Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets how much radiation will the public be exposed to?

Mobile X-Ray Van in use:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGAIJVk1028

Atlanta – For many living in a terror-spooked country, it might seem like a great government innovation: Use vans equipped with mobile X-ray units to scan vehicles at major sporting events, or even randomly, for bombs or contraband.

But news that the US is buying custom-made vans packed with something called backscatter X-ray capacity has riled privacy advocates and sparked internet worries about "feds radiating Americans."

"This really trips up the creep factor because it's one of those things that you sort of intrinsically think the government shouldn't be doing," says Vermont-based privacy expert Frederick Lane, author of "American Privacy." "But, legally, the issue is the boundary between the government's legitimate security interest and privacy expectations we enjoy in our cars."

American Science & Engineering, a Billerica, Mass.-company, tells Forbes it's sold more than 500 ZBVs, or Z Backscatter Vans, to US and foreign governments. The Department of Defense has bought the most for war zone use, but US law enforcement has also deployed the vans to search for bombs inside the US, according to Joe Reiss, a company spokesman, as quoted by Forbes.

"Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of national security … you have to be realistic that this is another way in which the government is capturing information they may lose control over," says Mr. Lane. "I just have some real problems with the idea of even beginning a campaign of rolling surveillance of American citizens, which is what this essentially is."

Prof. Peter Rez, a physicist a Arizona State University who specializes in X-ray technology, and who has been doing research on backscatter X-ray dosages, says that if used properly, the radiation doses received by targeted persons would be very minute, but then he notes that if the government begins a major campaign of surreptitious X-raying on highways and at locations of security concern the machines are already being used at major sporting events like the Superbowl, there have to be concerns about whether the machines are being maintained in proper working condition driving them around on America’s run-down highways is subjecting the machines to quite a beating, and about whether the operators are using them properly.


Links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGAIJVk1028
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/228
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100929/ts_csm/329052

Pennsylvania: Prison guard can't hold a private investigator license.

A prison guard can't hold a private detective license, the Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled, "because of the obvious potential for abuse and conflict of interest."

Marcel Centeno has been licensed as a private detective in New York for three years. He also works in Berks County, Pa., as a prison guard.

Centeno applied for a private detective's license in Pennsylvania. Over the state's objections, the trial court granted the license.

The Superior Court reversed, however, citing the appearance of impropriety and the potential conflict of interest.

"Moreover, it is well established that corrections officers are also considered law enforcement officers," the court wrote. "The Courts of Pennsylvania have consistently held that a law enforcement officer cannot simultaneously hold a license as a private detective."

Links: http://www.courts.state.pa.us/OpPosting/Superior/out/a13004_10.pdf
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/09/28/30632.htm

Current Issue of The Police Chief Magazine, "The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement."

Current Issue of The Police Chief Magazine, "The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement."

Link:http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/

NPPA protests TSA poster depicting "Suspicious" Photographer, could private investigators become suspected terrorists while conducting photo surveillances?

The National Press Photographers Association has informed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that it objects to a Transportation Security Administration poster that depicts a photographer as a suspected terrorist.

The poster and free-standing counter cards, distributed by TSA, features a photograph of a person holding a camera, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, standing by an airport fence with a small private airplane in the background. The text reads, "Don't let our planes get into the wrong hands."

"It is my understanding that airport administrators have been directed to post and prominently display this material around airports 'one poster per entrance,'" said NPPA's general counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher, who voiced the organization's complaint to Napolitano.

NPPA has asked Napolitano to immediately order the removal of the objectionable TSA posters from display.

“Photography by itself is not a suspicious activity, and is protected by the First Amendment. Unfortunately the reliance by law enforcement officers to question, detain and interfere with lawful activities by photographers under the guise of preventing terrorist activities has become a daily occurrence. The abridgement of a constitutionally protected activity because of that erroneous belief is only reinforced by your generalized statements and the depiction of photography as some sinister act.”


Link: http://nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2010/09/poster.html

A not guilty finding means your still stuck paying the bills, The Justice Department won't help you.

A judge had a warning for the Justice Department lawyers who accused Army Lt. Col. Robert Morris of conspiring to steal military supplies: The case could be "ill-advised." A nearly two-year Army probe had cleared him. And another U.S. attorney's office had declined to prosecute.
The cost of fighting federal charges could "take the guy's life savings away," the judge added.

Prosecutors went ahead, anyway. The judge's prediction was right a jury needed only 45 minutes to find Morris not guilty. By then, though, his career had derailed. His parents had mortgaged their home to help with $250,000 in legal bills. He had drained his own savings.

The government he had served in uniform for decades could have compensated Morris for some of the losses. A 1997 law requires the Justice Department to repay the legal bills of defendants who win their cases and prove that federal prosecutors committed misconduct or other transgressions.

Hyde Amendment awards are so infrequent and so small that the law "hasn't been a major remedy for bad prosecutions," said Bennett Gershman, a Pace Law School professor who examined the misconduct cases USA TODAY identified. "It's a very minuscule deterrent" to prosecutors.

The law, known as the Hyde Amendment, was intended to deter misconduct and compensate people who are harmed when federal prosecutors cross the line. A USA TODAY investigation found the law has left innocent people like Morris coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases.

USA TODAY documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Yet USA TODAY found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded.


Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2010-09-27-hyde-federal-prosecutors_N.htm

Texas court reverses conviction in dog scent case are dog scent hits, etc. junk science?

DALLAS — A man convicted of murder after three bloodhounds allegedly matched his scent to the victim should be set free because the evidence against him was not legally sufficient, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Wednesday.

The court acquitted Richard Winfrey Sr., reversing his 2007 conviction in the murder of high school janitor Murray Burr in the small town of Coldspring, about 60 miles north of Houston.

Under the ruling, prosecutors will not be allowed to retry the case.

The main evidence against Winfrey in the 2004 murder was a positive scent identification from three bloodhounds named Quincy, James Bond and Clue. The dogs belong to former Fort Bend Sheriff's Deputy Keith Pikett, who retired earlier this year after being targeted by the Innocence Project of Texas, a group that claims the ex-lawman passes off junk science as legitimate investigative techniques.

Pikett is a defendant in at least three lawsuits from men saying they were wrongly jailed after his dogs linked them to crimes they did not commit. He did not return a message left by The Associated Press.

Trained dogs are routinely at border checkpoints and airports to smell for drugs, bombs or other contraband. They're used by search and rescue teams and in other police work, such as to chase suspects.

In Winfrey's case and other Texas cases, however, Pikett's bloodhounds use a "scent lineup" to link defendants to crimes.

Three years after Burr's death, Pikett's dogs sniffed clothing worn by the murder victim when he was killed. Authorities then took scent swabs from six individuals and placed them in separate coffee cans. The dogs alerted Pikett when they sniffed the coffee can containing a swab taken from Winfrey, the deputy testified.

Jeff Blackburn, the chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas, has led the charge against dog scent identification and other types of "junk science" in Texas. He said he believes there are dozens of innocent people behind bars statewide because of similar dog scent cases.

"This puts out a strong message from the court about junk science in this state," Blackburn said. "This is really the first time the court has rejected the use of this junk."

Link:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jK259cPp9Tn7ZbN4B41sOBnGzo6AD9ID86QG0

New report questions biometric technologies in solving and fighting crimes.

Television cop shows love "biometric" technologies — fingerprints, eye scans and so on — but a blue-ribbon panel report calls for caution on widespread use of biological identification.

Released by the National Research Council, the "Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities" report headed by HP Labs distinguished technologist Joseph Pato, concludes all biometric recognition technologies are "inherently fallible."

Federal agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are funding research in improved biometric screening, but the report cautions they're not doing basic research into whether the physical characteristics involved are truly reliable or how they change with aging, disease, stress or other factors. None look stable across all situations, the report says.

Deployment of biometric screening devices at airports, borders or elsewhere without understanding the biology or the population being screened will lead to long lines, false positives and missed opportunities to catch criminals or terrorists, the report says.

"No system is infallible. There is no silver bullet," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. "We have to test our security strategies carefully, or there will be a lot of taxpayer money wasted on systems that disappoint us."




Link: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12720
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2010-09-27-biometrics27_ST_N.htm

How to track your laptop or Android cell phone if it's stolen.

There are obvious reasons to like Prey. Chief among them, it's free to use for up to three devices of any kind, from computers running Windows, Mac, or Linux to Android devices. But that wouldn't mean anything if the tracking Prey provided wasn't really solid. It's not fool-proof, especially if the thief wants to entirely wipe your computer or phone, but if that's not the case, it gives you a fighting chance.

We'll tell you why in readable text, being a blog and all, but we think our video walkthrough, embedded above, tells the tale even better—with old-timey music, too, courtesy of Incompetech.

On a laptop with a webcam, a Wi-Fi chip, and Prey installed, it's a good bet you'll have a photo of your thief and an approximate location on them just as soon as they have your computer running for a few minutes. You don't have to actively search, either—devices with Prey installed in the background "phone home" to your web-based account every 20 minutes by default (you can decrease this interval), spilling their guts about everything they're doing.

Because it's tracking software that doesn't want to be seen, Prey is almost invisible when it's running on your system, without any configuration or executable files to be seen. In fact, once you've deleted the installer, you shouldn't be able to find Prey at all in your system, because that's the idea. It quietly and quickly checks in with Prey's servers in the background, at an interval you decide, to see if the owner has logged in and marked it as stolen. That's all it does—until you flip the switch on Prey's servers to note that it is, in fact, stolen, or ask for an update on the hardware profile.



Links: http://preyproject.com/download
http://lifehacker.com/5643460/how-to-track-and-potentially-recover-your-stolen-laptop-or-android-with-prey

Have you deleted all your information on your cell phone before recycling or selling it?

CLIFTON PARK, NY - State Police confirmed that they are actively investigating whether graphic pictures found on used cell phones were uploaded to the Internet improperly.

The cell phones were reportedly sold at a business in the Wilton Mall that pays cash on the spot for used phones and iPods. Police were combing computers and websites to see if pictures left behind by customers were used illegally.

After the case came to light, News Channel 13 also wanted to know how anyone can make sure that a cell phone phone is wiped clean before selling or recycling it.

However, Annibale said before donating, she tries to protect any private information first.

"You know, what I usually delete everything I've done it twice and I delete everything," she said.

But is deleting enough? We learned there are other steps you can take to ensure your phone is scrubbed clean.

"The factory reset will delete it all at once. You can sit there and go through everything one by one by one, but a factory reset will be easier and faster for the customer," said Frank Perry, a Store Manager at Verizon Wireless.


Link: http://wnyt.com/article/stories/S1756593.shtml?cat=300

Prosecutorial misconduct in the news again, the commonality is they can't be prosecuted for misconduct.

ORLANDO — The jurors who helped put Nino Lyons in jail for three years had every reason to think that he was a drug trafficker, and, until July, no reason to doubt that justice had been done.
For more than a week in 2001, the jurors listened to one witness after another, almost all of them prison inmates, describe how Lyons had sold them packages of cocaine. One said that Lyons, who ran clothing shops and nightclubs around Orlando, even tried to hire him to kill two drug suppliers.

But the federal prosecutors handling the case did not let the jury hear all the facts.

Instead, the prosecutors covered up evidence that could have discredited many of Lyons' accusers. They never revealed that a convict who claimed to have purchased hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Lyons struggled even to identify his photograph. And they hid the fact that prosecutors had promised to let others out of prison early in exchange for their cooperation.

Judges have warned for decades that misconduct by prosecutors threatens the Constitution's promise of a fair trial. Congress in 1997 enacted a law aimed at ending such abuses.

With help from legal experts and former prosecutors, USA TODAY spent six months examining federal prosecutors' work, reviewing legal databases, department records and tens of thousands of pages of court filings. Although the true extent of misconduct by prosecutors will likely never be known, the assessment is the most complete yet of the scope and impact of those violations.

USA TODAY found a pattern of "serious, glaring misconduct," said Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman, an expert on misconduct by prosecutors. "It's systemic now, and … the system is not able to control this type of behavior. There is no accountability."

In a justice system that prosecutes more than 60,000 people a year, mistakes are inevitable. But the violations USA TODAY documented go beyond everyday missteps. In the worst cases, say judges, former prosecutors and others, they happen because prosecutors deliberately cut corners to win.

One reason violations may go undetected is that only a small fraction of criminal cases ever get the scrutiny of a trial, the process most likely to identify misconduct. Trials play a "very important" role, said former deputy attorney general David Ogden, because they force judges and attorneys to review a case in far more exacting detail.

The number of people charged with crimes in federal district courts has almost doubled over the past 15 years. Yet the number whose cases actually go to trial has fallen almost 30%, to about 3,500 last year, USA TODAY found. Last year, just four defendants out of 100 went to trial; the rest struck plea bargains that resolved their cases quickly, with far less scrutiny from judges.

"We really should be more concerned about the cases we don't know about," said Levenson, the Loyola professor. "Many of the types of misconduct you identified could happen every day, and we'd never know about it if defendants plead out."


USA Today's list of 201 criminal misconduct cases:
http://projects.usatoday.com/news/2010/justice/cases/


Links:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2010-09-22-federal-prosecutors-reform_N.htm
http://projects.usatoday.com/news/2010/justice/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/charticle-federal-prosecutor-misconduct.htm

The Illinois State police "Fusion Center" is operating in secrecy, how many others are doing the same?

The Illinois State Police are not responding to lawful requests for documents under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois today asked a state court in Chicago to compel the police agency to turn over records about the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center. STIC is Illinois’ “fusion center,” an entity that integrates the gathering, storage, sharing, and analysis of information about suspected criminal activity among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies in Illinois. Fusion centers have been a focal point for controversy because they collect and share massive amounts of personal information about members of the public, often without adequate safeguards, oversight, and transparency.

“It is dangerous when government – at any level – operates in secret,” said Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Illinois. “It is more dangerous here since the activities of fusion centers around the nation raise serious concerns about centralizing unchecked authority in a single agency. Combining unchecked authority with secrecy is bound to lead to abuse.”

Press reports across the country paint a troubling picture of fusion center activity. The fusion center in Virginia, for example, labeled that state’s historic black colleges as a “possible threat.” An analyst at the fusion center in Wisconsin targeted protestors on both sides of the abortion debate as a threat to public safety. The Maryland fusion center targeted and spread information about dozens of lawful advocacy organizations. The Missouri fusion center urged surveillance of the supporters of Congressman Ron Paul.

“If law enforcement fusion centers are going to gather a vast quantity of personal information about many people, at a minimum privacy policies must be adopted. We also need rules to protect the First Amendment rights of all persons – no matter what their political beliefs – to engage in speech about public policy issues without being investigated by a fusion center,” added Dan Feeney, a lawyer with Miller Shakman & Beem who is cooperating with the ACLU on this case.


MA "Commonwealth Fusion Center":
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eopssubtopic&L=3&L0=Home&L1=Homeland+Security+%26+Emergency+Response&L2=Commonwealth+Fusion+Center&sid=Eeops


Links: http://www.aclu-il.org/featured/2010/Complaint-ACLUvISP-FOIA.pdf
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=14461

U.S. Department of Justice: Crime analysis for problem solvers in 60 small steps.

The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP Center)
(www.popcenter.org) now serves as a locus for the
collection of the growing body of knowledge regarding
problems commonly encountered by the police. It
disseminates this material in various ways, but primarily
through the publication of its problem-oriented guides.
Each guide synthesizes existing knowledge and evaluated
practices regarding a specific problem, and stimulates
police to advance their own thinking about how best to
handle the problem in its local context.

This 60-step manual assumes that you are an
experienced analyst and that you are accustomed to
providing the kind of information needed to support
police operations. This means that:

1. You use modern computing and know how to access
and manipulate comprehensive databases.

2. You know how to use software to map crime, to
identify hot spots, and to relate these to demographic
and other data.

3. You routinely produce charts showing weekly or
monthly changes in crime at departmental and beat
level, perhaps to support CompStat-style operations.

4. You are accustomed to carrying out analyses into such
topics as the relationship between the addresses of
known offenders and local outbreaks of car theft and
burglary.

5. You may have carried out some before-and-after
evaluations of crackdowns, such as on residential
burglaries or car thefts.

6. You have some basic knowledge of statistics and
research methodology such as is provided by an
undergraduate social science degree.


Link: http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/CrimeAnalysis60Steps.pdf

Pennsylvania state police narratives are not public records, how will this affect private investigators?

A Pennsylvania state appeals court ruled Thursday that incident reports filed by state police officers are not public records, citing an exemption in the state’s Right to Know Law that protects from public disclosure “a record of an agency relating to or resulting in a criminal investigation.”

Donald Gilliland, who at the time was the managing editor of the Leader-Enterprise, appealed the police department’s decision to the state Office of Open Records, who ruled in Gilliland’s favor. The office stated that “because an incident report is equivalent to a police blotter, and police blotters are excluded from the criminal investigative records exemption … the incident report was a public record.” Under the law, a police blotter is defined as a “chronological listing of arrests.”

The state police then petitioned the appeals court to review the Office of Open Records’ decision. The court agreed with the state police that the incident report did not qualify as a police blotter and was therefore exempt from disclosure. Instead the court held the record to be “a description of an investigation by the state police into a complaint of criminal activity.”

In the dissenting opinion, Judge Dan Pellegrini argued that incident reports are not “criminal investigative material,” a necessary qualification in order for a record to be exempt from a open records request. He also argued that the state police did not uphold its burden under the law to prove why the incident report should be considered “investigative material.”

“The state police provided no guidance as to why the report qualified as investigative material or what specific information in the report was not subject to public access,” he wrote.

“It would be an absurd result if the new Right to Know Law, which was ‘designed to promote access to official government information in order to prohibit secrets, scrutinize the actions of public officials, and make public officials accountable for their actions,’ instead restricted public access to these readily available documents by now making them exempt from disclosure,” wrote Pellegrini.


Links: http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/docs/20100917_121600_pa_ct_opin.pdf
http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=11564

FBI targeted "non-violent" activitists for years and improperly placed some of them on terrorism watchlists.

The FBI in recent years opened investigations into some U.S. activists with little basis, unjustifiably extended the duration of the probes, improperly retained information about activist groups in its files, and classified its investigations of “nonviolent civil disobedience” as investigations into “acts of terrorism,” according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

The report by the Justice Department watchdog didn’t find that the FBI targeted these groups on the basis of their free speech activities — which would be a serious violation of FBI guidelines — but did fault the agency for other reasons, most notably a “factually weak” basis for opening investigations.

“FBI agents and supervisors sometimes provided the Office of the Inspector General with speculative, after-the-fact rationalizations for their prior decisions to open investigations that we did not find persuasive,” the report said.

The report also found that that the FBI unnecessarily classified its probes as domestic terrorism investigations, even though some of the potential crimes were trespassing or vandalism — acts not normally considered to be terrorism. This classification resulted in several individuals improperly being placed on terrorism watchlists.


Links: http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s1009r.pdf
http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/watchdog-faults-fbi-for-factually-weak-basis-for-investigating-activists

SBI bloodstain analysis team had no guidelines for 21 years. Is this a concern for other departments?

North Carolina: For 21 years, a key group of State Bureau of Investigation agents tasked with interpreting bloodstain patterns at crime scenes operated on their own, without leadership or written policies.

The News & Observer requested a copy of the bloodstain analysis policy in July. The Department of Justice, which oversees the SBI, provided it late last week. The policy was dated October 2009, eight weeks after the acquittal of a Clemmons dentist highlighted shoddy bloodstain analysis.

Eric Hooks, assistant SBI director, said it was the agency's first policy involving bloodstain pattern analysis.

The work of the SBI's bloodstain pattern analysts does not fall under the agency's crime lab, which has come under widespread criticism and scrutiny that threatens cases both pending and concluded. This unit was not included in a recent audit that found that SBI lab analysts withheld or misreported the results of blood tests in at least 230 cases.

That audit, by two retired FBI supervisors, focused on evidence withheld from prosecutors and defense attorneys.

The problem with the bloodstain pattern analysts is the question of junk science.

Seth Edwards, president of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, said Wednesday that he was concerned that problems extended beyond the SBI lab.

"At this point, everything at the SBI is open for discussion," Edwards said.

The lack of policy is "astounding," said Marilyn Miller, a professor of forensic science at Virginia Commonwealth University. "If you are a reputable unit, you have written procedures for everything you do."

Dozens of cases where SBI bloodstain analysts testified are under question, she said.


Link:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/09/09/671509/sbi-bloodstain-analysis-teamwent.html

Forensic science evidence can be flawed, misleading, remarkably unscientific, and sometimes flat wrong.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen was right recently when he declared, "Murderers should fear forensic science." Forensic science evidence can be a powerful tool against the guilty. It has also proven to be a powerful tool for exonerating the wrongly accused and convicted.

But in our exuberance to embrace the wonders of forensic science, we must be careful not to be swept away too readily by any claims presented in the guise of "forensic science." As effective as forensic science evidence can be, it can also be flawed, misleading, remarkably unscientific, and sometimes flat wrong.

Indeed, examination of the nearly 260 DNA exonerations of the last two decades reveals that misleading or erroneous forensic science evidence has been the second most prevalent contributor to wrongful convictions - second only to mistaken eyewitness identification. And a recent analysis of DNA exoneration cases found that prosecution forensic analysts gave invalid or inaccurate testimony in 60% of the trials studied.

It is thus with some irony that Van Hollen celebrated the power of forensic science evidence in a press release about a court of appeals opinion affirming a conviction in a case that included some of the most suspect and least-scientifically grounded forensic "science" testimony possible. In that case, a ballistics expert visually matched a bullet from a murder to the defendant's gun, and testified that no "other gun in the world would have left those particular type of markings on that bullet." He added, "There is no error rate" for his "eyeball analysis."

Ballistics can be a useful tool in identifying sources of bullets from a crime scene. But there is no basis in science for proclaiming that a particular bullet could be matched to a particular gun to the exclusion of all other guns. There is no scientific basis for such assertions because they have not been studied adequately. No scientific principles define how many points of similarity must be identified to call a gun and a bullet a match, or even what protocols analysts should employ when making their visual comparisons.

And certainly no scientific analysis supports the analyst's claim that his method has no error rate. No real science, not even DNA analysis, can claim such perfection.

This is precisely the type of indefensible testimony that sent Robert Lee Stinson to prison for 23 years for a Milwaukee murder he did not commit. In that case, the expert (a forensic dentist) proclaimed that he had matched Stinson's teeth to bite marks on the deceased's body, to the exclusion of all other teeth in the world. DNA not only exonerated Stinson 23 years later, but also identified the true perpetrator.

And it is precisely the kind of testimony that the National Academy of Sciences decried recently as unsupported by scientific evidence and grossly improper.


Link: http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/102105579.html

Mississippi: Two men exonerated after 30 years in prison, calls into question confessions and guilty pleas.

A judge in Hattiesburg, Mississippi today threw out the guilty pleas of two men who had spent three decades in prison for rape and murder after DNA tests showed they were innocent. The decision comes too late, however, for a third man who died in prison eight years ago.

"It was a good result in a tragic situation," said Emily Maw, director of the Innocence Project New Orleans and lawyer for Dixon, Bivens and the Ruffin family. "This is a particularly sad case. Another man committed the crime and then let these men sit in prison for 30 years. We hope it will have an impact on how we look at confessions and guilty pleas."


Link:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/dna-evidence-clears-men-served-30-years-rape/story?id=11654532

Could your pilot be drunk, overtired etc. are the present regulations enough?

An airline pilot caught this week in Amsterdam for being over the legal alcohol limit just before takeoff highlights an issue among U.S. pilots that occurs once a month on average, government data show.

The case of the unidentified Delta Air Lines captain renews a long-standing debate about whether the federal blood-alcohol limit for pilots — .04% — is adequate to protect safety. In most states, the legal limit for driving is .08%.

About 12 commercial pilots are found to violate the FAA standard each year, according to agency data. That's a small fraction of the more than 11,000 who are tested yearly.

The Colgan captain, who lived in Florida, had spent the night before the crash in the airline's crew room at Newark, a place not suited to sleeping. The co-pilot, who lived in Seattle, had taken two cargo flights overnight to Newark and had grabbed some sleep in the crew room, too. Both died with everyone else on the plane.

While the National Transportation Safety Board didn't cite exhaustion as a formal cause of the Buffalo crash, it found that the pilots' performance was likely impaired by fatigue. Lack of rest has been a factor in several crashes since 1997, in which 249 people died, and in many incidents where, perhaps only through luck, no one was killed. On one commuter flight over Hawaii in 2008, the crew overshot its destination because the pilots were asleep.

Most passengers have no idea that pilots are allowed to work 16-hour days, and sometimes longer. Or that it doesn't matter whether they're flying a grueling schedule that runs through the night or requires repeated takeoffs and landings. Or that pilots are expected to get to a hotel, sleep, eat, dress and get back to work — all within their required eight-hour rest periods.


The FAA failed to fully address one of the most contentious issues contributing to fatigue: pilot commutes. Pilots can fly for free, and many commute long distance to their home bases. It's a job perk for some, a necessity for others, particularly regional airline pilots whose bases frequently change and whose low salaries can make it tough to live near big cities. The FAA skirted a common-sense starting point — long sought by the NTSB— of explicitly requiring airlines to keep records of which pilots commute and from where.



Links:
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2010-09-16-drunkpilots16rw_ST_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-09-17-editorial17_ST_N.htm

Wisconsin: Prosecutor who 'sexted' victim won't resign.

A Wisconsin prosecutor known for two decades as an advocate for crime victims says he is embarrassed about sending sexually suggestive text messages to a choking victim while he was prosecuting her ex-boyfriend, but will remain in office.

Calumet County District Attorney Kenneth Kratz issued that statement Wednesday after The Associated Press reported on the 30 texts he sent to a 26-year-old woman who had complained to police last year. A police report shows he repeatedly sent Stephanie Van Groll text messages in October 2009 trying to spark an affair.

''Are you the kind of girl that likes secret contact with an older married elected DA ... the riskier the better?'' Kratz, 50, wrote in one message. In another, he wrote: ''I would not expect you to be the other woman. I would want you to be so hot and treat me so well that you'd be THE woman! R U that good?''

Kratz was prosecuting Van Groll's ex-boyfriend on charges he nearly choked her to death last year. He also was veteran chair of the Wisconsin Crime Victims' Rights Board, a quasi-judicial agency that can reprimand judges, prosecutors and police officers who mistreat crime victims.

Van Groll told police in Kaukauna, Wis., where she lived, that she felt pressured to have a relationship with Kratz or he would drop charges against her ex-boyfriend.

Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/09/16/us/AP-US-Wisconsin-Prosecutor-Sexting.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=lawyer&st=nyt

FOIA requests from the Milwaukee police department for newspapers & private investigators is an expensive proposition.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sued the Milwaukee Police Department Thursday in a dispute over fees and delays under Wisconsin's open records law, according to court documents.

Reporters Gina Barton and Ben Poston claim they were subjected to excessive fees and unreasonable delay while conducting an independent examination of department crime statistics beginning in May 2010.

Poston was told his request for 100 selected incident reports, which he had received at no charge in a previous instance, would cost about $600 to cover the time it took to locate the records and review each report for non-disclosable information.

Barton, who made a similar open records request, was informed that the newspaper would be charged more than $3,500 and that police staff would not be able to work more than eight hours per week on her request.


Links:
http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/docs/20100914_173439_milwaukee_paper_lawsuit.pdf
http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=11554

Private investigator hired to investigate an Allentown PA firefighter.

A veteran Allentown firefighter was fired last month after a city-hired private investigator caught him playing golf on the same three days he called out sick, city records show.

Richard G. Gawlik Jr. played a round at three different courses — including Allentown Municipal Golf Course — on Aug. 17, 18 and 19, all days he called in sick, according to records obtained by the Morning Call, including a termination letter sent to Gawlick.

Gawlik also called out from work on Aug. 20, the final day of his four-day shift, but apparently did not play golf. The nine-handicapper did play 20 rounds that month, online records show.

"The city regards golf while on paid sick leave a misuse and/or abuse of paid sick leave, which is a fraudulent act and theft of time. This is a serious violation of the code of conduct," states the Aug. 25 termination letter, obtained under a Right to Know request.

Mayor Ed Pawlowski, who has long bemoaned the fire union's generous sick day policy, said, "Sick leave is clearly not vacation time. You can't call out sick and go out and play golf."

Gawlik, hired in 1995, could not be reached for comment.

The firefighters union has appealed the firing and union President John Stribula said the public should not jump to any conclusions.

City officials said the Morning Call story prompted them to hire the private investigator and they focused on the serial abusers.

After the story ran last year, firefighters' use of sick days declined dramatically, leading to the lowest amount of reported sick days since at least 2005, records show. Since January, the number began to rise, leaving the city on pace to have the most sick days in the department's history.


Link:
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-firefighter-fired-golf-20100913,0,2952663,print.story

A private prison in Phoenix, AZ is blamed for two murders.

The Arizona prison breakout that led to the killing of two campers was caused by "lax procedures and incompetent management" of the private prison operator in Kingman, the mother of one of the victims says. Vivian Haas, whose son, Gary and his wife were shot to death, claims that Management and Training Corp. admitted in an Aug. 13 letter its responsibility for the escapes, and that the circumstances "were shocking and egregious."

Haas says that Management and Training Corp.'s officers failed to check an alarm that sounded when the men cut through one of two security fences surrounding the prison. She says the alarm system set off false alarms so often that the guards ignored them.

Haas adds that the "perimeter fencing was substandard," and that patrols of the perimeter "were scattershot at best." Light poles around the prison were routinely burned out, and "intrusions by outsiders near the fence perimeters were common."

On March 22, 2004, the Arizona Department of Corrections awarded a contract to Management and Training Corp. to operate the private prison which was "designed and constructed for 1,100 minimum security beds and 300 medium security beds to house DUI inmates," according to the complaint.


Links: http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/09/14/Escape.pdf
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/09/14/30317.htm

Before you fly, do you know the condition of your pilot?

Medical record data from 2008, 2009 and 2010 provided by the Federal Aviation Administration under a public records request show:

15 pilots - including one from Massachusetts - have been treated for or diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Another 292 pilots have attempted suicide, including five Bay Staters.

2,700 pilots have been treated for alcohol abuse, including 34 from Massachusetts, and another 1,253 have been diagnosed as alcoholics - including 20 Bay Staters.

1,377 pilots have been treated for drug abuse - 23 from Massachusetts - and another 94 for drug dependence.

87 were treated or diagnosed with sexual deviation, which includes pedophilia, voyeurism and fetishism.

23 pilots, including one from the Bay State, have been treated or diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, 80 for major affective disorders, including bipolar disorder, and two others for paranoia.


Link:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100915report_serious_baggage_for_pilots/srvc=home&position=0

False confessions: How the innocent admit, are convicted of crimes they didn't commit.

KANSAS CITY, Missouri -- Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape, but one overwhelming factor put him away: He confessed.

At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could have known, including that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication would come only years after Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled in 1991.

"I beat myself up a lot" about having confessed, Lowery said in a recent interview. "I thought I was the only dummy who did that."

But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people -- including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led -- are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by interrogators.

New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.

An article by Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions -- by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.


Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied.

"I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy," like someone saying simply, "I did it," he said.

Instead, he said, "almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable," rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. "I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred," he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. "I didn't expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated."

Links:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/14confess.html
http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2010/09/false_confessions_how_the_inno.html

Eyewitness Evidence: A Trainer‘s Manual for Law Enforcement (2003)

Although dated this manual from the The National Institute of Justice will be useful to private investigators and attorneys.


Link: http://www.ncjrs.gov/nij/eyewitness/188678.pdf

Another piece of evidence comes forward showing the NYPD have quotas. How many other police departments have "performance goals" or quotas?

For nearly every New Yorker who has received a summons in the city — caught at a checkpoint monitoring seat-belt use, or approached by a small army of police officers descending on illegally parked cars — quotas are a maddening fact of life.

No matter how often the Police Department denies the existence of quotas, many New Yorkers will swear that officers are sometimes forced to write a certain number of tickets in a certain amount of time.

Now, in a secret recording made in a police station in Brooklyn, there is persuasive evidence of the existence of quotas.

The hourlong recording, which a lawyer provided this week to The New York Times, was made by a police supervisor during a meeting in April of supervisors from the 81st Precinct.

The recording makes clear that precinct leaders were focused on raising the number of summonses issued — even as the Police Department had already begun an inquiry into whether crime statistics in that precinct were being manipulated.

Police officials have long denied the existence of a quota system, but they add that they do have “performance goals” they expect officers to meet.

Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10quotas.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Sheriffs in North Carolina want the lists of patients using painkillers etc. Will other state law enforcement departments follow?

Sheriffs in North Carolina want access to state computer records identifying anyone with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances.

The state sheriff's association pushed the idea Tuesday, saying the move would help them make drug arrests and curb a growing problem of prescription drug abuse. But patient advocates say opening up people's medicine cabinets to law enforcement would deal a devastating blow to privacy rights.

Allowing sheriffs' offices and other law enforcement officials to use the state's computerized list would vastly widen the circle of people with access to information on prescriptions written for millions of people. As it stands now, doctors and pharmacists are the main users.

"I am very concerned about the potential privacy issues for people with pain," said Candy Pitcher of Cary, who volunteers for the nonprofit American Pain Foundation. "I don't feel that I should have to sign away my privacy rights just because I take an opioid under doctor's care." Pitcher is receiving treatment for a broken back.

The ACLU opposed a bill in 2007 that would have opened the list to law enforcement officials, said ACLU lobbyist Sarah Preston. The organization would likely object to the new proposal.

"What really did concern us is the privacy aspect," she said. Opening the record to more users could deter someone from getting necessary medicine because of the fear that others would find out, she said, "particularly in small towns where everybody knows everybody."

On Tuesday, the North Carolina Sheriff's Association went to a legislative health committee asking for access to state computer records that ID people with prescriptions for certain drugs.

Association president Sam Page said it will help them combat a growing problem.

"We take that information, we could go and check against that database and see if that person, in fact, appears to be doctor shopping and obtaining prescriptions for the purpose of resell, which is illegal," he said.

While well intended, Brad Keller feels this move violates a person's right to privacy.

"You're talking about accessing my private records for what purpose? You certainly aren't medical professionals," he said.

At this time, Page says the proposal is just that and hopes it will start a dialogue on how to better assist law enforcement in finding the criminals abusing the system.

In response to the proposal, William Bronson with the state Department of Health and Human Services, is offering a compromise. He suggests the state allow drug investigators to request information from the database related to a specific investigation.


Links:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/09/08/669723/lists-of-pain-pillpatients-sought.html

http://charlotte.news14.com/content/local_news/charlotte/630136/sheriffs--request-for-pain-pill-records-ignites-privacy-debate

The role of lawsuits in law enforcement decision making.

By Joanna C. Schwartz:

Drawing on extensive documentary evidence and interviews, this Article finds that officials rarely have much useful information about suits alleging officer misconduct. Some departments intentionally ignore information from suits. The small number of departments with formal policies to gather data from lawsuits characteristically falter in the implementation phase. Technological kinks, employee error, and deliberate efforts to sabotage data collection combine to undermine other department's limited efforts to gather information.

Over two-thirds of police departments and over 80 percent of sheriff's departments with more than one thousand sworn officers have no computerized system to track lawsuits brought against them. Even less frequently do law enforcement agencies investigate claims made in lawsuits, review closed litigation files, or consider the dispositions of cases.

If we embrace the potential impact of information from suits on law enforcement behavior, however, there remains a gap between where we are now and where we might one day be. Until that gap closes, the information failures revealed in my study should lead us to reconsider certain assumptions in judicial opinions and scholarship. No longer should we facilely—and inaccurately—consider it “almost axiomatic” that lawsuits deter.

Even when departments do gather information about lawsuits, they rarely take note of who wins, or how much they win. Accordingly, these recommended
changes would not alter the data entered into systems currently in place to
gather and analyze information from suits.

Take, for example, Daryl Levinson’s theory that government policymakers
are motivated by political, not financial, concerns, and so are not reliably deterred by lawsuits. Levinson hypothesizes that a police chief will allow his officers to engage in constitutional violations-chokeholds, for example-despite lawsuits against them, until “the costs of permitting chokeholds, quantified in constitutional tort damages paid to people severely injured or killed by the police, would exceed the crime-reduction benefits.” According to Levinson, this same calculation will likely occur regarding any rights that are frequently litigated in civil rights damages actions.

Link: http://uclalawreview.org/pdf/57-4-4.pdf

Massachussetts: Scientists questioning arson investigative practices that were used for years.

John Lentini, who has investigated more than 2,000 fires and become a national voice against poor fire investigative practices, said state investigators misinterpreted evidence that showed the fire probably started in the basement. “The government’s hypothesis of the way the fire spread violates the laws of physics,’’ he said.

For the past decade, fire scientists have been testifying in courts across the country, questioning old arson convictions with new science. The movement has launched a high-stakes battle, pitting scientists against prosecutors, who dispute the need for new trials.

In the past several months, three of the nation’s top fire scientists have questioned at least three Massachusetts arson convictions, including the 1983 life sentence for Victor Rosario of Lowell, the subject of a Globe investigation in June.

The scientists — fire engineers who scientifically test and study the outcomes of fires — say that years ago investigators regularly pointed to certain burn patterns as irrefutable evidence of arson. But scientific tests have since shown that those same patterns also appear in accidental fires.

Those misconceptions plagued most fire investigations before the field’s first scientific manual was published in 1991 and continued until the widespread adoption of the science a decade later, the scientists said.

Over the same period, the number of structure fires ruled arson in Massachusetts steadily declined.

From 1984 to 2001, the number of structure fires ruled arson fell more than 70 percent, while total structure fires remained largely stable.

In 1984, roughly 10,600 structures caught fire and investigators ruled 2,133 arson; in 2001, there were about 10,200 structure fires, of which 618 were ruled arson.

But the scientists said the decrease shows that as investigators used more science, they ruled fewer fires arson.

“There were a lot of accidental fires determined to be arson that weren’t,’’ Lentini said. “I don’t know any other way to interpret this dramatic of a decline.’’



Link:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/09/08/scientists_challenge_massachusetts_arson_convictions/

Small police departments like the one in Conway, NH indicate they may lack training in photo array procedures, etc.

OSSIPEE — A Harvard-educated psychologist, who
trains police how to conduct photo lineups, testified
last week that Conway detectives could have taken
several simple steps to minimize the chance that the
victim in a 2008 rape fingered the wrong man.

The chief Conway detective administering the
lineup knew which of the eight photos was Perri.
That violates “standard practice” in research and
is easily avoided by using an officer who cannot
tip off the witness, intentionally, or unintentionally,”
said Dr. Steven Penrod, a clinical psychology
professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in New York.

“I would want my administrator not to know who
the suspect is, what we call blind,” he said Thursday,
noting witness confi dence in their selections
can be “pushed around” by reactions of administrators.
The retired lead detective, Joe Faia, testifying
Thursday as a defense witness, told jurors that his
only training in lineups came on the job. He said
he could not recall any formal coursework, adding
that detective Alan Broyer created the seven other
photos using computer software and descriptions
of Perri.

“I’ve prepared many photo lineups in many
cases,” said Faia. “I prepared them as I was
taught.” “It’s hard to do with a small police department,”
he added.

Public defenders John Bresaw and Eric Wolpin
have suggested Conway police told the woman
that the suspect’s photo was in fact in the array.
“I think it’s very bad. It’s basically saying to the
witness we’ve brought you down here because we
got somebody who we think did it,” Penrod said.
But county prosecutor Susan Boone noted multiple
factors made Faia’s lineup “more reliable,”
including that all eight photos resembled Perri in
some way and that the victim was exposed to his
face for a long time.

Link:(Pages 11 and 12)
http://www.laconiadailysun.com/pdf/2010/9/7.pdf

Can a Password Save Your Cell Phone from the Search Incident to Arrest Doctrine?

Over the last few years, dozens of courts have authorized police to conduct warrantless searches of cell phones when arresting individuals. Under the so-called search incident to arrest doctrine, police are free to search text messages, call histories, photos, voicemails, and a host of other data if they arrest an individual and remove a cell phone from his pocket. Given that courts have offered little protection against cell phone searches, this article explores whether individuals can protect themselves by password protecting their phones. The article concludes, unfortunately, that password protecting a cell phone offers minimal legal protection. In conducting a search incident to arrest, police may attempt to hack or bypass a password. Because cell phones are often found in arrestees’ pockets, police may take the phones to the police station where computer savvy officers will have the time and technology to unlock the phone’s contents. And if police are themselves unable to decipher the password, they may request or even demand that an arrestee turn over his password without any significant risk of the evidence on the phone being suppressed under the Miranda doctrine or as a Fifth Amendment violation. In short, while password protecting a cell phone may make it more challenging for police to find evidence, the password itself offers very little legal protection. Accordingly, legislative or judicial action is needed to narrow the search incident to arrest doctrine with respect to cell phones.

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1669403

Close to 100 people tasered in the U.S. in 2009 and nearly 4 deaths per month can be linked to being tasered.

The rate of deaths in Taser-related incidents is rising as police forces increasingly adapt the conducted energy weapons, a Raw Story analysis finds.

A 2008 report (PDF) http://www.amnestyusa.org/uploads/ListOfDeaths.pdf from Amnesty International found 351 Taser-related deaths in the US between June, 2001 and August, 2008, a rate of just slightly above four deaths per month.

A database of Taser-related deaths maintained at the African-American issues blog Electronic Village counts 96 deaths related to the use of Tasers since January, 2009.

Assuming the statistics are correct, that indicates the death rate has increased to an average of five per month.
Amnesty International notes that efforts to determine the lethality of Tasers are being frustrated by the weapon's manufacturer, Taser International.

"Medical studies so far on the effects of Tasers have either been limited in scope or unduly influenced by the weapons' primary manufacturer," the group states.

"Given the unresolved safety concerns, Amnesty International recommends that police departments either suspend the use of Tasers and stun guns pending further safety research or limit their use to situations where officers would otherwise be justified in resorting to firearms," Amnesty says.


Links:http://truthnottasers.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-follows-are-names-where-known.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/taser-related-deaths-accelerating/

MDPD’s “Terrorist Awareness Guide” turns private investigators and photographers into suspected terrorists

The Homeland Security Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department has published a “Terrorist Awareness Guide” where it advises citizens to be on the lookout for people taking “inappropriate photographs or videos.”

The broad points on what citizens should look out for describe some of the actions private investigators conduct.

"The following should cause a heightened sense of
concern:

• Unusual interest
• Surveillance
• Inappropriate photographs or videos
• Note-taking
• Drawing of diagrams
• Annotating maps
• Using binoculars or night vision devices"



Links:
http://carlosmiller.com/2010/08/26/mdpds-terrorist-awareness-guide-turns-photogs-into-suspected-terrorists/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36478574/Terrorist-Awareness-Guide-MDPD-PINAC

As far as I can tell Accurint Killer is now just called Accurint.

If anyone has any news concerning what happened to Accurint Killer please feel free to post a comment. As far as I can tell Accurint Killer is now just called Accurint.

Link:
http://www.accurint.com/

Getunvarnished.com claims to be an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation.

Getunvarnished.com could be another website private investigators and Attorneys use to search for disparaging comments.

"On Sunday, I posted about laws that prohibit employers from consulting certain information about job applicants, from credit reports to Facebook pages and Google search results. These laws seek to forestall unwarranted assumptions and bias. They proceed on the notion that credit history and Facebook postings have little to tell us about trustworthiness and smarts.

Much like credit ratings and Facebook posts, anonymous online reviews of people may do little more than misinform employers and ruin reputations. For instance, the site GetUnvarnished.com explains that it provides “inside scoop” on business professionals, including “candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more.” On GetUnvarnished.com, people can comment on others’ reputations anonymously. Although the site uses Facebook to verify its users, it does not reveal their identities to readers. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, GetUnvarnished.com isn’t interested in a real-name culture. It seems highly unlikely that we can rely on people to rate others’ professional skills in a fair and balanced way. People aren’t restaurants, hotels, or books in whom we have, for the most part, little personal stake. Give a competitor a bad review and you may find yourself rich with work. As Evelyn Rusli of TechCrunch notes, GetUnvarnished may become a “nicely indexed digital burn book.” Germany should include sites like GetUnvarnished on its employer-ban list too."

Links:http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2010/08/anonymous-employee-dirt-soon-available-on-you.html
http://www.getunvarnished.com/login

Is criminal profiling flawed?

Last year, a searching report by the US National Academy of Sciences challenged all of forensic science to demonstrate its scientific credentials. For profiling, rising to that challenge may take some doing, as even some of its strongest advocates consider it as much an art as a science. Psychologist Brent Snook of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John's, Canada, goes as far as to say, "Profiling should be suspended until proper testing of the method provides evidence that it works." There are even mutterings that this is a perfect opportunity to expose criminal profiling for the pseudoscience it really is. Is this the end for the staple of detective dramas, or can profiling prove its worth?

The idea that you can predict the characteristics of an offender from an analysis of his or her behaviour at the crime scene goes at least as far back as Jack the Ripper, a killer who haunted east London in 1888. But profiling in the modern sense probably began in 1956, when police investigating New York City's Mad Bomber consulted psychiatrist James Brussel. He famously predicted that when the man who had terrorised the city for 16 years was apprehended, he would be wearing a buttoned, double-breasted suit. In fact, George Metesky was in his pyjamas when officers arrived at midnight to arrest him. He went off to get dressed and returned in a double-breasted suit, and it was buttoned.

The American model of profiling emerged from this auspicious start. Developed by the FBI, it relies on the judgement of experienced police investigators. First, all the available information about the crime is assimilated. Then the crime is classified as either organised or disorganised, with organised crimes characterised by planning, advanced social skills and control over victims, and disorganised ones tending to be more impulsive and opportunistic.

Profiling now looks more scientific, but is it? Canter's approach has never been properly evaluated, says Snook, a former student of Canter's. And Mark Hilts, who heads the second of three behavioural analysis units at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, admits that the FBI has carried out no controlled studies of profiling's efficacy since the centre was established in 1985. The FBI does not publish its profiles, so nobody else has done it for them either. "I'm not really sure how you'd do it, quite honestly," says Hilts.

The main performance measure used by both the FBI and the National Policing Improvement Agency, which is responsible for profiling in the UK, is the level of customer satisfaction in surveys of the law enforcement agencies that use their services. "We get a lot of return customers," says Hilts. But that doesn't necessarily mean profiling is effective. Instead, the profiles might simply be couched in such ambiguous terms that they can be made to fit almost any possible offender.

Will profilers ever have the whole picture? Some law enforcement agencies are beginning to show signs of disillusionment. "I don't think profiling has much of a future," says statistician Chris Devery, who has conducted a review of the literature for the New South Wales police force in Australia. "There's just no evidence that it works."

Others see a future for it, but only if practised very differently. Salfati admits that profiling is "very, very young" in scientific terms, though she is optimistic that it could be an effective investigational tool, if rebuilt on solid scientific foundations. After all, she says, "It's just another name for understanding how people act. By saying that profiling doesn't work, we're essentially saying that psychology doesn't work."


Link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727751.500-is-criminal-profiling-flawed-and-disorderly.html

Hackensack NJ police chief accused of owning a private investigation company and hiring off-duty police officers to work for him.

Ken Zisa emphasized this week that he is still the chief of the Hackensack Police Department.

“I’m not the former police chief, I’m not the ex-police chief,” Zisa said in his first interview since he was suspended from the force after being charged with insurance fraud and official misconduct. “Tell your headline writers.”

Zisa declined comment on a range of topics during a 35-minute telephone conversation Thursday, including the charges against him and whether he hopes to return to the Police Department.

But he said repeatedly that the newspaper’s coverage has been unfair. He disputed an article published in The Record last month about his side work while he was chief, including a $5,000-a-month contract between his private security company — Krisant Security Associates LLC — and Bergen Regional Medical Center from January 2004 to December 2005.

The article reported a statement by the medical center’s management company in August 2007 that said the chief’s company provided “consulting” and “security services,” including the “employment of off-duty police officers,” in connection with a June 2004 nurses strike at the facility.

In a previous interview in 2007, Zisa said he paid Hackensack police through his company to work at the hospital, but would not talk about the kind of work they did. On Thursday, he again declined to say what those off-duty police officers did for the hospital.

“I’m not going to discuss that with you,” he said.

The article reported that state law prohibits active law-enforcement officers from owning a private-investigation or security company. Active police officers can do consulting work, such as recommending where security cameras should be placed, but they cannot be hired as independent contractors to provide investigations or security guards for hire, the law says.


Link:
http://www.northjersey.com/news/082710_Suspended_Hackensack_police_chief_says_newspaper_treats_him_unfairly.html

Can dead flowers cause a house fire?

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A fire that did $20,000 in damages to a northeast Arkansas home wasn't caused by an electrical problem or burning food or arson, an insurance investigator concluded.

Instead, the dead plants did it, according to a report summary provided to the homeowner, Brian Duncan.

"The fire was caused by self-heating through decomposition of organic materials contained within a plastic flowerpot," the Aug. 25 letter from State Farm Insurance Co. said.

Or, in layman's terms, spontaneous combustion.

Duncan, whose home is a few miles south of Paragould, said the flowerpot had contained dead, decomposing flowers and potting soil that his wife had planted in the summer of 2009. Paragould is about 150 miles northeast of Little Rock.

"She had intended on repotting (the flowers)," Duncan said. But they sat on the porch, unwatered, and eventually died.

He said it was clear where the July 25 fire had begun, because the burning flowerpot and plants charred a hole in the porch and they fell to the ground several feet below.


Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100901/ap_on_re_us/us_odd_flower_arson

The five real reasons police pull you over.

On the police report, it will say something like "observed vehicle swerving erratically. Issued verbal traffic warning. Officer detected aroma of marijuana."

But in reality, says Ofc. Frank Adams-- the renegade 15-year Miami-Dade veteran who this week claimed to New Times that he watched his fellow officers severely beat an unarmed man-- that quota-chasing cop pulled you over because you're black and dreadlocked, and then he illegally searched your car in the hopes of finding anything illegal.

You always knew it was true but had never heard it from a cop. Before now. Here are the real reasons you're staring at your beleagured reflection in that trooper's aviators:

1. You're in a car with a lot of people.
2. You're black (Hispanic).
3. You have dreadlocks and gold teeth.
4. You are among six black, dreadlocked men packed into one car.
5. The cop is behind on his field interview and arrest quotas.

"There's not a specific time of day when the need for stats arises. There's no specific day of the week. It's more so when you look at your numbers and you realize you're in need. Every day you want to try to get something-- one or two arrests, a traffic infraction, a field interview. The expectation is that you average two of each category every day you're on duty. Then the department will be extremely happy with you.

And let's say for some reason you didn't hit your numbers the day before. Then it's catch-up time. Maybe you were forced to respond to a scene of a death yesterday. You were there for hours, and you didn't get one stat. That next day, you want to camp out on a busy street in the city, and just start pulling people over. Or you'll want to head to an area-- say in front of a corner store-- where you know there's drug activity, and just search everybody in front of the place. Even though that's illegal."

Link:
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2010/09/the_five_real_reasons_that_cop.php

Miami-Dade police officer claims fellow officers lie.

Miami-Dade Police officer Frank Adams calls it the "Rodney King beatdown." When the burly, soft-spoken 15-year department veteran watched four fellow cops kick, choke, and punch an unarmed subject eight years ago, he says, it was every bit as vicious as the infamous Los Angeles incident. The only difference There wasn't a video camera to catch it.

"I thought he was dead," Adams says of 42-year-old Henry Lee Gaines, who was arrested around 4 a.m. September 22, 2002, in front of his tiny banana-colored Brownsville home. "I saw him go into convulsions and thought, Oh my God, they killed this guy."

But what really floored Adams is the way Officer Gregorio Perez, who wrote the report, spun the incident. Five-foot-nine-inch Gaines was described as an incredibly powerful aggressor. He had allegedly lifted one officer onto his shoulder, climbed a set of stairs, and hurled the cop to the ground. He had supposedly even grabbed Adams by the shirt and repeatedly punched him, knocking him to the ground and injuring his hand.

It's a lie, Adams says. He claims Gaines never resisted: The hand injury had occurred when another cop knocked Adams over while trying to kick Gaines. No criminal charges have been filed, but the claim was validated last month by the department's Professional Compliance Bureau (PCB).

Miami-Dade Police spokesperson Treanese Louissaint declined to answer a lengthy list of questions detailing Adams's claims about the alleged beatdown and other incidents. She said the department "will be able to make a comment" only upon receipt of information from the PCB. As of press time, that had not happened.

Link:
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2010-09-02/news/miami-dade-cop-frank-adams-colleagues-lie/