his hands cuffed behind his back, as a team of police officers stood close behind him and dozens of uniformed officers from the 71st Precinct, where the shootings occurred, and surrounding precincts lined the courtroom benches. Mr. Woods’s mother was also in the courtroom.

Mr. Megaro said that Mr. Woods’s family lived near him and that he did not pose a risk of flight, but Judge Allman denied his request for bond. His next court appearance was set for Aug. 3.

Outside court, Mr. Megaro said, “The Woods family’s thoughts and prayers are with the Timoshenko family.”

Investigators believe that Mr. Bostic may have connections in North Carolina, one official said; another said detectives were in contact with relatives there. The High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Fugitive Task Force, made up of deputy United States marshals, New York City detectives, state troopers and federal agents, was investigating.

Earlier, officers in New York showed up in force at a house in Far Rockaway after someone called 911 to report that “the people you’re looking for in the cop shooting are in that location,” a law enforcement official said. Teams of officers converged on Bay 32nd Street and Bessemund Avenue, driving an armored vehicle and a half-dozen heavy trucks from the Emergency Service Unit and using a police robot. They entered a house and led a man out in handcuffs.

But the man was later released, the police said. One law enforcement official said it was not believed that the episode “has anything to do with the shooting.” Mr. Kelly said it was a “good-faith call,” one of many that came in yesterday reporting what people believed were sightings of the suspects.

Mr. Kelly reiterated the extensive criminal histories of Mr. Bostic, Mr. Ellis and Mr. Woods. He said investigators were working to see whether the men could be linked to any other crimes before or after the Monday shooting. He said Mr. Bostic had been linked, through ballistics, to a drive-by shooting in Jamaica, Queens, on Sunday.

“There was a Porsche that was involved in the shooting, and we believe that Bostic shot an individual in the leg and also robbed him during this event,” Mr. Kelly said. A gun used in the Monday shooting was linked to the Sunday shooting, he said. He said an earlier shooting in Lawrence, in Nassau County, was also “still under investigation” for any links.

Also, Mr. Kelly said the department had determined that the Porsche used in the drive-by shooting Sunday night was taken from the car dealership where Mr. Bostic worked in Inwood, in Nassau County; the BMW used in the Monday shooting was also taken from there. “And the Porsche was returned to the lot,” Mr. Kelly said.

Referring to the three guns recovered near the abandoned BMW, Mr. Kelly said, “We’ll get the full history of these guns, but right now, we don’t have the full histories.” He said one of them, a semi-automatic pistol, had 24 rounds in its magazine. Another, a .45-caliber handgun, was made in Argentina. The third, a 9-millimeter High Point, is “a very common gun” and well known to the police in New York, he said.

Before Mr. Bostic’s arrest was announced, Mr. Kelly said he would urge Mr. Bostic and Mr. Ellis “to turn themselves in, as we don’t want any more violence.” He added, “We will work to give them safe passage.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Brick, Ann Farmer, Thomas J. Lueck and Michael Wilson.

    2nd Police Shooting Arrest Made in Pennsylvania, NYT, 12.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/nyregion/12cops.html?hp

Driver Faces Charges in Mens' Deaths

July 10, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:25 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- A man accused of trying to smuggle more than a dozen Central American men in an SUV will be charged with capital murder in the deaths of three men thrown from the vehicle in a chase, police said.

The driver, a native of Cuba, was among the 12 people hospitalized early Monday when the SUV rolled while being tailed by police. The three men who were thrown from the vehicle died at the scene, according to a San Antonio police report.

The driver, whose identity has not been released, will be charged with three counts of capital murder in the deaths, said San Antonio Police Sgt. Gabe Trevino.

Police say the injuries of the 12 hospitalized ranged from minor to critical.

All the vehicle's occupants were men and most were believed to be from Guatemala and Honduras. They were apparently being smuggled to Houston, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.

The Medical Examiner's Office in San Antonio was working to identify the three dead and notify their families via the consular offices.

Four of the SUV's occupants weren't injured. They were being held by ICE pending further investigation.

Authorities say the driver led a state trooper and police from three departments on a high-speed chase that covered more than 100 miles.

    Driver Faces Charges in Mens' Deaths, NYT, 10.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigrants-Crash.html

Classmate Charged

in Woman's 1986 Death

July 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- More than 20 years after a pregnant woman was found strangled in a roadway, a high school classmate who served time for killing another woman has been charged with her murder.

Gary Troutman was ordered held without bail Wednesday in connection with the March 1986 death of Angela Savage, the Broward County Sheriff's Office said.

Savage, 24, was last seen buying cigarettes at a neighborhood store with her infant son in tow. Witnesses said they saw a man approach her as she walked home. The infant was found safe the next morning on the porch of a family friend's home and Savage's body was found sprawled on a road.

The sheriff's office declined to say Wednesday how it linked Troutman to Savage's death, though detectives said when they reopened the case last year that they were counting on DNA tests.

Troutman, 45, recently served nine years in prison for the murder of a pregnant teen in February 1986 -- six weeks before Savage was killed.

Cassandra Scott, 17, had been found strangled near a Deerfield Beach warehouse. Her death remained unsolved until Troutman was arrested in 1994 after a fight with his wife. While being questioned, he confessed that a strangulation fantasy had compelled him to kill the young woman, authorities said.

Court records did not list an attorney for Troutman. He had a public defender in his previous case, but that office's phone would not accept incoming messages Thursday.

Troutman went to Deerfield Beach High with Savage, and their families attended church together, relatives said after his arrest.

''They were all friends. (Troutman's) wife and my daughter -- all of them grew up together,'' said Savage's father, Bernard Adams.

    Classmate Charged in Woman's 1986 Death, NYT, 5.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Cold-Case.html

Mothers Surrender in Fire Deaths

June 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- The mothers of five children killed in a house fire surrendered to police Thursday to face involuntary manslaughter charges for leaving the youngsters alone while they went to a bar.

Wearing a T-shirt saying ''Mommy Loves You,'' Shakita Mangham, 25, arrived at municipal court early Thursday. Furaha Love, 25, turned herself in at police headquarters a short time later.

Authorities concluded that the children were not left with a baby sitter the night of the June 12 fire, as Mangham had initially told police.

Love's attorney, Ernest Sharif, called the charges unwarranted.

''We're in a very emotional climate right now,'' the attorney said Thursday. ''Five children died. Automatically people want to make the connection it was her fault. But from a legal standpoint, it was not her fault.''

He said Love was ''a loving parent who did something she regrets, but she didn't kill the children.''

Mangham's attorney, Jim Ecker, said he would comment after his client was arraigned Thursday.

    Mothers Surrender in Fire Deaths, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fire-Children-Killed.html

Police May Face an Alcohol Test

After Shootings

June 19, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

The New York City Police Department is moving to require officers to take breath tests for alcohol if they shoot someone and to undergo a psychological screening when they become candidates for undercover work, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced yesterday. Both measures are among the recommendations of a panel created after a Queens man was fatally shot in November in a volley of 50 bullets fired by officers.

Mr. Kelly, who set up the panel in December, said he had accepted all 19 of its recommendations, which included hiring actors to help train officers in their undercover roles as gun dealers or narcotics traffickers and creating programs to teach the public about the need for such operations.

He said he would send the recommendations to senior commanders for feedback and hoped to have the changes in place quickly after he heard from them.

Mr. Kelly said the breath tests probably would be conducted by members of the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

The new procedures would be the first substantive changes to the way the Police Department operates since the Queens man, Sean Bell, 23, was killed while leaving a strip club in Jamaica on Nov. 25, the morning of his wedding.

Two of Mr. Bell’s friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, were wounded. Three police detectives have been indicted in connection with the shooting.

Four of the five officers involved in the shooting are detectives, and the union that represents them criticized the breath test recommendation, saying such a measure — which would apply to all police officers — was subject to collective bargaining.

The Bell case — in which the five officers fired 50 shots into a gray Nissan carrying the three men — prompted calls for the Police Department to rethink the tactics and rules of undercover operations. The detectives indicted in the Bell case were in a larger group seeking prostitution arrests at the Club Kalua, a topless bar.

One of the detectives approached Mr. Bell’s car. But Mr. Bell drove forward, clipping him, and then hit a police minivan, backed up, nearly hitting the detective again and slammed into the minivan a second time, the police have said.

Neither Mr. Bell nor his friends were armed, although the police officers apparently believed that they were, and no gun was found in the car.

The Rev. Al Sharpton and a lawyer representing Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman offered measured support for the panel’s suggestions. “It is positive change, and it is a first step in the right direction,” said the lawyer, Sanford A. Rubenstein, who also represents Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell.

“It also gives greater authority to the New York State Legislature to amend state law to enact this requirement statewide, and it could be a model to enact this kind legislation across the country,” Mr. Rubenstein said.

Although the Police Department review was called in response to the Bell shooting, Mr. Kelly said the panelists, all but one of whom were high-ranking members in the department, did not investigate specifics of that case. “We didn’t say, ‘Hey, take a look at this case,’ ” the commissioner said.

At the time of the shooting, one aspect of undercover work — that officers inside a bar or club are allowed up to two alcoholic drinks during an eight-hour shift so as not to look suspicious — came under special scrutiny.

Mr. Kelly said yesterday that he supported the two-drink rule, and he reiterated that there is no “indication or evidence” that alcohol played a role in the Bell shooting. He said the five officers involved “were found to be fit for duty.”

Requiring that police officers take breath tests after shootings — whether the officers are on duty or off — is a significant change.

Mr. Kelly said the idea was “roughly akin” to federal tests, like those required for railroad operators after crashes, and he said the police department in Milwaukee had a similar policy.

Albert W. O’Leary, a spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents 23,000 rank-and-file officers, said the union had no comment on the recommendations. But the breath test idea was immediately criticized by Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association.

“I would challenge that,” Mr. Palladino said of the breath tests. “I think it is a mandatory subject of collective bargaining, so if the department chooses to just unilaterally impose that, I would challenge that in the appropriate arena, whether that is in the office of collective bargaining or State Supreme Court.”

Mr. Palladino said the unions also were “taking a look” at the 18 other recommendations on the list announced by Mr. Kelly.

Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled last year that department discipline falls within the authority of the police commissioner “and is not subject to negotiation through collective bargaining.”

Psychological screening for potential undercover officers would involve interviews by psychologists or psychiatrists who would determine the candidates’ mental suitability for the job, the police said.

The screenings would be in addition to the current practice, in which candidates for undercover work are observed by supervisors in field situations to see how they cope. Normally, psychological exams are required when police officers are hired.

The committee also recommended that commanders not limit undercover candidates to those officers who have at least two years of experience on the job. It proposed the commanders consider “particularly suitable” candidates who have less experience.

The panel also proposed that officers wear the same type of jacket — known as a “raid jacket’ — when they sweep in to make arrests after an undercover operation is completed. It recommended that undercover officers, like all members of the department, complete firearms training sessions twice a year. To help achieve that, Mr. Kelly said that “special accommodations be made” so that “their identify is protected.”

Mr. Kelly said the breath tests could begin as soon as September. He said the guidelines for the tests, and how they will be implemented, are subject to the responses of commanders. He said commanders at shooting scenes will still be required to determine if an officer involved in a shooting was fit for duty.

Police officials said the goal of the breath tests is an attempt to gather all the facts for the standard post-shooting analysis. “You’re not required to take a Breathalyzer test now,” Mr. Kelly said. “That’s the big difference.”

Last year, police officers were involved in 36 shootings in which individuals were injured or killed. (Thirteen people were killed in such shootings.) In recent years, such shootings have numbered in the “double digits,” Mr. Browne said, much lower than in earlier eras.

Mr. Sharpton said the call to test officers’ sobriety after shootings was a “rallying cry” among black religious leaders and elected officials when they met with Mr. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at City Hall on Nov. 27 to calm frayed tempers after the Bell shooting. Still, Mr. Sharpton had concerns.

“In the Bell shooting, the Breathalyzer could have been conducted by the cops in the shooting, or by those who responded to the shooting who may have been witnesses or implicated in the case,” Mr. Sharpton said. “But other than that, it is a step in the right direction.”

    Police May Face an Alcohol Test After Shootings, NYT, 19.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/nyregion/19undercover.html

Funeral held for N.Y. man shot by police

Sat May 26, 2007
7:39PM EDT
Reuters
By Chris Michaud

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Civil rights activist Al Sharpton on Saturday delivered the eulogy at a packed funeral service for an unarmed Honduran immigrant shot and killed by an off-duty policeman following a traffic accident a week ago.

Fermin Arzu "came to this country to pursue the American dream, but ended up the American nightmare," Sharpton told more than 50 people at a small funeral home in the Bronx.

Many more gathered outside or paid respects after the service.

Arzu, 41, a building porter and father of six, was killed when police officer Raphael Lora fired five shots at him after Arzu's vehicle hit a parked car on May 18.

The Bronx shooting recalled an incident last November in which officers fired 50 shots at three unarmed black men in the borough of Queens, killing 23-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding day and wounding two men. Two officers have been indicted for manslaughter and a third for reckless endangerment.

Sharpton said earlier on Saturday that Arzu's shooting was strikingly similar to the Bell case.

"This is the same case, of police disregarding the rights of the citizens of New York," Sharpton told a rally of about 100 people in Harlem that, like the funeral, was also attended by Bell's fiancee.

He called reports that Arzu had been drinking at the time of the shooting "distractions," adding that even if he had committed a crime, such as fleeing from the scene of an accident, he "should have been arrested, not killed."

Initial police reports said Lora had stopped the Arzu's vehicle after it hit a parked car and was confronting him when the car lurched forward. Lora opened fire, hitting Arzu. Officers are barred from firing at a vehicle unless they feel their lives are in danger. No weapon was found.

Lora has been placed on desk duty while the Bronx district attorney continues his investigation.

New York's police department has come under increased scrutiny following several high-profile cases of fatal shootings or abuse, including the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant who died when police fired 41 shots at him in the Bronx.

    Funeral held for N.Y. man shot by police, NYT, 26.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN254562520070526

After Bronx Crash,

Minivan Driver Is Fatally Shot

by Off-Duty Officer

May 20, 2007
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

An off-duty police officer shot and killed a driver in the Bronx late Friday night when the man, who had just crashed into another car, began to pull away after the officer confronted him.

The officer, Raphael Lora, fired five times, hitting the driver, Fermin Arzu, once in the back, the police said. The minivan Mr. Arzu was driving then careered two blocks down a quiet Bronx street, sideswiped a car, jumped a curb, slammed into a church wall and burst into flames.

Mr. Arzu, 41, a building porter and musician from Honduras, was declared dead at the scene. The medical examiner said the officer’s bullet had perforated his heart and a lung.

Officer Lora, 37, who is assigned to the Manhattan Traffic Task Force, was treated at Jacobi Medical Center for an arm injury and released.

The Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating the shooting, and as part of standard procedure, Officer Lora was put on modified duty and his gun was taken away. The Bronx district attorney’s office said it was reviewing the case.

The police said they did not yet have enough information to determine whether the shooting fell within department guidelines. Those rules forbid officers from firing at a moving vehicle unless deadly force is being used against the officer or another person with something other than the vehicle.

It was unclear what Officer Lora saw or thought he saw on Friday night. According to one person with knowledge of the officer’s account, who declined to be identified because he was closely involved in the investigation, Officer Lora said he saw Mr. Arzu reach for the glove compartment. But no weapon was found in the minivan, the police said.

Officer Lora is being represented by lawyers from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a police union, a spokesman for the group said, adding that it had no comment on the shooting.

The police have been under intense scrutiny since Nov. 25, when five officers fired 50 bullets into a car in Queens, killing the driver, Sean Bell, 23, and wounding two of his friends.

Mr. Bell’s death touched off weeks of marches and angry denunciations that did not wane until a grand jury handed down indictments in March, charging two officers with manslaughter and one with reckless endangerment.

On Friday, according to the police, Mr. Arzu’s red Nissan Quest swerved across Hewitt Place, a two-way street, about 11:40 p.m. and crashed head-on into a parked Mitsubishi Montero, causing the Montero to back into a parked Honda Accord and buckle the front of the Honda. Mr. Arzu backed up his minivan, the police said, then continued half a block to Longwood Avenue and Hewitt Place.

It was not clear if he was trying to flee the scene of the accident.

Officer Lora, who lives nearby, then raced into the street, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, the police said, and approached the minivan. Witnesses told the police that the two men began yelling.

One witness said that Officer Lora had a badge around his neck, the police said. The witness said Officer Lora was at the driver’s door, which was open, when the minivan lurched forward and the officer began shooting.

The police said Officer Lora fired his 9-millimeter Glock handgun five times. Four bullets lodged in the vehicle’s door frame, rear back panel and the panel over the taillight, the police said, and one hit Mr. Arzu.

The minivan kept going, heading down Hewitt Place toward Westchester Avenue, two blocks away, where it eventually slammed into the church. The minivan burst into flames, which were extinguished by responding police officers and firefighters, the police said.

While police guidelines forbid shooting at a moving car in the absence of another threat, Andrew C. Quinn, a lawyer for the Sergeants Benevolent Association, another police union, said, “If the officer reasonably believes the person has a weapon and is about to use it, and that he may use deadly physical force, he can fire his weapon.

“You are in department guidelines,” he said, “regardless of whether that person is behind a wheel of the car.”

New York State law, which would apply in any criminal inquiry, allows someone to fire at a car if it is being used as a deadly weapon or if someone believes deadly force is about to be used against him, Mr. Quinn said.

The shooting devastated Mr. Arzu’s friends, who described him as a garrulous, lively man who struggled to speak English but communicated exquisitely through music, particularly reggae and Honduran songs.

He lived with his companion of four years and her young son in a 12th-floor apartment on Westchester Avenue, half a mile from the accident scene.

Mr. Arzu’s companion recently had a double mastectomy, according to one of her sons, who would not give his name. Mr. Arzu doted on her, he said.

Mr. Arzu played the bass, the piano and drums and, until recently, was part of a band, the Rio Tinto Stars Band, that played in cafes and bars and toured to Miami and Boston, according to Albert Fernandez, a friend.

Mr. Arzu worked at a building near the Cross Bronx Expressway as a porter and doing maintenance.

Mr. Arzu had two arrests dating to the late 1990s, a law enforcement official said, but the records were sealed.

As is customary in an autopsy, the medical examiner’s office is having his blood tested for traces of alcohol or drugs.

According to the police, Officer Lora has not been involved in a previous shooting case since he joined the department in 1999. The police said he was evaluated after the shooting and determined to be fit for duty.

Officer Lora was described by a neighbor as a quiet, attentive and meticulous man. He lives with his wife and two teenage daughters, said the neighbor, David Encarnacion, 20.

Down the street, a mess of glass shards, twisted metal and a crumpled Nissan hubcap still lay by the church wall yesterday. Witnesses described a chaotic, frightening scene on Friday.

Geraldo Reyes, 16, said he and his uncle cowered in their car after they heard the shots, and saw the van career down the street with Officer Lora running after it.

“We didn’t know if he was a cop or a regular person,” he said.

And Marisol Medina, 36, said she heard a half-dozen shots and then looked up to see the minivan racing down Hewitt Place.

“The car was accelerating as if a dead weight was pressing the gas pedal,” she said.

Kai Ma contributed reporting.

    After Bronx Crash, Minivan Driver Is Fatally Shot by Off-Duty Officer, NYT, 20.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/nyregion/20shoot.html

Officer in Diallo Killing

Wants His Name Restored

May 20, 2007
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

Kenneth Boss cannot remember a time when he did not want to be a police officer.

Not when he took the police academy test early, at age 16, and had to wait four years to be hired.

Not when his first assignment was in the transit bureau, far from his dream job.

Not when he pulled out his gun on a dark Bronx street one frigid night in 1999 and fired 5 of the 41 police bullets aimed at an unarmed West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo, whose killing unleashed a torrent of rage against the Police Department.

And not now, more than seven years after a jury acquitted him and three other officers of murder charges in the Diallo case, leaving Officer Boss in a shadowy limbo that he has spent years fighting to escape, an effort he has redoubled of late.

While the other three have walked away from the department, Officer Boss, 35, is still a New York City police officer, though you might not know it by his duties. He fixes power tools for the department in a repair shop on a lonely aviation field in Brooklyn, and sometimes plays the victim or the perpetrator in police drills. He is forbidden to carry a gun.

In March, Officer Boss filed a federal lawsuit against the Police Department and the city demanding his gun back and a return to full enforcement duty. He says the department has no reason not to reinstate him, especially since he earned a Navy Achievement Medal after a seven-month tour with the Marines in Iraq in 2006.

Instead, Officer Boss says, he is a pariah in the Police Department whom others derisively call “Kenny No-Gun.”

“I find myself in a fight now, a fight for my name,” Officer Boss said last week in an interview at the office of his lawyers, Rae Koshetz and Edward W. Hayes, in Midtown Manhattan. “They won’t acknowledge that I’m anything but a bad memory. They won’t acknowledge that I ever was a good cop.”

On its face, Officer Boss’s lawsuit seeks to answer the question of what it means to be a police officer and what a department can and cannot do with an officer who has been legally cleared, but is clearly stigmatized in the eyes of the public.

But police experts said the suit could not have been filed at a worse time. Less than four months earlier, on Nov. 25, a young man named Sean Bell died in a storm of 50 police bullets that also wounded two of his friends. Critics drew comparisons between the shootings of Mr. Diallo and Mr. Bell, who also was black and unarmed, and whose death rekindled tensions between the Police Department and minority communities.

Three of the five undercover officers involved in Mr. Bell’s shooting, and two of the three indicted for it, were black, and officers said they fired only after Mr. Bell drove into one of the officers.

Delores Jones-Brown, a former prosecutor in New York City and interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said feelings in minority communities were still too raw from the Bell shooting.

“The police have a community relations problem, and the notion that he would end up back on the force, I’m sure they see it as a political football,” she said. “And yeah, it means he gets caught in the middle of that.

“By no fault of his own, I don’t think it would be good for anyone, even him, if he were to get his gun back,” Ms. Jones-Brown said.

The department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, refused to comment on the case. But the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, made his position clear long before the Sean Bell shooting, when Officer Boss filed a similar lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan in 2002. Mr. Kelly said the notoriety of the Diallo case would erode the public’s trust in Officer Boss, and in the department, if he were put back on patrol. And it would be disastrous for the department, Mr. Kelly said, if Officer Boss were involved in another shooting.

In the 2002 case, the court said that the police commissioner had the right to decide whether to return an officer’s gun. An appeals court upheld the decision in 2005. So Officer Boss pressed ahead this spring in federal court.

Days after he filed the lawsuit, a grand jury handed down manslaughter indictments for two of the five officers who shot at Mr. Bell and reckless endangerment charges for a third. The three officers, who have pleaded not guilty, have been suspended without pay.

By his own acknowledgment, Officer Boss is alone in his fight. Two of the other officers who fired at Mr. Diallo, Richard Murphy and Edward McMellon, joined the Fire Department. The fourth, Sean Carroll, who, like Officer Boss, was assigned to a job at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, quit in 2005.

The Police Department said at least a couple of other officers were in positions like Officer Boss, cleared of wrongdoing but not allowed to carry a gun. One is Officer Richard S. Neri Jr., who accidentally shot and killed an unarmed teenager, Timothy Stansbury Jr., on a Brooklyn rooftop in 2004.

Patrick J. Lynch, president of the police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said in a statement that any officer not facing criminal or department charges should be armed and returned to full duty. But Officer Boss said support from other officers had been thin. “Everyone knows full well it would be career suicide to help,” he said. “Most cops feel what I’m doing is futile.”

In his current job, Officer Boss rarely gets overtime assignments. He acknowledged that missing out on potentially thousands of dollars a year in extra pay is a motivation to keep on fighting. But he said that his principal goal was to get his old job back and be freed from such indignities as having to carry an identification card stamped “No firearm.”

The ordeal has also capsized his personal life: At the time of the Diallo shooting, he had a live-in companion, but she moved out, he said, because their relationship was unable to bear the stress.

“I’m doing this to regain my name and set the record straight on this,” he said, “and to prevent the Police Department from doing to other cops what they’ve done to me.”

Officer Boss grew up in Holbrook, on Long Island, the son of a union carpenter and a registered nurse. He was hired by the transit police in 1992 and then transferred to the city’s Police Department, which was then a separate agency, in 1994.

He worked his way up through street patrols in Harlem and East New York, Brooklyn, eventually becoming part of the elite Street Crimes Unit. He said he had earned more than 40 medals and, with his partner, was named the unit’s Officer of the Month in December 1998 for having the most arrests of suspects with guns the previous month.

Officer Boss’s description of what happened the night Mr. Diallo was killed, Feb. 4, 1999, has remained unchanged: A tragic mistake.

He and the other officers were patrolling a troubled area of the Bronx, on the lookout for a serial rapist. They testified that they spotted Mr. Diallo, who was 22, on his stoop, and tried to question him because he was acting suspiciously. Officer Carroll said he began firing because he believed Mr. Diallo was reaching for a gun; instead, it was a wallet. Officer McMellon stumbled and fell backward off the stoop.

Bullets ricocheted in the vestibule, and Officers Murphy and Boss said they believed Officer McMellon had been shot. Officer Boss, the last out of the police car, fired five times, believing, he said, that a two-way gun battle was under way. It was not clear whether any of his shots hit Mr. Diallo, who died after being struck by 19 bullets.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it and wish I could change the outcome,” Officer Boss said.

Critics and protesters said the shooting was brutal proof of ingrained racism in the department and overaggressive crime-fighting tactics. A grand jury indicted the four officers — all of them white — on murder charges in 1999, but a jury in Albany cleared them in January 2000, prompting more protests.

In April 2001, the Police Department’s Firearm Discharge Review Board concluded after an internal investigation that the shooting had not violated any department guidelines and that the officers should not be disciplined for it.

The police commissioner at the time, Bernard B. Kerik, agreed, but kept all four officers on modified duty and, in an unusual move, did not return their firearms, a decision Mr. Kelly upheld. The board also said the officers should be retrained on firearms and have their cases reviewed in a year, but neither directive was carried out, according to Officer Boss.

But he continued trying to prove himself. After Sept. 11, he said, he worked on the pile at ground zero doing search and recovery for nine months, a claim the Police Department did not dispute. In April 2002, Officer Boss wrote a letter to Mr. Kelly asking to be reinstated, but was turned down.

In 2004, he enlisted in the Marines. He took military leave and was deployed to Iraq in early 2006. He was the best in his platoon, according to his platoon commander, Capt. Gary K. Koon, and was awarded the achievement medal for combat operations.

During one exchange, according to a letter Captain Koon wrote to Mr. Kelly, Officer Boss shot dead an insurgent who had fired a bullet into his bulletproof vest. In a separate confrontation, he killed an armed insurgent who turned to confront him, Captain Koon wrote.

Officer Boss says his service in Iraq makes clear his ability to act appropriately under duress. Captain Koon and another officer, Major Craig R. Abele, wrote to Mr. Kelly, urging him to reinstate Officer Boss to full duty.

The state courts said that while Mr. Kelly did not have to give Officer Boss a gun, he could not keep him on “modified duty” indefinitely. While the department classifies his status as “full duty, no gun,” according to a court brief, Officer Boss’s new lawsuit argues that he is still, in effect, on modified duty.

Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay, said the Police Department was acting reasonably, echoing the argument that its liability, and Officer Boss’s, would increase if he were rearmed.

“What if this guy got himself into another situation?” Professor O’Donnell said. “In some ways, they’re saving the cop from himself. Even though the cop doesn’t want to be saved from himself.”

And Robert Conason, a lawyer who represented Mr. Diallo’s parents, said returning Officer Boss to full duty would be “inappropriate.” (In 2004, the city and the Diallo family reached a $3 million settlement.)

Officer Boss says that even if his lawsuit fails, he will stay on the force. He has less than five years left until full-benefit retirement, and after all, he said, his heart is with the department.

“This thing is bigger than me,” he said. “And I’m going to see it through to the end.”

    Officer in Diallo Killing Wants His Name Restored, NYT, 20.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/nyregion/20gun.html

Critics Bash 'Warrior Culture' of LAPD

May 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The Police Department's violent response at the end of an immigrant demonstration is the latest incident highlighting what critics describe as the force's ''warrior culture.''

It's an ethos that's been on display before -- the use of clubs and tear gas to disperse 15,000 peaceful anti-war protesters in Century City in 1967, the Watts riots, the Rodney King beating in 1991, the harsh crackdown on demonstrators at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

Public outcry and inquiries that followed each event haven't deterred some officers from cracking a few kneecaps to assert order, even in front of cameras.

Chief William Bratton's criticism of his department and decision to quickly reassign two high-ranking officers after the immigration rally near two weeks ago were roundly applauded, though skeptics say it's not nearly enough to address deep-seated issues that produce violent responses by some officers.

Bratton was appointed in 2002 to steer the LAPD after a rogue anti-gang unit scandalized the department by assaulting and framing people in the tough Rampart district. Dozens of criminal convictions were tossed out as a result of the scandal.

Bratton has since had some success in improving community relations, including his swift action following the May 1 immigration rally violence.

However, skeptics say none of these efforts are enough to address the deep-seated culture that has caused repeated bouts of excessive force.

''The LAPD is a big ocean liner and it will take a long time to turn around,'' said Joe Domanick, a senior fellow of criminal justice at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. ''(Bratton) has not focused on the paramilitary culture and us-against-them mentality that seems to still persist in the LAPD.''

He said the culture originated during the reign of William H. Parker, hired as chief in 1950, who imagined the city's police force as an urban army.

Domanick said Parker's view was: ''We're the only thing standing between chaos and anarchy. We are the professionals. We know better. No one tells us better.''

After the King beating, lawyer Warren Christopher, who later became secretary of state, was tapped to lead a commission in dissecting the department.

The Christopher Commission examined five years of reports, police radio communications and hearings and interviews with dozens of residents and police, and found that ''a significant number of officers'' routinely used excessive force.

''The Department not only failed to deal with the problem group of officers but it often rewarded them with positive evaluations and promotions,'' according to the report.

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice led a similar investigation after the Rampart scandal and, in a 2000 report, found little had changed.

The anti-gang unit, known as CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), ''developed an independent subculture that embodied a 'war on gangs' where the ends justified their needs,' the report said. ''They resisted supervision and control and ignored LAPD's procedures and policies.''

Since then, Bratton has had to take a number of actions in response to police use of force.

He restricted police from firing on cars in most cases after officers killed a 13-year-old car theft suspect who rammed a squad car in 2005. In 2004, Bratton banned police from carrying long metal flashlights after video showed a Hispanic police officer using one to repeatedly beat a black suspect who was lying on the ground.

Critics say it will take a lot more to change the LAPD's warrior culture.

Particularly telling of a resistance to change was the department's decision to put Cmdr. Louis Gray in charge of policing the May 1 rally, said National Lawyers Guild attorney Carol Sobel. Gray was the one who gave the order to fire rubber bullets at demonstrators outside the 2000 convention, said Sobel, who said one of the rubber projectiles hit her between the eyes.

''The institutional memory is very short,'' said Sobel, who worked with police afterward to revise crowd control protocols.

Bob Baker, president of the police union, turned down a request for an interview, but issued a statement defending the police response after the May 1 clash, saying officers responded appropriately when some members of the crowd threw bottles and rocks at police.

''As Chief Bratton says, 'sometimes policing isn't pretty and there is little if any time for reflection and discussion before action,''' Baker said. ''... In the coming days it will become clear what transpired. Until then there should be no rush to judgment.''

Associated Press writer Jeremiah Marquez contributed to this report.

    Critics Bash 'Warrior Culture' of LAPD, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Rally-LA-Police.html

Men Sue Chicago Police,

Alleging Beating

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- Four businessmen who claim they were beaten by six off-duty Chicago police officers filed a federal lawsuit against police and the city on Tuesday.

The lawsuit alleges the officers attacked the men while they played pool at an upscale bar Dec. 15.

The men suffered injuries including broken ribs, broken facial bones, injured vertebrae and bruises, according to the suit, which seeks unspecified damages.

The officers were stripped of their police powers in March but have not been charged. The confrontation was caught on tape but police have not released any footage.

The suit names 16 police personnel and the city of Chicago as defendants. It alleges that the department's Office of Professional Standards didn't contact prosecutors about the case as quickly as officials claimed.

After the victims complained to OPS, officers intimidated them, including making a late-night visit to one man's sister and banging on her door for a half hour, the suit alleges.

Cook County State's Attorney spokesman John Gorman declined to comment on the suit Tuesday. A Chicago police spokeswoman said the department doesn't comment on pending litigation.

Superintendent Philip Cline has acknowledged that police were called to the Jefferson Tap and Grille on Chicago's North Side but left without intervening after a sergeant allegedly involved in the incident waved them off.

A bartender who said she beaten by an off-duty police officer in an attack caught on video has also sued the officer and the city.

    Men Sue Chicago Police, Alleging Beating, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Police-Beatings.html

Los Angeles Punishes Police Official

Over Clash at Demonstration

May 8, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, May 7 — The city’s mayor and its police chief said Monday that one of the highest-ranking officials in the Police Department would be demoted and transferred in the wake of a violent confrontation between officers and demonstrators at an immigration rally last week.

The police official, Deputy Chief Cayler Carter Jr., a 30-year veteran of the department, will be reduced one rank, to commander, and moved out of the Central Bureau, which he currently heads.

Mr. Carter has been ordered to work from home while investigations into the episode proceed. He was the highest-ranking police official present last Tuesday when officers, in response to a group of agitators who were trying to provoke them with taunts and thrown objects, fired 148 rubber bullets and used other forceful tactics to break up the immigration rally, in MacArthur Park. Several spectators and journalists were injured, as were a number of officers.

The second in command at the scene, Cmdr. Louis Gray, will also be transferred out of the Central Bureau, a 1,700-member unit that, according to the department’s Web site, serves more than a million residents in an area roughly the size of the District of Columbia.

“I have to be comfortable with the leadership around me,” William J. Bratton, the police chief, said at a City Hall news conference with Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa.

The demotion of the two officials came a day after 60 members of an elite squad, the Metropolitan Division, were removed from street duty as a result of the clash. Mr. Bratton said they were unlikely to return to the division, made up of highly skilled, specialized officers who are trained in relative isolation from neighborhood streets and are on guard for riot conditions.

The episode at MacArthur Park underscored problems that have continued to dog the department deep into the term of Mr. Bratton, who rode into town five years ago with a plan to reduce crime, improve the department’s relationship with the city’s myriad ethnic groups and change its essential culture.

Still, the swiftness of Monday’s response by him and Mr. Villaraigosa, and their profuse apologies in the last few days, signaled their determination to break with the department’s long history of disproportionate response to events on the street and defensiveness to criticism.

That the move against the department officials was announced at City Hall, by the mayor and the police chief together, was a sign that Mr. Bratton, whose appointment is up for renewal this summer, enjoys the unqualified support of Mr. Villaraigosa.

The civilians who oversee the department also made their support clear. “I personally still have confidence in Chief Bratton,” John W. Mack, president of the Board of Police Commissioners, said at the news conference.

Mr. Mack will play a major role in whether Mr. Bratton gets a second term. And although he said he viewed the events in MacArthur Park as “a major setback for the department,” he praised the chief for not being defensive about the resulting criticism.

Mr. Villaraigosa, who was out of the country on the day of the rally, appeared eager Monday to demonstrate that he was firmly in control of his city and the way the department polices it.

“Accountability begins at the top,” Mr. Villaraigosa said, adding: “Let me be clear about this. When I say accountability starts at the top, it starts with me. Today we’re taking decisive action.”

Though the outcome of several investigations is pending, it appears that a group of roughly 50 agitators, throwing bottles at the police, were pushed by them into the park among nonviolent protesters, rather than being isolated and confined. What followed, videos of the demonstration suggest, were widespread and fairly random acts of aggressive police tactics against a broad swath of people in the park, including reporters.

“You see in the highly specialized, aggressive units the lack of judgment about appropriate and proportionate use of force,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer who, appointed by Mr. Bratton and the civilian commissioners, led a committee that studied the widely publicized corruption in the department’s Rampart Division.

Ms. Rice said she was glad the department’s leadership had taken a firm stand. Referring to a former Los Angeles police chief known for tough methods, she said, “It is important to send a strong signal that this lack of judgment and this mindless kind of tactic may have been O.K. under Daryl Gates, but it’s not O.K. in 21st-century L.A.”

“The question for me, though,” she added, “is not the individuals who get disciplined, but do they understand the mentality that led them to do what they did?”

    Los Angeles Punishes Police Official Over Clash at Demonstration, NYT, 8.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/08california.html

Action by Police at Rally

Troubles Los Angeles Chief

May 4, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
and JULIA PRESTON

LOS ANGELES, May 3 — Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that the episode here in which police officers clashed with demonstrators and journalists on Tuesday at an immigration rally was the “worst incident of this type I have ever encountered in 37 years” in law enforcement.

Eight officers and at least 15 civilians were hurt, the police said, with people still calling the department on Thursday to report injuries. Mr. Bratton said 240 nonlethal projectiles were fired by the police into the crowd.

“Clearly, something went wrong here,” he said in a interview.

After a request by Mr. Bratton, the F.B.I. announced Thursday that it would open a civil rights inquiry into the incident, which has drawn outrage from immigrant and civic groups and journalists’ organizations and a rebuke from the City Council. On Wednesday Mr. Bratton announced two internal investigations by the Police Department.

News video images of the incident that erupted at a peaceful gathering in MacArthur Park, west of downtown, showed the police marching into the crowd, shoving and knocking down demonstrators and journalists with batons and firing rubber bullets at close range.

In television and press interviews throughout the day, Mr. Bratton said he was troubled by the police action he saw on the videos, and he sought to assure the city that he intended full disclosure of the facts.

Organizers of the May Day rally, whose theme was a call for broad changes to immigration laws, said they had held extensive negotiations with the police in preparing for the demonstration. They said the police did not follow the agreed-upon procedure in case of a disturbance.

“It completely broke down,” said Victor Narro of the National Lawyers Guild, who was the organizers’ liaison with the police.

Bob Baker, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, appealed in a statement for “no rush to judgment.” He said the clash had started after the demonstrators threw rocks and bottles. “Our officers gave a legal dispersal order and were met with violence,” Mr. Baker said. “In the coming days it will become clear what transpired.”

According to demonstrators, organizers and journalists who witnessed the incident, a band of youths who were not affiliated with organizations formally participating in the rally confronted the police at least one block from the park. The youths, some covering their faces with bandanas, taunted the officers and by some accounts threw rocks and bottles at them.

Police officers in riot gear lined up in rows and pushed the youths back down the street into the park, the witnesses said. “They started moving in,” said Angela Sanbrano, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, an event organizer. “They started beating up on anybody that didn’t move.”

The police said they declared the assembly unlawful and issued orders to clear the park. But many demonstrators said they did not hear the orders, and others, who spoke only Spanish, did not understand them.

Nine people were arrested for various offenses, including assault with a deadly weapon for throwing rocks at officers, the police said Wednesday.

For the past two days, local television viewers have seen video of Christina Gonzalez, a reporter for the Fox News affiliate, KTTV Channel 11, being repeatedly shoved by an officer with a baton. When Ms. Gonzalez knelt to help a camerawoman, Patti Ballaz, whom the police had pushed to the ground, an officer angrily threatened Ms. Gonzalez with arrest and then grabbed her shoulders, spinning her abruptly to the side.

“You can’t do that!” Ms. Gonzalez cried out. “You know that!”

Ms. Ballaz suffered a hairline fracture of a wrist.

Another reporter, Patricia Nazario from KPCC-FM, a National Public Radio affiliate here, said she was talking to her editor on her cellphone when an officer struck her in the back with a baton.

Ms. Nazario said she faced the officer and told him she was a reporter. He struck her again with the baton on her left thigh, she said.

“It happened so fast and I was on the ground,” she said. “It was like they were robots, on autopilot.”

After examining videos of the events, Marc Cooper, associate director of the University of Southern California Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, said, “It seems to be a prima facie violation” of policies the police worked out with the American Civil Liberties Union in 2002 in the wake of scuffles with the press at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 2000.

The incident occurred as Mr. Bratton seeks to become the first police chief to earn a second five-year term since the city imposed term limits on high-ranking police officials in 1992. Although he has reduced the city’s crime rate by roughly 25 percent, his department has been dogged by the widely held perception that officers are often needlessly forceful.

The 1991 beating of Rodney G. King by the police and the acquittal a year later of the officers charged with using excessive force prompted riots; in the 1999 Rampart scandal, an antigang unit was accused of framing people, robbing suspects and other brutal conduct.

Jennifer Steinhauer reported from Los Angeles, and Julia Preston from New York. Ana Facio Contreras contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    Action by Police at Rally Troubles Los Angeles Chief, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/us/04immig.html

Officers Gather, 5,000 Strong,

to Mourn Fallen Trooper

May 3, 2007
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

DELMAR, N.Y., May 2 — A little more than two and half years ago, a young woman named Barbara Rhodes stood at the front inside Bethlehem Lutheran Church here, just outside Albany, and pledged to have and to hold a young state trooper named David C. Brinkerhoff so long as they both should live.

But death took Trooper Brinkerhoff, 29, sooner than either of them could have imagined when a fellow trooper accidentally shot him last week during a confrontation with an armed suspect in a Catskill farmhouse. On Wednesday, his wife returned to the church where they were married, this time to mourn.

She was joined by about 5,000 law-enforcement officers, including hundreds of her husband’s fellow state troopers. They came from as near as the local police department and as far as a Texas state police barracks — rank upon rank of stiff dress uniforms in gray or blue or black, lining the street on a discordantly beautiful spring morning.

They stood motionless as a procession of motorcycles and limousines escorted Trooper Brinkerhoff’s hearse to the church door. And they saluted as one when his coffin was lifted by an honor guard of fellow troopers and carried into the church, a bagpipe company’s dirge floating through the gentle breeze.

Inside the church, the coffin was draped in white and flanked by flower arrangements. One by one, his brothers, his pastor and his friends stood near the coffin to eulogize a warm, generous and devoted man they mostly called Brink.

“David wasn’t shallow about anything,” said the Rev. Mark A. Mueller, the senior pastor at Bethlehem, delivering the funeral’s sermon. “He did everything he did to the fullest. He believed everything that he believed to the fullest.”

Trooper Brinkerhoff, Pastor Mueller said, “would have forgiven anyone who might have had anything to do with his death.”

In his remarks, Gov. Eliot Spitzer cited the words of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and praised the state police for putting themselves in harm’s way. Trooper Brinkerhoff, he said, “embodied everything that it means to be a great New Yorker.”

So decent and kind was Trooper Brinkerhoff, the governor said, that he “has even been remembered fondly by many to whom he issued traffic summonses.”

“Now there’s a real New Yorker,” Mr. Spitzer added.

Mrs. Brinkerhoff did not deliver a eulogy, but a letter to her husband was distributed with the funeral program.

“I will miss you more than you could ever imagine,” she wrote, “but I have no regrets, we always told each other I love you and we never took one another for granted.”

She recalled her husband’s determination to join the department’s elite Mobile Response Team and his joy at learning that he had been selected.

“You died doing what you loved doing,” she wrote. “We are all so proud of you.”

Trooper Brinkerhoff was later buried at a cemetery in Coxsackie, the town where he and his wife and daughter, Isabella, lived and where his state police troop has a station.

Outside the church, the thousands of other police officers gathered quietly as the service inside progressed.

“We come to show support for the family and to show the camaraderie that we have — the close-knit brotherhood,” said Sgt. Billy Shelton, a trooper with the Texas state police based in McAllen, near the Mexican border.

Sergeant Shelton said he and a fellow Texas trooper had met Trooper Brinkerhoff’s family at a wake earlier in the week, presenting them with a Texas state flag that had flown over the Capitol in Austin the day he died.

Six New York State troopers have been killed in the last 13 months, one of the deadliest periods in the agency’s history. Two of the troopers died in car accidents on the job, one died in combat in Iraq, and three were fatally shot in the line of duty.

In a eulogy at the funeral, Preston L. Felton, the acting superintendent of the state police, said Trooper Brinkerhoff represented the best in law enforcement.

“He wanted to be a member of the long gray line,” Mr. Felton said, referring to the color of the troopers’ dress uniforms. “Troopers are our everyday heroes.”

State police officials released a detailed timeline on Wednesday of the hours before Trooper Brinkerhoff’s death, during the search for the suspect, Travis D. Trim.

According to the timeline, the officers who entered the house did not know if Mr. Trim was inside. Also, an alarm company with sensors in the house had reported no movement inside.

A state police spokesman said the agency had not yet been able to identify which of Trooper Brinkerhoff’s teammates fired the bullet that killed him.

Law-enforcement deaths are always difficult to stomach, Sergeant Shelton said outside the church, but are never more tragic than when they are caused by a fellow officer.

“I can’t imagine what that trooper is going through,” he said.

    Officers Gather, 5,000 Strong, to Mourn Fallen Trooper, NYT, 3.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/nyregion/03trooper.html

Justices Back Police in Chase Case

April 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Monday gave police officers protection from lawsuits that result from high-speed car chases, ruling against a Georgia teenager who was paralyzed after his car was run off the road.

In a case that turned on a video of the chase in suburban Atlanta, Justice Antonin Scalia said law enforcement officers do not have to call off pursuit of a fleeing motorist when they reasonably expect that other people could be hurt.

Rather, officers can take measures to stop the car without putting themselves at risk of civil rights lawsuits.

''A police officer's attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the lives of innocent bystanders does not violate the Fourth Amendment, even when it places the fleeing motorist at risk of serious injury or death,'' Scalia said.

The court sided 8-1 with former Coweta County sheriff's deputy Timothy Scott, who rammed a fleeing black Cadillac on a two-lane, rain-slicked road in March 2001.

Victor Harris, the 19-year-old driver of the Cadillac, lost control and his car ended up at the bottom of an embankment. The nighttime chase took place at roughly 90 miles an hour.

Harris, paralyzed, sued Scott.

Lower federal courts ruled the lawsuit could proceed, but the Supreme Court said Monday that it could not. Justice John Paul Stevens dissented.

In an unusual move, the court posted the dramatic video on its Web site.

Scalia described a ''Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort, placing police officers and innocent bystanders alike at great risk of serious injury.''

Stevens, however, said that a district court judge and three appellate judges who watched the same video concluded that issue should be decided after a trial, not by a judge in a pretrial ruling.

He said that was preferable to the case ''being decided by a group of elderly appellate judges,'' a reference to himself and his colleagues on the court. At 87, Stevens is the oldest justice.

Scalia said people could watch the tape and decide for themselves. ''We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself,'' he said in a footnote that accompanied the ruling.

The case is Scott v. Harris, 05-1631.

------

On the Net:

Video of the chase: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott--v--harris.rmvb

    Justices Back Police in Chase Case, NYT, 30.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Police-Chase.html?hp

New Charges in Taped Police Beating

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:18 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- An off-duty Chicago police officer who authorities say was videotaped beating a female bartender half his size faces 14 additional felony charges, prosecutors announced Friday.

Anthony Abbate, already charged with aggravated battery, was charged with seven counts of official misconduct, one count of communicating with a witness, three counts of intimidation and three counts of conspiracy, Cook County State's Attorney's office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said.

He is scheduled to be arraigned on the new charges May 16.

The Chicago Police Department was heavily criticized after the bar surveillance footage was released worldwide showing the man police identified as Abbate, 38, punching, beating and throwing the bartender to the floor after she refused to serve him more drinks.

The 24-year-old bartender, Karolina Obrycka, suffered bruises to her head, neck, back and lower body in the Feb. 19 attack, according to her attorney, Terry Ekl.

Authorities said last month that they were investigating whether someone tried to bribe and then threatened the bartender to keep her from pressing charges.

Abbate's attorney, Peter Hickey, said he was angry because he found out about the new charges from the media.

Abbate has been placed on leave, and police have said they intend to fire him over the alleged beating, which embarrassed the city and police department. Police faced intense criticism because Abbate originally was charged with a misdemeanor, until the videotape became public.

Police Superintendent Philip J. Cline, who is retiring, said Abbate had ''tarnished our image worse than anybody else in the history of the department,'' and said he would speed up the process of getting officers accused of misconduct off the street.

    New Charges in Taped Police Beating, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Police-Beating.html

NYC Man Dies After Scuffle With Police

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- A man died as officers tried to remove him from his home after his girlfriend reported he was acting irrationally, authorities said.

Authorities were attempting to determine what killed Patrick Ryan, 41, early Thursday.

Officers and emergency medical workers were called to his home in Queens around 4:30 a.m. and he scuffled with officers as they tried to subdue him, according to police. Seven officers suffered minor injuries.

Ryan became unresponsive as emergency workers put him on a gurney, police said. He was handcuffed to prevent him from injuring himself or others, police said.

Ryan was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to police.

Officers later found drug paraphernalia, a white powder and 35 rounds of .380-caliber ammunition at Ryan's home, police said.

Family members said his girlfriend was eight months pregnant with their child.

''I'm grieving,'' said Ryan's mother, Justiana Reid.

    NYC Man Dies After Scuffle With Police, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-BRF-Custody-Death.html

Comrade’s Shot

Killed New York State Trooper

April 28, 2007
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

The bullet that killed a New York state trooper during a shootout Wednesday morning in a farmhouse in the Catskill Mountains came from the gun of a fellow officer, not the suspect they had cornered, the state police said yesterday.

The police said that the suspect, who was hiding in the house after shooting another trooper the day before, fired one bullet at the slain trooper, David C. Brinkerhoff, but that it hit his body armor. That bullet knocked Trooper Brinkerhoff onto one knee. He was then struck once in the back of the head, fatally, during the fusillade of bullets that followed from three other troopers.

“As you can imagine, this new information is a source of great consternation and sadness,” Preston L. Felton, the acting superintendent of the state police, said in a news conference in Albany. “While it is clear that something went wrong, nothing can detract from the bravery and dedication of the men who entered” the house.

The state police also said that the suspect, Travis D. Trim, a 23-year-old college dropout from North Lawrence, N.Y., appeared to have died during the gunfight, having been shot once in the face and twice in the chest — not when the house went up in flames Wednesday night after being surrounded by scores of heavily armed police officers for most of the day.

Mr. Trim, who had a minor criminal record, was armed with a rifle and a handgun when the troopers encountered him on the second floor of the house about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. He had apparently broken into the unoccupied house, on a country road at the edge of Margaretville, N.Y., a tiny village, to hide after shooting a trooper, Matthew Gombosi, in the chest during a traffic stop on Tuesday afternoon. Trooper Gombosi, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, was unhurt.

On Wednesday, police officials said that they suspected that Mr. Trim might have died during the morning gunfight, but that they could not be sure since the troopers’ focus was on removing Trooper Brinkerhoff and another officer, Richard G. Mattson, who was shot in the arm, from the house.

The tense nine-hour standoff that followed — in which the police fired several tear gas canisters into the house and searched it room by room with a robotic camera — ended in an accidental fire that destroyed the farmhouse, a weekend home belonging to a New Jersey family. Mr. Felton said yesterday afternoon that the blaze appeared to have started when a final tear gas round fired into the house landed on a bed.

On learning that his brother, who was 29 and had a 7-month-old daughter, was killed by a colleague’s bullet, Michael Brinkerhoff, who lives in the Buffalo area, said in a telephone interview: “It doesn’t change anything. Regardless of how it went down, I still believe it was the result of Travis Trim’s actions.”

Similarly, Gov. Eliot Spitzer said in a written statement that “nothing should detract from Trooper Brinkerhoff’s honor and dedication to duty, or that of his fellow M.R.T. team members,” referring to the state police Mobile Response Team. He added, “We owe this fallen trooper and his colleagues a full appraisal of the facts as well as our continuing respect and gratitude.”

While deaths by fire from comrades are common in war zones, they are less so among police officers in the United States. Since 1893, there have been 198 such fatalities, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Since 2000, 18 such deaths have been documented.

Mr. Trim’s family and friends portrayed him this week as a troubled man with a paranoid disposition and a recent history of drug use. He had no felony convictions, and those who knew him expressed shock that he was capable of shooting a police officer.

The police say they do not know why he was in a remote corner of the Catskills, almost 300 miles from his home in upstate New York near the Canada border. He apparently stole a Dodge Caravan minivan from a friend at the State University of New York campus in Canton on April 20, and Trooper Gombosi pulled him over on Tuesday in Margaretville because the van’s license plate was missing, the police said.

Responding to the developments in the case yesterday, Mr. Trim’s grandmother, Ruth Trim of Dickinson Center, N.Y., told The Associated Press: “It would make me feel a lot better, but I’m still disgusted that he would be shooting at troopers. We need our troopers. It’s an awful world out there.”

At the news conference, Mr. Felton said the police had not completed their analysis of the shootout, but based on the information from an autopsy and a preliminary forensic review, he said the fatal wound to Trooper Brinkerhoff was “made by a .223 tactical round, and this round is believed to have been fired” by a member of the Mobile Response Team, an elite group akin to a SWAT team. The troopers had been drawn to the house by a tripped burglar alarm.

He said Trooper Mattson had been “shot in the arm by the assailant,” possibly by Mr. Trim’s .30-30 rifle.

Seven troopers in all were in the house during the gunfight, and four of them fired their weapons, discharging a total of 69 rounds. Mr. Felton said it was unclear who first entered the room where Mr. Trim was clutching the rifle. But he said that Trooper Brinkerhoff was probably the first to realize that Mr. Trim had opened fire.

“In a firefight such as this, Trooper Brinkerhoff was struck in the chest and was knocked back to one knee,” Mr. Felton said. “Other members came to his aid and started to return fire at the shooter, and at some point Trooper Brinkerhoff ended up getting hit with a round somewhere across the line of fire.” He said that Trooper Brinkerhoff had been wearing his Kevlar helmet.

“There is no more volatile or unpredictable situation than one presented by an unstable individual who is heavily armed and intent on causing harm,” Mr. Felton said.

“This is made even more serious when that individual has exhibited an inclination to harm police officers,” he said, adding, “Tragedy is often the result, as it was here.”

Last fall Trooper Brinkerhoff spent days tracking another fugitive, Ralph J. Phillips, who, in a strange foreshadowing of the Travis Trim case, had killed one state trooper and shot two others. But after learning that his wife, Barbara, was about to give birth, Trooper Brinkerhoff left the manhunt to return home, and Mr. Phillips, who is known as Bucky, was captured the day Trooper Brinkerhoff’s daughter was born.

Trooper Brinkerhoff is to be buried on Wednesday near Coxsackie, N.Y.

Nicholas Confessore and Sabrina Pacifici contributed reporting.

    Comrade’s Shot Killed New York State Trooper, NYT, 28.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/nyregion/28trooper.html?hp

A Fatal Wound From a Colleague’s

Weapon Is Rare, but Always a Risk

April 28, 2007
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
and SABRINA PACIFICI

The accidental shooting of David C. Brinkerhoff, the New York state trooper who was killed by a bullet from a fellow trooper confronting a suspect inside a Catskill farmhouse on Wednesday, puts Trooper Brinkerhoff in a small minority of police officers killed in the line of duty.

In the annals of law enforcement history, cases of officers dying at the hands of their own colleagues have been exceedingly rare. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, from 1893 through 2006, about 18,000 officers were killed on the job — but only 198 of them at the hand of a fellow officer.

Put another way, slightly more than 1 percent of all officers killed in the line of duty were killed by bullets fired by their colleagues. In the last decade, in fact, more officers have died in traffic-related accidents than by gunfire of any kind.

About 57,000 officers are assaulted every year, but with the introduction of Kevlar body armor in 1974, the number who suffer fatal injuries has decreased.

Experts said yesterday that many deaths involving gunfire from colleagues were caused by crossfire between teams of officers who were firing at the same assailant. In Trooper Brinkerhoff’s case, the police said that as he entered a farmhouse in pursuit of a suspect near Margaretville, N.Y., the suspect fired at him, hitting Trooper Brinkerhoff’s body armor. That bullet threw him off balance, and he was then hit once in the head during the gunfire that followed from three other troopers.

That situation mirrored others in recent years. Earlier this month, a veteran F.B.I. agent was killed in New Jersey when he was hit by a bullet from another agent’s gun as the agents swarmed a group of robbery suspects outside a bank. Three years before that, in June 2004, a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles was accidentally shot in the neck by a fellow officer as they surrounded a gunman outside a motel and opened fire.

“There is not one moment that is not potentially life threatening,” said Craig W. Floyd, chairman and chief executive of the Officers Memorial Fund. “You are equipped; you are taking all possible precautions and you have the best training possible, but this is not enough to protect an officer all the time.”

Among those officers killed accidentally by their colleagues, statistics show that 43 of the 198 were killed because of mistaken identity and 14 were killed in training exercises. But the No. 1 factor is accidental discharge of another officer’s weapon. That was the case in Kennesaw, Ga., in 2005, for example, when an officer was killed at the North Central Georgia Law Enforcement Academy. During a firearms training session, a training instructor’s firearm discharged as he performed a demonstration, shooting and killing a 23-year-old officer.

Even under the most benign circumstances, officers can be shot and killed, Mr. Floyd said. “It’s the nature of the job.”

    A Fatal Wound From a Colleague’s Weapon Is Rare, but Always a Risk, NYT, 28.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/nyregion/28friendly.html

After Fatal Clash,

Questions About Police Tactics

and a Suspect’s Mental State

April 27, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON
and LISA W. FODERARO

It was dusk Wednesday when the roaring fire ended an extraordinary day of tragedy and the massing of police manpower, armor and technology in a quiet corner of the Catskill Mountains.

Cameras stuck on poles, cameras embedded in thrown balls and even a camera mounted on a stair-climbing robot were used to track a suspect in the killing of a state trooper who may have already been shot dead.

But when the smoke cleared yesterday morning, there was the skeleton of a farmhouse and an abundance of unanswered questions, and the troopers who had been side by side with their slain colleague had not yet been interviewed.

“We want to give the troopers a little bit of time to get their emotions under control,” said Maj. Kevin Molinari, commander of Troop C of the state police.

On Wednesday, Travis D. Trim, 23, confronted troopers searching for him, fatally shooting Trooper David C. Brinkerhoff, 29, and wounding Trooper Richard G. Mattson, the authorities said. The troopers returned fire, possibly striking Mr. Trim, before two officers fled with their two wounded comrades. That night, after troopers fired tear gas canisters into the farmhouse, a fire swept the almost century-old structure and ignited a cache of ammunition stored there by its owner, making the hills echo with explosions and keeping firefighters at bay.

Yesterday, a charred body found clutching a rifle inside the house set ablaze during the deadly standoff was identified by the police as Mr. Trim, a college dropout who had stolen a friend’s van days earlier.

Mr. Trim’s family and friends tried to reconcile the man they know — admittedly deeply troubled, using hallucinogenic drugs and seeming paranoid — with the man accused of killing a trooper.

“Travis was crazy, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who would shoot a cop,” said Jake Ritz, 18, a student at SUNY Canton, which Mr. Trim attended before dropping out last year.

An autopsy conducted yesterday at Albany Medical Center was expected to determine whether Mr. Trim died in the fire or was shot. The results were not immediately released.

In addition, Major Molinari said the state police would conduct an internal investigation into the events and tactical decisions that led to the standoff and its fiery end. He defended the troopers’ firing tear gas canisters into the home, one of which may have touched off the fire.

“The major issue is, we had a clear and detailed and well-thought-out and methodical plan in place yesterday as to what we needed to do to remove Travis Trim safely from that residence,” he said. “There does come a point in time when we realized that we are going to have to go in the house.”

Mr. Trim’s criminal career took its first violent turn on Tuesday, when a trooper, Matthew Gombosi, pulled over the van with a missing license plate outside a service station in Margaretville, a village on the edge of Catskill Park about 140 miles northwest of New York City, the police said.

Mr. Trim, appearing disoriented and without identification, they said, pulled out a pistol and shot Trooper Gombosi, whose body armor spared him from serious injury. Mr. Trim then fled, the police said.

Early Wednesday morning, the police responded to a burglar alarm at the nearby vacation home of Carole Chamberlain-Berman of Bergenfield, N.J. After finding a backpack and other belongings of Mr. Trim’s, the police called in a team of four troopers from the Mobile Response Team, an elite and heavily armored unit.

They encountered Mr. Trim on a second-story landing about 8:30 a.m. It remained unclear yesterday how many rounds were fired. Trooper Brinkerhoff was struck in the head, Trooper Mattson in the left arm.

Troopers converged on the home. There were about 140 troopers, along with 40 or 50 officers from local police departments and members of the F.B.I., Major Molinari said. The troopers fired tear gas into the house for hours and called the telephone in the home, but Mr. Trim did not pick up, the major said.

Eventually, Robert A. Chamberlain, Ms. Chamberlain-Berman’s son, arrived and drew a diagram of its interior so that the police could send a robotic camera into the house, where it examined every room downstairs and began climbing to the second floor before tumbling back down, the major said.

“Every logical step that we had laid out in an effort to safely remove him without use of force was completed,” Major Molinari said. “It just reached a time when we are going to execute the plan and go into the residence.”

Shortly before 6 p.m., troopers could be seen donning heavy camouflage vests and packs, readying themselves for entering the home. But first, more tear gas was fired.

“You have to remember, this is an individual who, within a span of 18 hours, had shot three police officers, killing one and injuring another,” Major Molinari said.

Late Wednesday night, the acting superintendent of the New York State Police, Preston L. Felton, said it was possible that the last gas canisters used had been pulled from a different batch, one that is hotter when fired.

“There may have been several rounds of hot tear gas shot into the building by one of the other units, and I’m having our internal affairs look into it,” the superintendent said. “It’s not something that we planned to do, but the use of tear gas has, on occasion, led to fires, and we’re aware of that, and that’s why we stationed firefighters in close proximity.”

Laura Drake contributed reporting.

    After Fatal Clash, Questions About Police Tactics and a Suspect’s Mental State, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/nyregion/27catskill.html

An Earnest Trooper Gone Too Soon

April 27, 2007
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
and FERNANDA SANTOS

Ralph J. Phillips, the fugitive who killed a New York state trooper last year, did not know David C. Brinkerhoff. But Mr. Brinkerhoff knew Mr. Phillips. Mr. Brinkerhoff, a 29-year-old state trooper who was shot and killed on Wednesday, spent days tracking Mr. Phillips near the Pennsylvania border last fall, his first big assignment as part of the agency’s elite Mobile Response Team.

But when his wife, Barbara, called during the manhunt to tell him that she was about to give birth, Trooper Brinkerhoff knew where he was needed. He returned home and took her to the hospital.

His daughter, Isabella, was born the next day, the same day his fellow troopers cornered and captured Mr. Phillips.

“He would have almost been side by side with the man that found him,” his older brother Michael Brinkeroff recalled yesterday. “But he came back the night before. Barb called and said ‘You better get home.’ ”

They would like him to come home again. But on Wednesday, seven months after the capture of Mr. Phillips and the birth of Isabella, Trooper Brinkerhoff was fatally shot by another fugitive, Travis D. Trim, a 23-year-old college dropout, while entering a farmhouse in the Catskill Mountains where Mr. Trim had hidden.

Trooper Brinkerhoff became the sixth state trooper killed during the past 13 months. Two of the troopers died in car accidents while on the job, one died in combat in Iraq, and three were shot, including Troopers Brinkerhoff and Joseph A. Longobardo, whom Mr. Phillips shot last year while he was on the run.

Troopers Longobardo and Brinkerhoff had finished their Mobile Response Team training together.

“It’s devastating,” said Trooper Thomas Mungeer, first vice president of the New York State Police Benevolent Association, who met Trooper Brinkerhoff while working as a union delegate for Troop F, where Mr. Brinkerhoff was assigned. “This is a dangerous job, with more risks than most people out there would imagine, but we’ve had one after another, six troopers killed in the past 13 months.”

Yesterday, Trooper Brinkerhoff’s family and friends met at his home on a cul-de-sac in Coxsackie, a small town off the New York State Thruway not far south of Albany. They gathered their memories of a son, husband and father, their voices breaking over the past tense.

“He was confident and sure-footed in his everyday life, and he was confident and sure-footed in his job,” said his mother, Karen M. Howard. “And he was a wonderful father.”

It was hard to remember a time when they didn’t expect him to go into law enforcement, his brother said. Trooper Brinkerhoff grew up in Boston, N.Y., outside Buffalo. His mother owned a restaurant there not far from a state police barracks. The troopers came by for coffee; soon enough, they brought their families for dinner. When his mother moved the restaurant to nearby West Seneca, the troopers followed.

“The troopers were always around her and the kids, so it was only fitting that David would grow up to be one of them,” said Tim Clark, who used to own an antiques store near the restaurant and is now the director of the Buffalo Niagara Film Commission.

He was the youngest in the family but still, somehow, its fulcrum, conscientious and determined. When his two brothers and parents didn’t feel like attending Sunday services, he went to church alone. In high school, when he wasn’t studying or playing soccer or baseball, he trained to be an emergency responder.

“He was the all-around kid. He was athletic, he played in the school band, he was good-looking,” Michael Brinkerhoff said. “But he meshed and blended with everyone. You won’t find one person to say one bad thing about him.”

When he graduated from high school in 1995, he wrote in his yearbook that he hoped one day to become an F.B.I. agent, and spent the next three years at the State University of New York at Albany, majoring in criminology. Neither parties nor girls distracted him much, his mother said, though the state trooper’s exam did. He took the test when he turned 21 and passed. To enter the academy, he had to drop his college classes. But he wasn’t one to leave things unfinished.

“After he got out of the academy, he went right back to his degree,” his brother said. He continued on to get a master’s degree in public administration, all while serving as a state trooper.

In the winter of 2002, after four years in the state police, two friends set Trooper Brinkerhoff up on a blind date with a pretty young blonde named Barbara. They fell in love, and two and a half years later they married. Living in Coxsackie, they liked to walk their dog in the hills. When they could, they flew to Cancún, Mexico, for a few days on the beach.

“If I were to send you their wedding picture — that’s how they look all the time,” said Mr. Brinkerhoff, a special education teacher who lives near Buffalo. (Daniel Brinkerhoff, the third brother, is a sheriff’s deputy in Erie County.) “They were happy,” he said. “They always smiled.”

Duty came calling often. Trooper Brinkerhoff spent his first wedding anniversary in New Orleans, patrolling the streets ravaged by Hurricane Katrina with a volunteer detachment of New York state troopers. It was something out of a movie, he told them over the phone, empty and desolate, like another world. He would never forget the smell.

When he came back, Trooper Brinkerhoff set his eyes on the Mobile Response Team. He spent six months in training: hand-to-hand combat, weapons practice, rescue operations.

With his fellow trainees, he had to survive several days on Mount Marcy, the state’s highest peak, with just the clothes on his back. They woke up one morning to find themselves in a foot and a half of snow, Ms. Howard recounted. They marked their unit’s name, South Team, in the snow and took a picture to show back home. Last June, Trooper Brinkerhoff finished his training.

Not long after, he approached his commanding officer at Troop F, Maj. Ed Raso, and invited him to the induction ceremony.

“You should have seen the smile on his face,” Major Raso said. “This kid was just so proud to be a member of the State Police, and really, really proud that he’d be joining the M.R.T.”

    An Earnest Trooper Gone Too Soon, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/nyregion/27trooper.html

3 Officers Indicted Drug Raid Shooting

April 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- A grand jury indicted three current and former police officers in the shooting death of an elderly Atlanta woman during a drug raid, a judge said Thursday.

Officers with a no-knock warrant had raided the woman's home without warning on Nov. 21 after an informant said he had bought drugs from a dealer there. Kathryn Johnston, 92, died in an exchange of gunfire after the plainclothes officers burst in.

Gregg Junnier and J.R. Smith were charged in the indictment with felony murder, violation of oath by a public officer, criminal solicitation, burglary, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and making false statements.

Arthur Tesler is charged with violation of oath by a public officer, making false statements, false imprisonment under color of legal process.

Fulton County prosecutors said earlier this year that they intended to seek murder charges against three officers. The three also are expected to face federal charges.

When officers raided Johnston's home without announcing their presence, police say she fired a handgun and officers returned fire. An autopsy report revealed Johnston was shot five or six times in the chest, arms, legs and feet.

Narcotics officers said an informant had claimed there was cocaine in the home, but none was found.

The case raised serious questions about no-knock warrants and whether officers followed the proper procedures.

Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington asked the FBI to lead a multi-agency probe into the shootout. He also announced policy changes to require the department to drug-test its nearly 1,800 officers and mandate that top supervisors sign off on narcotics operations and no-knock warrants.

To get the warrant, officers told a magistrate judge that an undercover informant had told them Johnston's home had surveillance cameras monitored carefully by a drug dealer named ''Sam.''

After the shooting, a man claiming to be the informant told a television station that he never purchased drugs there, prompting Pennington to admit he was uncertain whether the suspected drug dealer actually existed.

    3 Officers Indicted Drug Raid Shooting, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Elderly-Shooting.html

2 N.Y. State Troopers Shot;

1 Dies of Injuries

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:07 p.m. ET
The New York Times

MARGARETVILLE, N.Y. (AP) -- A state trooper was shot to death and another was wounded in this Catskill Mountains town Wednesday as police chased a suspect in the shooting of a third trooper hours earlier, authorities said.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Eliot Spitzer said one of the troopers died shortly after the shooting.

Both had been flown by helicopter to a hospital, said Maureen Tuffey, a spokeswoman for the state police in Albany. She did not describe the extent of their injuries, and neither she nor Spitzer spokeswoman Christine Anderson identified them.

The hunt for the suspect started after Trooper Matthew Gombosi was shot in the torso during a traffic stop in the Margaretville area on Tuesday. Police said his body armor saved him from serious injury, but the suspect escaped.

A stolen minivan the suspect had been driving was found abandoned on a road in nearby Middletown, authorities said. They identified the suspect Tuesday as Travis D. Trim, 23, of North Lawrence.

The shooting Wednesday was the second death of a New York State Trooper during a manhunt since September.

Last summer, Ralph ''Bucky'' Phillips led police on a five-month manhunt throughout heavily wooded western New York after breaking out of a county jail. During his time on the run, he shot one trooper during a traffic stop and two others who were searching for him. One of those troopers later died.

Phillips was captured in September and is serving two life sentences.

After that manhunt, the largest in New York history, the union that represents state troopers sharply criticized the way state police officials managed the search.

    2 N.Y. State Troopers Shot; 1 Dies of Injuries, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nyregion/AP-Trooper-Shooting.html

40, 000 Pounds of Cocaine Seized at Sea

April 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:51 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ALAMEDA, Calif. (AP) -- The Coast Guard began unloading more than 40,000 pounds of cocaine seized from three ships off the Central American coast, much of it from a single bust considered the largest in U.S. maritime history.

Coast Guard officers had boarded a 330-foot ship heading north off the Pacific coast of Panama last month and discovered about 38,000 pounds of cocaine in two shipping containers, officials said. It was the largest single sea-based seizure of cocaine by a U.S. agency, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Brian Leshak.

Crews unloaded the cocaine Monday at a port in California, along with cocaine from two other busts. In one, also last month off Panama, a Coast Guard cutter chased down a speedboat carrying about 2,000 pounds of cocaine, officials said.

The other bust was in February and involved an Ecuadorian-flagged fishing vessel that allegedly had been loading cocaine into speedboats off Mexico's coast. The fishing vessel's crew set fire to their ship and tried to flee in the speedboats but were caught, the Coast Guard said. About 900 pounds of cocaine were seized there.

The cocaine, with an estimated street value of $500 million, will be turned over the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which will take the drugs to Miami to be destroyed, Leshak said.

    40, 000 Pounds of Cocaine Seized at Sea, NYT, 24.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Record-Cocaine-Bust.html

Three Yale students

arrested for burning U.S. flag

Wed Apr 4, 2007 4:41PM EDT
Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - Three Yale University students, including a Briton and a Greek national, have been charged in a case involving the burning of a U.S. flag outside a Connecticut house, a court official said on Wednesday.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, 19, were arrested on Tuesday and charged in New Haven Superior Court with reckless endangerment, arson, breach of peace, criminal mischief and other offenses.

Police said the three torched a flag hanging from the porch of a house in New Haven near the Ivy League school.

Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek. Both are freshmen. Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, according to police and court documents. Anklesaria and Angelopoulos turned over their passports.

Police gave no indication why they set fire to the flag. The trio acknowledged it was a "dumb thing to do" when questioned by police, the New Haven Register reported.

They appeared in court in leg irons and handcuffs, the newspaper said. Bail was set at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, and $15,000 for Anklesaria, it added.

Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, "Come Back to Afghanistan," about his experiences there, the Yale Daily News reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning was protected under constitutional free-speech guarantees, invalidating laws in 48 states and outraging veterans' groups and others who say that an important national symbol should be protected from defacement.

"It makes me sick to my stomach to think that someone would burn the American flag," Marc Suraci, 37, owner of the two-story house, told the Register, describing himself as "very, very patriotic."

    Three Yale students arrested for burning U.S. flag, R, 4.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0436814620070404

3 at Yale Accused of Burning U.S. Flag

April 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- Three Yale University students, one a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, were arrested on charges of setting fire to an American flag hanging outside a home.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19, were arrested early Tuesday on charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson, police said.

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, police said. He worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, ''Come Back to Afghanistan,'' based on his experiences, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday.

Angelopoulos, who is Greek, and Anklesaria, who is British, are both freshmen. They had to surrender their passports.

Bail was set at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, and $15,000 for Anklesaria. They were jailed Tuesday night; police did not immediately respond to calls on their status Wednesday morning.

Authorities said the three students had waved over two police officers in the area early Tuesday to ask for directions.

A short time later, the officers returned to the neighborhood to see if the students had found their way home and spotted the burning flag. One officer pulled down the burning flag and the other tracked down the three men, authorities said.

    3 at Yale Accused of Burning U.S. Flag, NYT, 4.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Flag-Burning.html

Chicago Cop

Accused in 3rd Bar Beating

April 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- For the third time this year, surveillance videotape has surfaced of an off-duty Chicago police officer involved in a bar fight, authorities said.

The latest incident became public one day after Police Superintendent Philip J. Cline announced he would retire early. The department has been struggling with the fallout from the previous tapes after one, showing an off-duty officer attacking a female bartender, appeared worldwide on the Internet and cable news channels.

Prosecutors were reviewing the new tape and hadn't yet decided whether to file charges, said John Gorman, a spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's office.

The latest complaint was filed last week -- before Cline's announcement -- by an off-duty police officer visiting from Washington, D.C., Police Department spokeswoman Monique Bond said.

Bond would not identify the officer involved or talk about details of the video.

Until prosecutors decide what to do, ''we're just not at liberty to discuss it,'' she said.

The only surveillance video to appear public so far showed Anthony Abbate, a 12-year veteran of the force, punching, kicking and throwing a bartender to the floor on Feb. 19 after she reportedly refused to continue serving him drinks, authorities said. Police have faced allegations that someone tried to bribe and then threatened the bartender to keep her from pressing charges in the case. They also have been criticized for waiting a month to arrest Abbate, who initially was charged with a misdemeanor but was later charged with felony aggravated battery.

Six other officers were removed from street duty after they were accused of beating four businessmen in a bar on Dec. 15. They have not been charged in the incident, and the videotape of that confrontation has not been seen by the public.

Cline has said police were called to the bar about the fight but a sergeant who was among the officers involved waved them off.

Cline didn't discuss the tapes when he announced his retirement, though he said it was difficult to leave during ''these times of challenge.''

He had promised to change the way the department responded to allegations of misconduct, including moving faster to get officers accused of misconduct off the street.

Mayor Richard M. Daley has called the beating incidents ''unacceptable'' and said the department moved too slowly to take action. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, head of the Chicago-based Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, urged that future allegations of police misconduct be subject to review by a civilian board.

    Chicago Cop Accused in 3rd Bar Beating, NYT, 4.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Chicago-Police.html

Chicago Police Head

Retires Amid Scandal

April 2, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:09 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- Chicago's police superintendent announced Monday he would retire early as his department tries to deal with two highly publicized videotaped beatings involving off-duty police officers.

Last month, six officers accused of assaulting four businessmen in a bar were removed from street duty, and prosecutors filed felony charges against another officer accused of beating a female bartender.

Superintendent Philip J. Cline said after the videotapes surfaced that he would change the way the department responds to allegations of misconduct.

In announcing his retirement Monday, Cline said he would stay on until a replacement could be found.

Chicago Police Head Retires Amid Scandal, NYT, 2.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Chicago-Police.html