Law Enforcement Commentary

Next time you think you‘ve got it bad, stop and think about our men and women overseas that are fighting for our rights….they need our thoughts, our prayers, letters and care packages!

you stay up for 16 hours
He stays up for days on end.

You take a warm shower to help you wake up.
He goes days or weeks without running water.

You complain of a ‘headache’, and call in sick.
He gets shot at as others are hit, and keeps moving

You put on your anti war/don’t support the troops shirt, and go meet up with your friends.
He still fights for your right to wear that shirt.

You make sure you’re mobile phone is in your pocket.
He clutches the cross hanging on his chain next to his dog tags.

You talk trash about your ‘buddies’ that aren’t with you.
He knows he may not see some of his buddies again.

You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
He patrols the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.

You complain about how hot it is.
He wears his heavy gear, not daring to take off his helmet to wipe his brow.

You go out to lunch, and complain because the restaurant got your order wrong.
He doesn’t get to eat today.

Your maid makes your bed and washes your clothes.
He wears the same things for weeks, but makes sure his weapons are clean.

You go to the mall and get your hair redone.
He doesn’t have time to brush his teeth today.

You’re angry because your class ran 5 minutes over.
He’s told he will be held over an extra 2 months.

You call your girlfriend and set a date for tonight.
He waits for the mail to see if there is a letter from home.

You hug and kiss your girlfriend, like you do everyday.
He holds his letter close and smells his love’s perfume.

You roll your eyes as a baby cries.
He gets a letter with pictures of his new child, and wonders if they’ll ever meet.

You criticize your government, and say that war never solves anything.
He sees the innocent tortured and killed by their own people and remembers why he is fighting.

You hear the jokes about the war, and make fun of men like him.
He hears the gunfire, bombs and screams of the wounded.

You see only what the media wants you to see.
He sees the broken bodies lying around him.

You are asked to go to the store by your parents. You don’t.
He does exactly what he is told even if it puts his life in danger.

You stay at home and watch TV.
He takes whatever time he is given to call, write home, sleep, and eat.

You crawl into your soft bed, with down pillows, and get comfortable.
He tries to sleep but gets woken by mortars and helicopters all night long.

REMEMBER our Troops, and do not forget them LATER -
Lest we forget -

Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2009
Why Government Can’t Run a Business
Politicians need headlines. Executives need profits.

By JOHN STEELE GORDON
The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in — if not taking over entirely — America ’s health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government’s track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible.

In 1913, for instance, thinking it was being overcharged by the steel companies for armor plate for warships, the federal government decided to build its own plant. It estimated that a plant with a 10,000-ton annual capacity could produce armor plate for only 70% of what the steel companies charged.

When the plant was finally finished, however — three years after World War I had ended — it was millions over budget and able to produce armor plate at twice what the steel companies charged. It produced one batch and then shut down, never to reopen.

Or take Medicare. Other than the source of its premiums, Medicare is no different, economically, than a regular health-insurance company.

But unlike, say, UnitedHealthcare, it is a bureaucracy-beclotted nightmare, riven with waste and fraud.

Last year the Government Accountability Office estimated that no less than one-third of all Medicare disbursements for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and hospital beds, were improper or fraudulent. Medicare was so lax in its oversight that it was approving orthopedic shoes for amputees.

These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises. There are a number of reasons why this is inherently so. Among them are:

1) Governments are run by politicians, not businessmen. Politicians can only make political decisions, not economic ones.

They are, after all, first and foremost in the re-election business. Because of the need to be re-elected, politicians are always likely to have a short-term bias. What looks good right now is more important to politicians than long-term consequences even when those consequences can be easily foreseen.

The gathering disaster of Social Security has been obvious for years, but politics has prevented needed reforms.

And politicians tend to favor parochial interests over sound economic sense.

Consider a thought experiment. There is a national widget crisis and Sen. Wiley Snoot is chairman of the Senate Widget Committee.

There are two technologies that are possible solutions to the problem, with Technology A widely thought to be the more promising of the two. But the company that has been developing Technology B is headquartered in Sen. Snoot’s state and employs 40,000 workers there.

Which technology is Sen. Snoot going to use his vast legislative influence to push?

2) Politicians need headlines. And this means they have a deep need to do something (”Sen. Snoot Moves on Widget Crisis!”), even when doing nothing would be the better option. Markets will always deal efficiently with gluts and shortages, but letting the market work doesn’t produce favorable headlines and, indeed, often produces the opposite (”Sen. Snoot Fails to Move on Widget Crisis!”).

3) Governments use other people’s money. Corporations play with their own money. They are wealth-creating machines in which various people (investors, managers and labor) come together under a defined set of rules in hopes of creating more wealth collectively than they can create separately.

So a labor negotiation in a corporation is a negotiation over how to divide the wealth that is created between stockholders and workers.

Each side knows that if they drive too hard a bargain they risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs for both sides. Just ask General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

But when, say, a school board sits down to negotiate with a teachers union or decide how many administrators are needed, the goose is the taxpayer. That’s why public-service employees now often have much more generous benefits than their private-sector counterparts. And that’s why the New York City public school system had an administrator-to-student ratio 10 times as high as the city’s Catholic school system, at least until Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a more than competent businessman before he entered politics) took charge of the system.

4) Government does not tolerate competition. The Obama administration is talking about creating a “public option” that would compete in the health-insurance marketplace with profit-seeking companies. But has a government entity ever competed successfully on a level playing field with private companies? I don’t know of one.

5) Government enterprises are almost always monopolies and thus do not face competition at all. But competition is exactly what makes capitalism so successful an economic system. The lack of it has always doomed socialist economies.

When the federal government nationalized the phone system in 1917, justifying it as a wartime measure that would lower costs, it turned it over to the Post Office to run. (The process was called “postalization,” a word that should send shivers down the back of any believer in free markets.) But despite the promise of lower prices, practically the first thing the Post Office did when it took over was . . . raise prices.

Cost cutting is alien to the culture of all bureaucracies. Indeed, when cost cutting is inescapable, bureaucracies often make cuts that will produce maximum public inconvenience, generating political pressure to reverse the cuts.

6) Successful corporations are run by benevolent despots. The CEO of a corporation has the power to manage effectively. He decides company policy, organizes the corporate structure, and allocates resources pretty much as he thinks best. The board of directors ordinarily does nothing more than ratify his moves (or, of course, fire him). This allows a company to act quickly when needed.

But American government was designed by the Founding Fathers to be inefficient, and inefficient it most certainly is. The president is the government’s CEO, but except for trivial matters he can’t do anything without the permission of two separate, very large committees (the House and Senate) whose members have their own political agendas.

Government always has many cooks, which is why the government’s broth is so often spoiled.

7) Government is regulated by government. When “postalization” of the nation’s phone system appeared imminent in 1917, Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T, admitted that his company was, effectively, a monopoly. But he noted that “all monopolies should be regulated. Government ownership would be an unregulated monopoly.”

It is government’s job to make and enforce the rules that allow a civilized society to flourish. But it has a dismal record of regulating itself.

Imagine, for instance, if a corporation, seeking to make its bottom line look better, transferred employee contributions from the company pension fund to its own accounts, replaced the money with general obligation corporate bonds, and called the money it expropriated income. We all know what would happen: The company accountants would refuse to certify the books and management would likely — and rightly — end up in jail.

But that is exactly what the federal government (which, unlike corporations, decides how to keep its own books) does with Social Security.

In the late 1990s, the government was running what it — and a largely unquestioning Washington press corps — called budget “surpluses.” But the national debt still increased in every single one of those years because the government was borrowing money to create the “surpluses.”

Capitalism isn’t perfect. Indeed, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous description of democracy, it’s the worst economic system except for all the others. But the inescapable fact is that only the profit motive and competition keep enterprises lean, efficient, innovative and customer-oriented.

Mr. Gordon is the author of “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power” (HarperCollins, 2004).
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A17
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Printed with permission

New Fingerprinting Technique Could Crack Cold Cases

Posted: Friday, April 17, 2009
Updated: April 17th, 2009 04:07 PM GMT-05:00

By Melissa Gray
CNN

It was early one Sunday morning when the killer rang at a front door that was decorated with a wreath for Christmas. When his victim answered, he fired four fatal shots, ran off and disappeared.

The unsolved murder of Marianne Wilkinson, 68, in a town near Dallas, Texas, in December 2007 has left investigators with few clues and few leads. They recovered the gun used in the crime a few months later, but the gunman’s identity — and his motive — remain a mystery.

Now, a groundbreaking technique developed across the Atlantic Ocean in Britain may help Texas police and others to crack cold cases like this.

The technique enables scientists to detect fingerprints on spent bullets and shell casings, even when the print had been wiped off. It works by detecting the minute corrosion of metal caused by sweat, which corrodes the metal in the shape of the fingerprint.

“That sweat is in the pattern of the original fingerprint that was deposited,” said John Bond, a forensic scientist for England’s Northamptonshire Police and a researcher at the University of Leicester, who developed the technique.

The corrosion is often impossible to see with the naked eye because it’s so small — as small as a micron, which is a millionth of a meter, Bond said.

His method involves dusting the metal with a fine black powder that adheres to the corroded areas, allowing scientists to see the fingerprint.

A detective from the police department in North Richland Hills, Texas, where Wilkinson lived in a gabled home with her husband, went to meet Bond late last year, Bond and the department said.

Bond was able to obtain a print from the shell casings in the Wilkinson case, meaning police could be able to discern who loaded the gun, if they can find a match, North Richland Hills Police Investigator Larry Irving told CNN.

Police are optimistic Bond’s technique will bring them another step closer to solving the case.

“Prior to (the detective) coming over, and one of the reasons he came over, is they had little or no forensic evidence for this murder,” Bond said. “So my own feeling would be that finding fingerprints would be significant.”

Investigators believe Wilkinson may have been the victim of mistaken identity, according to a profile of the case posted on the Web site for the television show “America’s Most Wanted,” which featured the case.

A neighbor whose address is very similar to Wilkinson’s told police she had recently gone through a bitter divorce, and that she and her ex-husband had an ongoing business dispute, according to the Web site.

Large amounts of money were at stake, the show said, and the woman believed she was the intended target.

Investigators traced the gun’s history to a man who is now deceased and, authorities believe, had no connection to the slaying, according to the television show’s Web site. Police believe the gun has changed hands several times since then and are still seeking information on its latest owners.

The bullet fingerprinting technique won’t necessarily solve crimes like the Wilkinson case but could unearth new clues, Bond said.

“It’s helping police get evidence they didn’t have before,” he said. “It’s simply a new line of inquiry and can be especially valuable with cold cases.”

In September, Bond found fingerprints on a shell casing from another murder case — a 1999 double homicide in Kingsland, Georgia.

In that case, the suspect or suspects entered a Title Pawn business downtown, shot and killed the two employees and stole a small amount of money, said Kingsland police lieutenant Todd Tetterton.

Police assigned a full-time cold case detective, Christopher King, to the case because of “some things that had changed.” The department read about Bond’s technique in a magazine article and contacted him to see if he could help, he said.

“We were interested in trying anything we could,” Tetterton said.

Four shell casings had been found at the crime scene, but fingerprint testing using traditional techniques didn’t reveal anything of use. Bond was able to find fingerprint ridges on three of the four casings, and one of them yielded enough ridge detail to possibly provide an identification, a University of Leicester statement said, quoting King.

Tetterton would only say that more than one shell casing was found at the scene, and said Bond was able to get results for detectives. He declined to say more, citing the ongoing investigation.

“The results are surprising,” the university statement quoted King as saying. “I feel very optimistic. These results are better than I had expected and better than I hoped for.”

Bond doesn’t advertise his services, which he performs free of charge.

“All of the inquiries we’ve had from the U.S. police forces have all been initiated by them,” he told CNN. “We never say no, so anybody who says, ‘I’ve got some shell casings, we have some over 30 years old’ — we always say send them and we’ll have a look.”

Bond says he tries to know as little about a case as possible before he looks for fingerprints, so no one can accuse him later of looking for something specific.

In one case, he said, he found a partial print on a shell casing sent in by police in Boulder, Colorado. The detective told him it was a fingerprint they expected him to find.

“That was confirmation for me” that the technique worked, Bond said.

The technique won’t work, however, if a person has just washed their hands or put on gloves before loading a gun. But Bond said that’s not too much of a concern.

“Because of the nature of who these people are and the nature of what they’re committing, personal hygiene is not foremost in their mind when they’re doing this,” Bond said. “It’s also the heat of the moment. They might be sweating, perspiring, because you know you’re going to go out and break the law.”

President Obama is creating a new border czar position and has chosen a former Justice Department official to fill the post, an administration official told FOX News.

The new Homeland Security post will be responsible for issues related to drug-cartel violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The administration official said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is expected to name Alan Bersin to the position on Wednesday during a visit to the Southwest border. The official would speak only on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement.

The Obama administration has promised to crack down on border violence and work with Mexican authorities to curb drugs and arms trafficking.

Napolitano, who is making her second border trip in two weeks, will be discussing the agency’s efforts to curb the flow of illegal immigrants, guns and drugs along the border. Last year customs officials apprehended 792,321 people who tried to get into the U.S. through the Southwest border, and immigration officials removed more than 369,000, according to Homeland Security Department statistics.

The Obama administration has promised to crack down on border violence and work with Mexican authorities against drug cartels. Hundreds of federal agents, along with high-tech surveillance gear and drug-sniffing dogs, are being deployed to the Southwest.

In his new capacity, Bersin will work with international officials and their counterparts in the U.S. and border states.

From 1993 to 1998, Bersin was the federal prosecutor who led the government’s crackdown on illegal immigrants at the California-Mexico border. Bersin and Napolitano were both U.S. attorneys during the Clinton administration.

During his final three years, Bersin doubled as the U.S. attorney general’s Southwest border representative, or “border czar.”

Under Bersin’s watch, the U.S. government rolled out Operation Gatekeeper, a massive increase in border enforcement in the San Diego area that pushed migrants to cross illegally from Mexico in the remote mountains and deserts of Arizona.

The Justice Department did not know if or when this border czar position was eliminated. Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said top Justice officials still perform these roles, and the deputy attorney general chairs a Southwest border working group in the department.

Most recently, Bersin was chairman of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. He also served under California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the secretary of education.

Earlier, Bersin was the superintendent of San Diego public schools. At the time, Hispanic groups decried the appointment and said Operation Gatekeeper caused a steep increase in deaths by forcing immigrants to attempt treacherous mountain and desert crossings into the United States.

Obama and Napolitano travel to Mexico this week to meet with Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The officer was called to scene on a domestic disturbance call.

A man who received a new trial because of processing errors at a Detroit police crime lab has been convicted.

Northern California police have served more than 15 search warrants.

Posted: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Updated: April 1st, 2009 03:07 PM EDT

By JAMIE STENGLE
Associated Press Writer

DALLAS —

The police officer who pulled out his gun and threatened an NFL player with jail instead of allowing him inside a hospital where his mother-in-law was dying resigned Wednesday.

Officer Robert Powell had been placed on paid leave pending an investigation of the March 18 incident.

“I made this decision in the hope that my resignation will allow the Dallas Police Department, my fellow officers and the citizens of Dallas to better reflect on this experience, learn from the mistakes made, and move forward,” Powell said in a statement issued through his attorneys.

He had stopped Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats’ SUV outside Baylor Regional Medical Center in suburban Plano after the vehicle rolled through a red light.

The officer pulled out his gun and threatened Moats with jail as the player and his family pleaded to be allowed to go inside the hospital. Powell continued writing Moats a ticket and lecturing him even after a fellow officer confirmed that Moats’ mother-in-law was dying.

Jonetta Collinsworth, 45, died of breast cancer before Powell allowed Moats to go inside the hospital.

Powell’s resignation was first reported by Dallas-Fort Worth television station KTVT. He later issued an apology, and Moats said he would accept it.

“I still hope to speak with the Moats family to personally express my deep regret, sympathy, and to apologize for my poor judgment and unprofessional conduct,” he said in the Wednesday statement.

He also said he wanted to apologize to his fellow officers.

A call to Dallas police was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Dallas police Chief David Kunkle previously apologized to the family and said Powell acted inappropriately. He also lauded Moats’ restraint, noting that he did not try to seek special treatment by identifying himself as an NFL player.

Moats, 26, explained that he had waited until there was no traffic before continuing through the red light. When Powell asked for proof of insurance, Moats grew more agitated and told the officer to go find it.

According to video from a dashboard camera inside the officer’s vehicle, Moats’ wife, Tamishia Moats, and another woman disregarded Powell’s order to get back inside their vehicle, and they rushed into the hospital. After Powell yelled at Tamishia Moats to stay in the SUV, she said, “Excuse me, my mom is dying – do you understand?”

——————————————————————————–
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

JASON TRAHAN and TANYA EISERER
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

The unblinking eye of a dashboard camera in a police car can be a career-ender.

That may be the outcome for Officer Robert Powell. His dash cam preserved his 13-minute harangue of Ryan Moats during a traffic stop earlier this month as the young NFL player pleaded with the rookie officer to let him be with his mother-in-law dying in a nearby hospital room.

The video, released last week, went viral and has sparked nationwide outrage. Police Chief David Kunkle has been inundated with calls to fire Powell, currently on leave. On Friday, Powell called the incident “unfortunate” in a statement released by his lawyer.

As bad as Powell’s experience has been, experts say that for most police officers, in-car video can rescue a career threatened by a bogus allegations of misconduct.

The power of video was cemented 18 year ago by the infamous Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police officers.

Cameras, both in-car and wielded by bystanders, have “had a huge impact in being able to provide independent visual documentation of the incident,” said Sam Walker, a national police accountability expert.

“If the officer did the right thing, then it’s good for us to know that and have some independent documentation,” he said. “If the officer was in the wrong, then it’s good for us to know that. This is what’s been lacking in most police use-of-force incidents. Traditionally, you would have had a he said-he said situation. As the cliché has always been, the tie goes to the officer.”

In the Powell-Moats incident, without the video or if a Plano officer hadn’t witnessed part of the traffic stop, an Internal Affairs inquiry might have gone nowhere. The Plano officer reported the incident to his supervisors.

“It would have been their word against [Powell], and it probably would have ended up being inconclusive,” said Assistant Chief Floyd Simpson, who oversees the city’s seven patrol stations. “The in-car camera systems bring a different view.”

About 67 percent of Dallas’ 906 squad cars are outfitted with cameras, which cost about $4,400 each, said Lt. Dale Barnard, the department’s fleet coordinator.

The digital camera begins recording automatically when an officer flips on lights and sirens, or if the patrol car is in a crash. Officers are required to wear microphones to record conversations. It is a violation of DPD rules for an officer to turn off the camera, and officers cannot erase the videos.

Officers download the videos, but a sergeant preserves those that need to be kept longer than 90 days or those to be used as evidence.

Figures from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics show that in 2003, 54 percent of police departments in cities with more than 250,000 people were using in-car cameras. That’s up from 34 percent in 2000.

The good and the bad

Last year, dash-cam video was a mixed bag for Dallas police officers.

Some officers found themselves cleared of misconduct allegations. Others had wrongdoing exposed on video. Other instances led to tweaks in department policy.

In August, two Dallas police officers arrested a drunken man at a club near the southwest patrol substation. The man later complained that the officers had roughed him up. But the officers were exonerated after investigators heard an audio recording showing that the man was yelling, screaming and kicking the cage in the squad car.

On Sept. 16, a furor erupted when a Dallas officer shot and killed an unarmed hit-and-run suspect, Derrick Jones. The uproar all but evaporated when police brass released the dash-cam video. It showed a 6-foot-3, 240-pound Jones pounding the smaller officer in the head just before the fatal shot.

Dash-cam video resulted in several reprimands after a Sept. 6 chase.

Police launched an internal investigation after video showed an officer racing more than 20 miles across Dallas to join the chase. The video showed him careening in and out of traffic at 100 mph before he crashed and was injured. After pulling all the in-car videos, supervisors ended up disciplining 21 officers, including the injured one, for violating department policy.

A Dallas police dash-cam video also showed the Oct. 17 death of 10-year-old Cole Berardi, who was struck by an officer driving at least 29 mph over the speed limit on a darkened road. His sirens and emergency lights were not on.

That video helped persuade Kunkle to issue new driving guidelines, requiring that officers not drive above the speed limit unless lights and sirens are activated.

Recent police videos have sparked outrage elsewhere.

On New Year’s Day, bystanders armed with cellphone cameras in Oakland, Calif., captured a 27-year-old transit police officer shooting Oscar Grant, 22, who was being detained along with several other young black men while police investigated a fight on a train.

Grant was lying face down when the officer pulled the trigger, and bystanders are heard gasping, then screaming at the ring of officers surrounding Grant’s body. The officer is facing murder charges.

In Maryland, a dash-cam video that surfaced this month resulted in prosecutors in Prince George’s County dropping charges against a 30-year-old motorist accused of assaulting two cops. The video showed the officers using batons and pepper spray on the unarmed man, who had refused to sign a traffic ticket.

‘Let me pull the video’

But for the vast majority of officers, dash cams are reputation-savers in alleged misconduct cases, said Mike Fergus, a program manager for the International Association of Chiefs of Police who studied how nearly two dozen state police agencies used dash cams.

“Our study found that, if there’s a complaint filed against an officer, and if the incident was recorded, 93 percent of the time, an officer was exonerated,” Fergus said. “Mostly, it’s someone saying the officer was rude, and the sergeant says, ‘Let me pull the video,’ and then click. It’s dropped.”

Dallas police Senior Cpl. Herb Ebsen, 54, is a supporter of having cameras in the cars, but he said some of his colleagues do see drawbacks.

He said officers fear that comments made inside the privacy of the squad car may be used against them. Also, the angle of the camera may not capture the full context of an incident.

“It doesn’t always put everything in context and in complete reality,” said Ebsen, a 26-year veteran. “They can save you or they can kill you. Without a doubt, we know they can all be used against us. Officers feel it’s kind of a Big Brother issue.”

That’s a common sentiment among officers across the U.S., said Nathan Triche, who studied hours of in-car video as part of a master’s thesis in sociology and criminology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“No one likes being closely supervised,” said Triche, a five-year veteran deputy with the Guilford County sheriff’s department in North Carolina. “You wouldn’t want a camera set up on the side of your office, monitoring how you speak to people on the phone. You’re going to end up with people feeling like they’re micromanaged.”

When questioned by commanders facing increasing public outrage, Powell, who has been a Dallas officer for three years, told his superiors he felt he did nothing wrong in the Moats traffic stop.

According to several Dallas police officers, many young officers share Powell’s assessment of the incident. Seasoned officers who have seen the video, including most members of the command staff, said they were aghast and embarrassed at Powell’s conduct.

Simpson, the Dallas patrol assistant chief, said in-car cameras haven’t “changed police work in my mind. We still do pretty much what police officers do. But it has brought some things to light.”

The Canadian PressRelated Articles: Canada cracks down on gangs before 2010 Olympics Police see hike in Canada drug violence Gangs infiltrate Canada’s airports VANCOUVER , British Columbia — The Vancouver Police Department is paying the price to put gang members behind bars.In a report to Vancouver city council, Chief Jim Chu says a deadly gang war that erupted across Metro Vancouver earlier this …

By Meredith May San Francisco ChronicleRelated Resources: News report: Oakland PD stunned by day of loss Slideshow: Memorial for fallen Oakland officers OAKLAND, Calif. — When awful, unexplainable things happen, sometimes the best thing is a warm meal served by a friend who has been there before.That’s why Oakland firefighters loaded up on hamburger and tri-tip steak and took over the kitchen …